Leigh Travis - The War Of The P.A.D.

The War Of The P.A.D.

Leigh Travis, Ph.D.

September, 1988: 20,000 feet and climbing.

Two rows behind me there was a rugged looking guy with charcoal-brown, wavy hair talking with his two young, and attractive, female seatmates on the DC 10. Shortly after the take off he had offered to trade seats with me as I was a smoker, he wasn't, and his seat with the girls was in the smoking section. I was surprised, and pleased because the thought of a five-hour plane ride to California without smokes felt for me a little like a sentence to spend the night in jail, and so I said "sure" to his offer.

But we never traded.

Girls can do that to us guys.

Needless to say, I wasn't pleased with my almost-generous buddy but, as it turned out, I wasn't through with him either.

So I had five hours, without smokes, ahead of me. With or without cigarettes I needed the time to think about my contribution to the meeting of the men's rights leaders in San Diego, California. The topic of the meeting was "The Future Of The Men's Rights Movement In The 90's And Beyond" - no small agenda, and certainly a topic worth five hours of uninterrupted thought.

The first thing that struck me was that 30 years ago, in 1958, there would not have been any such meeting or even the thought of having such a meeting: thus, things had really changed, markedly, in those 30 years. But what "things"? What had happened that was forcing a group of men to gather to discuss and plan out the future of the "men's rights movement"? I counted the ways in which the "War Between the Sexes" had, in at least the most obvious ways, changed in those 30 or so years since around 1958:

1. First, and most obviously: Women, with the help of science, had managed to gain almost absolute control over their reproductive cycle with the Pill.

2. Second: Women had gained control of and largely orchestrated the daytime media's frontal attacks against virtually all men, not to mention writing, and publishing, libraries of popular books decrying the victimization of innocent women by scurrilous men.

3. Third: Women had entered and secured approximately 50 percent (plus) of the jobs in the work force.

4. Fourth: as had been true since roughly 1920, women had continued to win approximately 90% of all child custody cases; what was new and different was that they had then expertly managed post-divorce programs of domestic terrorism (visitation denials, the "underground," false allegations of sexual child abuse), and had received only minimal bad press for these sometimes fraudulent and inhuman cruelties.

5. Fifth: Following the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, women had dispatched approximately 25 million embryos with absolutely no male input in these decisions or any real fears of male opposition.

6. Sixth: Because of the cumulative effect of wartime male deaths in the 20th century, for the first time in human history there were more females than males on the earth and, in The United States, there were approximately 10 million more women than men, thus providing women with an approximately 51 to 49 percent political advantage.

Major cultural changes for women, indeed. And what were men doing during this 30 year period to understand and retool themselves for these sweeping changes in the armaments of the War between the sexes? Clearly the "reality" of the war had changed. What had men done?

Some men became hippies and then, later, bank presidents. Some wrote songs protesting the evils of the "establishment," grew wealthy, and aged to the other side of the "generation gap." Some tuned out and stayed tuned out, forever. Some started "men's rights" organizations that were for the most part (and largely still are) underfinanced, mismanaged, and inept. Some protested the War in Viet Nam. Some ordered hundreds of thousands of men to war, of whom approximately 52,000 died in a war that wasn't a "war" and perhaps never could have been won - most of them 19 year old boys who were drafted before they had the right to vote. Apparently, they had only the "rights" to serve, die, be traumatized and maimed? No welcome home, either. No cheers for the heroes. No victory parades.

And it got worse in the 60's, 70's and now, the 80's.

To hell and back - from one guerrilla civil war to another in the domestic jungles of the American divorce courts, at home, with the very people Viet Nam was fought to protect: their wives and their children. The divorce rate was not making casualty figures from Nam look petty; but no one really saw, or counted, or knew how to count, the wounded, killed and maimed in the guerrilla war at home. No male heroes seemed to emerge unscathed from the divorce court battles either. No medals of valor. No purple hearts. Only bad news - relentlessly bad press: men were drunkards, wife-beaters, child molesters, rapists, skinflints, deadbeats.

