Conclusion
The wound that unifies all men is ihe wound of their disposability. Their disposability as soldiers, workers, dads. The wound of believing that they are lovable if they kill and die so others might be saved and survive.
Stage 11 technology has ret ersed what humans need to do to survive. Stage И societies created the technology for our species to survive without killing but also created the technology to end our species if we do kill. We have responded by changing only what women do to survive. While we have used birth control, population growth, and technology to free women from female biology as female destiny, we have also used birth control and technology to create female biology as male destiny: she can choose to abort or to sue for support.
The freedom of women from biology as destiny has not freed men from male biology- as male destiny. We have not demanded that both sexes equally share the hazardous jobs and the risks of dying. We are still socializing men to be our killers, and therefore unlovable. . . and therefore disposable.
Changing millions of years of genetic heritage will play many tricks on both sexes. Women will think that being divorced means they are independent even as they seek dependence on the government as substitute husband; men will think that they are helping to make women equal even as they are passing laws to protea women from a dirty joke rather than passing laws to protea themselves from dying on a construaion site.
Ideally there should not be a men’s movement but a gender transition movement, only the power of the women’s movement necessitates the temporary correaive of a men’s movement. And this creates a special challenge for men: there are few political movements filled with healthy People, yet few healthy changes have occurred without political movements
Aether or not a men’s movement makes a genuine contribution will depend on its ability to communicate that all the world’s evils are not men’s resPonsibility . the origin of war was not men, it was survival. That men have neyer been their own commanders, the commander of men is the com — ^^d to protea That had men not proteaed, no one would be here asking
for more rights But that in the future, we cannot socialize a sex to be more willing to kill for us without producing a sex able to kill us; that we cannot socialize a sex to be more willing to die without producing a sex in denial — in denial of its self-esteem and its feelings. (We reinforce low male selfesteem by telling men they are the oppressors who cause war and therefore they desert* to be the only sex sent to war.)
With nuclear technology, the survival of the species is finally compatible with men demanding the socialization to love and be lovable. But men will not demand this until men see how the influences that make them disposable surround them in every direction from the outside and have infiltrated every cell of their insides — and how, by calling that disposability power, they have accepted bribes to blind themselves to their powerlessness.