Sexual Significant Other - the Mate

"A man without a woman is not a man," Jewish proverb.

In todays jargon this would perhaps no longer be gender specific.  It speaks to the essentially relational aspect of the individual.  We lack eyes in our back for defence.  Together with another we can stand back to back and even hugging we have a 360 degree view of our environment.  When one is sleeping the other can be awake.  The dyad rather than the monad is the essential 'unit' of mankind.

In the the days of Winston Churchill and before, almost up to present days it was ever said, "Behind every good man there is a good woman."  Hitler's problem according to the high self esteem women, in part if not all, was that little tart, Eva Brawn, Hitler's girlfriend.  The male joke today is that she was the one who was refusing sex unless poor Adolf killed her more Jews.  She definitely wanted the English Crown Jewels and the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth were not going to give them to the whore of Germany.

With the rise of Margaret Thatcher to English Prime Minister and given her impressive partner the saying was extended to be 'behind every good woman is a good man.'  "Birds of a feather flock together' is well acknowledged despite the fact that all criminals insist they didn't know their mates were up to no good when the groups are caught red handed.

Much as the  Feminism of Social Communism would claim "all men are victimizers" and "all women are victims",  despite the the facts of history, the limits of generalization, and the ethnocentricism of the culturally ignorant  rhetoric of these western university WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic).  Personally coming from a Celtic Egalitarian background, with equally powerful  complementary parents,  so different from the patriarchal Mediterranean  Israel, Rome and later Germany, we've always celebrated the outstanding women.  Pelagius the Aberdeen monk pilloried by Augustine was considered more offensive for his tonsure and love and celebration of the mother than his famed "Pelagian heresy".

As France had her Joan of Arc, all Latin and South America celebrated the woman as mother. Catholics and Christians in general have always portrayed Mother Mary as next to God. An early pre Nicene or pre Roman empire Christian schism had God as dualistic, mother and father God.  In, Evolution of God, Robert Wright traced the father-mother God to the early Jewish community before the Yahweh 'emperor' God of Jewish patriarchy.  Orthodox Jews still at times pray "thank god I am not a woman' .  Jesus's offence among many was his egalitarian approach to women, his friendship with Martha and Mary, his deferring to Mary, and his calling the ultra masculine Jewish 'Father' of the day ,"Abba"  the diminutive  'daddy'.    

Most of the great men of history were family men, men as fathers, not as boys.  The rite of passage for most cultures was the marriage of a man and woman and the becoming of these adolescent individuals fathers and mothers and adults in family.  Gender until very recently referred to the sex of man as boy and father and woman as girl and mother.  The dissolution of family in the war of group versus individual invariably seeks to destroy all natural allegiance in exchange for artificial allegiances  crown, flag or religious dogma.

Radical feminism was a theology of individualism, a death cult promoting abortion, ritual infanticide no different in it's scientific guise than the infanticide  renounced historically as epitomized by the Abraham and Isaac sung so well by Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen.   Radical feminism was by nature a rejection of the mother by the daughter.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and these daughters imitated their fathers and emulated the hard drinking, sexist, polygamous men of their hurt and angry girl imaginations. To them a man to a woman was as useful as a bicycle to a fish.  There's nothing womanly about girlish 'radical feminism'.

Much of modern day confusion especially in the Courts and Government edicts reflects the ignorance of the laws regarding development and science.   Intellectuals are forever formulating ideas alien to nature and playing out their 'experiments' on millions of people.  The billions murdered by atheist communism in Russia and China speak to the failure of fundamental understanding of the 'interconnectedness' of individuals.  No man and no woman is an island.' It was not surprising that the old 'women's studies' departments evolved to 'gender departments' as so many white girls maturing went on to become mothers themselves and realized their former dogma favoured killing off their sons.

The  Chinese meanwhile were with patriarchal communist efficiency killing off all future feminists by selectively aborting female babies. The hijacked humanism of the original suffragette and women's liberation movement having weathered the obscenity of radical feminism expanded culturally to include women of all races where motherhood and children were not abhorrent and despised. On the international scene the simple education of women without abortion has reduced family size to three; not dissimiliar to the numbers common in aristocracy, which have usually celebrated their own children, no matter how much they had disregarded the children of the masses. The spiritual women studies today increasingly replace the paradigm of individualism and 'corporations' artificial legal constructs of the 'individual'.  Today it's recognised that it takes a village to raise a child. Good children are a product of good mothers and good villages.

The importance of our most significant others cannot be understated whether or not one goes on to produce a family following marriage, adopting or simply maintaining a long term partnership, this relationship beyond the original family membership is the greatest developmental process in life.

It has long been understood that where there is no money or sex involved people can quite easily 'agree' in general. This is why coffeehouse intellectuals can have such fun playing with ideas. It's why governments and government committees are so exciting because they're invariably playing with someone else's money. Church ladies are forever making rules for 'other women' but rarely are willing to have their own behaviour held up for similar scrutiny.  Censors love to read salacious material and censor you or me from the same experience.

The poor routinely criticize the way the rich spend money but invariably when the poor become rich they too spend similarly.  Revolutions mostly exchange tyrants and little often changes.  The 'reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo', so with reform comes a new 'status quo'.  Progress when it occurs doesn't do so smoothly but rather in stops and starts with 2 or 3 steps forward and 1 or 2 steps back.

