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Female Supremacy Articles - Page 3

It's a Woman's World - The phasing out of men

Forty-five years ago the British science-fiction writer John Wyndham published a story titled "Consider

Her Ways." A woman of that time, Jane Waterleigh, volunteers to test a hallucinogenic drug. She wakes in the body of another woman some generations in the future. That future is a woman's world; all men were killed off by a rogue virus, which also prevented the birth of any more male babies. After a spell of disorder, the women got civilization going again, and erected a society modeled on those of the ants (hence the title, from Proverbs 6.vi). Bloated, obese "mothers" are dedicated full-time to childbearing it is in the body of one of these monsters that Jane's personality has lodged itself. The "mothers" are attended by midget, sterile "servitors." Society's heavy lifting is done by muscular Amazon types, also sterile, and the whole thing is presided over by a wise "Doctorate" of normal-looking women who can give birth if they wish to. The medical specifics are left unclear, but some sort of parthenogenesis seems to be involved.

Wyndham's purpose was to set a fictional frame for some 1950s-ish arguments about "romance" and the place of women in a consumer society. In years to come, however, he may be hailed as a prophet. While it is foolish to attempt to predict the future in any detail, there are signs that the world we are heading into, with its unprecedented demographic changes and momentous advances in the biological sciences, may be a woman's world. Those qualities we are accustomed to think of as "masculine", that have been brought forward more or less intact from our origins as hunter-gatherers in the Old Stone Age, are now surplus to requirements. Masculinity, as it has been understood from the beginning of our species, is now at last obsolete.

The signs are everywhere. In post-industrial society, men simply do not do very well. As everyone knows, we do not live as long as the other gender. A woman aged 20 can expect to live 6.3 years longer than a man; at 60 the gap is still 5 years. It is less well-known that this is a modern phenomenon; until the early twentieth century, American men lived longer than women. Men are less healthy than women, and get more of most diseases. The culprit here is testosterone, which weakens the body's resistance, and causes it to age more rapidly. Eunuchs have longer life expectancy than other men.

It is notorious that men misbehave much more than women: 90 percent of U.S. jail inmates are men, as are 90 percent of murderers and 80 percent of drunk drivers. Men are also of declining economic importance: Male participation in the civilian labor force has dropped from 86 to 75 percent since 1950, while the female rate has risen from 34 to over 60 percent.

As Western society moves ever closer towards pure meritocracy, it is becoming clear that women are not only healthier and better-behaved than men, but also smarter or, at least, more willing to be educated. More women than men pass straight from high school to college (this has been true since the early 1970s) and more women than men now earn degrees. In 1996, women were 56 percent of graduate students, compared with 39 percent in 1970. The education business is, in fact, being colonized by women at all levels, including the administrative: As of last summer, four of the eight Ivy League colleges has female provosts.

Even more striking results come from England, where single-sex secondary schools are still common and the Department of Education publishes "league tables" of schools nationwide based on results in standard examinations. In the league tables for year 2000, four level" exams, taken at age 17 plus, were girls-only schools. The top 20 schools broke down as: 11 girls-only, 6 boys-only, 3 mixed. Preliminary results for 2001 indicate that women have widened the gap.

As men slip further behind in the meritocratic rat race, the culture sends out more and more signals that traditional masculinity is passé. Peter Whittle reminded us in the Los Angeles Times last February

that Clark Gable would, if he had lived, be 100 years old this year. Whittle went on to compare the ideal of masculinity represented by Gable with the one currently on display in our movie houses. You can get

the point by noting that Gable arrived on the set of Gone With the Wind two days before his 38th birthday, a milestone that Tom Cruise reached in July 2000, and that Brad Pitt will arrive at this coming December.The difference is, of course, that Gable was unapologetically and unambiguously a man, while Cruise and Pitt are, in their screen personae, essentially boys. The trend line is heading off even further into pretty childishness, too think of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Whittle: In my interviews with countless fans, it became clear that for teenage girls, the boyish but androgynous look was the one they preferred in their idols smooth, hairless, lacking traditionally adult,

masculine physical attributes, and, by implication, sexually unthreatening.

