Daniel Amneus Warned Against A Fatherless, Feminist Dystopia in Back to Patriarchy!

In his 1999 book The Decline of Males, Lionel Tiger coined a word for the key problem that Back To Patriarchy! attempted to address. The word is bureaugamy. Tiger defined bureaugamy as “a family pattern involving a mother, a child and a bureaucrat.” While Tiger's approach is far less ferocious, he provides a continuation of many of the arguments Amneus made twenty years earlier. Back to Patriarchy! asserts that governmental policies and social trends are trivializing fatherhood in order to meet the lopsided version of “equality” demanded by feminists. Some key problems he identifies are welfare programs that support single mothers, demands for publicly funded or subsidized child care programs, outrageous alimony awards, and a tendency to award custody to mothers—while fathers are required to pay child support and have little or no say as to how their money is spent or how the children they pay for are raised. In the final chapter, he summarizes the problem:

“Societies are run primarily for the benefit of women and children, but women and children are no more trusted to run societies directly than the passengers in the back seat of a taxi are to be trusted to directly handle the controls of the vehicle that is operated for their benefit. The ghettos are the obvious example of societies that fail to find ways of utilizing male aggression, and they are kept from capsizing only by subventions from the male-run society on the outside.

The problems of these ghettos, thanks to feminism and government interference and mismanagement, are becoming the problems of the larger society.”

The Decline of Males provides a fresh batch of statistics and examples that show the continuation of this trend toward the bureaugamy of the fatherless ghetto that encourages no productive, responsible role for men as providers and allows them to “run amok.” I identified essentially the same problem in Androphilia, with emphasis on the perpetual adolescence of gay males whose masculinity is channeled into non-productive—and often destructive—pleasure-seeking. Much like love 'em and leave 'em ghetto “baby-daddies” they are able to devote all of their free time to self-indulgence, status-seeking, mindless materialism and irresponsible sex.

Frankly speaking, the problem here is really men, and what to do with them. Amneus basically admits as much. You can't expect men to become women because they are not women. There are positive and negative ways to channel male tendencies, and saddling men with the responsibility of fatherhood is one of the most positive things you can do with them. It also makes the best use of the male's natural talents, evolved in our species to support the lifestyle of what Desmond Morris called a “vertical, hunting, weapon-toting, territorial, neotenous, brainy, Naked Ape.” This is not to say, and this is outside the scope of the book, that the world would be better if there were only women. It is my opinion that an all-female society would quickly stagnate and collapse, in part because of a sort of creative/destructive desperation that comes with maleness. Amneus alludes to this uniquely male desperation here:

“All societies are run, and must be run, by males. There are a number of reasons why this is so—greater male aggression and superior male ability in the handling of abstractions being two. A less obvious but more basic reason is that males have a sexual inferiority complex that makes it necessary for them to find some kind of compensatorily meaningful activity which can give them assurance that they are just as important as women. Otherwise they run amok.”

The concept here is spot-on, but it is wrong-headed to frame the natural state of men as if it were some sort of pathology. Perhaps Amneus was throwing women a bone here, but if this “insecurity” is truly an integral part of the average human male psyche—and I think it is—then this elemental quality should not be presented as some sort of psychological handicap any more than the male's more powerful physique. As with physical power, this drive to compete, to dominate, to achieve, to make a mark can be both productive and destructive—sometimes simultaneously. It is this Apollonian force that is ultimately responsible for everything from the electric light bulb to the Kalashnikov. Bigger, better, faster, stronger.

When attacking “the fatherless family,” Amneus presents a range of studies that correlate criminal (and homosexual) activity with fatherless homes or the prominence of the mother within the familial structure. This argument is grounded in good sense, especially when one of his sources makes the convincing point (one I also made in Androphilia) that males without strong father figures often associate positive behavior with femaleness and emasculation, and to assert their masculinity they often end up emulating destructive men. While rebellion is part of growing up, it is easy to see why having responsible men around as role models would decrease associations between ethical and responsible behavior and femininity. Some single and/or dominant mothers certainly do make it a project to teach their sons how to be “good” men, and some succeed, but it is reasonable to suggest that frequent interaction with a positive male role model who is both strong and responsible would make positive masculinity far less abstract, far more tangible and far more normal to a young male forming his own identity. Feminist programs designed to teach responsible male behavior to young men—anti-rape programs on college campuses, for example—can hardly compete with a consistent male role model who corrects bad behavior “man to man.”

“Put it this way: it is well that male aggression should be employed for useful purposes. It is the squandered aggression of single males, improperly socialized by the civilizing forces of the patriarchal family, that produces most crime and delinquency. Feminism is a program for increasing the number of such unsocialized males—whose antisocial behavior is then pointed to by the feminists as proving the need for more feminism.”

In a strange but chin-stroking and eyebrow-raising tangent, Amneus theorizes about a far-fetched but conceivable right-wing “Götterdämmerung”as a backlash against the fatherless, feminist society.

“...will human males, for all their docility in the past, docility that the feminists might, with reason, suppose to be infinite, consent to be reduced to the status of drones, or will they instead react in the manner that Professor Roszak shows their grandfathers reacted—preferring that the world should be bathed in blood rather than their masculinity should be threatened with such contempt as feminists show for it?”

