More on Mothers
By Jay B. Scott
One of my fellow residents here at the apartment complex likes to play his Christian CDs way up loud with his door open—as a groovy and loving witness, of course, and not as his own brand of revenge for civilization and its discontents. Anyway, I can't help but be reminded that all of that gushy praise those singers are giving to a “male” god is so obviously confusing in light of the fact that no man or woman praises any earthly male even remotely like that. But both men and women praise mothers (and all associated women) exactly like that! So religious phrases like “Chapel of Praise,” or “Worship Service,” and the like are really just indicative that it is motherly women who are being worshipped. And the secular world is no different: the run-away majority of popular songs involve men with honey dripping off their lips for women. This is not the case with the sex roles reversed, to any critical amount (praise be to the Wilson Sisters of Heart and their song “Magic Man”!). The old Mother Worship, and even the so-called patriarchal religions—in which Mother is revealed through the Son (though, of course, this is never admitted, as part of “mother protection”)—has come down to us quite in one piece!
There was a certain nineteenth-century American writer by the name of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, one of those scribbling women—er, uh, feminist pioneers—who wrote many wonderful short stories. In her piece, “The Revolt of `Mother,'” the protagonist claims that children have an “inborn” loyalty to their mother. If this were so, however, then mothers wouldn't even have to bother with being the ones who raise infants and small children. Whatever servant, man or woman, whom they chose to raise those little bundles of joy, would not be able to sway the children's symbiotic loyalty away from their birth mother. But we all know this isn't so. Let me state two popular examples that illustrate my point. The first is from Hans Christian Anderson's famous story of “The Ugly Duckling.” When the misplaced baby swan breaks through its shell and looks up at the mother duck, it starts screaming, “Help! I've been kidnapped! Where's my mommy?!” Right? We know it does nothing of the kind. That little gawky baby looks up with those big goo-goo eyes and squeaks, “Ma-Ma!” The real-life version of this scenario is the dreaded Delivery Room baby swap: the wrong baby goes home with the parents. The most frightening thing is not that the parents get the wrong baby; if Freeman was correct, that inborn loyalty would kick in, and that baby would start screaming little “Baby Abduction!” cries. No—the most frightening thing about Delivery Room baby swaps is that NOTHING happens! That little cuddly creature looks up at that strange woman with those very same eyes of bottomless adoring trust. So much for Freeman's “inborn loyalty” platform. But mothers do get their children's unswerving loyalty from being the primary, or even better, the sole caregiver of those children from the delivery room up until around the age of six. This is generally called “The Formative Years.” And the most important thing that's being formed is the unquestioning loyalty of the little political subjects toward their monarch. The result of this is also shown in Freeman's story: When “Father” realizes that “Mother” has duped him out of a major life project, he approaches “Mother” for an explanation. Immediately (and not from inborn loyalty, but from cultural conditioning), the pre-adolescent son steps protectingly in front of “Mother” to defend her against the man she has taught the boy to hate--the one that he owes exactly half his very existence to. My dear reader, this is what POWER is all about! Mothers figured out long ago that if fathers ever got to the children first, it would be mothers who would be the hated ones. Our society would be singing gushy praises to men. The prisons and the battlefields and the backbreaking labor jobs and the heart attack Type-A office jobs would be occupied by women. And it would be Mother Mary nailed to that cross instead of a man. No, mothers well learned that “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” And rocking the cradle happens after birth.
Now let's talk about birthdays. It's implicit in a birthday that two people are involved: you and your mother. And considering that birthing is exactly what gives mothers their world-controlling power, I say that every birthday celebration is just another celebration of Motherhood—once removed, out of that protective drive to step in front of Mother to make her invisible. This may seem like a petty argument, until we look a little deeper. Let's say that instead of celebrating your birthday, you celebrated your CONCEPTION DAY! (Oh, yes, I know that some people don't know the exact day of their conception. But then, some people in this world do not know the exact day that they were born, either. That never stopped them from throwing a drunken party to honor their big entrance into the world!) Celebrating your Conception Day does one very important thing: it gets Daddy involved! Ah-ha! There's the rub! Mother will be damned if all those friends and relatives lifting their glasses and singing praises to her for giving birth to you will instead crowd her out and make her actually share the glory of you with your father! That would just be way too mature and democratic
Now, in making “Conception Day” the replacement for “Birthday,” I am not necessarily condoning the Right-To-Lifers' view that 1-week-old embryos are as viable as full-term babies. I have already shown elsewhere these women's true motives for piling up babies by the bushel basket full: there is strength in numbers. But one only needs large numbers in one's group if they are COMPETING with someone else's group. This idea was amply illustrated by Merlin Stone in her landmark book, When God Was a Woman. She talks about those wonderfully religious and moral people, the Hebrews—led by that quintessential Mother's Son, Joshua—who tumbled down the walls of Jericho and all of the other neighboring towns, killing every last man, woman, child—and yes, babies. No abortion doctor has yet been able to match the skillful gore of Joshua when he put those little bundles of joy to his twenty-pound, two-edged sword. Whee! Here goes an arm and there goes a leg and off goes the little punkin' head! He probably sang that song as he sliced and diced those little cuties into a blob of bloody biomass. Remember, Dear Reader, that this is the ultimate result of competition.