So what did men do to ward off this frontal and sometimes outrageous attack on their beings? Virtually nothing. Instead, they became confused, demoralized, lost confidence in themselves and their sex, even believed some of the patent nonsense said about them.

The wounded men and ex-fathers met secretly in dungeony bars, talked sports, and tried to cure their sense of hopelessness by "hitting" on women, not realizing that they couldn't play the game by the same rules anymore, not seeming to realize that there was a war going on at home, a war, in its insidious way, more destructively paralyzing than any other war in American history because it was a civil guerrilla war, like Viet Nam, with no discernible front lines, where friends became instant enemies, where a night of seeming passion and "love" could turn into years of courtroom vilification at great financial cost, and where the rules of the war were blurred, uncertain, and baffling.

And men didn't understand that, unlike Viet Nam, this war at home was waged not only in bed and in the bedlam of the mass media - but it was somehow invisibly embedded in the sinew of our body politic, our value, our customs, our daily lives, and those of our children: it was, and is, a virulent new form of guerrilla war for us, fought in our homes in our homeland, against each other.

I have never been in a shooting war and have little guidance or insight to offer someone about to enter one. It seems to me, however, as an outsider, that most wars, unlike checkers matches, are not cleanly won. By definition, in war, the two sides play by different "rules," that is to say, the "rules" of the invading forces, on the one hand, and the "rules" of the invaded, on the other hand. The invaded seem usually to win if, for no other reason, they fight fiercely because they have the most to lose, are the "wronged underdogs" and from that position have the right to, and do, mercilessly torture the invaders and defeat them emotionally, morally, and militarily, with no quarter given.

Clearly, by 1988, men had become the underdogs with no quarter given them in a non-military guerrilla civil war at home; but men appeared to be losing on every front: why? Who, in fact, was the invader, who the invaded?

III

What were the different rules in this 30 year "war between the sexes"? Certainly the rules had changed since the phrase was first invented. Certainly the way men seemed to be strategizing their war game bore unsettling resemblance’s to another war, namely, the Revolutionary War. In that war the British marched straight ahead, like proper chivalric gentlemen, in an upright line against us: we hit and ran, attacked on religious holidays, were rotten S.O.B.'s. And we won - that is to say, the guerrilla tactics of the invaded won.

In the war between the sexes fought in the luxurious playboy "pads" of the 50's, men coaxed, coerced and conquered their "enemy's" sexual territories, had a ball and, well, if they "knocked them up" being honorable gentlemen (as well as rogues) they lived generously in the bed they had made for themselves, creating (or having the courts create for them) their downsized individual "Marshall Plans" (called "alimony," "maintenance," "support"). But there was something wrong with the outcome of this state of the war between the sexes: the rule seemed to be "To the vanquished belongs the spoils," not the other way around.

"What the hell is going on"? I fumed as we flew over Phoenix, listening to the laughter of my buddy and his harem behind me in the smoking section: "we guys," I philosophized, "are fighting this 1980's war by the rules of the 1700's, and British rules of engagement at that! Some soldiers we are! Why can't we see that the old chivalric/proper gentlemen rules are the wrong tools for this war? We have been asleep, it would appear, and it sure looks like we've misread the action and badly missed something: but what?"

The obvious sometimes hurts like hell. For openers, men seemed to have missed the rather blatant fact that the power base had shifted radically: we'd been done in by science and our own chauvinistic naiveté. She got the power - the Pill - and with it she's now the hunter, we guys the hunted: she can now choose to get herself "knocked up" ("by accident"), leaving us with the old 1700's code of chivalric atonement - being proper gentlemen - and with that role, the attendant guilt payments of the vanquished.

Or she can choose not to be a parent, backed by an army of feminists and the Supreme Court, legally dispatching what might have been our sons or daughters, or choose to be a parent, divorce us, righteously demand a "Marshall Plan" of child support and/or alimony, or both, claiming all of the above as the "rights" of women blossoming from the very roots of the Constitution.

