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The Privileged Sex Paperback – May 18, 2013
by
Martin van Creveld
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Print length310 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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Publication dateMay 18, 2013
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Dimensions6.69 x 0.78 x 9.61 inches
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ISBN-101484983122
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ISBN-13978-1484983126
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"As a woman one would like to hit this macho on the mouth, but nevertheless he is worth listening to… In saying that the roles of the sexes are less flexible than Western society commonly believes, he may be right after all." A. Barth, Der Spiegel
"Martin van Creveld has written a work that is rich in facts, provocative, and easy to read. It reviews the relationship between women and war in both myth and history. It offers plenty of material for discussion, and not by feminists alone." M. Mantzke, Das Parlement
"Van Creveld has unhesitatingly put his finger on many sore points—he can be sure many will be screaming at him in anger. As they say, though, "many enemies, much honor." Ruf, Dresdner Neueste nachrichten.
“[Van] Creveld presents lots of material to base his thesis on. And look, history suddenly assumes a completely different face from the one (radical) feminists have tried to make us believe in. Many well-liked clichés concerning the exploitation and oppression of women turn out to have no foundation, whereas others were invented for political-ideological reasons.” InkulturA-online.
Want to discover what is actually happening with men and women now and did happen throughout history? Latch onto a copy of The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld, an astonishingly learned polymath…. Any serious thinker on these matters will have to consult van Creveld for an honestly clear insight into the matter of sex and why and how it matters." Prof. Lionel Tiger, Minding the Campus.
"Martin van Creveld has written a work that is rich in facts, provocative, and easy to read. It reviews the relationship between women and war in both myth and history. It offers plenty of material for discussion, and not by feminists alone." M. Mantzke, Das Parlement
"Van Creveld has unhesitatingly put his finger on many sore points—he can be sure many will be screaming at him in anger. As they say, though, "many enemies, much honor." Ruf, Dresdner Neueste nachrichten.
“[Van] Creveld presents lots of material to base his thesis on. And look, history suddenly assumes a completely different face from the one (radical) feminists have tried to make us believe in. Many well-liked clichés concerning the exploitation and oppression of women turn out to have no foundation, whereas others were invented for political-ideological reasons.” InkulturA-online.
Want to discover what is actually happening with men and women now and did happen throughout history? Latch onto a copy of The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld, an astonishingly learned polymath…. Any serious thinker on these matters will have to consult van Creveld for an honestly clear insight into the matter of sex and why and how it matters." Prof. Lionel Tiger, Minding the Campus.
About the Author
Prof. Emeritus Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is one of the world's best- known experts on military history and strategy. His interest in women's history and feminism dates back to the early 1990s when he testified in front of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. One of the outcomes of his research in the field is the present volume. Previously published in Germany and in Brazil, in both countries it made the cover of leading news magazines. Currently it is being translated into Dutch as well.
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Product details
- Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 18, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 310 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1484983122
- ISBN-13 : 978-1484983126
- Item Weight : 1.38 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.69 x 0.78 x 9.61 inches
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Best Sellers Rank:
#1,387,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16,037 in Historical Study (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Customer reviews
4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
45 global ratings
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Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2018
Verified Purchase
Well researched and accurate explanation of how we got here and the fallacies that certain people and the media rely on in order to support their own narrow, hurtful and at times dangerous points of view. Very detailed but an easy and enlightening read that reveals both the biological, psychological and societal causes that allowed the privileged sex to evolve. This is not a pro-male or a anti-woman book, just a balanced look at the situation.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2016Verified Purchase
Martin van Creveld's "The Privileged Sex" is an academic look at the rapidly changing way that women interact and participate in the world by an expert military historian and analyst.
I saw this book as Dr Van Creveld's search for his own and personal answer to the question. The book is written as an a fairly low-key academic review rather than as a document directed at convincing the reader of the author's conclusions. Additionally, the book is one of several written by the Dr Van Creveld in his effort to understand the rapidly changing ways that women participate in the world.
Van Creveld's conclusions might be considered revisionist to some. Frankly, I had the feeling in reading him, that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined conclusion.
I would recommend this book to those interested in reading the account of a well respected and well known academic who has studied and written about many aspects of history for many decades.
I saw this book as Dr Van Creveld's search for his own and personal answer to the question. The book is written as an a fairly low-key academic review rather than as a document directed at convincing the reader of the author's conclusions. Additionally, the book is one of several written by the Dr Van Creveld in his effort to understand the rapidly changing ways that women participate in the world.
Van Creveld's conclusions might be considered revisionist to some. Frankly, I had the feeling in reading him, that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined conclusion.
I would recommend this book to those interested in reading the account of a well respected and well known academic who has studied and written about many aspects of history for many decades.
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2016
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A brilliant and controversial insight into the popular myth of women's historical oppression, a line so pushed as received wisdom in today's world that one almost dare not question it for fear of being called "misogynist." A must-read for any free-thinker and questioner, rebel, rascal, troublemaker and hard-line skeptic. Martin van Creveld is thorough and his writing style is accessible. My only lamentation with the book is that it is not more thorough, but that can be forgiven, as all of his claims are cited, including accusations of myth-making and his refutations of those myths.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2013
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Martin van Creveld really put together a masterpiece with this book and I'd say this is the best book on the subject of men's issues that I've ever read. What sets this book apart is that it examines the feminist movement's claim that the average woman before the first wave feminist movement was treated like a slave compared to men. This is the central defense that the feminist movement has when demonizing men as a whole and because so many books and leaders revolving around the men's issues movement leave this claim unexamined or unchallenged the feminists usually score an easy victory in debates on the topic. Not so after reading this book! He goes all the way back to ancient Greece to examine the treatment of women back then and journey's to ancient Egypt to Rome and to the modern day. The book is so relevant that it's hard to even believe this book is over 13 years old. I would recommend this book to anyone questioning the hyperbolic claims of the feminist movement because it will give you a firm grounding moving forward and because it provides the most concrete sources I've seen out of any book on the subject. The book was so good I bought a copy and sent it to a friend who is also questioning the rampant lies told about men these days. I would really like to see Mr. Creveld write another book on the topic because we have seen the feminist movement pick up the pace the past decade. This is a 5 star book so pick it up you won't be disappointed.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2014
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This is one of the most engaging books on history I have ever read. I opened to a random page by accident and ended up reading the book cover to cover. This is one of the most engaging books on history and society that I have every read. This is a rare life changing book that challenges the myths, falsehoods and contradictions which underlay western culture.
Just buy it and open to a random page.
Just buy it and open to a random page.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2016
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Utterly comprehensive. Excellent. Wish there were more stars to give it.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2013
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Based on research that is both empirical and broad, this book takes an original and interesting look at its topic.
Moreover, Professor van Creveld has written a synergetic book that is greater than the sum of its parts.
One by one, the myths woven by feminists over the last few decades are torn to pieces.
The author shows that discrimination has always existed and will continue to exists. However, this discrimination works not against women but in their favor.
This is not a matter of opinion but of facts that are systematically investigated and put together.
Not only does the book show that the radical feminist demands for "equality" are based on lies, but it also points out that, the more demands that are raised, the more women lose their privileged status.
It is because of feminism that present-day women have to work harder, die earlier, and suffer from various diseases that used to affect only men.
Another outstanding characteristic of the book is the author's courage in standing up for the truth in a world awash with feminist propaganda that describes men as exploitative, aggressive, violent and patriarchal. Those who have read Professor van Creveld's other works, which deal with military history, will not be surprised to find an empirical, well-organized, profound, revolutionary and objective volume.
Order, read, think, and internalize.
Moreover, Professor van Creveld has written a synergetic book that is greater than the sum of its parts.
One by one, the myths woven by feminists over the last few decades are torn to pieces.
The author shows that discrimination has always existed and will continue to exists. However, this discrimination works not against women but in their favor.
This is not a matter of opinion but of facts that are systematically investigated and put together.
Not only does the book show that the radical feminist demands for "equality" are based on lies, but it also points out that, the more demands that are raised, the more women lose their privileged status.
It is because of feminism that present-day women have to work harder, die earlier, and suffer from various diseases that used to affect only men.
Another outstanding characteristic of the book is the author's courage in standing up for the truth in a world awash with feminist propaganda that describes men as exploitative, aggressive, violent and patriarchal. Those who have read Professor van Creveld's other works, which deal with military history, will not be surprised to find an empirical, well-organized, profound, revolutionary and objective volume.
Order, read, think, and internalize.
19 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2014
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Rambles a bit at times and has a painfully sappy final page. Other than that, an interesting, if somewhat traditionalist view on the problem.
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VEL – The Contemporary Heretic
5.0 out of 5 stars
Were Women Oppressed or Privileged in the Past and Present?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 22, 2016Verified Purchase
If any tenet of feminism receives even more widespread assent than that which maintains that women today are oppressed, it is that which asserts that women were even more oppressed in the past before modern feminism liberated them.
Van Creveld’s book turns the conventional wisdom on its head. Far from being oppressed, women are privileged and have been throughout recorded history – “Judged by almost any criterion, women are, and always have been, the privileged sex” (p238).
The bulk of his book is therefore concerned, not with contemporary conditions, but with history. However, surveying the entire course of human history is such a vast project that errors are unavoidable.