Instead of competition, let's try some COOPERATION. I remember back in the `80s there was an experiment going on in Cooperative Sports (to me, this is an oxymoron!). The whole idea was that it created a win-win situation. That is mature and democratic, sure enough. But, alas, it was an idea whose time has not come yet. We need to start at the beginning, with Democratic [Balanced] Parenting well in place, for anything like cooperative sports to not only be effective, but to simply make sense in the eyes of the masses. These same masses are still dealing with civilization and its discontents in the best way they know how. “Give me a blood bath!” “Throw those Christians to the lions!” (Not a bad idea—just kidding!) Vicariously participate in the Gladiators—of whatever day and time—ripping and pounding each other to pieces. Go to the Daytona 500 to watch Dale Earnhardt die. Whee! (Notice that these are all males doing the dying.) I can still remember with disgust my ex-wife screaming my stepson on to smashing victory at his junior high football games. There was something very primal and hateful in that “cheering” of hers. She wanted blood! But I was the bad guy for refusing to support Luke's football activities.
This reminds me of what seems to be the most important things to people (and, I might add, they are exactly important to everyone because they are important to mothers!). When I drive into some of these mid-western towns, the very first thing that greets me is a sign that identifies that town with their winning sports team of a particular year. This is that town's mothers saying, “Either join us or beware of us—we be bad!” Nice greeting. I prefer that the town sign say what kind of scholastic honors those people have achieved over the years. Robert Townsend, the (used to be popular) comedian, also demonstrated this idea in his skit about teachers being honored like players on a football team, jogging up to the awards stand victoriously to the madly cheering crowd. He also made a movie in which the super hero gained his awesome strength by absorbing the information in books. What a great guy--also sadly ahead of his time.
One of the most incredible cover-ups for Mother that I have run across is female infanticide. That we have never questioned that it is men who are responsible for this is blunt testimony to our overwhelming fear of Mother. I did a cross-cultural study of female infanticide for a sociology class in college, and I was shocked at what I found (not really—I was going “YES!”). Mothers, all around the world, and at all times, have been the indisputable champions of infanticide, executing their own flesh-and-blood offspring with the cool detachment of a psychopath. And that they kill their daughters is not because they're some mindless puppets of the misogynistic “Patriarchy,” but because those daughters, Nancy Friday reminds us, are “Mother's little competitors”—not only for the loyalty of the father, if there is one, but, more importantly, for the loyalty of Big Brother. Mother has very specific plans for Big Brother, and the last thing she needs is a fresh little tart distracting him from his pre-ordained mission as Mother's Mindless Sacrificial Male. All women, you see, save for Mother and perhaps those women pre-approved by Mother, are to be disdained by Big Brother. He has his master's (Mother's) permission to use and abuse those little vamps as he will (since he does Mother's will, anyway). And so, on the surface, it appears as though we have a misogynistic patriarchy. It's a really good slight-of-hand trick that can be easily performed as long as you get to the children first.
The Radical Feminists' hatred of the “Patriarchy” goes deep into their personal lives. To live with the fact that your own mother has rejected you and withheld her nurturing love from you in favor of Big Brother—whom she is constantly spending time making goo-goo eyes at, and lingering lustfully on the diaper changes—is a bitter pill to swallow, indeed. Daddy would shower you with love, but he is faithfully performing his own pre-ordained role of “Absent Father,” according to the Holy Rules of Motherdom. So you are left behind to carry out the “Cinderella” role, and you had better like it. The result that I have recently seen is in some of the fantasy advertisements that show a mother and daughter either literally or figuratively (as in an elderly woman and a supposedly unrelated younger woman) smiling, laughing, and otherwise having the time of their lives. No doubt this kind of fantasy scenario sells whatever products like hot cakes.