I loved that celtic Queen Boudica beat the Roman armies of Emperor Nero time and time again, being of such success that later Queen Victoria would celebrate and claim heritage.  Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, Catherine de Medici, mother of three French Kings, Isabella I , unifier of Spain, Hariet Tubman, conductor of the underground railway, all are examples of extraordinary women who defy the feminist paradigm of woman as 'victim'.  As scientists, when the data overwhelmingly defies an ideology, the ideology is chucked, whereas in politics the exact opposite occurs, with any evidence to the contrary and those who espouse it, removed to save and promote the ideology.  Ideology and politics aren't about 'truth' but about money, power and people.

The individual is a construct of 'history' and 'media'.  Even St Theresa is a product of the group of nuns who worked in Calcutta and she would be the first to say it.  Even as General Patton would speak of his dependence on his men.  We are not a collection of 'individuals' despite the fact we are born between piss and shit.  Our birth is a dyadic phenomena of 'mother and child'.  Paul Simon eulogized this in his song "mother and child reunion'.  When we think of ourselves as a 'alone' we negate our very mother, deny the X and Y chromosomes of our father and mother, and that our DNA all apparently relates back to one African cave family some 80,000 years ago.  No wonder people say to Barach and Michelle Obama, they've "come along way".   In addition our birth more often than not involved community.  Further, if we were collectively evil no child would survive infancy when their vulnerability is so great that they are wholly dependent on their parents and community.  Even the greatest of us stand on the shoulders of those who went before.

That first child adult bond of family with siblings perhaps or not is next developmentally seen as the adult adult bond of the first and most important 'significant other'.  Once the proto unit of family, though not always, to day with gay marriages and "DINKS - dual income no kids'" relationships and 'friends with benefits', despite all its permutations,  this 'sexual significant other " still remains of paramount importance in and of itself. It is the cauldron of personal development and the foundation of connectedness with community.

Spousal Abuse-Domestic Violence - Against Men

One of the principle problems of any discussion of domestic violence or spousal abuse is the persisting belief that 'women' as a 'gender' are 'collectively' victims.  One may as well enter into a discussion about Middle East Peace with a Zionist Jew or Radical Palestinian.  This collective 'denial' of violence as 'species' violence perpetuates gender violence as much as any number of other factors.
Radical feminism began with social communism.  In communism there is a paranoid vision of the world derived from Marx.  He saw the world in terms of 'victims', the 'proletariat' and 'victimizers' the beourgeosie and his solution was a one class society.  However Lenin felt that this 'one class' society required 'dictatorship' of the proletariat hence the latter day Russian communist regime with the dachaus and special stores for the 'leadership'.  China is no different and all communist countries despite their successful revolutionary beginnings have turned into the feudal equivalents theywere against.  There is a middle in society and Scottish socialism showed clearly that there was a place for diversity and a middle class and that 'war', the only solution of communism, was unnecessary.
In gender politics the new beourgeosie were the Women's Studies Professors and the the writers of radical feminism all the way down to the lipstick feminists who sound very much like people without a banner.  Hence the movement in universities to expand from the revolutionary 'paranoid' position of 'us against them' to (finally) some work on the value of 'egalitarianism".  The irony is this latest group calls themselves 'egalitarian feminists"  which sounds like capitalist communists to those who pay attention to language.  But we do have our 'red tories' today and and our blue liberals as everyone fights for centre stage and the teen agers claim they don't wear a uniform.
While 'crime studies' show that men are more likely than women to use violence, other studies usually family and domestic violence studies  show that men are more likely to inflict injury but that when all acts of physical aggression or violence are considered women are either as aggressive as men or more violent than men.
These violence studies further do not take into account that while men may be sexually aggressive women are freer to and are more likely to act out their aggression against men by having sex with their partners friends, family members or bosses.  Further agression between females is often expressed sexually through sex with a a girl's  boyfriend.
Further female parents acting alone were the most common perpetrators of child abuse.
Added to this,1/3 of sexual abuse victims are likely to sexually abuse themselves.  Then too a significant portion of physically abused will go on to physically abuse.
In addition to this there is a major variable of the person who has had one aggressive relationship compared to the person who has recurrent aggressive relationships. In the latter there are predators and volunteers more than predators and victims.
When I have been willing to enter into a discussion of solutions to the problem of spousal abuse or domestic violence from this position of 'fact' and 'scientific information' I have been threatened , ostracized and attacked directly and indirectly.  I have never hit a woman but I have repeatedly physically violated by women publicly and privately.  I have further treated countless men probably an equal number to the women I have treated who have been violently attacked by women.
The researchers I have known who were men have been castigated for bringing forward this information yet until we move out of this backwater we will not be able to get on with addressing the inherrent species violence and the bullying of those in power whether female or male. Further the tendency of any revolution is to exchange one bully and their spouse for another bully and their spouse. Matriarchy has long be associated by anthrolopologists with war, slavery and torture.  That suggests that violence is not gender specific but rather 'species' specific.
Lesbians have the highest incidence of violence over homosexuals and both have greater violence than heterosexuals.
Note that alcohol and drugs are directly associated with violence as are poverty and most importantly men fight men and women fight women so focusing on 'blame' rather than 'solutions' is going nowhere.
2007 1/4 of relationships reported violence.