For example, Van Creveld asserts, “a famous 18th century law ordained that a husband beating his wife should use a rod or switch no thicker than the base of his right thumb” (p162). Actually, the "famous law" is a feminist fabrication (see Who Stole Feminism? : p203-7). Wife-beating has been illegal in the UK since at least Anglo-Saxon times (George 2007).
It is curious that Van Creveld, although sceptical of other feminist claims, accepts this particular feminist fabrication at face-value.
“Three Legends”
In addition to making errors unavoidable, surveying the relative status of the sexes in every society that ever existed is obviously impossible. Van Creveld is therefore obliged to be selective. This is particularly evident in Chapter One, which focusses on 'Three Legends’.
The first of these, women’s alleged seclusion in ancient Greece is a controversy restricted to classicists. Moreover, seclusion can be interpreted as evidence of protection, rather than oppression. Thus, in later chapters, Van Creveld acknowledges, “concern for women’s health, and not oppression, explains why they usually stayed at home more often, and for longer than men” (p215) and why their work “did not take those engaged in it far from their homes” (p73), since “housing provides comfort as well as shelter against hear cold wind, rain, hail and snow” (p211).
Certainly, Greek women were better-off than their menfolk. In Sparta, boys were subject to an austere regime of military training (and institutionalized sexual abuse) from early childhood. Yet, according to Aristotle, Spartan women lived lives of “every intemperance and luxury” and socially and politically dominated the city-state.
Likewise, the third 'legend’ Van Creveld debunks, namely that the Nazis persecuted women as they did Jews and other groups is not widely believed. Actually, Van Creveld shows, the Nazis were the first government to extend child benefits to unmarried mothers (p19). Even non-Aryan females fared better than their untermenchen male equivalents, with only a fifth as many foreign females used as slave labour as men (p25) and only one woman killed in the regime’s early days (p18).
Witch-Hunts
In contrast, the second 'legend’ identified by Van Creveld – namely, the persecution of women in medieval witch-hunts – remains a feminist cause célèbre some three centuries after the practice ended.
The scale of the phenomenon is exaggerated. American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage is credited with popularising the figure of nine million women executed ( The History of Witchcraft : p123). Recent estimates put the number at less than a hundredth of this.
There are two reasons medieval witch-hunts cannot be viewed as evidence for the oppression of women. First, the accusers were not all male - “women participated in witch-hunts at least as much as men did” and “most maleficia were directed by women at women” (p11).
Second, victims were not all women. In Switzerland and Britain, most victims were male (p14); while “before 1350, nearly three times as many men as women were tried for witchcraft” and “for Europe as a whole, between 1300 and 1499 the number of accused men is said to have nearly equalled that of… women” (p13).
Yet even these figures are misleading because, Van Creveld explains, witchcraft “formed part of a much larger complex of 'spiritual’ offences that included heresy, apostasy and blasphemy, among others” and “comprised only a small fraction of the cases brought before the Inquisition” – yet “most of those charged with other spiritual offences were men” and “women accounted for only 10 percent of all those executed during the period in question” (p13).
As Van Creveld demonstrates in a later chapter, female defendants have long enjoyed preferential treatment before the courts. This explains the feminist fixation on medieval witch-hunts – “perhaps the only time in history when more women than men were charged with a serious crime and executed for it” (p152).
Explaining Female Privilege
Whereas other chapters seek to document female privilege, Van Creveld's second chapter seeks to explain it.
Female privilege, for Van Creveld, begins with biology. Even in the womb, “biologically speaking becoming female is taking the path of least resistance” (p31) whereas “simply becoming male is a risky enterprise” (p37).
Whereas a girl, on reaching a certain age, automatically becomes a woman; a boy must prove himself a man – “like an erection, manhood cannot be taken for granted” (p47).
Van Creveld is an historian not a biologist, so, unsurprisingly, he fails to identify any ultimate explanation for female privilege. The closest he comes is in suggesting that “the lesser efforts demanded of women may have something to do with the psychology of mating” and the fact that “to gain access to women [a man] has to perform and pay” (p62) – i.e. what biologists call 'sexual selection’.
Similarly, Van Creveld, in the book’s final paragraph, concludes, “nature having made us [men], as Nietsche put it, the 'unfruitful animal’, and forced us to compete for women, has turned us into the superfluous sex” (p287). This echoes both Warren Farrell’s description of men as “ The Disposable Sex ” and Robert Trivers' theory of differential parental investment (Trivers 1972).
Education
Much is made of the lack of education afforded girls in pre-modern societies. Actually, this reflects the pragmatic consideration that women, being provided for by husbands, had no need of vocational training. Far from evidencing female oppression, it is an indirect reflection of female privilege.
In other respects, girls had greater educational opportunities. “Unless they came from well-to-do families, and often even then," Van Creveld reports, "most boys were pushed to take up paid work while in their early to mid-teens” (p56). Whereas “secondary education for girls was sometimes free… boys’ parents had to pay fees” (p56) and “as late as 1987, women received more financial support for attending college than… men” (p58-9).
Thus, “by 1900, girls in American high schools outnumbered boys three to two” (p56).
Meanwhile, “only the most Spartan schools… did not have a female equivalent” (p61), such as military and monastic institutions that “often resemble[d] prisons or concentration camps” (p50).
Workshy Women?
Men function, Van Creveld explains, as “humanity’s beasts of burden” (p41); while “women represent the leisure class” (p105).
Whereas “most women settle into a life in which they are provided for and protected… most men step into one in which they provide and protect” (p64). “In the whole of nature,” he declares, “there is no arrangement that is more demanding and more altruistic” (p43).
As a result, “men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be enjoyed largely by others” (p46). Should they fail in this endeavour, “only too often the first to desert them are their wives” (p64), such that they “lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it” (p46).
Throughout history and across the world, the hardest and most dangerous work remains the exclusive preserve of men (p96).
Thus, women were “all but absent from miners’ and loggers’ camps, construction sites and garbage dumps” as well as “offshore oil rigs [and] arctic weather stations” today (p208). Similarly, “the tradition… that women at sea [even slaves] should be given the most secluded and comfortable quarters available has continued for thousands of years” (p212).
Indeed, “throughout history, wherever immigrants are numerous or conditions are hard and life difficult [e.g. the American frontier], women tend to be few and far between” (p211).
Moreover, “the smaller the relative number of women, the more precious and exalted they became in the eyes of the men” (p209). Thus, “in California mining camps during the middle of the 19th century men would pay large sums just to watch a (fully dressed) woman walk around” (p208).
Men also do more work. A 1995 “United Nations survey in 13 different countries found that men spent almost twice as much of their total time working than women, 66 percent to 34 percent” (p98).
In the West, whereas “men normally stay in the labour force throughout their adult lives… two-thirds of [women] are constantly drifting in and out of employment” such that “over a lifetime career women… work 40 percent fewer hours” (p102-3).
Double-standards apply – “a man who does not work for a living will probably be called a playboy or a parasite, while such a woman will be called a socialite or a housewife” (p66).
Thus, “the biblical term eved, ‘slave’ has only a male form” (p70) and “when God drove the first human couple out of Eden, it was Adam and not Eve whom he punished by decreeing that 'by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’” (p69).
Is Work Wonderful?
“During most of history,” Van Creveld reports, “work tended to be seen as something unpleasant, hard and even dangerous” (p66) - as indeed it often was. Work was “a burden imposed on man as a punishment–one which, monks and protestants apart, most people tried to avoid” (p88-9).
The privileged were those exempt from work – the 'idle rich’ and 'leisure class’. The oppressed those who worked – slaves, serfs and the 'working-classes’. Yet women’s increased labour-force participation over the last half-century is strangely celebrated as 'liberation’.
Work is, almost by definition, something one does, not because one enjoys the activity of itself, but rather because of the recompense offered in compensation.
Most people work because they are forced to do so – whether literally (slaves) or by circumstance ('wage-slaves'). Mark Twain famously concluded: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and… Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”.
Only with the rise of Protestantism did the curious notion emerge that work was somehow liberating. Yet, Van Creveld explains, what is forgotten is that originally “Protestantism glorified work precisely because it was unpleasant and therefore well suited to doing penance” (p69).
The 'Protestant Work Ethic’ is therefore analogous to religious practices such as fasting and self-flagellation.
Van Creveld deals with the notion that work is liberating with caustic cynicism – “The same claims were made by the 'Arbeit macht frei’ ['Work Sets You Free’] signs that stand at the entrance to Auschwitz” (p69).
'Too Weak to Work’?
Yet, Van Creveld insists, expecting women to work is hopelessly utopian. Women are unsuited to work as a matter of basic biology.
Thus, “in China during the Great Leap Forward, the attempt to make women do agricultural work… led to mass starvation” (p77); in the USSR, making women work “led literally to the country’s collapse” (p104); and “over the seventy years communism lasted, its attempt to emancipate women by making them work on equal terms with men caused their very will to live and give life to be extinguished” (p93).
The link between increased female labour-force participation and declining fertility is plausible. However, Van Creveld exaggerates.
The claim that women are unsuited to work may have been tenable when work usually involved hard physical labour. However, in the post-industrial West, where most men work in offices not coal-mines, it is obsolete.
