It’s A Man’s World Despite Women, And Savvy Men Know That Now Is The Time To Take Advantage Of It

James Brown wrote and sang the iconic song of the 60s, It’s a Man’s World

You see man made the cars
To take us over the road
Man made the train
To carry the heavy load
Man made the electric light
To take us out of the dark
Man made the boat for the water
Like Noah made the ark
This is a man's, man's, man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing
Without a woman or a girl

Of course the lyrics are nothing without the ‘Only One James’ tormented, passionate, bluesy stage rendition, but it gets across better than most songs - the irony of a woman-dependent man in a male-dominated world. We men did everything that God asked of us, shouted Brown. We created, did His Biblical work and created His civilizations, left our progeny to create and build more in His name….and yet this man’s world would be nothing ‘without a woman or a girl’.



In this woke, post-historical generation, men are somewhat timorous about their sexual destiny.  Millennia of history, of kings, shoguns, emperors, Mandarins, and shahs – a male triumphant history – seem to have been ignored.  Men have bought the feminist creed.   Men, they say, are adjuncts to history, the rooster’s contribution, the seed of progeny but nothing more.

Laura, the main character in Strindberg’s The Father, humiliates and finally destroys her husband who claims Victorian male rights over their child.  She has lain back for his little bit of creation, but no longer and never again.  He should roll over, move aside, be quiet, and die. Instead, she makes him mad with doubt about the paternity of their daughter, and drives him into an asylum.  Acquiring rights over their daughter is not enough.  Only his emasculation and ruin will compensate for his patriarchal demands, abusive behavior, and complete ignorance.  She is confident, willful, and vengeful.



Men are still afraid of the emasculating woman.  Although the idea of cuckolded pregnancy may be less salient than it was in the days of legacy and labor – both kings and peasants needed to know that they were affording only their legitimate progeny with the benefits of land and court – it is still pertinent.  Women cannot be trusted, as Othello insisted to the court judging him for the death of Desdemona. I saved myself from her treachery, he said, and now I give you fair warning about your own wives and lovers.



Shakespeare was perhaps the most insightful and perceptive of any dramatist or author when it came to sexual dynamics.  Women, he observed, were stronger than men. Despite men’s apparent superiority in personal and public affairs, they were outmatched, outgunned, out-thought, and outmaneuvered at every turn.  No man was the match for Rosalind, Dionyza, Volumnia, Goneril, Regan, or Margaret.  The women in his Comedies ran rings around their suitors; and those in his Histories and Tragedies went to arms to defend and promote their rights and the succession of their heirs. 

Despite claims to the contrary, D.H. Lawrence was a feminist writer.  Women in Love is a story about the struggle for sexual parity – the fine balance between dominance and submission whose equilibrium had nothing to do with gender, society, or history.  Sexual identity is never a matter of social distinction or preference, he wrote, but inbuilt, hardwired, absolute sexual priority.  Superiority and inferiority were meaningless concepts for Lawrence who understood that true sexual union can only come about when incalculable sexual preferences are balanced.



Lawrence was at best an idealist.  He was right in understanding that sex is the most essential, primal, and complex element of human life; and that men and women fight ad infinitum to achieve sexual balance; but was wrong in terms of sexual epiphany.  Lady Chatterley and Mellors finally achieve sexual union and perfect, simultaneous complementarity, but the end of the book suggests a sexual letdown.  Gutters, dinner, bathrooms, jobs, and residence will always get in the way.  Mellors and Mrs.  Chatterley had to go their own ways.

Which leaves the supposedly beleaguered, confused, American male whose sexual confidence has been derogated, eroded, and dismissed as retrograde and misogynistic.  He now defers rather than insists.  He demurs rather than pursues.  He is attentive to women’s every suggestion.  Coupling is a matter of civil and human rights, litigation or the fear thereof, and a conscientious commitment to righting the wrongs of the past.  Sexual satisfaction is a by-product, a half-hearted and disappointing one better returned to sender rather than kept and used.

While it is true that many men have fallen for this bill of goods, this political agenda, and radical civil rights agenda, many others have not.  Automatic complaisance or the laying down of sexual weapons have never been options.  The war between the sexes has not abated or disappeared.  If anything it has increased in intensity, scope, and consequence.

Yet feminists and feminized men still claim that the war is over, that women have won.
Nonsense of course.  Not only will the fight go on forever, but men will win out as they always have.  Fukuyama was as wrong as could  be when he declared after the fall of the Soviet Union that it was the end of history; and feminists are equally as wrong when they declare the eternity of the new, woke, women’s world. 

Yet they have not understood human nature.  Fukuyama ignored the imperatives of hardwired, innate aggressiveness, acquisitiveness, territorialism, and self-interest.  He should have known that once one major conflict was defused, others, even more dangerous, would take its place; and women having achieved what they consider a similar history-ending victory, will soon realize the arrogance and naivete of their conclusions.

Women still, regardless of their attempts to deny and dismiss any categorial assumptions about their sexual nature and identity, love their fathers and bad boys; and savvy men take advantage of these preferences at every turn.  A wife married to a bored husband will always wan to have a confident, discordant, infinitely sexual male in her bed; and this alert, sexually predatory male will sense her faithfulness to the idea of Daddy, her more primitive desire for The Wild One., and her rapture at finding a man who combines both. 

As importantly, the wife of the Don Juan will respond only to her pre-woke generational genes and upbringing, and will accept his infidelity as ‘natural’ and the wisdom that he ‘will always come home to Momma’.  He can have it both ways.



There is a third way that the savvy male in a woke generation can assure his sexual imperative.   Literature is filled with drunken, abusive husbands who have run roughshod over wives and children; so much so that they have become stereotypes against which feminist ire has been directed.  These so-called ‘men’ are not exceptions but the rule.  Misogyny is the name of the game.  Yet women, perhaps because of their still admonishing, intimidating fathers, capitulate. 

Amanda, a major character in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, is the victim of an abusive, drunken, absent husband; but she still loves him, ‘more than life itself’, and not a moment passes as she stands before his portrait on the mantelpiece that she doesn't smile in adoration.  Wingfield has abandoned the family, dismissed his wife, and left again; but Amanda still loves him without reservation.

Savvy men get all this – women’s faithfulness to their fathers, their sense of family duty and responsibility (hearth and home), their never-ending desire to hone men to their traditionalism, and their conviction that family trumps all, and that a few spousal dalliances mean little.

The unexpressed variable in this simple equation, the expression of inbred male rule now hidden and dismissed, is intimidation.  No woke or even woke-sensitive man would ever physically assault his wife or partner, for to do so would risk judicial process; but much more subtle threats occur all the time.  At least during this transitional period when women still remember their authoritarian fathers and male preference and until it is forgotten, women are still respectful of male authority, legitimate or not.  A husband’s derogatory or dismissive comment still stings even if the woman is a law partner on K Street.

All of which is a cautionary tale for the younger generation of men.  If you don’t watch out, these children of woke parents will no longer respond to history’s peremptory laws.  Sooner rather than later, your wives will no longer have authoritative, disciplinary fathers to look up to and compare you to.  They will become more independent and dismissive of your maleness than ever.

Who says? The next generation will tell.   Either women are hardwired in a biological Lawrentian male-female calculus and will always be deferential to men’s equally hardwired equivalent; or there is no such thing, and that the war between the sexes is asymmetrical and unpredictable.

Time will tell.

Meanwhile savvy men are exploiting father-love and female hearth-home destiny to their advantage.  They know that these Elysian Fields may not last forever, but while they do, enjoy the bounty.