Der Spiegel, special edition 5, 1998

The Women are at Fault - Matthias Matussek about Misandry and Women's Identity Problem
(translated by Walter H. Schneider - German version: Die Frauen sind Schuld)

Women are strong and smart, and men are pea-brained, urge-driven perpetrators. Women are on the ascent, men on the descent. "While women, with full awareness of their aims, developed themselves during the last 30 years," according to Berlin's "tip", "the direction taken by men exhibits, in an almost spooky fashion, the opposite trend." "Women are" ... and-so-on, and-so-on ...

Whoever tunes into one of the excitedly-chattering programs of feminine self-elevation comes to muse -- what bothers these women, who in Journals and TV magazines pat themselves on their shoulders? Why do they constantly stand before the fairy-tale mirror-on-the wall, to reassure themselves that they are the most beautiful,, the smartest, the most courageous?

 The answer is simple: because they are compelled to it and suspect at the same time that it all is fairly stupid. Nevertheless, ever since leftist theory became mired and foundered in the affirmative-action-driven industry of hiring-quota systems, only this dictate is valid: only woman is good, exactly because she is woman.

Because one can claim such with the same intellectual effort about men, or Haribo-bearkins [brand-name toy animal], or Hilfiger-jeans, doubts about this thesis must be wiggled away with continually more absurd contortions. Since then, therefore, the narcissistic posturing before the mirror, as silly as it is, is part of the prescribed role-acting for the "modern woman," something that she finds almost impossible to escape. Naturally, too, not so "the man," because with the self-worship as superwoman comes inevitably the devaluation of man. 

"You are shit." (Tic Tac Toe); "Only a dead man is a good man." (Women's bestseller); Only fear makes a man humble, therefore bearable." (Stern Magazine); "What is a man in muriatic acid? A solved Problem." [Emma, a radical women's periodical. The term "solved" in German can mean also dissolved --WHS]. In the face of this melange "the man" has only two possible courses of action. He finds himself a more sensible companion, perhaps a pit bull terrier, or, perhaps he doesn't give up and attempts to decode all of this rhetoric.

Admittedly, it has become difficult to comprehend the pirouettes of feminine self-determination. For example, there is the discussion of women's side [or experience, see German text at Frauenseite ]. At one time it was invented to promote "equal rights," then again it was deemed to be evidence of female discrimination. Now, for women's day, the "taz"-women deigned to let exclusively men write -- who can fathom all this?

But most immediately, it is noticeable that "modern woman," for the purpose of self-determination, simply can't deny herself man anymore. She conjures him to herself in a kind of excessively negative yearning, and sometimes the rampage simply over-revs, because nobody listens anymore in the media-noise. Accordingly, one could translate the Tictactoe-Emma-Stern tirade as follows: please take me seriously, I can't manage it anymore by myself!

It is an incurable fixation: just like the "little wife" of earlier times defined herself by the successes of her husband, so the feminist woman defines herself exclusively through success over or against man. One could say: she always thinks only of one thing, at him.

It is a continuous theme for party or hair-dryer, for magazine-quiz or cappuccino-circle. How should he be: hard or soft? Some indict him as an urge-driven perpetrator, others as an impotent entity, for some he hasn't enough, for others not enough testosterone -- only, this rhetoric has nothing to do with men, but instead everything with projections of female identity-crises. 

At the core of it, it is known as the dancing-lessons problem of pubescent girls who are unsure of their attractiveness. Ever since they were promised at their thumb-sucking age "their man" as a prince who solves all of their life-problems, he has been a construction doll with which they can fidget and fuss and that they can modify, whom they adore at times as a seducer, sometimes make faces at as an evil uncle, and who is necessarily increasingly less sufficient to satisfy their demands for perpetual bliss.

One is almost moved to call out: sisters, take the thumb out of your mouth and grow up. You yourself, and perhaps Alice Schwarzer too (pioneering German feminist) are responsible for your problems, but not man.

But, things aren't so simple, because the continual feminist scurrying over the course of the last 30 years resulted in real disenfranchisement of men and threw up trenches between the genders -- and made a major portion of women just as perplexed. The tirade, so one could say, solidified institutionally, in quotas and affirmative action boards, in male-hostile jurisprudence and a bureaucratic tunnel-system of women's houses and liberation seminars, an enormously powerful, well-funded propaganda apparatus, for whom the man is always the perpetrator, the woman always the victim. 

If one traces the explosion in the number of divorces, the feminists discourse led over and beyond that to the destruction of families and the decomposition of relationships. It is highest time to seriously react to all of this.