Van Creveld’s claims do, however, prove that feminists got one thing right: Men like Van Creveld do use an ideology of 'Biological Determinism’ and 'Male Supremacy’ to justify the Status Quo. However, Male Supremacism is used to justify, not women’s oppression, but rather imposing greater burdens on men, who, being superior, are perceived as able to bear them, while women, being weak, are, like children, protected and provided for.
On this view, being biologically inferior seems like quite a good deal!
The Redistribution of Wealth
If women cannot work, how do they survive? The answer, Van Creveld explains, “is because they were fed, clothed, housed and looked after by men” and “a society in which this was not the case has yet to be discovered” (p106).
He identifies three institutions that facilitate this:
1) Marriage;
2) Charity;
3) Welfare.
Marriage
“The family is,” for Van Creveld, “an economic institution” whose primary “purpose is to guarantee that… women will be provided for” (p107).
Thus, “the duty of husbands to provide for their wives according to their means is universal” (p110), and evidenced as far back as ancient Egypt (p109) and Greece (p111).
Thus, “a French royal decree of 1214 gave a wife the rights to half her husbands’ property” (p108); while “the husband’s duty to support his wife was… written into… Roman wedding charters” (p110). Accordingly, “before a man can marry he must work and pay and after joining hands in matrimony he must continue to work and pay” (p107).
Even if the marriage dissolves, the husband’s burden continues – “in ancient Egypt, divorce entailed heavy financial penalties for the husband, but none for the wife”; while “both Hindu and Muslim law oblige husbands to support their divorced wives” (p118).
____________
Van Creveld rationalizes these arrangements thus: “Compensating women for their lesser earning capacity has always been among the most important purposes of marriage” (p121).
However, in the post-industrial West, where heavy labour is rare, women can earn as much as men. Indeed, once potential earnings in the sex industry are considered, women’s 'earning capacity’ probably exceeds men’s.
Van Creveld has his causation backwards. Instead of divorce law compensating women for their lesser earnings, it is probable that women’s reduced earnings are themselves a rational response to current divorce law.
In short, why bother earning money when you have the easier option of marrying it?
____________
As a result, although men earn more than women, women spend more. Van Creveld reports that, as early as the Victorian era, advertisers had already begun to target “ Consuming Angels ” (p116).
Traditionally in France and Britain, “most of the earnings of working-class married men ended up in the hands of their wives [and] many surrendered their pay packet without even opening it, receiving back only what they needed to buy their daily ration of wine and tobacco” (p116).
Likewise, “Today… women buy 80 percent of everything” (p116-7: see Marketing to Women: How to Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market :p6).
Charity
Charity also functions to redistribute wealth to women. Often, “the mere fact that a person is female may entitle her to benefits which, had she been male, she could have only gotten if she were sick or incapacitated” (p123).
Beneficiaries included widows, ex-prostitutes, orphans in need of dowries, spinsters, unmarried girls – in short, any female lacking a husband.
Conversely, men were eligible only if they were married and hence obliged to support a wife, such that the latter was an indirect beneficiary. Thus, “a poor man received assistance if he had a woman, while a poor woman received assistance if she did not have a man” (p128).
In New York in 1820, many relief organizations “specifically designed to assist women… [yet] no similar organizations for men”, while “even the largest 'co-ed’ charitable organization… aided 27 percent more women than men” (p129). Sixty years later, “the Charitable Organization Society… the largest of its kind in New York… assisted four times as many women as men” (Ibid.).
Similarly, today, many charities (e.g. shelters for so-called 'battered women’) serve only females (p130). Yet “whereas women are always entitled to share in any… charity provided to men, men are not permitted to share in many forms of charity provided to women… even if they are … divorced, deserted, widowed, and… have a brood of young children” (Ibid.)
Welfare
Increasingly, the function of both charity and marriage is usurped by the state.
Thus, in the first attempt to create a ‘welfare state’ after the French Revolution, “women, particularly single mothers occupied an important place… on a par with wounded or disabled war veterans” (p126-7).
The first social benefits in the USA were “mothers’ pensions”, which, unlike other pensions, “neither required an investment of capital nor… contributions” – and “by 1935, all but two states had them” (p131).
Like modern child benefits, the “Aid to Dependent Children program” involved payments to mothers, not children – and, in all states but one, single fathers got nothing (p132).
Social Security also favoured women. Whereas “men only got benefits if they worked and contributed… married women received benefits irrespective of work”; and “a widow past retirement age would be entitled to receive benefits” whereas a widower past retirement age received nothing (p133).
On the death of their husbands, wives continued to receive the benefits their husbands had earnt – “having supported their wives during their entire lives, [men] were now expected to continue doing so after their deaths” (p134).
In other jurisdictions – Norway, Italy, France – “in all cases women started receiving benefits years, often decades before men did” (p134).
In the US, these inequalities were only remedied in 1975. Then the benefits in question were scaled back under Reagan. Thus, “as soon as women’s benefits were extended to men, those benefits came to be regarded as unnecessary” (p134).
This appears to be a universal pattern. Thus, to take an example not discussed by Van Creveld, in the UK for fifty years, women were eligible for a state pension at 60, whereas men had to be 65. This inequality is scheduled to be phased out only in 2020. By this time, neither sex will be eligible until they are 68.
____________
Van Creveld concludes:
"On the face of it, a husband, a charitable institution and a modern welfare state are entirely different. In fact, though the details differ, the principle is the same. All are designed partly - and some would say primarily - to transfer resources from men… to women" (p137).
One thing has remained constant – namely, the burden imposed on men. Thus, in Sweden men paid 61.5% of tax revenue – although women had 50% greater taxable wealth, received more allowances and received a greater proportion of their income as state welfare (p135).
Yet, whereas charitable donations and marriage are voluntary, taxes are mandatory.
Thus, we have gone from the traditional family to what Warren Farrell calls “a new nuclear family: woman, government and child” or “Government as a Substitute Husband” (see The Myth of Male Power ).
Unequal Before the Law
Countless studies demonstrate that, in the criminal courts, female defendants are dealt with more leniently than men (e.g. Starr 2012). Likewise, the pro-female bias of the family courts is well-documented .
Van Creveld shows that this favouritism is no new thing. Under ancient Salic Law, a person could be fined thrice as much for assaulting or killing a woman as they would be for the equivalent offence directed against a man (p141). Meanwhile, “in Yemen the blood money demanded for the death of a woman was 11 times that demanded for a man” (p141) – just as today criminals who victimize females are sentenced more severely (Curry et al 2004; Curry 2010)
Meanwhile, “medieval German even had a special term, frauenfrevel, or ‘women’s trifle’ for reducing the penalty levied against women [which] amounted to 50 percent of the fines imposed on men” and “there existed a whole class of sanctions which, regarded as light, were known as 'women’s punishments’” (p148).
Similarly, to take an example not discussed by Van Creveld, in Britain, the whipping of women was abolished in 1820, but remained legal for males, even boys as young as seven for offences as minor as theft, until well into the twentieth century (see 'corporal punishment’ entry, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica).
In common law jurisdictions (e.g. England, America), under the doctrine of coverture, husbands were punished for their wives’ transgressions (p142). In one case, “the jury was asked to consider whether a crippled and bedridden husband should be held responsible for a murder his wife committed in his presence” (p155).
Feminists protest 'sexual double-standards’. However, where adultery and premarital sex were unlawful, although the offence was defined by reference to the female partner’s marital status, the male partner was more severely punished. Thus, “in republican Rome, the law permitted a husband to kill his wife’s lover but not the woman herself” (p144).
Ditto for other sexual offences. Leviticus 20:17 prescribes that only the male party be punished for brother-sister incest, (p145), while, from the Bible onward, male homosexuality was severely punished, yet lesbianism ignored. The Nazis sent only gay men to concentration camps and, as recently as 1993, 22 US states prohibited gay male sex, but not one criminalized lesbianism (p146-7).
War
The next chapter deals with warfare. This replicates much of the material in Van Creveld’s earlier work, Men, Women & War , which I have already reviewed. I will therefore say little about this chapter save to conclude that Van Creveld convincingly shows that, in wars throughout history, it is men who are conscripted and who represent the overwhelming majority of casualties, including civilian casualties. Meanwhile, women are, as Van Creveld puts it, “The Protected Sex”.
Lifespan
Chapter Seven is titled “The Quality of Life”. However, the whole book has dealt with this topic. Much of Chapter 7 is concerned, not so much with quality of life, as its duration.
Biological factors have been invoked to explain women’s greater average longevity. However, Van Creveld disproves these theories. He demonstrates, in a deluge of data, that, throughout most of history, men actually outlived women. Only in the last few centuries has this pattern reversed.
This occurred first in northwest Europe. By 1990, only seven countries remained where men still outlived women and, by 2011, women outlived men “in every single one of the 194 countries surveyed” (p219).
Rejecting the counter-intuitive yet fashionable notion that women are somehow 'stronger’ than men, Van Creveld attributes men’s greater longevity under pre-modern conditions to “men’s greater robustness” and “the fact they did not have to bear children” (p205).
Women’s greater longevity today is attributed to technological advance. Yet “from the forceps to the condom to the pill, practically all these discoveries and inventions were made by men” (p207). Likewise, “the most important amenity men have provided for women is housing” since construction workers are overwhelmingly male (p211).
Additionally, “women’s longevity… reflected their privileged economic position – the fact that they were supported by men” (p217).