He suggests that by trivializing the role of the father, and by in many cases allowing bureaucracies to replace him even as he is taxed and penalized to support them, society provides no productive outlet for their masculinity other than violence. He theorizes that men might eventually react to their progressive emasculation with an increased interest in militarism. This seems far fetched in America, precisely because young men are far too coddled and comfortable to seek out the...discomfort...of war en masse. However, Amneus understands this, and in an earlier chapter he notes that “Two things would be needful to generate a right-wing revulsion: economic crisis and a grievance.” If emasculation is the grievance—in addition to, as Amneus suggests, a simmering resentment of white males against minorities given special treatment—then an economic crisis could easily shift white male sentiment to the far right. Americans live impossibly luxurious lifestyles that are utterly dependent on economic dominance. I would go so far as to suggest that if, say, the dollar were to lose a substantial amount of its value, or if oil prices were to rise to the extent that they made goods unaffordable, the artificially maintained “equality” between men and women would collapse as preferential programs became non-viable. Unemployed, disenfranchised males are a crucible of violence, as inner cities demonstrate. Or perhaps the US government, already engaged in an various conflicts around the world, would find a way to channel that violence. Surely, military service would be more attractive than life in the gutter. But maybe we are already too far gone for that. Amneus quotes Spanish philosopher Juan Donoso-Cortes:

“When a nation shows a civilized horror of war, it received directly the punishment of its mistake. God changes it into a feminine nation, and sends conquerors to ravish it of its honor.”

The hand of God is hardly necessary in this scenario; human nature and conflicts of interest will produce the same end result. I do appreciate the imagery, though, of God as a feisty old curmudgeon playing with the world like a board game, who one day decides a particular society has become “pussified” and sends manly men— like Conan the Barbarian—to crush them and to hear the lamentation of their women.

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I braced myself for Amneus' chapter on “The Homosexual Militants,” but I honestly had a difficult time finding points of disagreement with him. The “militants” he identified are essentially the same sort of radical feminists and Marxists I identified with the gay movement (and the gay identity) in Androphilia. He recognizes the gay mindset as conflicted, selfish, sloppy and petulant. And it still is. He also notes that “Most homosexuals are not part of the 'gay rights movement' in the sense of being activists or even wanting to come out of the closet; they would prefer being left alone.” While he was wrong to assume that most homosexuals would prefer to hide their sexuality, which I don't think is the case because doing so is more than a little inconvenient and requires regular and willful deception, his assertion that the majority of homosexuals are not actively part of the gay movement is probably more true today than it was when it was written. Amneus is also rightfully skeptical of the politicized move away from psychotherapy that could adjust sexuality for those who would prefer to live heterosexual lives. His rationale for discouraging homosexual behavior—and encouraging traditional marriage—is not based on superstition or ancient taboo, but on quotations from George Gilder's Sexual Suicide:

Without a durable relationship with a woman, a man's sexual life is a series of brief and temporary exchanges, impelled by a desire to affirm his most rudimentary masculinity. But with love, sex becomes refined by selectivity, and other dimensions of personality are engaged and developed. The man himself is refined, and his sexuality becomes not a mere impulse but a meaningful commitment in society, possibly to be fulfilled in the birth of specific children legally and recognizably his. His sex life then can be conceived and experienced as having specific long-term importance like a woman's.

The man thus can integrate his immediate physical sensations with his highest aspirations for meaning and community. The sex act itself can become a civilizing human affirmation, involving his entire personality and committing it, either in fact or symbol, to a long-term engagement in a meaningful future.

Contrasted with gay cruising culture—from the 1970s, 80s, 90s or today—or even contemporary heterosexual singles life, Gilder does make a meaningful point about reigning in the natural male desire to “get off” whenever and however and with whomever he can and civilize the male sex drive by channeling it into a stable, long term relationship.

* * *

So, how do we avoid becoming what Amneus called “a society of bastards, sluts, bitches, and sons-of-bitches?”

(Is it too late? Are we already there?)

His solution is simple enough—to preserve and strengthen the nuclear, patriarchal family. To this end Amneus advocates doing away with “a system of welfare that subsidizes and encourages illegitimacy, and by abolishing alimony and child-support payments that subsidize and encourage divorce. To those women who want to compete in the job market, Amneus says only that they should be forced to compete on truly equal terms—“on the basis of merit alone” without additional assistance from any sources as a result of their sex. He argues that as a result of the abolition of child-support payments, custody will most often be awarded to the highest wage earner, which will often be the father. Amneus developed this argument later in The Case for Father Custody (1999). If courts award custody to fathers, Amneus argues, “There will be fewer divorces; the family and society itself will be stabilized; crime, delinquency, illegitimacy associated with the fatherless family will decline.” He also states that families headed by fathers are far less likely to go on welfare. He opposes free child care progams, saying, “let liberated women be economically independent by not being subsidized.” Amneus also advocates a return to more traditional gender roles, sex-segregated education, and a return to more formal and conservative courtships that restore responsibility and meaning to sexual interactions.

The implementation of his solution, however, could be a bit tricky. Something like putting toothpaste back into a tube. I see this happening organically as a matter of necessity—during a period of stress—rather than as the result of a political or social movement.

Amneus also offers one more inventive solution. If American men are sick of dealing with feminist-educated American women, they might consider importing disadvantaged women from countries with more traditional ideas about gender.

“The fact is that there are scores of millions of women in the world who know all about the way American men pamper their women, who perhaps make little jokes about it, but who would very much like to be on the receiving end of some of the “oppression” about which our arrogant feminists clamor.”