The Woman Racket

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The Woman Racket, published today, Monday, February 4, by Imprint Academic.

In stock in Waterstones (some outlets), and orderable through Amazon (.co.uk & .com)
Auhor: Steve Moxon
stevemoxon3@talktalk.net
0114 2631714 / 07981 227540
Details & extracts at http://www.imprint-academic.com/moxon

The full title is: 'The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society' by Steve Moxon

The book is about the major new insights about what (males generally and) men are FOR, how they are much more dissimilar to women than had been thought, and why necessarily (the majority of) men always constitute the principle disadvantaged sub-group in any society.
It's the very first to draw on the recent scientific findings of the actual root of sex difference -- males acting as the 'genetic filter' for the whole lineage -- and of all of the other research showing hitherto unexpected inherent 'chalk & cheese' human sex differences re motivation, competition, affiliation, etc; with major implications for our view of men-women.

The book‘s had glowing praise from Bruce Charlton, the evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle (UK), and was previewed as part of a two-page profile of me in The Evening Standard, and by The Independent. There is much print and broadcast media interest, with a TV documentary series a possibility.


To give you a handle on the content, below is a rough draft of a commissioned newspaper article I titled 'The Woman Racket': Its time to admit we got men-women spectacularly wrong'.

The Woman Racket: It’s time to admit we got men-women spectacularly wrong

It was the now late, great and controversial American novelist, Norman Mailer, who likened feminism to McCarthyism, christening it ‘the woman racket’. He thought it more like a fad, but really it’s the latest twist to a perennial privilege.

That women are downtrodden and men rule the roost is the line we’ve all swallowed for decades now. It’s the crucial underpinning of ‘political correctness’, because with the abandonment of ‘the working man‘ as a worthy victim, PC needed a new majority to get all worked up about. Without women there would be only ethnic minorities and homosexuals. What if it turned out that actually women were not hard done by after all?

It so happens that’s just what recent science has uncovered. It is anyway fairly obvious if you take off the feminist tinted glasses we all now wear, and look at how most men are faring, rather than just focussing on the ‘top dogs’. There are always overwhelmingly men at the top, but that’s because men battle each other so fiercely, not that women are somehow done down. If that were the case, then how come at the bottom you find only men? And why do we view men in the middle as relative failures when we don’t see women in this way? If we were looking objectively, we’d see that most men make a good fist of it. So why the prejudice?

The answer stems from why there are sexes. They evolved because it made biological sense to divide individuals into either those involved in the time and energy consuming business of developing/ having/ rearing baby, or those involved in acting as what you could call the ‘genetic filter’. We can’t survive without either. Obviously, we’re nowhere without babies to replace the old and the dead, but because of relentless accumulation of gene copying errors, it is just as important that men function as a ‘duff’ gene disposal device cum ‘design and test lab’ for new genes. (And that’s as far, technically, as I’ll go on a Sunday!)

The upshot is that men rush about testing themselves against each other -- not infrequently to destruction -- but ultimately against Mother Nature herself. Many fall by the wayside in some way, leaving those without the ‘duff’ genes and/or with some fabulous new ones, to be the higher status guys that women are correspondingly ‘designed’ to choose to have babies with. The whole system of the renewal of life works much better if you have this division of labour that leaves women just to get on with it whilst men are put through the mill. This is why men on average die several years earlier than do women.

It’s why the sexes are profoundly separate. Biologists had anthropomorphically assumed that the males of animals are ‘dominant’ -- higher in the ‘pecking order’ -- over females. Both sexes were thought to co-exist in a unisex dominance hierarchy, yet it’s easily seen that ‘pecking orders’ are always same-sex. There isn’t the ‘power’ relation between the sexes that feminists insist there is. Quite the opposite. Our prejudices and morality are based on the ‘policing’ of men through psychological ‘cheater detection’ mechanisms, so that they don’t try to get away with anything more than to what their rank entitles them: most especially regarding women. We ‘do down’ men, but because females are biologically more valuable, women we ’big up’.

So how do we see this separation as we live our lives today? Now that men and women more usually work together, and it’s insisted that men and women are the same, we pretend that la difference is waning. In fact, the sexes always polarise. From toddler age, boys play with other boys, and girls play with other girls; boys wanting team games, whereas girls go around in twos and threes. Boys have quite rigid pecking orders even before school age, and this is completely different from the friendship network that girls have. Males have to climb the greasy pole, but females have only to pick the males off it, and simply look good. What does not happen is competition across the sexual divide. It would be pointless -- and actually counter-productive, for both sexes.

Surely though, men and women readily compete with each other at work for promotion. Ah, but it doesn‘t feel the same as competing against your own kind. It’s not ‘psychologically salient‘. That‘s when the real competition begins. Experiments show that when the sexes get together they just want to display to each other.

We can see why it is that women so hate women bosses. The workplace is modelled on ‘man world’: a hierarchy. Putting the female personal network into a hierarchy is incongruous. (That’s why when you look into the ‘prestige’ ratings of jobs, if you ask men or women to rate ‘housewife’, it comes in half way up the scores -- way above the equivalent job of laundry worker, and ‘househusband’ comes at the very bottom.) Men climb the greasy pole because that gives them status, which is what women look for in a man. But what do men look for in a woman? Fertility: beauty/ youth. The woman on reception is no less attractive than a woman on the board for all her lack of effort, but the few who move up the workplace hierarchy can better put themselves in the path of high status men. Women intuit all this, and look very suspiciously at these unusual women, as though they are cheating in some way. Women find far more natural the relationship of male boss and female underling, because it’s the natural essentially sexual (in the widest sense) way the sexes get on.

The separate hierarchies of the sexes serve to rank each sex according to their value as sexual partners -- their ‘mate value’. For the reason that what makes someone attractive is totally different for men and women, though status is the measure of man, it is not of woman. Women don’t aspire to status per se. This doesn’t mean that a small minority of women are not careerist. Other than to better put themselves in the path of high status men, work can become an end in itself, especially when it draws on sex-typical predilections. The truth though -- and this is a remarkable fact -- is that the proportion of women in full-time continuous work today (that is, with the same orientation to work as the great majority of men have) is the same as it was 150 years ago.

The surprise is that the ‘pay gap’ is only 20%. In fact, a ‘pay gap’ this small can only be explained by sex discrimination against men. Wherever you look, it is the majority of (lower status) men who are disadvantaged. Most domestic violence is actually female-on-male. The virulent resistance to this truth (that research has long starkly revealed) is testament to the depth of anti-male prejudice. It hardly needs pointing out that not females but males are let down in education; that not female but male cancer patients are neglected; that fathers but not mothers are denied proper contact with their own children … etc.

It’s the same story of wrongly supposed social injustice to women in recent history, though we can‘t see it because we inappropriately place on the past the values that have grown from modern contingencies, and miss that by the standards of the day life was clearly organised to preference women. When you properly look at child custody and marriage in centuries past, the law here is all about men never being allowed to divest their responsibilities. Even the standard social history of the vote is hopelessly false. Women from time immemorial could vote in their local communities, which was the locus of their affairs until early last century when for the first time national politics moved beyond ’imperial’ concerns -- war and the taxes to pay for war, that clearly directly concerned only men. The scandal was always the tiny proportion of men who were eligible to vote, which never topped 50% in practice, even in 1918 when women were first enfranchised.

Never before in this or in any culture has understanding of the sexes (by the chattering classes at least) been more spectacularly wrong. The view here is a counterblast, but it is set to become mainstream, and sooner than you think.

Steve Moxon