Fact: Ever since fashion journals and stylish feminism fed sparrow-brain diets like the ones cited above to the Girlie-Generation [sic], men have had to deal with a steadily more egotistical, more spoiled, more sulking role-model, that makes its appearance in every love-relationship and that develops an undertow that exposes even the most love-worthy, female partner to continual, corruptive temptation.

Fact: 30 years of systematic preferential treatment of women have produced a women's ideal that must consider every uncomfortable truth, every frustration, every slight in a relationship as a disturbing threat – a danger that can only be fought off by flight from the relationship. One calls that: emancipation.

Fact: Women are becoming increasingly less capable to have relationships: almost three quarters of all divorces are being filed by women after a relatively short duration of marriage, which comes to them correspondingly easy, because, as a rule, the tab is paid by the husband.

As the result of this [last] statistic, women obviously manage increasingly less frequently to develop the extent for conflict-resolution and for loyalty that is a prerequisite for an adult relationship and even for the constructing of a family.

Psychologists of the University of Washington, who recently published the results of the study of a longitudinal survey, confirm this observation: the best ingredient to keep an average marriage alive today is said to be "to obey the wife." Naturally, that is a devastating diagnosis. The modern woman as spoiled infant who demands unconditional obeisance, no man who still has it all together goes continually along with that.

To be sure, he'll have to secure his future far better than up to now, because the methods for revenge of male unruliness that the legislators put into the hands of women are horrifying. "He shall pay until he whimpers," recommends the Cosmopolitan for such cases. "The thumb-screw lets itself be tightened so delightfully, ever more mercilessly."

How did it come to this? In 30 years of male remorseful guilt and female lobbying, it seems that sulking prosperity-children have grown up, who call themselves, after a women's bestseller, "Bad Girls," and who fashion greed and capriciousness into a program for liberation. Everyone of their wishes must be read by the State and men in their eyes, and if they don't, they are women's enemies.

These fashionable inhabitants of the social-state hothouse swept the prudish feminism of the first hour into the cracks in the floor, where it promptly become hard, dirty and malevolent, however, where it also provides secure footing on the women's rights activists' Dance Floor [sic].

Just like any other spoiled child, they kick the weak and sink adoring themselves to their knees. Every professional success becomes a manifesto against men, every failure evidence of misogyny, and every instant of motherhood an entitlement to medals for valour.

It drives one silly with laughter to consider for instance the cult of the so-called lone-mothers. The government's aid-squadrons jump to help them as if they were seriously wounded, as if the birth of a child alone were social service in the front-line and, over and above that, a Nobel-Price-worthy performance, and further, as if each relationship-weak social-assistance-recipient who couldn't hang on to her boyfriend or exchanged him for another one were as a-matter-of-course entitled to a war-widows pension in the form of support and government-sponsored privileges for life.

Painstakingly, these modern dolls, for lack of more important problems search, under the guidance of women's magazines, the folds and creases of their souls for "frustrations" in a relationship. Does he have enough time? Does he revere me sufficiently? Is he truly Superman? Why does he smoke in the John? Away with him!

The modern woman, who feels herself to be so superior to the "old" one, is a caricature that devours feminist self-help books and fashion journals in alternation and knows at all times exactly who is at fault for her malaises: The Man.

In a tricky way she is even right. It was largely men who passed those laws and created the structure by which women, in a character-twisting fashion, were advantaged in every way. It was those old-fashioned, derided protector-men who actually intended through their preferential treatment of women to eliminate injustice.

All of these gifts of the "patriarchal society" are being celebrated today as victories of the strong woman and are being used for biological power-politics, always under the pretense of the fight against "discrimination against women.

It is a purely symbolic battle, because true equality before the law was already gained through the battles of the despised grandmothers and great-grandmothers -- in addition, they darned socks, raised true heroines, camp-followers and bystanders, wrote novels and brought their families through wars and post-war reconstruction. 

Let's take a closer look at today's discrimination. Maybe it exists for young women in a certain lack of men in the age group 18-20, therefore in a handicap when visiting the disco -- namely, young men must serve, different from women, in the armed forces, and those who don't serve substitute social services, nurse the elderly, wash the handicapped, care for the halt or children in orphanages.

The demand for female equality remains in this regard, let's say, rather restrained. Young women come today to the university with an enormous advantage in the time frame, and can, thanks to hiring quotas, count with certainty on preferential treatment if they truly should endeavour at some time to obtain employment.