Mothers have done such a bang-up job of convincing everyone that they are the all-natural, sole keepers of the nurturance ambrosia that they have fooled even the smartest of the inner circle of Feminism. These Rad-Fems speak wistfully of dancing naked under the harmonious influence of Mother Moon, within some primal meadow surrounded by the sacred trees of life, and so on. Boy, how sad to be so deprived—even sadder to come crawling back to the very person who has thrown you in the Paris sewers. This is how convinced the Feminists are that nurturance—what they so desperately need—is a Mother thing, not a human thing that could just as easily be supplied by Father, if he were only allowed to do so. I have suspected for some time now—and probably heard it from someone else too long ago to remember—that relationships, as they have been, are ultimately sado-masochistic.
Mother's monopoly on nurture is only part of the picture dealing with our most basic needs. Nurturance can be considered our most basic emotional need. But what about our most basic physical needs—the familiar three that we can recite in our sleep—Food, Clothing, and Shelter. I am here to tell you that She has the monopoly on those, as well. Think about Food. It's no coincidence that agricultural societies are the most blatantly matriarchal. I like to say that “Daddy may bring home the bacon, but it's Mommy who gets all the praise for cooking it.” I think that Mother's control over food is self-evident. It's certainly as American as “Mom and Apple Pie.” What then about clothing? When you were still in school, who bought all of your school clothes? Even as an adult, who is still trying to give you underwear for Christmas? You've got it. Again, in two parent families, the dutiful father simply hands over his slave paycheck to the Master, who then decides how it will be spent. The last one of our basic needs will be the most argued, I'm sure, as we have always heard the saying, “A man's home is his castle.” In another writing, I assert that everything is just the opposite of what it appears to be. This is certainly true of men being king of their castle. If you've ever seen the Disney animated version of “Alice in Wonderland,” you'll know just what it means to be king. You're simply another subject of the Queen! Or what about the subject, “Empty Nest Syndrome?” This refers to the parental house after the last of the children have left. It gives the big hint as to what a house really is: a nest! Nests are for child rearing, and I don't think anyone will dispute Who has traditionally been in charge of that one. So then, mothers have had the monopoly on all of our basic needs: Food, Clothing, Shelter, and Nurturance. And what's the obvious pay-off for mothers? Only the total dependence of Her subjects. It's what everyone wants: loyal followers. You get to dictate to them everything that you want them to do, and you've got the grapes to dangle in front of them. Like the song says, “Everybody wants to rule the world.” And mothers get to rule their corner of the world simply because they get to the children first. Even after the children grow up and leave home, there is still the feeling anchored inside each of them that they OWE their mother. However, I tell you that this is not a mystery, or the result of any magical symbiotic relationship, but because of plain and simple conditioning. The problem, once again, is that the children's loyalty is toward only the mother. Who cares if the old man dies a premature death, from being driven like a slave, some thirty years before the mother passes away. At least Mom is well cared for. Damn right! That was the plan all along. And all Mother had to do to pull it off was to CHEAT!
Mother's monopoly over the control of the children and the kind of power that she derives from it is vividly illustrated in George Orwell's Animal Farm. Napoleon is a typical Mother's Son. He cheats in imitation of his cheating mother. In another writing, I said of the Mother's Chosen Son that “He and the Mother are One.” So let's just call Napoleon “Napo-Leanne” in order to drive home the reality behind the story. The Father in the story is Snowball. He is a true father, independent in his thinking, and therefore free to be creative. He has devised a plan that is beneficial for everyone—a truly democratic, fair, and just treatise. However, Napo-Leanne, being tradition-bound and therefore not a free thinker, is jealous of the potent power that Snowball is able to wield because of his scientific rigor. Napo-Leanne wants all power over the people for herself. So she gathers unto herself a pack of orphaned puppies and hides away for a season. No one sees her for the longest time. But on the day that she has been waiting and planning for, she surfaces not with puppies but large, strong attack dogs. Napo-Leanne sics the fierce creatures on the virtuous Snowball, and they chase him off the property, and rip him to shreds. Then Napo-Leanne uses fear and coercion to force the loyalty of the rest. In the end they suffer under her totalitarian rule. Now, haven't I mentioned this strategy before? Remember in “The Revolt of `Mother'” where the half-grown son is unleashed by “Mother” to snarl threateningly at “Father”? Also, remember the city limit signs? It's the same strategy. Football is the true reason for schools, not scholastics. Mother is training her pack of attack dogs, and there will be no revolt against Her! Fathers will be the slaves, and they will like it, or else! We do not have Freud's Oedipal Conflict here, where the woman is believed to be the passive object and therefore not responsible; we have Berne's feminine game called “Let's You And Him Fight.” It's the age-old Ritual Regicide come down to us in all of its horror and injustice.