And furthermore, she can - and for the most part, does - choose to remain curiously silent about the sexist outrage of us (and our sons) being the only citizens "rightfully" compelled to surrender our bodies as cannon fodder in some swamp, somewhere, to protect the "rights" of women to transmogrify or attempt to transmogrify, our lives, in divorce procedures, into kafkaesque nightmares of

process servers,

supoenas,

depositions,

interrogatories,

hearings,

trials,

sons and daughters held hostage or abducted, and so on, ad nauseam.

"What can men do?" I anguished, biting my pen.

"Change" was the answer. Change what? Change our entire attitude towards ourselves and our relations with the fairer sex! How?

First: the old chivalric rules cannot withstand the onslaught of the Pill and the other attendant horrors any more than could the old, gentlemanly, British rules of war withstand the unchivalrous tactics of the American guerrillas in the Revolutionary War here at home. We must dump chivalry, and all its self-destructive elements, now, and forever.

The situation seemed to me dire indeed. So what else, what kind of practical political and legal program, could I offer the men at the conference - what were the "new rules" for men to embrace, the updated tactics and weaponry for fathers, their sons and other men in the 80's and beyond?

I could see the Rockies coming up through my window: we would be landing shortly. There had to be a way out of the mess, had to be some kind of secret weapon, a weapon of supreme fairness and maturity, beckoning to us men and women, a brilliant light of sanity, right before our eyes, a simple, undeniable and compelling truth everyone saw but had avoided seeing clearly because of sexist blinders on our eyes, fears of seeing and stating the obvious, no matter the cost. A simple idea, bold, honest, a conquering vision, and hence a strategy for men to end the destructive war.

And it hit me: there it was: three words, three battles that men had to fight, and win:

Paternity/Assent/Draft: "P. A. D."

The battle plan of the men's rights movement in the future seemed to be charmingly simple and chillingly clear: men had to announce, and mean it, that their Paternal capacities as nurturers - not just their capacity for paternalism - be recognized and honored by their culture; that their biological capacities as co-equal producers of embryos be valued and weighed equally in any decision to destroy any embryos, if consentingly created, and that our homeland beauties who had shown themselves ruthlessly capable of destroying embryos in the millions be compelled to protect the rights that permitted them to assume unilateral parenting decisions at home while men were dying overseas: Paternity rights equal to Maternity rights (including paternity leaves), co-equal Assent regarding parenting decisions, and the compulsory Draft lottery for women as well as men: "P.A.D."

A different, fairer, saner, world!

"P.A.D." seemed at that moment and seems to me now an absolute necessity for our stability as men and women. Over the last 30 or so years, the realities of male/female relationships and marriages had become utterly different from the worlds of romance and power games played in the 50's where men "hunted" women and tried to "score." That kind of sexist male thinking (with its concomitant chivalric nonsense), combined with the catalyst of the Pill, the consequent "freedom" it gave women from the biological tyranny of their bodies, the invisible mantle of invulnerability bestowed on them, from birth, protecting them from the responsibility to protect not only their rights but the rights of everyone - if necessary, with their lives - has caused "P.A.D." to become inevitable, the next stage in the evolution of the "war between the sexes."

The chronicle of the major events of the "war between the sexes" from the time of the world of chivalric thinking to the new world of P.A.D. thinking has historical markers, although these markers are by no means frozen in time.

First: from the beginnings of time, before the Pill, women had little control over their biological destinies.

Second: because they were routinely with child, they were of little value on the battle field and that evolutionary task of defending territory fell to men.

Third: starting early in the 19th century women got tired of being treated like chattel, a man's property, and began asserting their inherent human right to the dignity of citizenship and, in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution passed and women became "equal" to men in the election booths.

Fourth: however, while women had attained the same constitutional rights as men, they were not saddled, as were men, with the same constitutional responsibilities of defending those rights against external aggressors, such as in the World Wars of the 20th century.