They will with absolute certainty not apply in garbage removal, as furniture mover, or in a foundry, because here only men work. According to an American study, in which professions were ranked according to pay, risk to health, dirt and stress, 24 of the 25 "lousiest" professions are a purely male thing.

Even against the life-risk "love" women are insured today -- a full-risk insurance for the case that they may be abandoned at some time. As a rule, family- and divorce laws see to it that they are entitled to alimony and custody, therefore, at any rate, a social-democratic happy-end to every love-tragedy.

That's not all. Even if they are the ones who googly-eyed lose themselves to the next prince, which in the mean-time is most likely the rule, they are given the privilege to clean house. They have the continual stranglehold on the emotional and financial assets of the man. They have him by the collar.

On the other hand, the same risk doesn't taper off with men, but rather multiplies: they don't just suffer the loss of the loved partner, but lose also the children and must pay to boot, sometimes to the point of impoverishment.

With every new attempt to found a family, this man-trap looms larger for men, while the woman -- theoretically -- retains the possibility to win ever new additional gains. Or, as best-selling [female] author Gaby Hartmann jokes: "The woman who after three divorces doesn't drive a Porsche yet has done something wrong."

On average, women today live six to seven years longer than men. Death-professions like Uranium mining or erecting scaffolds are a men's thing, women in turn occupy first places in TV consumption at any time of day. There is a simple reason why department stores reserve them a multiple of the floor area that they hold ready for men -- it is women who"with full awareness of their aims developed themselves" who spend most money. In short: in our society, women are being pampered like weak children. 

Let's look back. In a remarkable theoretical coup, about 30 years ago, feminists like Alice Schwarzer declared the female half of society to be an endangered species and themselves as its chiefs. The battle for "women's rights" was from then on something like the saving of the rain forests. Not for nothing was the success story of the women's movement intertwined with the Greens [in Germany there is actually a Green Party which holds a considerable number of seats in the Bundestag -- WHS], a party which for top-jobs demands as a qualifying attribute to be a woman.

The Feminist Territories: a society-funded program of female self-worship, and, by the way, a splendid business enterprise. Because, for all intents and purposes, since then "woman" is synonymous with noble purpose, control is hardly possible anymore and corruption on account of the social phrase became a virtually dead-sure certainty.

Most recent examples: Hesse's Green female Minister for the Environment, and Hamburg's SPD [Social Democratic Party] Senator for Social Issues, who both had to resign as the result of being accused of patronage. In the first case it was a girlfriend, in the second the husband. The social reasons were sonorous and the interdependencies no less so -- the social-state's version of "Friends of the Italian Opera." [I'm not sure what this phrase relates to --WHS] 

When the corruption in office became known, both women reacted classically. They criticized the critics as enemies of women. The Hamburg Senator for Social Issues considered the critique to be "impudence," especially for a "female politician," and she didn't by chance resign because she had to, but rather because she "didn't want to expose her children to further allegations of this sort. That's what one calls political abuse with dependents.

Under such auspices, the Juso-slogan [Juso may mean Jugendsorgeamt (Youth-welfare Office), but I'm not sure, I'm waiting for a definition -- WHS] "Women into Power" naturally becomes a horror flick, just like the related [slogan which] wishes "Women into the Executive Floor." Why must women be placed into top-positions? Only because they are women? How insulting for them! Aren't there other criteria too, for example: performance?

But no. In most cases these pass-words are introduced by back-benchers in politic and media, who, beside the fact that they are women, have not much to offer. At any rate, with the modern feminist phenotype, the proximity of social phrase, business acumen and ruthlessness is quite noticeable. After all, it is only a small group of well-earning female journalists and politicians, who assumed the power of definition for "women" and who love to use the lower third of society ("female recipients of social assistance") to defend their own sources of income. 

The entitlement rhetoric functions at all times. Feminism draws thereby from quite traditional sources, such as the appeal to men to protect the weaker sex -- and this appeal has been built in the mean-time to have become a battle system. In the Feminist Territories, the female claim of powerlessness is an all-powerful totem over which incantations are spoken and to which incense is offered, a totem that suffers no competition. 

For example, when the SDR [Sueddeutscher Rundfunk -- South German Broadcasting Corporation] produced the movie "Of the Disappearance of the Fathers," the participants in the 19th Fall-Conference of "Women in the Media" reacted promptly. They gave the report, which showed a father's fight for his daughter -- a man who shed tears -- the "Sour Cucumber"-award [Sour cucumber is a term used in the German media to denote a non-newsworthy item in the slow and boring summer vacation time that has been elevated to newsworthy status. --WHS]. Why? Because it was said that it had "denounced women" and "in sentimental fashion stirred up compassion for discarded fathers." Overall, it was said, this movie was based on "contempt for women and on misogyny."