The bankability of these present-day movie stars also depends in part on their appeal to homosexual men, a large and wealthy constituency with disproportionate influence over all matters of style and taste in our culture.

The modern workplace has also been de-masculinized. I have spent many years working in the offices of big corporations, among the vast clerical middle class of the Information Age. It has often struck me how much more suitable this work is for women than for men how, in fact, men seem rather out of place among the "tubes and cubes" of the modern office. No masculine values are visible here. The mildness of manners, the endless tiny courtesies, the yielding and compromising, the cheery assertions of labor-room stoicism ("Hangin' in there!") that are necessary to get this kind of work done, leave little outlet for masculine forcefulness. Such outlets as did once exist have been systematically sealed off by the feminists and "sexual harassment" warriors. Was it really only twelve years ago that my mixed-gender office in a big Wall Street trading house celebrated the boss's birthday by bringing in a full-monty stripper to entertain us? Yes, it was. If we did that today, we should be the subject of a 60 Minutes segment.

The more boisterous manifestations of masculinity physical courage, danger-seeking, the honor principle, belligerence, chivalry, endurance, small-group loyalty which were once accessible to all men, in episodes of war or exploration if not in everyday life, have now been leached out to the extremes of our society to small minorities of, at one extreme, super-rich sports and entertainment stars, and at the other, underclass desperadoes. There is no place now for a Francis Burton, whose love of danger and of alien cultures led him to be the first, and quite probably the only, non-Moslem ever to penetrate the holiest sanctuary of Islam, the Ka'aba in Mecca he even had the audacity to make a surreptitious sketch of the place while he was supposed to be praying. (Burton, by the way, was a holy terror as a boy would be a sure candidate for heavy Ritalin treatment nowadays.)

Even war, that most quintessential of masculine activities, is probably a thing of the past. For war

you need a large supply of young men. With the great demographic collapse of modern times, that supply is drying up. Soft, feminized, over-civilized, under-militarized societies of the past were likely to

be jolted back into vigor, or just overrun, by warriors from the wild places. Now there are no more

wild places. While one should never be complacent about these things, and it is possible that a starship fleet of unwashed plunderers, cutlasses in their teeth and knives in their boots, is on its way from Alpha Centauri even as I write, the odds are good that the human race ain't gonna study war no more.

Sexual intercourse itself is on the way out. I have written elsewhere about the sudden (historically

speaking) ubiquity of fellatio among young people. This is a genuine social phenomenon of our times. Its significance in this context is that fellatio is an act of condescension by a woman towards a man. The subtext, as we say nowadays, is: "I am not willing to engage in sexual congress with you. However, to maintain your affections, and pacify your beastly masculine nature, I will do this." Fellatio is Ritalin for adolescents. What the mostly-female staff of elementary schools are doing to 8-year-old boys, female students are doing to the 16-year-olds, though the meaning of "orally administered" is of course somewhat different in the two cases. Along with the normalizing of homosexuality, we see here another sign that ordinary heterosexual intercourse is losing its market share. Sperm is no longer much in demand for its original purpose.

Males are, in fact, not biologically necessary. Plenty of species manage without them. One family of aquatic organisms, the bdelloid rotifers, seem not to have produced any males for about 30 million years, yet they are thriving. Whiptail lizards in the Arizona desert happily reproduce by parthenogenesis. The shuffling of genes that occurs in heterosexual pairing is useful to our somewhat more complicated species in keeping ahead of diseases and parasites, which base their attack strategies on the commonest genetic patterns of the previous generation. This shuffling can, however, be accomplished by fusing two eggs, instead of a sperm and an egg. Presumably this was the trick performed by the women in John Wyndham's story. There are some small points to be cleared up the placenta produced in egg-egg unions is unsatisfactory but these problems can no doubt be mastered. Or mistressed.

There is a movie that has haunted me for years, one of those under-appreciated masterpieces that Hollywood used to turn out from time to time when the accountants were looking the other way. It was titled Lonely Are the Brave (1962). In it, Kirk Douglas he wrote in 1989 that this was his favorite among all the movies he had made plays the part of a cowboy who has outlived his time. Escaping from jail, he heads for the hills on horseback pursued by various cops, rangers, and soldiers, all riding in jeeps and helicopters. At last man and horse make an absurd, hopeless dash for freedom to a frontier that no longer exists. A truck driven by Carroll O'Connor hits them as they attempt to cross the Interstate.