Today, if men still outlive women in a few of the poorest countries (e.g. Afghanistan), this is taken as incontrovertible proof of oppression.
However, “what is usually regarded as the 'normal’ sex ratio… is not really normal at all” but results from “men providing women with all the amenities of civilized life” (p211). To do so, “they had to engage in backbreaking labor and often they paid the price by dying a lonely death… [without even] a sign to mark their grave” (p211).
Mental Health
Van Creveld’s penultimate chapter, discusses the treatment of mental illness.
Until recently, the treatment of the insane was draconian and the vast majority of inmates at mental institutions male. Today this pattern is reversed - women are more likely to be diagnosed with psychiatric conditions and their treatment is sympathetic.
Van Creveld is sceptical regarding the scientific status of psychiatry - “mental diseases are simply labels invented to fit patients’ complaints into whatever intellectual framework exists at a given time and place” (p251; see also The Myth of Mental Illness ).
He traces to history of psychiatric diagnoses, from the nineteenth century epidemic of 'hysteria’, to the twenty-first century fashion for 'chronic fatigue syndrome’. He contrasts the sympathetic treatment accorded the ostensible victims (overwhelmingly female) of these dubious diagnoses of unknown aetiology with that accorded men suffering from 'shell shock’ ('post-traumatic shock disorder’) during WWI.
Why Women Whinge?
This chapter also seeks to explain why, despite female privilege, women still complain. He concludes women are simply “The Complaining Sex” and proposes “feminism itself may be just a manifestation, writ large, of this particular predisposition” (p237).
As to why women whinge, he purports to paraphrase Nietzsche – “everything about women… is a complaint, and the complaint has one cause: namely the plain fact that a woman stands a much better chance of getting her way by complaining” (p274).
Whereas “the sole way men can attract attention is by succeeding… women can attract attention almost equally well by failure or by complaining” (p276). In contrast, “if they complain, [men] are much more likely to be met with indifference or contempt” (p278).
This then explains why women are more likely to attempt suicide as a 'cry for help’, whereas men are more likely to actually kill themselves without seeking treatment (Ibid.).
In short, the reason women whinge is because, on hearing them, male 'white knights’ are all too ready to ride heroically to their rescue.
Conclusion
Van Creveld concludes the best cure for feminism is war – “war is an unfavourable breeding ground for feminism because, as long as it lasts, women desperately need men to defend them… [and] because… while men are away on campaign women do exactly as they please” (p281). Thus, “if the price of peace is… feminism… then perhaps it is a price worth paying” (p281).
This is intuitively plausible. When men are forced to fight, surely no woman could envy the male role.
However, the historical record does not support this theory. It was after WWI, when unprecedented numbers of men were conscripted and killed, that women were first enfranchised in both Britain and America. Meanwhile, in Britain, those men whose contribution to the war effort was comparable to that of women (i.e. conscientious objectors) were actually disenfranchised for a decade as punishment ( A Question of Conscience : p70).
In the absence of war, Van Creveld proposes that feminists will increasingly eschew integration in favour of segregation and special privileges (p282-3). The alternative is that “feminism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions” since “today, as in the past, men and women want each other and cannot live without each other” and women still seek demand a man act as breadwinner (p283).
Indeed, Van Creveld proposes, “much of feminism should be understood as an attempt by women who have failed to attract and keep a man to avenge themselves on their more fortunate sisters” (p284).
However, one thing is certain, women’s privileges will continue – “so it has always been, and so – unless the nature of people of both sexes changes suddenly and fundamentally – it will always be” (p279).
Neither, he suggests, “in our heart of hearts, would we like the situation to change” (p287).
In this, he is right. As he has amply demonstrated in preceding chapters, men are naturally chivalrous and protective of women.
As for why men feel this way, he ventures, “after all, it was women who gave us life. In a way, all we are doing is returning a debt” (p287).
This is unconvincing. If men do owe a debt, it is not to womankind as a whole, but rather to a specific woman, namely their mother. Moreover, fathers also play a vital role in the conception of offspring. Finally, the alleged pain of childbirth is hardly equal to the hardship men endure throughout entire lifetimes to protect and provide for their womenfolk.
In short, if, on balance, any debt exists, then, on the evidence of Van Creveld’s previous chapters, it is clear in what direction it is owing.
Van Creveld admits as much later in the same paragraph, when, in his final sentence, he suggests that all men really require in return for their sacrifices is an occasional ‘thank you’.
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Curry 2010 The conditional effects of victim and offender ethnicity and victim gender on sentences for non-capital cases. Punishment & Society 12(4):438-462
Curry, Lee & Rodriguez (2004) 'Does Victim Gender Increase Sentence Severity? Further Explorations of Gender Dynamics and Sentencing Outcomes', Crime & Delinquency, 50(3):319-343.
George (2007) 'Skimmington Revisited' Journal of Men's Studies 10(2):111-127
Starr, (2012) Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases (August 29, 2012). University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, No.12-018
Trivers, R.L. (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (pp. 136–179). Chicago, IL: Aldine
Van Creveld’s book turns the conventional wisdom on its head. Far from being oppressed, women are privileged and have been throughout recorded history – “Judged by almost any criterion, women are, and always have been, the privileged sex” (p238).
The bulk of his book is therefore concerned, not with contemporary conditions, but with history. However, surveying the entire course of human history is such a vast project that errors are unavoidable.
For example, Van Creveld asserts, “a famous 18th century law ordained that a husband beating his wife should use a rod or switch no thicker than the base of his right thumb” (p162). Actually, the "famous law" is a feminist fabrication (see Who Stole Feminism? : p203-7). Wife-beating has been illegal in the UK since at least Anglo-Saxon times (George 2007).
It is curious that Van Creveld, although sceptical of other feminist claims, accepts this particular feminist fabrication at face-value.
“Three Legends”
In addition to making errors unavoidable, surveying the relative status of the sexes in every society that ever existed is obviously impossible. Van Creveld is therefore obliged to be selective. This is particularly evident in Chapter One, which focusses on 'Three Legends’.
The first of these, women’s alleged seclusion in ancient Greece is a controversy restricted to classicists. Moreover, seclusion can be interpreted as evidence of protection, rather than oppression. Thus, in later chapters, Van Creveld acknowledges, “concern for women’s health, and not oppression, explains why they usually stayed at home more often, and for longer than men” (p215) and why their work “did not take those engaged in it far from their homes” (p73), since “housing provides comfort as well as shelter against hear cold wind, rain, hail and snow” (p211).
Certainly, Greek women were better-off than their menfolk. In Sparta, boys were subject to an austere regime of military training (and institutionalized sexual abuse) from early childhood. Yet, according to Aristotle, Spartan women lived lives of “every intemperance and luxury” and socially and politically dominated the city-state.
Likewise, the third 'legend’ Van Creveld debunks, namely that the Nazis persecuted women as they did Jews and other groups is not widely believed. Actually, Van Creveld shows, the Nazis were the first government to extend child benefits to unmarried mothers (p19). Even non-Aryan females fared better than their untermenchen male equivalents, with only a fifth as many foreign females used as slave labour as men (p25) and only one woman killed in the regime’s early days (p18).
Witch-Hunts
In contrast, the second 'legend’ identified by Van Creveld – namely, the persecution of women in medieval witch-hunts – remains a feminist cause célèbre some three centuries after the practice ended.
The scale of the phenomenon is exaggerated. American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage is credited with popularising the figure of nine million women executed ( The History of Witchcraft : p123). Recent estimates put the number at less than a hundredth of this.
There are two reasons medieval witch-hunts cannot be viewed as evidence for the oppression of women. First, the accusers were not all male - “women participated in witch-hunts at least as much as men did” and “most maleficia were directed by women at women” (p11).
Second, victims were not all women. In Switzerland and Britain, most victims were male (p14); while “before 1350, nearly three times as many men as women were tried for witchcraft” and “for Europe as a whole, between 1300 and 1499 the number of accused men is said to have nearly equalled that of… women” (p13).
Yet even these figures are misleading because, Van Creveld explains, witchcraft “formed part of a much larger complex of 'spiritual’ offences that included heresy, apostasy and blasphemy, among others” and “comprised only a small fraction of the cases brought before the Inquisition” – yet “most of those charged with other spiritual offences were men” and “women accounted for only 10 percent of all those executed during the period in question” (p13).
As Van Creveld demonstrates in a later chapter, female defendants have long enjoyed preferential treatment before the courts. This explains the feminist fixation on medieval witch-hunts – “perhaps the only time in history when more women than men were charged with a serious crime and executed for it” (p152).
Explaining Female Privilege
Whereas other chapters seek to document female privilege, Van Creveld's second chapter seeks to explain it.
Female privilege, for Van Creveld, begins with biology. Even in the womb, “biologically speaking becoming female is taking the path of least resistance” (p31) whereas “simply becoming male is a risky enterprise” (p37).
Whereas a girl, on reaching a certain age, automatically becomes a woman; a boy must prove himself a man – “like an erection, manhood cannot be taken for granted” (p47).
Van Creveld is an historian not a biologist, so, unsurprisingly, he fails to identify any ultimate explanation for female privilege. The closest he comes is in suggesting that “the lesser efforts demanded of women may have something to do with the psychology of mating” and the fact that “to gain access to women [a man] has to perform and pay” (p62) – i.e. what biologists call 'sexual selection’.