Something similar happened to me when I reported in Der Spiegel about hunger-striking men from the lower levels of society whose divorced wives denied them access to their children. The feminist counter-public marched up in virtually closed ranks -- against the men who had dared to publicize their weakness.

They were derided as "shaggy", "whining", as "losers", they "wailed in the light of Fall over photos of their children," and were "slightly touched." That is how today's misandry unrestrained makes its way, so ruthlessly reacts the "feminate" when one breaks its propaganda-monopoly on powerlessness.

That isn't simply the lively lust for a Sottise [sic -- I don't know the term and have not yet received a definition. It may mean "Schottische" but I'm not sure, I never learned to dance it when I lived in Germany. --WHS] -- there is something far deeper in relation to civilization and social conscience that got ruined. The breakdown is structure, as evil as a barbed wire obstacle.

The [Feminist] Territories -- a closed world, which, logically, also persecutes apostate women. Female authors like Karin Jaeckel, who wrote about "The Used-up Man" [a translation that I used before, but, which perhaps more properly should be "The Sucked-dry Man" --WHS], or Eva Fischkurt, who took aim at "Sexual Harassment by Women," Katharina Rutschky, who subjected feminist "abuse"-propaganda to a merciless revision, or Dorothea Dickmann, who dared to criticize the feminist "Mother-myth" – they all, who critically illuminated these counter-worlds, were not just torn apart, they were subjected to massive personal attacks.

This intolerance with critics, this deficient capability to exercise self-criticism, has become intensified. That bodes of a gloomy burden for gender relations. Whether it concerns the warriors in the old feminist bastions or the happier [30 years ago, the more correct translation of the word "froehlicheren" would have been "gayer", but now the meaning of that once creditable English term has become corrupted. --WHS] egotists of the Girlie-Generation [sic], as long as they require the male enemy, they'll get him.

Because a man who must consider such role handicaps may possibly still consider a One-Night-Stand [sic], but no longer the adventure of a deep relationship. Whereby, paradoxically, feminism threatens to become victorious: quite possibly, it will bring that type of distrusting, self-centered, relationship-shy man into the world of which it always warned.

And on the other side stands a steadily growing, gigantic army of single women and lone mothers who can give their directionless children little more for the road than their inability to have relationships and, other than that, the advice to seek consolation through the ideal complete-husband/complete-father, the State and its gray support systems.

A new togetherness? It is likely to be expected only when the material basis changes. When fathers have the same chances in custody hearings as mothers. When it is demanded of women to work like men for their livelihood, and when, on the other hand, men in distress are given the same support as women. In short: when the sucking-dry of men stops being a generally accepted society game.

But necessary too is the demolition of myths that endeared themselves, a new architecture for the infrastructure. Therefore, togetherness only then when the word has spread that there is also female power [the meaning of the word "power" in that context could also be "violence" --WHS] and male powerlessness. That marital abuse by women, as evidenced through American studies, is as frequent as that by men. That beyond that, it is far more likely mothers than biological fathers who sexually abuse their children -- and that a major portion of the perpetrators are lone mothers.

Only when it is recognized that fathers are just as important for the upbringing of children as are mothers, and that the fatherless society is a catastrophe scenario, [only then] will there be a new togetherness.. When the word has spread that the exclusion of fathers signifies child abuse. And when altogether the debasement of men will be just as outlawed as that of women.

Only then will there be togetherness when women learn again that relationships aren't self-service stores, but, rather, partnerships. That all depends on loving the other in his otherness. That there are no special female rights, and that in professional life all turns on performance and achievement, and not on [hiring] quotas.

Most of all, only when women learn again to comprehend that frustrations are a constituent of life, and when they no longer hold men responsible for rainy days, but instead the weather, and for becoming wet not the man, but instead the fact that they forgot their umbrella -- therefore, only then when they have become adults will they be partnership-capable and in a position to enjoy the sunny days of togetherness too.

30 years of women's movement have not furthered emancipation, but instead led extensively into a sulking infantilization. It is time, dear sisters, to put the nice fairy-tale books into the corner and to look into a real mirror.

There is much to do.

Matthias Matussek has given permission to translate this article into English. He also expressed the hope that many others will write books about these essentially simple, fundamental truths.

Walter, 1998 05 24