We of the male gender are in basically the same situation as Kirk Douglas's cowboy, lingering on in a

world that has less and less use for us. We may puff and preen and work out for a few more decades, but it will all be empty show. The world that is just over the horizon will be a woman's world. At last, when we and our paleolithic skill set have fallen into complete desuetude, some Caroline O'Connor in a sixteen-wheel rig will come along and put an end to our sorry little performance. It was fun while it lasted the patriarchy, the wars, the all-night poker games, the seductions but now the game is up. The male gender is finished. Shall we be missed, I wonder?

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Excerpt from "Wallis's Betrayal"

Evening Standard January 30 2003.

by Christopher Hudson

"The sexual relationship between Wallis and Edward has always been puzzling, but what is certain is that it played a significant role in the dominance which Mrs Simpson established over the Prince of Wales and future King. Wallis was more highly sexed than Edward, and this was not the last occasion that she took a lover. In the late 1940s, Wallis had an affair with a New York playboy, Jimmy Donahue, which lasted for several years, much to the Duke's distress. But certainly by that time it was simply another means by which the Duchess of Windsor kept her husband on the leash which she tied so effectively around his neck in the early 1930s"

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Excerpt from "The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity"

The Nature of Man and Woman

The essential difference between the sexual nature of man and woman lies in the different nature of male and female orgasm.

When a man ejaculates, he ejects his semen-essence from his body.

When a woman reaches orgasm, she too 'ejaculates' all sorts of sexual secretions internally, but these are retained within her body.

For both men and women, sexual essence is an important storage battery for vital energy and a major source of resistance and immunity.

In conventional sexual relations, a man ejaculates every time he has intercourse, regardless of his own age or condition. This habit gradually robs him of his primary source of vitality and immunity, leaving him weak and vulnerable to disease and shortening his life span. Meanwhile, the women gets stronger and stronger, both from her own orgasmic secretions and from her assimilation of potent male semen-essence.

The different nature of male and female orgasm is reflected in the various slang terms to describe that magic moment in both the Chinese and Western languages.

The most common Chinese term for female orgasm is gao-chao, literally 'high tide', a graphic and poetic image drawn from nature.

But when man ejaculates, the Chinese say that he has 'lost his essence, 'thrown it away', 'leaked semen', or 'surrendered'. If a man ejaculates before his partner reaches orgasm, the Chinese say that she has 'killed' him. The French refer to ejaculation as 'petite mort', or 'little death'.

By patterning their sexual relations on the models of Heaven and Earth and conforming to the nature of Yin & Yang, men may derive life-giving benefits from the sexual forces, rather than being forever at their mercy.

Instead of depleting precious stores of essence and energy, sex may be used to replenish them.

Classically, appropriate analogies were drawn between human nature and Mother Nature, which illuminated the basic qualities of man and woman. Appropriate principles drawn from those analogies were then applied to regulate human sexual relations. As the Han Dynasty adept Wu Hsien put it:

"The male belongs to Yang. Yang's nature is such that the male is easily aroused but also quick to retreat. The female belongs to Yin. Yin's nature is such that the female is slow to be aroused and also slow to be satiated."

Throughout the animal and insect world, nature has fashioned the female as a superior specimen uniquely equipped for the survival and propagation of the species.

According to the 'law of the jungle', the male exists only to provide the seed for future generations and to protect the nest while the female nurses the young to maturity. Sexual intercourse occurs seasonally, and while all females 'in heat' get fertilized, only a small fraction the strongest males perform the task. Even among primates, only the strong, dominant males are permitted to fertilize the females, while weaker male specimens are either discarded or kept at a distance from the herd.

Among many orders of insect, such as black widow and praying mantis, nature gives the male even shorter shrift: the moment he deposits his seed in the female, she promptly kills and devours him as a post-coital snack.

Only humans (and a few higher primates such as orangutans) engage in sexual intercourse all year long, day and night, in any season or weather, and only humans do it primarily for pleasure rather than procreation. Yet the human male, despite his inflated ego, is subject to the same inherent limitations that nature has imposed on his gender in all species.

