That Male Ego

...To reduce sexual differences is to commit sexual suicide, Gilder says, meaning that sharply distinct sex roles are part of the natural order of things (which he calls the sexual constitution...

...reviewed by William L. O'Neill Since feminists have written some bad books it is only fair, I suppose, that anti-feminists should do the same...

...Gilder argues, as traditionalists did in the Nineteenth Century, that women's moral superiority and maternal satisfactions ought to compensate them for having to take second place everywhere else in life...

...Yet there is an element of truth in Sexual Suicide, which makes one long for a book that would deal helpfully with the problem of masculine insecurity...

...They fly from New York on the evening of July 8th and stop in Scandinavia seeing top Government officials...

...Mr...

...Jerome Davis, Friends House, Apt...

...In advancing this argument Gilder is prepared to go much further than the public at large...

...George Gilder, a journalist and liberal Republican speech writer, has a very simple and familiar thesis...

...He pounces happily on every survey and election return that seems to indicate that average Americans (unlike intellectuals, who, he appears to believe, are mostly emasculated anyway—except for Norman Mailer) like the "sexual constitution" as it is...

...They confer with members of Parliament...

...Victorians generally assumed, as Gilder does in Sexual Suicide, that male beastliness is checked only by marriage and the family...

...In a typical paragraph Gilder combines this argument with another of his favorites: "A society of relatively wealthy and independent women will be a society of sexually and economically predatory males, pursuing the violent and short-term patterns of male activity learned on the battlefield and in the hunt, or a society of narcotized drones, who have abandoned sexuality altogether...

...If they cannot be providers, they have to resort to muscle and phallus...

...That was not a good answer to feminism even then, is a worse one now, and will not be accepted by millions of women in any case...

...Male identity, the family, and civilization are linked together, and all will collapse unless feminists give up their mad effort to resemble men...

...Davis invites you to join the group...

...Yet surely the proper response is not to repress women but to liberate men from their fears and doubts...

...When men are denied the comfort of social fictions that prevent them from having to confront their actual inferiority, as by almost any kind of feminine achievement in a male field, they lose their sexual identity and commit various crimes...

...In short, equal pay for women leads to promiscuity, rape, and mayhem...

...The sexual power of women, if combined with economic power, leaves many males with no civilized way to achieve sexual identity...

...That some reviewers have taken this book seriously only shows again how much remains to be done before male-female relations are placed on a wholesome and equitable footing...

...Then they fly on to Leningrad where they arrive July 12th and stay till July 15th...

...Portions of this book are nothing less than vicious, such as Gilder's argument that government endorsement of equal rights for women is a betrayal of the civil rights movement...

...They then fly back to New York...

...The challenge feminism presents us with is not, as Gilder supposes, how to save the male sex from emasculation, but rather how to devise a new kind of masculine identity that does require the exploitation of women to sustain it...

...Next they fly to Moscow and stay there till July 20th...

...It is that men, young men especially, can be socialized only by domesticated females, and therefore whatever threatens traditional male-female relationships threatens civilization itself...

...O'Neill, professor of history at Rutgers, is the author of "The Woman Movement" "Women at Work," and "Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America") You Are Invited to Join a Fascinating Seminar to Europe Next July Dr...

...C-25, Sandy Spring, MD 20860...

...But this curious book is so thoroughly reactionary and so determined to preserve the male ego at whatever cost to women that only the most hardened misogynist ought to take any pleasure in it...

...Next they fly to Germany and then go on to London where they stay till the afternoon of July 29th...

...Obviously many men do suffer from feelings of inadequacy and doubt their manhood...

...Jerome Davis, former President of the American Federation of Teachers and President of the Eastern Sociological Society, is leading a Seminar to Europe next summer...

...There is no question but that feminism today, as in the past, brings these feelings to the surface, sometimes with destructive or anti-social results...

...In defense of this thesis Gilder does not hesitate to describe man as a pitiable creature indeed, so infantile and unsure of himself that he can be saved from psychic and moral disintegration only by rituals that affirm manhood and other qualities which in reality he lacks...

...In the Nineteenth Century this argument was directed by social conservatives mainly against divorce...

...Since the number that can be taken is limited, write at once to Dr...

...The total cost for everything—meals, hotels, airplanes, autos, New York to New York~is only $1487...

...Jerome Davis makes nothing from this, just gives his services free...

...In the process he even attacks equal pay for equal work, the most favored issue of the women's liberation movement, and one that a majority of Americans endorse...

...Gilder is convinced that being paid more than women is one of the chief restraints on male beasdiness, and therefore an essential feature of the sexual constitution...

...Other arguments are merely absurd, or even pathetic for what they reveal about the author...