Fifth: in approximately the early 1960's, contemporaneous with Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique, women got the Pill and with it absolute control, as above described, over the "chivalric" mentality of men: the hunted became the hunter, the hunter, the hunted, although surface behaviors, to this day, present a contrary illusion. This illusion is just that - an illusion. How? Simple arithmetic: there are, as you know, approximately 10 million more women in the United States than there are men: hence the hunt for a now scarce commodity. (This is not all bad news, of course: but one must remember the price one might pay for a "forgotten" pill.)

There is nothing more vulnerable, from a "modern" woman's point of view, than a playboy stuck in his chivalric code: one little feminine slip - "I think I forgot to take my pill, darling - I'm pregnant" - is all that it takes to turn a wondrous male "conquest" into a life time nightmare. He has "scored," all right, for (say) a 20 minutes joyride: but that "score" can quickly become an eighteen year sentence to slave labor ("until the minor child reaches the age of majority").

According to my client notes, such guerrilla tactics are probably prevalent in over 30 percent of all marriages occurring within the last 30 years or so and, if my client histories are representative, it is no surprise that 50 percent of first marriages - maybe a higher percentage - end in divorce. Assuming that these marriages were based on the deceitful guerrilla tactic above described, what else could we expect? Such a colossal, conscious deception is not, I submit, the expression of a class of creatures made of sugar and spice and everything nice nor, for that matter, is a chivalric response to an outright fraud the expression of a fully adult man.

Furthermore, as a corollary, it is critically important for chivalric men to fully realize that females are just as violent as males, and female violence is not limited merely to the destruction of potential human life: it is well known that there are more physically abused husbands than there are abused wives. And while it is certainly true that the male is better equipped for invasive sexual aggression than is the female, pleas notice that all the emotional traumas of female rape - usually a one-on-one trauma - are repeated in wars by hoards of men attacking other men, with the added nightmares of hundreds of falling bombs, burning napalm, thousands of 50 caliber machine gun bullets, rockets, and the other multitudinous weaponry of war time destruction aimed at tactical targets composed of individual men. In war, men are punctured, paralyzed for life, shot, stabbed, blown up, battered, mutilated and killed without redress or cultural sympathy equivalent in any real measure to the sympathy extended female rape victims. The female may be able to turn her rape experience to her advantage (with profits from books, television appearances, etc.); the chivalric, wounded, male cannot, period.

You want to see male rape victims?: Go to any V. A. hospital.

The last 30 years have taught us a hard lesson - a bitter pill for male chivalry and male chauvinism to swallow, namely, men in the 20th century must learn that they are, at this stage of the game, essentially powerless to defend themselves against the tactics of the female half of the guerrilla war of the sexes - until, that is, men stop believing in such chivalric nonsense as sugar 'n spice "ladies" and become acutely aware that they might be wrongheadedly chivalrously trusting an animal with no proven history of courage in battle (as a class: certainly individual women are just as courageous as are individual men), no proven "instinctive" gentleness or capacity to raise children (there is no such thing as a "maternal instinct"), no cultural code of generosity (instead an unwritten code that goes something like "my money is my money, and your money is - my money!"), no finely tuned sense of fair play (that comes from team sports, and only recently have women been "allowed" to play team sports), and no learned reverence for human life and human freedom as indivisibly bonded concepts embedded in the Constitution of the United States that, in virtually any man's life, may ask of him the supreme sacrifice.

The immense importance of women serving their country via some kind of compulsory draft lottery, including combat training and readiness to take up arms at the side of their male counterparts, cannot be overstated, nor can the immense importance of men being accorded equal status as paternal nurturers and equally weighted decision makers in any parental planning decision. Without these three critical areas of male/female interactions played on as perfectly leveled a floor as can be devised, the ravages of the "War Between the Sexes" will most likely, and most tragically, continue indefinitely.

Oddly, while both sexes have incalculable gains to be realized from leveling the floor, it seems clear that it is not the female guerrillas who are likely to make the first move towards sanity: it is up to the men to effectuate P.A.D. This means that men must work together, as in war, to (if necessary) so "wound" their adversaries that said adversaries surrender on the terms stipulated (P.A.D.), or pay a heavy political and personal price.