Similarly, Van Creveld, in the book’s final paragraph, concludes, “nature having made us [men], as Nietsche put it, the 'unfruitful animal’, and forced us to compete for women, has turned us into the superfluous sex” (p287). This echoes both Warren Farrell’s description of men as “ The Disposable Sex ” and Robert Trivers' theory of differential parental investment (Trivers 1972).
Education
Much is made of the lack of education afforded girls in pre-modern societies. Actually, this reflects the pragmatic consideration that women, being provided for by husbands, had no need of vocational training. Far from evidencing female oppression, it is an indirect reflection of female privilege.
In other respects, girls had greater educational opportunities. “Unless they came from well-to-do families, and often even then," Van Creveld reports, "most boys were pushed to take up paid work while in their early to mid-teens” (p56). Whereas “secondary education for girls was sometimes free… boys’ parents had to pay fees” (p56) and “as late as 1987, women received more financial support for attending college than… men” (p58-9).
Thus, “by 1900, girls in American high schools outnumbered boys three to two” (p56).
Meanwhile, “only the most Spartan schools… did not have a female equivalent” (p61), such as military and monastic institutions that “often resemble[d] prisons or concentration camps” (p50).
Workshy Women?
Men function, Van Creveld explains, as “humanity’s beasts of burden” (p41); while “women represent the leisure class” (p105).
Whereas “most women settle into a life in which they are provided for and protected… most men step into one in which they provide and protect” (p64). “In the whole of nature,” he declares, “there is no arrangement that is more demanding and more altruistic” (p43).
As a result, “men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be enjoyed largely by others” (p46). Should they fail in this endeavour, “only too often the first to desert them are their wives” (p64), such that they “lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it” (p46).
Throughout history and across the world, the hardest and most dangerous work remains the exclusive preserve of men (p96).
Thus, women were “all but absent from miners’ and loggers’ camps, construction sites and garbage dumps” as well as “offshore oil rigs [and] arctic weather stations” today (p208). Similarly, “the tradition… that women at sea [even slaves] should be given the most secluded and comfortable quarters available has continued for thousands of years” (p212).
Indeed, “throughout history, wherever immigrants are numerous or conditions are hard and life difficult [e.g. the American frontier], women tend to be few and far between” (p211).
Moreover, “the smaller the relative number of women, the more precious and exalted they became in the eyes of the men” (p209). Thus, “in California mining camps during the middle of the 19th century men would pay large sums just to watch a (fully dressed) woman walk around” (p208).
Men also do more work. A 1995 “United Nations survey in 13 different countries found that men spent almost twice as much of their total time working than women, 66 percent to 34 percent” (p98).
In the West, whereas “men normally stay in the labour force throughout their adult lives… two-thirds of [women] are constantly drifting in and out of employment” such that “over a lifetime career women… work 40 percent fewer hours” (p102-3).
Double-standards apply – “a man who does not work for a living will probably be called a playboy or a parasite, while such a woman will be called a socialite or a housewife” (p66).
Thus, “the biblical term eved, ‘slave’ has only a male form” (p70) and “when God drove the first human couple out of Eden, it was Adam and not Eve whom he punished by decreeing that 'by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’” (p69).
Is Work Wonderful?
“During most of history,” Van Creveld reports, “work tended to be seen as something unpleasant, hard and even dangerous” (p66) - as indeed it often was. Work was “a burden imposed on man as a punishment–one which, monks and protestants apart, most people tried to avoid” (p88-9).
The privileged were those exempt from work – the 'idle rich’ and 'leisure class’. The oppressed those who worked – slaves, serfs and the 'working-classes’. Yet women’s increased labour-force participation over the last half-century is strangely celebrated as 'liberation’.
Work is, almost by definition, something one does, not because one enjoys the activity of itself, but rather because of the recompense offered in compensation.
Most people work because they are forced to do so – whether literally (slaves) or by circumstance ('wage-slaves'). Mark Twain famously concluded: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and… Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”.
Only with the rise of Protestantism did the curious notion emerge that work was somehow liberating. Yet, Van Creveld explains, what is forgotten is that originally “Protestantism glorified work precisely because it was unpleasant and therefore well suited to doing penance” (p69).
The 'Protestant Work Ethic’ is therefore analogous to religious practices such as fasting and self-flagellation.
Van Creveld deals with the notion that work is liberating with caustic cynicism – “The same claims were made by the 'Arbeit macht frei’ ['Work Sets You Free’] signs that stand at the entrance to Auschwitz” (p69).
'Too Weak to Work’?
Yet, Van Creveld insists, expecting women to work is hopelessly utopian. Women are unsuited to work as a matter of basic biology.
Thus, “in China during the Great Leap Forward, the attempt to make women do agricultural work… led to mass starvation” (p77); in the USSR, making women work “led literally to the country’s collapse” (p104); and “over the seventy years communism lasted, its attempt to emancipate women by making them work on equal terms with men caused their very will to live and give life to be extinguished” (p93).
The link between increased female labour-force participation and declining fertility is plausible. However, Van Creveld exaggerates.
The claim that women are unsuited to work may have been tenable when work usually involved hard physical labour. However, in the post-industrial West, where most men work in offices not coal-mines, it is obsolete.
Van Creveld’s claims do, however, prove that feminists got one thing right: Men like Van Creveld do use an ideology of 'Biological Determinism’ and 'Male Supremacy’ to justify the Status Quo. However, Male Supremacism is used to justify, not women’s oppression, but rather imposing greater burdens on men, who, being superior, are perceived as able to bear them, while women, being weak, are, like children, protected and provided for.
On this view, being biologically inferior seems like quite a good deal!
The Redistribution of Wealth
If women cannot work, how do they survive? The answer, Van Creveld explains, “is because they were fed, clothed, housed and looked after by men” and “a society in which this was not the case has yet to be discovered” (p106).
He identifies three institutions that facilitate this:
1) Marriage;
2) Charity;
3) Welfare.
Marriage
“The family is,” for Van Creveld, “an economic institution” whose primary “purpose is to guarantee that… women will be provided for” (p107).
Thus, “the duty of husbands to provide for their wives according to their means is universal” (p110), and evidenced as far back as ancient Egypt (p109) and Greece (p111).
Thus, “a French royal decree of 1214 gave a wife the rights to half her husbands’ property” (p108); while “the husband’s duty to support his wife was… written into… Roman wedding charters” (p110). Accordingly, “before a man can marry he must work and pay and after joining hands in matrimony he must continue to work and pay” (p107).
Even if the marriage dissolves, the husband’s burden continues – “in ancient Egypt, divorce entailed heavy financial penalties for the husband, but none for the wife”; while “both Hindu and Muslim law oblige husbands to support their divorced wives” (p118).
____________
Van Creveld rationalizes these arrangements thus: “Compensating women for their lesser earning capacity has always been among the most important purposes of marriage” (p121).
However, in the post-industrial West, where heavy labour is rare, women can earn as much as men. Indeed, once potential earnings in the sex industry are considered, women’s 'earning capacity’ probably exceeds men’s.
Van Creveld has his causation backwards. Instead of divorce law compensating women for their lesser earnings, it is probable that women’s reduced earnings are themselves a rational response to current divorce law.
In short, why bother earning money when you have the easier option of marrying it?
____________
As a result, although men earn more than women, women spend more. Van Creveld reports that, as early as the Victorian era, advertisers had already begun to target “ Consuming Angels ” (p116).
Traditionally in France and Britain, “most of the earnings of working-class married men ended up in the hands of their wives [and] many surrendered their pay packet without even opening it, receiving back only what they needed to buy their daily ration of wine and tobacco” (p116).
Likewise, “Today… women buy 80 percent of everything” (p116-7: see Marketing to Women: How to Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market :p6).
Charity
Charity also functions to redistribute wealth to women. Often, “the mere fact that a person is female may entitle her to benefits which, had she been male, she could have only gotten if she were sick or incapacitated” (p123).
Beneficiaries included widows, ex-prostitutes, orphans in need of dowries, spinsters, unmarried girls – in short, any female lacking a husband.
Conversely, men were eligible only if they were married and hence obliged to support a wife, such that the latter was an indirect beneficiary. Thus, “a poor man received assistance if he had a woman, while a poor woman received assistance if she did not have a man” (p128).
In New York in 1820, many relief organizations “specifically designed to assist women… [yet] no similar organizations for men”, while “even the largest 'co-ed’ charitable organization… aided 27 percent more women than men” (p129). Sixty years later, “the Charitable Organization Society… the largest of its kind in New York… assisted four times as many women as men” (Ibid.).
Similarly, today, many charities (e.g. shelters for so-called 'battered women’) serve only females (p130). Yet “whereas women are always entitled to share in any… charity provided to men, men are not permitted to share in many forms of charity provided to women… even if they are … divorced, deserted, widowed, and… have a brood of young children” (Ibid.)
Welfare
Increasingly, the function of both charity and marriage is usurped by the state.
Thus, in the first attempt to create a ‘welfare state’ after the French Revolution, “women, particularly single mothers occupied an important place… on a par with wounded or disabled war veterans” (p126-7).