Matriarchy is a social acknowledgment of female superiority and is therefore a natural pattern for the human species to follow. China's prehistoric matriarchy is still reflected in Chinese language and thought. The single most common word in the Chinese language is hao, which means 'good' in all its various senses.

The ideogram for 'good' consists of the symbol for 'women' placed next to that for 'child', indicating that the highest good is the generative relationship between mother (not father) and child. The ideogram that denotes the word 'surname' in Chinese consists of the symbols for 'woman' and 'birth' clearly indicating that family decent in prehistoric China was traced through the mother's line, just as it was in ancient Hebrew tradition prior to patriarchy.

In all the ancient Chinese sex manuals, woman is always depicted as the guardian of sexual arcana and the supreme source of life-sustaining essence and energy. In these texts the woman plays the role of the great initiator and teacher of sex, while the man is described as a sexually ignorant bumbler.

Because of her sexual potency, woman was regarded as possessor of great stores of Teh (power). The contemporary Taoist Jolan Chang, in his book The Tao of the Loving Couple, quotes some conclusions by Mary Jane Sherfey regarding the power of female sexuality:

"All relevant data from the 12000 to 8000 BC period indicate that precivilized woman enjoyed full sexual freedom and was often totally incapable of controlling her sexual drive. Therefore, I propose that one of the reasons for the long delay between the earliest development of agriculture (c. 12000 BC) and the rise of urban life and the beginning of recorded knowledge (c. 8000-5000 BC) was the ungovernable cyclic sexual drive of women. Not until these drives were gradually brought under control by rigidly enforced social codes could family life become the stabilizing and creative crucible from which modern civilized man could emerge."

Although man took control of the family, village, economy, religion and state, he still found himself at woman's mercy in bed. No amount of human artifice can mask or alter the fundamental facts of Tao. Hence, there arose a deep contradiction between man's artificial social superiority and his genuine sexual inferiority is-a-is woman, and this gave rise to the battle of the sexes that still rages in most boudoirs today.

It also explains the deep fear and resentment that many men harbor toward women, despite women's supposed 'inferiority'.

'Macho' men simply cannot face the fact that women are sexually superior, nor do they dare admit the realities of their own inherent sexual weakness.

This sad state of affairs is due primarily to sexual ignorance. Any man open-minded enough to take a serious look at the Tao of Yin and Yang- and self disciplined enough to practice it- will find that the Tao completely eliminates the fundamental inequity between male and female sexual potency.

The Tao enables the male member to become an all-weather instrument of equal competence to that of its female counterpart and permits man and woman to 'make love not war', while at the same time protecting the health and prolonging the lives of both partners.

In the Western world, artists and athletes have so far been the only people who truly realize the debilitating nature of male ejaculation. In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin wrote, 'Like Balzac, who believed that a night of sex meant the loss of a good page of his novel, so I believed that it meant the loss of a good day's work at the studio.'

On a more contemporary note, let's listen in on an interview with jazz musician Miles Davis which appeared in the April 1975 issue of Playboy magazine:

Davis: You can't come, then fight or play. You can't do it. When I get ready to come, I come. But I do not come and play.

Interviewer: Explain that in layman's terms.

Davis: Ask Muhammad Ali. If he comes, he can't fight two minutes. Shit, he couldn't even whip me.

Interviewer: Would you fight Muhammad Ali under those conditions, to prove your point?

Davis: You're goddam right I'd fight him. But he's got to promise to fuck first. If he ain't going to fuck, I ain't going to fight. You give up all your energy when you come. I mean, you give up all of it! So, if you're going to fuck before a gig, how are you going to give something when it's time to hit?

What neither Davis nor Ali realize is that sexual intercourse without ejaculation prior to a fight or gig would improve their performances even more than if they abstained altogether.

Artists and athletes rely on optimum levels of physical and mental vitality in order to perform, which is why they are more sensitive to the loss of semen and vital energy through ejaculation. However, other men suffer just as severely from such loss, albeit they remain fairly unconscious of it. For example, the male tendency to fall sound asleep after ejaculation is a prime indicator of complete exhaustion. If orgasm itself were so exhausting, then women would feel the same effects from it, but they don't. It is the physical ejection of semen from the body- not orgasm per se- that harms man.

