The second sex
Published Postimees 16 January 2013

One issue scares the hell out of me. Men's rights.

We are are told that we live in a male dominated society, that men have it easier than women; there are people who make a living by telling us this.

In Estonia there are a dozen organisation dealing with women's rights there is even a gender studies unit (i.e. women's studies unit) at Tartu University, but there isn't yet far as I am aware, and I have checked, even one organisation dealing with men's right.

It is inevitable that anybody who challenges this hegemony will come in for a barrage of criticism from an army of well-funded groups.

When men's rights are discussed, it is in the context of men's health. Men are dying off. Men die younger and are more likely to commit suicide than women.

Even God it seems is against men. Last week January 10 2012, for example the ministry of internal affairs published figures that show, on average, young men were more likely to drown and older men were more likely to die in a fire, than women.

I think that men have it tough and the situation is getting worse. I believe that feminism, or at least the radical form of it that has come to dominate, is wrong, and the effects of feminism that are causing great harm in my own country and in the rest of the Anglo-sphere are beginning to crop up here.

To explain feminism fully would require a book or several books, it's a big topic. Most people think they have an idea of what feminism, but actually it is harder than quantum mechanics. I will give it a stab.

Modern Feminism is a Marxist belief system. Feminism is built on the premise that society is patriarchy, that is, society was designed by men for the benefit of men. Feminism says women are oppressed and this oppression goes back to pre-history

Feminism grew out of the writing of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Instead of class exploitation, there is gender exploitation

Feminists champion the idea that there or no mental or physical differences between men and women of any kind and that gender is not biological but a social construct.

When modern feminism emerged as movement in the latter half of the 20^th Century, they retroactively re-branded the early 20^th Century suffragette (votes for women) movement in the UK and USA as 1^st wave Feminism and called their movement 2^nd wave feminism. In this way they legitimised what was essentially a radical left-wing movement as being the heir of a liberal movement.

To be sure, there are feminists who don't call themselves Marxist, there are even feminists who call themselves conservatives, but the core of feminist ideology is Marxism. Feminist campaign against inequality, where does the inequality come from? The patriarchy.

Once you understand this and with this country's experience of Marxism that should set alarm bells ringing. I haven't got space here to explain why I think patriarchy theory is wrong; suffice to quote what Margaret Thatcher famously said about modern feminism.

“I owe nothing to the women's movement.”

Examples of the patriarchy are the fact that as readers of this newspaper will know, women earn less than men, are under represented in Riigikogu and as head of big companies and domestic violence against women is an ongoing problem.

Feminists fights to correct these injustices. So far so good.

Let me run that by you again. There is no evidence that shows that a woman doing the same job, working for the same company is earning less than a man. Men don't benefit from the men in power if anything women benefit, and domestic violence against men is as bad problem as against women.

Let's look at these points one by one. According to EU the gender gap is worse in Estonia than in any other country in the EU, 30 percent according figures published in 2010. But the explanation for this is the choices that people make, not discrimination.

In the United States a leading feminism and campaigner for women's right called Warren Farrell asked himself the question:“If you can pay a woman less than a man, why would anyone employ a man?”

He then did qualitative research, for a decade which showed that women are earning the same or even slightly more than men for doing the same job.

In his books, “Why men earn more” and “The myth of male power” Farrell demonstrated that what was actually going on is that men and women make different choices for the sake of their families.

Men will often chose difficult, dirty, dangerous,work to bring in money for their children. Women often chose lower paying public sector jobs that allow them to spend time with their children.

I'm sure that you know many talented women in government jobs, who are aware that they could make more money working in the private sector.

Ask them why they stay the answer is always the same. “It is good for women.”

Public sector jobs offer part-time working, flexi-working even extended maternity leave. Government or local government office in Estonia are overwhelmingly female. In some offices all the workers are female.

In the United States and the United Kingdom the true situation is that women now earn more than men!

Women in their twenties are earning more than men as the Office of National Statistics reported last November (ONS) and as Time Magazine trumpeted in its October 2010 issue.

In some US. cities young women are earning 20 per cent more than men, the result of years of affirmative action programs that favour women in higher education.

Feminists say that it come down to gender stereotypes, women are somehow brainwashed into going into fields like teaching and nursing that pay less.

Can we believe women or men are really mindless zombies who make career choices based on what they have seen on television?

Also It just isn't true. Estonian women have always done back breaking work on the land. Soviet women were expected to do the same work as men. A female member of my Estonian family lifted the heavy stones of Viru Hotel whilst pregnant.

If women are not working on construction sites now, it is because they don't want to. And why should they be expected to? Again a question of choice.

Men do this type of work because it feeds their family. But they suffer because of it. It was precisely these construction jobs that disappeared in the recession, and those men who didn't lose their job are still out working in all weathers, risking having bits of heavy equipment fall on them. Most injuries on the job are suffered by male. Yet again choice.

I an not saying that women are earning the same as men in Estonia. It just that I don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody has done the research, as Warren Farrell has done in the United States. All we have are bogus statistics that prove nothing and give the nation's enemies another stick to beat it with.

Sections of the Russian media can and do write, not only is Estonia a fascist nation, it is sexist nation.

As to men being at the top of society, well men are at the bottom of society too. After four years of hardship, I can't leave my house without being accosted by a destitute man. Occasionally a woman will approach, but 90 percent of the homeless beggars who approach me for money are men. I have sympathy for these people, they are people. It used to be the case that people in trouble had a substance abuse problem, now I notice they are unlucky men who have fallen on hard times.

There are more men in Riigikogu, but they are not passing laws to benefit men. There is ample research that demonstrates men do not have own group preference the same way women do.

Men in power will enact laws that favour women. It was only in 2010 that the pension age for women was changed to match men and this change will only come about in 2016.

That leaves domestic violence. Again things are not what they seems. After 50 years of research it is becoming clear men are as likely to be the victims of domestic violence as women are.

The woman who set up the first women's shelter in the World in the 1970s in England discovered about two thirds of the women were just as violent as the men they were running away from. She became a victim of a hate campaign against her by radical feminists that turned so violent and ugly that she was forced to flee England.

Here I have only touch what is huge issue. I haven't even discussed how Estonian men are treated in custody battles over children. It is this issue that is causing the most anguish for men in the Anglo sphere. The fact that men are deprived from seeing children.

I am bracing myself for a series of angry rebuttal but to all my re-butters, I say, please keep in mind that I am not saying people shouldn't look after the interest of women, I am just saying we also need to look after the interest of men.