The first social benefits in the USA were “mothers’ pensions”, which, unlike other pensions, “neither required an investment of capital nor… contributions” – and “by 1935, all but two states had them” (p131).
Like modern child benefits, the “Aid to Dependent Children program” involved payments to mothers, not children – and, in all states but one, single fathers got nothing (p132).
Social Security also favoured women. Whereas “men only got benefits if they worked and contributed… married women received benefits irrespective of work”; and “a widow past retirement age would be entitled to receive benefits” whereas a widower past retirement age received nothing (p133).
On the death of their husbands, wives continued to receive the benefits their husbands had earnt – “having supported their wives during their entire lives, [men] were now expected to continue doing so after their deaths” (p134).
In other jurisdictions – Norway, Italy, France – “in all cases women started receiving benefits years, often decades before men did” (p134).
In the US, these inequalities were only remedied in 1975. Then the benefits in question were scaled back under Reagan. Thus, “as soon as women’s benefits were extended to men, those benefits came to be regarded as unnecessary” (p134).
This appears to be a universal pattern. Thus, to take an example not discussed by Van Creveld, in the UK for fifty years, women were eligible for a state pension at 60, whereas men had to be 65. This inequality is scheduled to be phased out only in 2020. By this time, neither sex will be eligible until they are 68.
____________
Van Creveld concludes:
"On the face of it, a husband, a charitable institution and a modern welfare state are entirely different. In fact, though the details differ, the principle is the same. All are designed partly - and some would say primarily - to transfer resources from men… to women" (p137).
One thing has remained constant – namely, the burden imposed on men. Thus, in Sweden men paid 61.5% of tax revenue – although women had 50% greater taxable wealth, received more allowances and received a greater proportion of their income as state welfare (p135).
Yet, whereas charitable donations and marriage are voluntary, taxes are mandatory.
Thus, we have gone from the traditional family to what Warren Farrell calls “a new nuclear family: woman, government and child” or “Government as a Substitute Husband” (see The Myth of Male Power ).
Unequal Before the Law
Countless studies demonstrate that, in the criminal courts, female defendants are dealt with more leniently than men (e.g. Starr 2012). Likewise, the pro-female bias of the family courts is well-documented .
Van Creveld shows that this favouritism is no new thing. Under ancient Salic Law, a person could be fined thrice as much for assaulting or killing a woman as they would be for the equivalent offence directed against a man (p141). Meanwhile, “in Yemen the blood money demanded for the death of a woman was 11 times that demanded for a man” (p141) – just as today criminals who victimize females are sentenced more severely (Curry et al 2004; Curry 2010)
Meanwhile, “medieval German even had a special term, frauenfrevel, or ‘women’s trifle’ for reducing the penalty levied against women [which] amounted to 50 percent of the fines imposed on men” and “there existed a whole class of sanctions which, regarded as light, were known as 'women’s punishments’” (p148).
Similarly, to take an example not discussed by Van Creveld, in Britain, the whipping of women was abolished in 1820, but remained legal for males, even boys as young as seven for offences as minor as theft, until well into the twentieth century (see 'corporal punishment’ entry, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica).
In common law jurisdictions (e.g. England, America), under the doctrine of coverture, husbands were punished for their wives’ transgressions (p142). In one case, “the jury was asked to consider whether a crippled and bedridden husband should be held responsible for a murder his wife committed in his presence” (p155).
Feminists protest 'sexual double-standards’. However, where adultery and premarital sex were unlawful, although the offence was defined by reference to the female partner’s marital status, the male partner was more severely punished. Thus, “in republican Rome, the law permitted a husband to kill his wife’s lover but not the woman herself” (p144).
Ditto for other sexual offences. Leviticus 20:17 prescribes that only the male party be punished for brother-sister incest, (p145), while, from the Bible onward, male homosexuality was severely punished, yet lesbianism ignored. The Nazis sent only gay men to concentration camps and, as recently as 1993, 22 US states prohibited gay male sex, but not one criminalized lesbianism (p146-7).
War
The next chapter deals with warfare. This replicates much of the material in Van Creveld’s earlier work, Men, Women & War , which I have already reviewed. I will therefore say little about this chapter save to conclude that Van Creveld convincingly shows that, in wars throughout history, it is men who are conscripted and who represent the overwhelming majority of casualties, including civilian casualties. Meanwhile, women are, as Van Creveld puts it, “The Protected Sex”.
Lifespan
Chapter Seven is titled “The Quality of Life”. However, the whole book has dealt with this topic. Much of Chapter 7 is concerned, not so much with quality of life, as its duration.
Biological factors have been invoked to explain women’s greater average longevity. However, Van Creveld disproves these theories. He demonstrates, in a deluge of data, that, throughout most of history, men actually outlived women. Only in the last few centuries has this pattern reversed.
This occurred first in northwest Europe. By 1990, only seven countries remained where men still outlived women and, by 2011, women outlived men “in every single one of the 194 countries surveyed” (p219).
Rejecting the counter-intuitive yet fashionable notion that women are somehow 'stronger’ than men, Van Creveld attributes men’s greater longevity under pre-modern conditions to “men’s greater robustness” and “the fact they did not have to bear children” (p205).
Women’s greater longevity today is attributed to technological advance. Yet “from the forceps to the condom to the pill, practically all these discoveries and inventions were made by men” (p207). Likewise, “the most important amenity men have provided for women is housing” since construction workers are overwhelmingly male (p211).
Additionally, “women’s longevity… reflected their privileged economic position – the fact that they were supported by men” (p217).
Today, if men still outlive women in a few of the poorest countries (e.g. Afghanistan), this is taken as incontrovertible proof of oppression.
However, “what is usually regarded as the 'normal’ sex ratio… is not really normal at all” but results from “men providing women with all the amenities of civilized life” (p211). To do so, “they had to engage in backbreaking labor and often they paid the price by dying a lonely death… [without even] a sign to mark their grave” (p211).
Mental Health
Van Creveld’s penultimate chapter, discusses the treatment of mental illness.
Until recently, the treatment of the insane was draconian and the vast majority of inmates at mental institutions male. Today this pattern is reversed - women are more likely to be diagnosed with psychiatric conditions and their treatment is sympathetic.
Van Creveld is sceptical regarding the scientific status of psychiatry - “mental diseases are simply labels invented to fit patients’ complaints into whatever intellectual framework exists at a given time and place” (p251; see also The Myth of Mental Illness ).
He traces to history of psychiatric diagnoses, from the nineteenth century epidemic of 'hysteria’, to the twenty-first century fashion for 'chronic fatigue syndrome’. He contrasts the sympathetic treatment accorded the ostensible victims (overwhelmingly female) of these dubious diagnoses of unknown aetiology with that accorded men suffering from 'shell shock’ ('post-traumatic shock disorder’) during WWI.
Why Women Whinge?
This chapter also seeks to explain why, despite female privilege, women still complain. He concludes women are simply “The Complaining Sex” and proposes “feminism itself may be just a manifestation, writ large, of this particular predisposition” (p237).
As to why women whinge, he purports to paraphrase Nietzsche – “everything about women… is a complaint, and the complaint has one cause: namely the plain fact that a woman stands a much better chance of getting her way by complaining” (p274).
Whereas “the sole way men can attract attention is by succeeding… women can attract attention almost equally well by failure or by complaining” (p276). In contrast, “if they complain, [men] are much more likely to be met with indifference or contempt” (p278).
This then explains why women are more likely to attempt suicide as a 'cry for help’, whereas men are more likely to actually kill themselves without seeking treatment (Ibid.).
In short, the reason women whinge is because, on hearing them, male 'white knights’ are all too ready to ride heroically to their rescue.
Conclusion
Van Creveld concludes the best cure for feminism is war – “war is an unfavourable breeding ground for feminism because, as long as it lasts, women desperately need men to defend them… [and] because… while men are away on campaign women do exactly as they please” (p281). Thus, “if the price of peace is… feminism… then perhaps it is a price worth paying” (p281).
This is intuitively plausible. When men are forced to fight, surely no woman could envy the male role.
However, the historical record does not support this theory. It was after WWI, when unprecedented numbers of men were conscripted and killed, that women were first enfranchised in both Britain and America. Meanwhile, in Britain, those men whose contribution to the war effort was comparable to that of women (i.e. conscientious objectors) were actually disenfranchised for a decade as punishment ( A Question of Conscience : p70).
In the absence of war, Van Creveld proposes that feminists will increasingly eschew integration in favour of segregation and special privileges (p282-3). The alternative is that “feminism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions” since “today, as in the past, men and women want each other and cannot live without each other” and women still seek demand a man act as breadwinner (p283).
Indeed, Van Creveld proposes, “much of feminism should be understood as an attempt by women who have failed to attract and keep a man to avenge themselves on their more fortunate sisters” (p284).
However, one thing is certain, women’s privileges will continue – “so it has always been, and so – unless the nature of people of both sexes changes suddenly and fundamentally – it will always be” (p279).
Neither, he suggests, “in our heart of hearts, would we like the situation to change” (p287).
In this, he is right. As he has amply demonstrated in preceding chapters, men are naturally chivalrous and protective of women.
As for why men feel this way, he ventures, “after all, it was women who gave us life. In a way, all we are doing is returning a debt” (p287).