The depressing phenomenon of 'post-coital blues' that follows conventional intercourse does not occur at all when men retain semen. Taoist sex is a barter arrangement between Yin and Yang: the man sacrifices a small measure of short-term pleasure in return for the long-term benefits of health and longevity, while the woman enjoys complete unrestricted sexual pleasure in exchange for a measure of her abundant supplies of life-prolonging essence and energy.

The contrasting nature of male and female orgasm has important implications for two types of sexual activity that have aroused a lot of controversy over the ages and appear to be gaining in popularity today: masturbation and homosexuality.

Viewed from the angle of Yin and Yang, the results of these two activities are very different indeed for men and women.

For men, masturbation represents an irretrievable and uncompensated loss of Yang semen-essence. While healthy males between the ages of 16 and 21 are veritable 'fountains of semen' for whom masturbation is relatively harmless, by the time they reach 25 or so, all the old shibboleths regarding males masturbation come true: weakness in thighs and knees, numbness in lumbar region, loss of vitality, depression, etc.

By the time they reach 30, men should entirely give up this self-defeating habit and start conserving semen exclusively for intercourse with women. Men who continue masturbating habitually into their 30's, 40's and 50's rob themselves of the very essence and energy that fuels their lives and protects their health.

A woman, by contrast, may masturbate to her heart's content without damaging her stores of essence and energy. In the polygamous households of ancient China, female masturbation and sapphism served important social and psychological functions in the harems of sexually beleaguered gentlemen. And since women do not reach their peak of sexual potency until their mid-30's (unlike men who 'peak out' after 18), masturbation is likely to become even more important as they grow older since so many men begin losing their potency just as women 'hit stride' around age 35.

The same point applies to homosexual relations: they are harmless for women but highly detrimental to men, both physiologically and psychologically.

Nature has made Yin passive and yielding, and two passive forces do not conflict. The Chinese refer to sapphic love as 'polishing mirrors', a term that reflects the fact that female homosexual practices are largely limited to the rubbing together of similar parts, rather than actual penetration of the body. And even when the body is penetrated with a surrogate phallus, it is done through the orifice intended for that purpose. Like masturbation, sapphism was a common practice in the household harems of wealthy Chinese families, where up to a dozen women might find themselves completely cut off from male company for months at a time when the man of the house was off on official business.

Taoist physicians regarded homosexuality among men, on the other hand as a dangerous practice- for several reasons. First of all, Yang is by nature an active, aggressive force, and, when two aggressive forces meet, a fundamental conflict of energies and intentions result. Male homosexuality requires that one partner yield to the other by adopting the female role, both physically and psychologically, and when this practice becomes a habit it completely undermines the fundamental role of Yang in the order of nature. Looking at this situation of Yang conflict at a microscopic scientific level, when sperm from two different men are mixed together and observed under magnification, they may clearly be observed fighting one another in a desperate struggle for supremacy.

Psychology aside, the greatest threat posed to men by homosexual practices are physiological.

Anal penetration, the mutual exchange of Yang sexual fluids, and frequent uncontrolled ejaculations are the culprits. Ancient Taoist physicians noted a pathological condition called 'Dragon Yang Syndrome' which occurred exclusively among promiscuous male homosexuals. 'Dragon Yang' (lung-yang) is a common Chinese euphemism for male homosexuality, equivalent to the English word 'gay'. Symptoms of this ailment included weakness and fatigue, skin ulcers and boils, low immunity, and impotence.

The foregoing observations on the nature of Yin & Yang make it clear that man and woman are not created equal.

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(Taken from Britain's Daily Mail; February 22 2003; p.30)

By Christopher Dunkley

Within the world of broadcasting, it has also been an open secret that television is predominantly a female medium. That is not to say that men don't watch it; of course they do. But the heaviest viewers tend to be women and the programmes which regularly get the highest ratings usually have more female than male viewers, notably the soap operas which dominate the Top Ten. Consequently, broadcasters have tended to put more effort into catering for women than men.