I mentioned that Napo-Leanne used fear and coercion to force the loyalty of the people. My discussion in this essay would not be complete without talking about Gossip. The writers of Sociology textbooks gloss over the subject by calling gossip a form of social control, as if to say that this is a good thing. But totalitarianism is a form of social control, too. Shall we just gloss over that one? No—and neither shall we side-step gossip because we are afraid of mommies. (This is not to say that gossip and mothers are not to be feared. They are both frightening as Hell, because they both can have the power over life and death—but only if you succumb to your fear. It's OK to be afraid; it's not OK to run away from your fear.) Let's take a really good look at Gossip, and see how it operates and what the pay-off is. If I were to come up to you and start talking to you about someone else in ways that defamed that person's character, I would be doing two things. The obvious thing is that I would be planting the seeds of doubt and distrust in your mind about the other person. The pay-off for me is that I would be effectively loosening the bond of your political loyalty to that person. I know that you either won't be able to verify the information one way or the other, or you simply won't take the time to investigate the matter. The next step, and the not-so-obvious thing that I would be doing, is to force your loyalty over to my side by making you afraid of me. By gossiping to you, I would be demonstrating that if I can talk about someone else behind his or her back, I can also talk about you behind your back. Dear reader, this is the act of a bully. In our wonderfully democratic Constitution of the United States, it is declared that a defendant has the right to face his accuser. Why? Very simple. If I am in the same room with someone who claims to have a legitimate complaint against me, that person is a lot less liable to stretch the truth (or downright lie) to the mediator also present. When a person is “protected” from the consequences of her actions, on the other hand, what has been set up is a kind of ultimate power. And there is an old saying: “Ultimate power corrupts ultimately.” Mothers have set females up as the protected sex (making males the unprotected, expendable sex!). That makes it extremely easy for them to cheat. And gossip is one of the biggest, most effective ways that they cheat. But we who know better need to stand up and call gossip what it is. Gossip is backbiting. Backbiting is the same as backstabbing. And in the Old West, backstabbing would have been the same thing as shooting a man in the back. That act was considered the supreme example of a coward. And everyone knows that cowards are bullies, and bullies are cowards. Gossiping bully-cowards are the ones who need to be cast out. And, yes, I know that men gossip, too. But it will be those men who well imitate their gossiping mothers who engage in such tyranny. And if we get down to the argument of which came first—the chicken or the egg—I will tell you what I have said before: Mother gets to the children first. That makes the chicken, Mother Hen, the responsible party.
In that mothers have set themselves and associated women up as the protected sex, there naturally arises a situation of imbalance. If one group gets all the protection, the other group will get none. That's the men, of course. But is this just the way it's supposed to be? Because I'm one of those who dared to think for themselves, I have come to the conclusion that there is no good reason for men protecting women. (Actually, it's more like men are the ones who need to be protected from women!) The argument for protecting women goes like this: Men are raised to protect women because women are more biologically precious than men, in that women only produce one egg every 28 days, while men make millions of sperm a second. The argument continues that you can repopulate a village with only a few males (the rooster in the hen house thing), but you can't repopulate a village with only a few females. Now, first of all, can men impregnate millions of females every second? Don't be impressed by the numbers. Secondly, and most importantly, ever since the advent of civilization 9,000 years ago, with it's domestication of grain and livestock, the human population has been outpacing all other species on the planet (funny that we kill deer when there gets to be too many of them!). And with the discovery of penicillin, our numbers have been exploding in a J-curve right off the graph. In 40 years, if we don't tell the right-to-lifer mothers why they need to switch to Pro-Choice, the world population will be doubled. Then it won't be just the third-world countries that will be the have-nots. It will be all of us. But the Rad-Fems have their own idea for reducing the surplus population—get rid of the men! Sally Miller Gearhardt proposed a plan a couple decades ago to reduce to male population to 20%. That means 20% of the male population, which is 10% of the total population. I'm here to tell you that this is something that will never occur naturally. Gearhardt is talking about male infanticide, because the Rad-Fems blame the big, bad Patriarchy for all of the female infanticide that has ever occurred in the world, and now they are going to get their very mature revenge on men. True fathers will be non-existent. However, the Rad-Fems aren't even waiting for the adult males alive today to simply die of old age and get out of the way. We are being systematically killed off by the policy makers who are shifting the resources away from us and over to the women in totally unegalitarian amounts. Everywhere I go these days, I see whole office buildings filled up with women earning that dollar. What happened to Equal Rights? There should be 50% men and 50% women working in those office buildings if in fact employers don't discriminate against sex, as the law states. But this is not the case; those laws are being purposely ignored. And who is checking? You've got it. Any man who tries to raise an argument is simply going to be called a misogynist, and be cast out. The Feminists have the noose around men's necks and are pulling tight. One only has to go to a Father's Rights web site to hear some of the horror stories happening to fathers everywhere. The law is on the side of women, and the enforcers in the court systems are stripping fathers of all their resources, and driving them to “suicide.” I quote the word because it's really murder that's being committed here. It's called regicide: the killing of the king.