This is unconvincing. If men do owe a debt, it is not to womankind as a whole, but rather to a specific woman, namely their mother. Moreover, fathers also play a vital role in the conception of offspring. Finally, the alleged pain of childbirth is hardly equal to the hardship men endure throughout entire lifetimes to protect and provide for their womenfolk.
In short, if, on balance, any debt exists, then, on the evidence of Van Creveld’s previous chapters, it is clear in what direction it is owing.
Van Creveld admits as much later in the same paragraph, when, in his final sentence, he suggests that all men really require in return for their sacrifices is an occasional ‘thank you’.
____________________
Curry 2010 The conditional effects of victim and offender ethnicity and victim gender on sentences for non-capital cases. Punishment & Society 12(4):438-462
Curry, Lee & Rodriguez (2004) 'Does Victim Gender Increase Sentence Severity? Further Explorations of Gender Dynamics and Sentencing Outcomes', Crime & Delinquency, 50(3):319-343.
George (2007) 'Skimmington Revisited' Journal of Men's Studies 10(2):111-127
Starr, (2012) Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases (August 29, 2012). University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, No.12-018
Trivers, R.L. (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (pp. 136–179). Chicago, IL: Aldine
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Fab book , an eye opener !
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 22, 2019Verified Purchase
This is a fantastic read , an eye opener , regardless of if your Male or female , this is worth the time , you womt be disappointed.
ian
4.0 out of 5 stars
hot stuff
Reviewed in Germany on February 22, 2019Verified Purchase
First of all I admire an author because to write such material needs a lot of courage. Perhaps this is possible because author lives in Israel where PC is not so rampant and he can survive his book relatively unmolested. I must admit I would not try to go into details of some of the claims exposed in this book. The author has researched a ton of material because I do not remember when it was the last time that I saw so many footnotes and sources. IF women would read this book they would surely be offended because at times claims are really shocking. I know my wife would be offended and that is some measure to me. But I must give good mark to this book because in general I learned a lot about women, their way of life and thinking and I better understand differences between sexes.
Tim A.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Women’s Privilege: From Where Did It Originate?
Reviewed in Canada on June 16, 2019Verified Purchase
Van Creveld’s book is impressive. There is nothing remotely similar to this exploration of the historical roots of female privilege. If you enjoy history and discussion of gender or sexual dynamics, then this military historian’s take on the privileged sex will easily hold your attention. I finished the book feeling vastly more knowledgeable about how we got to where we are today, and much more likely to burst out laughing the next time I hear about how “It’s a Man’s World.” (Ha!)
A.W. Goldfinch
5.0 out of 5 stars
Are Women the Privileged Sex?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 8, 2014Verified Purchase
In my days as an undergraduate, I submitted myself to medical experiments for money. It was a low point in a life dominated by low points, but there were no substantial risks. Being part of a treatment group, I occasionally stayed overnight with other members in accommodation close to a laboratory. One thing I observed in this group was that there were no females. There was not one in the group of about 20 people I stayed with. I never saw any around the facilities, apart from staff. When I put this to a researcher, I was informed that the use of women in clinical trials is discouraged, and has been for decades. The impetus for this was the Thalidomide scandal in the late 1950's, when pregnant women in a clinical drug trial ended up giving birth to children with fin-like arms or legs. Non-approved drugs and treatments can harm males as well, but that doesn't seem to matter as much.
Visiting Dublin's woefully-named Mountjoy Prison as a law student, I could not help get taken aback by the radically different conditions male and female prisoners have to endure. The men of Mountjoy are confined to an actual prison. Its a bad prison at that, one of the last in Europe where they still practice slopping out. The women, on the other hand, live in self-contained apartments superior to what many people live in at university.
Thus, women get the benefit of medicine once its safety has been verified using male guinea pigs. Much like how they benefit from the safety that requires the sacrifice of men and boys in combat. Much like how they benefit from welfare programs penned by mostly male legislators, or the easier justice of mostly male jurists. Examples of female privilege are abundant, now and throughout history. Why the notion that women have a tougher time of it than men has so thrived in face of these facts is quite the mystery.
Its a problem that's recently been tackled by my one of my favorite historians, and my favorite military theorist, Israel's Martin Van Creveld. Van Creveld's The Privileged Sex has just been published in English, being previously only available in German. His is a thesis well worth reading.
Van Creveld contends that for every disadvantage women have endured, whether man-made or as a result of biology, they enjoy a privilege that that is equally or more important to their lives. These range from being spared the obligation to fight in wartime, to the hardest of labors in general. Too many female writers, inclined to see oppression in all places and times, ever mention these privileges (guilty males, even less so). Our perceptions of gender relations have also been skewed by popular stories concerning the alleged historical exploitation and oppression of women. Many of these are without foundation, and if seriously scrutinized turn out to be invented for political-ideological reasons. Feminists have, for instance, portrayed societies that permitted a man to have more than one wife as sexist, with a view of women as being like cattle. Yet in many places this arrangement was simply a way of looking after widows. It was the best possible way of looking out for their welfare at a time when unattached women would have had a difficult time even surviving. They claim women were persecuted in Nazi Germany, yet German women were more likely than men to vote for Hitler. Another example is the portrayal of witch-hunts as part of the general oppression of women. Yet how could these have been anti-woman, when in some countries just as many or more men were executed for witchcraft? In nearly all places men accused of witchcraft were more likely to be executed or face stiffer penalties than their female peers. Not to mention that it was overwhelmingly women accusing other women of being witches, and prosecutions for witchcraft often reached their height under female rulers like Catherina De Medici, Mary Queen of Scots, and `Good Queen Bess' herself. Indeed, some authorities, like James VI of Scotland, had to abolish the general commission against witchcraft because it had become a mere vehicle to settle scores among mostly female rivals.
Similarly, we are told that women do not thrive in the fields of science and engineering because males have kept them out of these vocations. But not even Stalin was able to force females to study technical subjects. Today, officialdom is most satisfied that girls vastly outnumber boys in our medical schools. Yet very few have addressed the disastrous consequences of this. After their expensive training, in most places covered or heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, only a tiny percentage of female graduates remain full-time doctors. They largely avoid the most stressful work in hospitals. A huge proportion quickly leave the profession entirely. In Ireland, only 10% of female GPs pursue full-time practice in the long-term. Some, like the journalist Kevin Myers, have estimated the figure at even less than that, remarking that this is "not a health system; it is a first day on the Somme". Thus, we in the developed world have to make up the difference by importing doctors from poor countries that need them most.
Discourse on domestic violence is similarly dominated by a presumption that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators. For a long time, studies have been casting doubt on this perception. Erin Pizzey, the founder of the UK charity today known as Refuge, has been subjected to death threats and boycotts because of her claims that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Reciprocal violence is indeed the most common pattern, and a study of 55,000 US military personnel found that women are just as likely to physically assault their partners. We also know from the US Dept. of Justice's Survey of State Prison Inmates that women are 24% more likely to kill their children than men, and 32% more likely to kill relatives, children included.
So why does the myth of the oppressed female continue?
Fans of Richard Dawkins might say it is the result of a mental gene, or meme, that predisposes people to believe in certain things. It does seem that we have a natural distaste for seeing women harmed or treated harshly. You are 200 times more likely to see a man die on screen than a woman. It is telling that Hector says to his wife in The Iliad that men would rather die than watch women dying. Its one of the reasons that even in Israel, where women are conscripted, very few serve in combat units and they are exempt from reserve duty. Van Creveld says that in his decades of teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, not one female student has ever had to miss one of his classes for this obligation that affects many of the young men. Its hard to quantify all the ways women are treated more gently and paternalistically in the sphere of law and order. When police respond to an incident, women are much more likely to get off with a warning than men. This applies to every single category of offence, and is even true when factors like prior arrest records are controlled for. In Britain, women are six times as likely to be acquitted of manslaughter, and have an easier time convincing juries that they acted under provocation in cases of murder. Their charms work on male cops, jurors, and judges as much as female ones. This happened even to female Nazis on trial for their roles in the euthanasia program.
The love does not appear to be reciprocal, if only from the amount of fictional works by female authors imagining a future utopia without men, from Mary Bradley's 1890 novel Mizora to more recent works like Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) or Dorris Lessing's The Cleft (2008). Are there any males fantasizing of a world without women? Nonsense. We like them too much.
The Complaining Sex
This brings us to something in the nature of women. Of course, feminism as an ideology should never be synonymous with being female. But there are forms of feminism that give political expression to something almost inherent in the gender. Women are the complaining sex; they seek attention and often seethe with a mysterious resentment. Freud might have put this resentment down to penis envy. Coupled with male deference, we have a prescription for disaster. Now, not all women possess the traits just described. History is replete with examples of women with nothing but contempt for those living on the privileges of their gender. The first known female commander, Queen Artemisia of Caria, Van Creveld tells us, told Xerxes that Greeks were as superior to Persians as men are to women. Queen Elizabeth I was fond of cracking what would be called today misogynist jokes.
Yet the grievances of woman appear to be as endless as they often are baseless. In the medical sphere, Florence Nightingale was perceptive enough to admit in Cassandra that many female patients are merely seeking attention. Patterns of suicide (a supreme form of complaint) in the sexes are a good indicator. Men are significantly more likely to kill themselves than women. But worldwide, women are four times as likely to attempt suicide. Perhaps they are remarkably incompetent. Perhaps they are practising the fine art of appearing vulnerable.