There can no be no question as to who is the invader, who is the invaded: the only question is how long will the invaded remain toxicantly blind to their reality before the toxicity annihilates them or the blinders are suddenly removed and the long simmering rage explodes?

I realize that the ramifications of P.A.D., calling as it does for the death of St. George and his progeny, may raise specters, in my male readers, of cruel loneliness, frightening, empty, the way the death of a loved friend, mate, or parent affects us all. So be it. Chivalry is no friend or lover or parent: it is an ego trip of the worse kind (the kind you go on alone). And chivalry is optional, not a compulsion: you can choose to open that door for her, or you can choose to let her open the door for herself, as do other grownups.

There is no longer available to us men the luxury of waiting for something to happen to magically change the war between the sexes: it won't just "happen." We have to do P.A.D. together, guys: and that's a "good" ego trip (the kind you go on with other people): women, of course, are more than welcome aboard - if they're willing to play by mutually developed rules, applied equally to all players. Which means, ladies, among other things, you are no longer allowed to permit yourselves to become "damsels in distress."

The plan landed in San Diego. I got my luggage and waited: the airport was overflowing with thousands of faces, not one of them familiar. Not that I expected to see anyone I knew: I had no idea of what the men who were supposed to be meeting me looked like. But the guys who had promised to meet me at a particular spot in the terminal didn't seem to be there. I paged them: no response. Felt eerily and painfully rejected and stranded, like the day I went to pick up my son for my weekly visitation and discovered him not there and my ex-wife's vacant home clearly abandoned.

My name sounded over the PA with instruction to go to the baggage area to meet my contacts. As I picked up my suitcase a voice from the milling crowd shouted "Leigh?" I looked towards the sound of the voice and saw a strangely familiar face: it was the DC 10 Casanova, grinning broadly: "oh boy," I grimaced to myself, "he was one of the prophets from the 'men's rights' movement of the future?" I studied my shoes, felt the floor squire under my feet, thought "this is all I need - a playboy type - probably has a Hugh Hefner vintage pad and lives the chivalric type of life I know to be insane."

"In the flesh" I quipped, lighting a smoke, "and you are--?"

"Asa Baber," he replied.

And off we went: the philosopher, and Col. Asa Baber, fellow voyager, writer of the "Men" column in PLAYBOY, Viet Nam veteran, war protester, and today, I hope, friend.

There were, counting myself, seventeen men at the conference charting the "future of the men's rights movement." I presented "P.A.D." and no one cheered or offered to stage a demonstration or, for that matter, a beer party to celebrate the wonderful news of P.A.D. There were other agendas, poignantly vivid, agonizingly painful. During one day most of us broke down and sobbed, one at a time, telling our stories, asking for help (a totally un-chivalric exercise of the conference), and some of us were held and comforted by another man, or men, perhaps for the first time in our lives. We talked for hours, drank beer, ate together, played volleyball, and learned. It was an extraordinary experience that I draw on, often daily, for hope and strength.

I have sent copies of this article to all of those men, and I believe that is it worthwhile to remark that as the months and years have passed since that September, 1988, presentation of "P.A.D.," Detroit's Mayor Colman Young and singer Tom Jones have been winged with paternity suits and orders to take blood tests, the Supreme Court has decided one lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Rowe v Wade, Justice Thomas - whose position on abortion is unknown but perhaps antithetic to the "choice" feminists - has been put through an ordeal of public humiliation by an expert female guerrilla, and Jean Elshtain (Women and War) has decided, after exhaustive research, that women should be given no "automatic exemption" from the draft lottery.

Life goes on. It looks like we men will have a few more chances to convene together, create strategies and other battle plans for the sexist guerrilla war that hounds and wounds us all, a runaway, waking nightmare, still largely unconscious for most people (who are contributors to the creation of the war but know it not). All of us, men and women, regardless of age, are apparently doomed to and do fight daily skirmishes or get into major battles lasting years over the custody of our children, and we men, I believe, would be well advised to recognize that a major battle is right on - not over - the horizon in a war history may decide to recognize as the final battle of the war between the sexes, the "War of the P.A.D."

Pun, but no joke, intended.