But here's the problem with getting rid of fathers. There's an old saying: “Necessity is the (damn the incidiousness!) `Mother' of invention.” Fathers have always been disenfranchised from any critical amount of political power, as I have already given examples of. I am speaking of true fathers, like Snowball, and not fake father/Big Brothers and Big Brother `wanna-be's like Napo-Leanne who do the will of their tradition-bound mothers. This last kind of man is the fat-cheeked one who bellows at you, “That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it's gonna be!” They're people like the high school football coach, or some other well-trained ball buster—you can't miss them, they're everywhere! The first kind of father, on the other hand, is the one who slipped through the cracks while Mommy and her chosen son Junior were making goo-goo eyes at each other. This young male knows that he's outside the power circle, and that necessarily drives him to think of new ways of empowering himself. He is the one who becomes the scientific man, because at the base of all true scientific practice lies the embrace of fairness and the loathing of cheating. Historically, the rise of Science tracked parallel with the rise of Democracy. They were a twin birth, and they were born of necessity by a critical amount of men who managed to slip through the cracks and away from the inculcation into social bondage. But what happens if the current trend to get rid of fathers continues unabated? Then the chance to balance out the political power structure at its most foundational level will be gone. The fragile inroads that fathers have made over the last few centuries toward the kind of justice that their position deserves will be destroyed. This will destroy the exact kind of men who are synonymous with science, and its offspring, technology. I'm talking about Western European culture. The Feminists say they despise it, and the Feminists are making international policy now. These are the same Feminists who want to dance naked under Mother Moon. If they succeed in crushing the uprising of these true fathers, and turn the world of humanity around in the rearward direction toward old matriarchal ways, then what might we expect? Well, in the absence of science and technology, we would probably all be getting back to Mother Nature in ways that we probably won't like. We'll be walking outside our tent communities to squat at the dung heap, hoping Mother Nature isn't blowing her winds in our direction. Disease will be rampant and unchecked due to equally unchecked childbirth. And our world will be a ghetto presided over by a tyrannical Venus of Willendorf-type Mommy!
My dear reader, the above example is the ultimate result of cheating. I've said it elsewhere before and I'll say it here again. In order for a living organism, whether a blade of grass or a human society, to grow and to live and to flourish, there must be orderliness within the life processes. There is a delicate balance in these processes, and if the orderliness of that balance is disturbed and disrupted, then the processes start spinning out of control toward the edge of chaos. (Chaos is a word that was originally used to describe the disordered, non-living universe that existed before the development of life on earth. Chaos theory is also a modern-day mathematical treatise in which orderliness is dependent upon balance.) If the life processes lose their balance, then they become corrupted. And corruption is a process of decay, which results in the death of the organism. In this essay, the main themes that I've tried to emphasize are the importance of the balance of power, and the consequences of disrupting that balance. Cheating is the disruption of order. It's not a “fun” thing; in the end it's suicidal. Although I have intended to write this for anyone's eyes, it is my hope that you mothers and prospective mothers will respond favorably to these words, and actively plan to include fathers in the daily upbringing of your infants and small children. All you can do is your own part. But doing that will be enough to change the world for the better. Thanks for reading this.
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