Is feminism related to this dynamic? Just as female patients, such as Freud's Dora, have based their lives around imagined illnesses and relished the attention, so others find a purpose in grievances, real or imagined.
Some insight may come from the anorgasmic woman, or female frigidity. This has caused no end of anguish in men, who are expected to bear the blame. Yet frigidity is quite a often a ruse; a way to lash out at a male partner. Simone de Beauvoir was quite candid about the subject, finding the courage to address it after being `cured' of her frigidity by the American writer Nelson Algreen. What de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex on the subject of frigidity could well describe the mindset of the extreme feminist. Replace the word `frigidity' with `feminism' and you get the point:
Resentment is the most common cause of feminine frigidity; in bed the woman punishes the man for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him an insulting coldness. There is often an aggressive inferiority complex apparent in her attitudes... She is thus revenged at once upon him and upon herself if he has humiliated her by neglect, if he has made her jealous, if he was slow in declaring her intentions, if he took her as a mistress while she wanted marriage. The grievance can flare up suddenly and set off this reaction even in a liaison that began happily... Frigidity... would appear to be a punishment that woman imposes as much upon herself as upon her partner; wounded in her vanity, she feels resentment against him and against herself, and she denies herself the pleasure.
I will end with another quote, from Van Creveld himself, in the final chapter of The Privileged Sex: "It would be nice... if from time to time, amid the torrents of invective feminists spew at us, we occasionally heard a pleasant female voice saying "thank you, Mate"."
With that, I and most men would be quite content to be guinea pigs and beasts of burden for the privileged sex.
Visiting Dublin's woefully-named Mountjoy Prison as a law student, I could not help get taken aback by the radically different conditions male and female prisoners have to endure. The men of Mountjoy are confined to an actual prison. Its a bad prison at that, one of the last in Europe where they still practice slopping out. The women, on the other hand, live in self-contained apartments superior to what many people live in at university.
Thus, women get the benefit of medicine once its safety has been verified using male guinea pigs. Much like how they benefit from the safety that requires the sacrifice of men and boys in combat. Much like how they benefit from welfare programs penned by mostly male legislators, or the easier justice of mostly male jurists. Examples of female privilege are abundant, now and throughout history. Why the notion that women have a tougher time of it than men has so thrived in face of these facts is quite the mystery.
Its a problem that's recently been tackled by my one of my favorite historians, and my favorite military theorist, Israel's Martin Van Creveld. Van Creveld's The Privileged Sex has just been published in English, being previously only available in German. His is a thesis well worth reading.
Van Creveld contends that for every disadvantage women have endured, whether man-made or as a result of biology, they enjoy a privilege that that is equally or more important to their lives. These range from being spared the obligation to fight in wartime, to the hardest of labors in general. Too many female writers, inclined to see oppression in all places and times, ever mention these privileges (guilty males, even less so). Our perceptions of gender relations have also been skewed by popular stories concerning the alleged historical exploitation and oppression of women. Many of these are without foundation, and if seriously scrutinized turn out to be invented for political-ideological reasons. Feminists have, for instance, portrayed societies that permitted a man to have more than one wife as sexist, with a view of women as being like cattle. Yet in many places this arrangement was simply a way of looking after widows. It was the best possible way of looking out for their welfare at a time when unattached women would have had a difficult time even surviving. They claim women were persecuted in Nazi Germany, yet German women were more likely than men to vote for Hitler. Another example is the portrayal of witch-hunts as part of the general oppression of women. Yet how could these have been anti-woman, when in some countries just as many or more men were executed for witchcraft? In nearly all places men accused of witchcraft were more likely to be executed or face stiffer penalties than their female peers. Not to mention that it was overwhelmingly women accusing other women of being witches, and prosecutions for witchcraft often reached their height under female rulers like Catherina De Medici, Mary Queen of Scots, and `Good Queen Bess' herself. Indeed, some authorities, like James VI of Scotland, had to abolish the general commission against witchcraft because it had become a mere vehicle to settle scores among mostly female rivals.
Similarly, we are told that women do not thrive in the fields of science and engineering because males have kept them out of these vocations. But not even Stalin was able to force females to study technical subjects. Today, officialdom is most satisfied that girls vastly outnumber boys in our medical schools. Yet very few have addressed the disastrous consequences of this. After their expensive training, in most places covered or heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, only a tiny percentage of female graduates remain full-time doctors. They largely avoid the most stressful work in hospitals. A huge proportion quickly leave the profession entirely. In Ireland, only 10% of female GPs pursue full-time practice in the long-term. Some, like the journalist Kevin Myers, have estimated the figure at even less than that, remarking that this is "not a health system; it is a first day on the Somme". Thus, we in the developed world have to make up the difference by importing doctors from poor countries that need them most.
Discourse on domestic violence is similarly dominated by a presumption that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators. For a long time, studies have been casting doubt on this perception. Erin Pizzey, the founder of the UK charity today known as Refuge, has been subjected to death threats and boycotts because of her claims that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Reciprocal violence is indeed the most common pattern, and a study of 55,000 US military personnel found that women are just as likely to physically assault their partners. We also know from the US Dept. of Justice's Survey of State Prison Inmates that women are 24% more likely to kill their children than men, and 32% more likely to kill relatives, children included.
So why does the myth of the oppressed female continue?
Fans of Richard Dawkins might say it is the result of a mental gene, or meme, that predisposes people to believe in certain things. It does seem that we have a natural distaste for seeing women harmed or treated harshly. You are 200 times more likely to see a man die on screen than a woman. It is telling that Hector says to his wife in The Iliad that men would rather die than watch women dying. Its one of the reasons that even in Israel, where women are conscripted, very few serve in combat units and they are exempt from reserve duty. Van Creveld says that in his decades of teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, not one female student has ever had to miss one of his classes for this obligation that affects many of the young men. Its hard to quantify all the ways women are treated more gently and paternalistically in the sphere of law and order. When police respond to an incident, women are much more likely to get off with a warning than men. This applies to every single category of offence, and is even true when factors like prior arrest records are controlled for. In Britain, women are six times as likely to be acquitted of manslaughter, and have an easier time convincing juries that they acted under provocation in cases of murder. Their charms work on male cops, jurors, and judges as much as female ones. This happened even to female Nazis on trial for their roles in the euthanasia program.
The love does not appear to be reciprocal, if only from the amount of fictional works by female authors imagining a future utopia without men, from Mary Bradley's 1890 novel Mizora to more recent works like Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) or Dorris Lessing's The Cleft (2008). Are there any males fantasizing of a world without women? Nonsense. We like them too much.
The Complaining Sex
This brings us to something in the nature of women. Of course, feminism as an ideology should never be synonymous with being female. But there are forms of feminism that give political expression to something almost inherent in the gender. Women are the complaining sex; they seek attention and often seethe with a mysterious resentment. Freud might have put this resentment down to penis envy. Coupled with male deference, we have a prescription for disaster. Now, not all women possess the traits just described. History is replete with examples of women with nothing but contempt for those living on the privileges of their gender. The first known female commander, Queen Artemisia of Caria, Van Creveld tells us, told Xerxes that Greeks were as superior to Persians as men are to women. Queen Elizabeth I was fond of cracking what would be called today misogynist jokes.
Yet the grievances of woman appear to be as endless as they often are baseless. In the medical sphere, Florence Nightingale was perceptive enough to admit in Cassandra that many female patients are merely seeking attention. Patterns of suicide (a supreme form of complaint) in the sexes are a good indicator. Men are significantly more likely to kill themselves than women. But worldwide, women are four times as likely to attempt suicide. Perhaps they are remarkably incompetent. Perhaps they are practising the fine art of appearing vulnerable.
Is feminism related to this dynamic? Just as female patients, such as Freud's Dora, have based their lives around imagined illnesses and relished the attention, so others find a purpose in grievances, real or imagined.
Some insight may come from the anorgasmic woman, or female frigidity. This has caused no end of anguish in men, who are expected to bear the blame. Yet frigidity is quite a often a ruse; a way to lash out at a male partner. Simone de Beauvoir was quite candid about the subject, finding the courage to address it after being `cured' of her frigidity by the American writer Nelson Algreen. What de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex on the subject of frigidity could well describe the mindset of the extreme feminist. Replace the word `frigidity' with `feminism' and you get the point:
Resentment is the most common cause of feminine frigidity; in bed the woman punishes the man for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him an insulting coldness. There is often an aggressive inferiority complex apparent in her attitudes... She is thus revenged at once upon him and upon herself if he has humiliated her by neglect, if he has made her jealous, if he was slow in declaring her intentions, if he took her as a mistress while she wanted marriage. The grievance can flare up suddenly and set off this reaction even in a liaison that began happily... Frigidity... would appear to be a punishment that woman imposes as much upon herself as upon her partner; wounded in her vanity, she feels resentment against him and against herself, and she denies herself the pleasure.
I will end with another quote, from Van Creveld himself, in the final chapter of The Privileged Sex: "It would be nice... if from time to time, amid the torrents of invective feminists spew at us, we occasionally heard a pleasant female voice saying "thank you, Mate"."
With that, I and most men would be quite content to be guinea pigs and beasts of burden for the privileged sex.
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