While our civilization may have evolved from watching gladiators murder each other between Roman orgies to MMA pay-per-view and online porn, men haven’t changed. Sex and violence are still the big motivators. Priests, Kings and armies have been controlling sex to breed violence for centuries. We’ve been a male-dominated civilization.
“Only two things a young man wants to do and that’s fuck or fight,” my First Sergeant used to say as if he were delivering wisdom from the Sermon On The Mount. He’d been sentenced to the Army and Vietnam as a teenager in lieu of jail after firing a shotgun at a guy while part of a Polish street gang in Chicago.
Sex and violence go together like Venus and Mars, ever present in the human condition. The United States, like the ancient Roman Republic our founders imitated by design, heavily favors the cult of Mars over Venus. It’s one of many reasons we’ve been such a violent country at home and abroad.
As Americans, we’re encouraged to worship at the altar of violence. Our entertainment idols stare at us from posters and billboards holding guns in their hands. Our national sport, football, inures its players to the point of brain damage as they assault each other for our school, city and state pride and amusement. Our digital games reward us with upgraded weapons and powers for killing scores of virtual humans. Our most admired historical leaders won wars. Our most trusted institution is the military.
I know a thing or two about what people nowadays call the patriarchy. I grew up in a world where everyone’s dad was a soldier and then spent a significant portion of my twenties in the all-male world of an army combat arms unit. We sang jody calls about our dicks in between going to the field to blow shit up and run shit over in our tanks for Uncle Sam. Sergeants extolled the virtues of hardness.
While I was in the service, the Virginia Military Institute was being sued to admit women and I asked an L.T. I knew who graduated from V.M.I. what he thought: “They’re afraid she’ll have sex with someone, I don’t even know why men would want to go there,” was his response.
We can tell how dysfunctional and violent a society is measured by how much they shame women and sex. Islamists fly planes into buildings and cut people’s heads off because they’re terrified of women controlling their own sexuality. Fundamentalist Christians are able to deny centuries of science, support war and self-flagellating economic policies toward the goal of controlling women’s sexuality. Donald Trump can threaten to burn millions of people alive with nuclear war on Twitter but can’t admit he had sex with a porn star.
Growing up in the 80s, the most shameful things you could be called as a young man were a pussy or a faggot. It meant you were weak, a coward. The name-calling, like all name-calling, simply pointed out the social hierarchy. During my four decades on this planet I’ve found it’s quite the opposite. The bravest people I’ve known have been women, gay or both.
The consequences for sex and violence have radically changed thanks to modern technology. Sex between consenting adults no longer must result in a baby and/or venereal disease but violence perpetrated by an individual can kill scores with a store-bought gun. Nonetheless, it is women’s control over their own bodies that the Republican party seeks to control. The right wing wants to restrict family planing and abortion to punish women for sex, as if it were somehow a bad thing.
The cult of man used its raw muscle to hack nature into submission, dig into the bowels of the earth, pound steel into swords, conquer our neighbors and enslave the weak. It has resulted in a dying planet rigged to explode with thousands of nuclear weapons.
My fellow dudes, there is a better way.
Might I suggest we move the needle away from masculine and toward the feminine. Life is simply better the more women are involved. Women are generally kinder. Women tend to talk things out. Women care more about the future as their children are usually more important than their ego. Women nurse us back to health. Women create life.
Human civilization is on the precipice. If we continue business as usual, we’ve got maybe a generation or two left before the climate annihilates us. We need to change and that change means taking the power away from the destroyers who have lead our societies for thousands of years and putting it in the hands of creators. It means empowering more women to fix the awful mess we’ve made. It means women must have, at a minimum, full equality and control over their own bodies.
As studies have shown that we men are more impulsive and mature at a slower rate than women, I’ll boil it down for my bros: what would you rather do, fuck or fight?
Wes Clark Jr. 