Now, however, something new is happening. From being a mere tendency, the feminisation of television is turning into a rout. Wherever you look - terrestrial broadcasting or the new cable and satellite channels, analogue or digital, news programmes or commercials - women and women's interests are favoured.

Female presenters are replacing males, and material traditionally regarded as being of particular interest to men is downgraded or side-lined. In some cases, men have to pay more for programmes that interest them.

Statisticians know that across the entire range of programme types, from light entertainment to news, the audience split is 40 per cent male to 60 per cent female.

In soap opera, the split is 39 per cent men to 61 per cent women. The position is reversed only in sport, where the figures are 65 per cent men to 35 per cent women.

The number of episodes of soap opera, so heavily favoured by women, is rising exponentially, with Coronation Street, Crossroads, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Family Affairs, Hollyoaks, Neighbours and more providing dozens of episodes every week.

At the same time, many of the top male attractions - sports such as soccer and boxing and virtually all first-run movies - are bing spirited away to specialist subscription channels or pay-per-view networks.

Thus, while the quantity of women's favourite viewing goes up on the free terrestrial channels, men have to pay through the nose for the programmes they used to get for nothing.

The acceleration of this process may have something to do with efforts made in the past few years to promote women to the top jobs in TV.

As of this month, Fiona Bruce is said to be the highest paid newsreader in the land. Dawn Airey, who was chief executive of Channel 5 (or `Five' as it is now called) has just become managing director of BSkyB, with her former job being taken by another woman, Jane Lighting.

These days, the top ranks of the BBC are dominated by women, with BBC1 and BBC2 each having a female controller - Lorraine Heggessey and Jane Root - and above them, Jana Bennett is director of television.

Look through a week's schedules and, even leaving aside the daytime programmes which have always heavily favoured female viewers since more of them are available to view at that time (still true, though steadily changing) you find dozens, even scores, of programmes made specifically to appeal to women.

The BBC is in the midst of a season of programmes on domestic violence from which you might conclude that no woman ever laid a finger on a man.

On a lighter note, consider this coming Wednesday. Programmes across the networks include Footballers' Wives, Working Girls, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, The Golden Girls, Girls On The Job, Girls With Guns and Hairy Women.

I am not making this up. The billing for Hairy Women explains : `A group of women discuss the issues surrounding female body hair, including why fashion deems it so important to appear hairless, and reveal the extent to which their daily lives and routines are affected by the hair-removing process'.

That list consists exclusively of programmes which include the words `wives', `women' or `girls' in their titles. There are plenty more, such as Greenham Common - about the women who set up the permanent demo outside the U.S. air force base - with titles which do not include such words.

On top of that, there are entire networks such as UK Style and Living which are aimed much more at women than men.

But is it not possible to pick out a parallel list in similar terms catering for male interests? Not that I can see.

Documentaries agonising over the trials of the morning shave for men seem shamefully absent from Wednesday's schedules...and from every other day of the week. The only title I can find on Wednesday with the word `husbands', `men' or `boys' in the title is The Men Who Killed Kennedy, on the History channel.

Obviously, there are programmes in which the central concern is men or masculinity, but look at them closely and you find they differ interestingly from their female counterparts.

In Sex And The City, famous for its portrayal of a group of trendy New York women, feminism is the dominant mindset. Men are seen as inept, nerds, useless except for providing strappy sandals and, if the vibrator has run out of batteries, the occasional orgasm, usually unsatisfactory.

However, in a programme such as Men Behaving Badly, famous for its portrayal of young British men, the dominant mindset is not a masculine equivalent of feminism but, once again, feminism itself.

Here, too, men are seen as inept nerds, useless except for providing women with canned beer and not even the occasional orgasm, which is quite beyond them.

Tuesday will see the return to BBC2 of Manchild, a series which was hailed as a British male counterblast to Sex And The City.

Watch it while doing the crossword and that may seem credible, but look more carefully and you find that, once again, this is not a celebration of masculinity but precisely the opposite.

It is dedicated to reinforcing the politically correct - meaning feminist - attitudes of women towards middle-aged men who are shown as boastful, inept and, of course, incapable of getting in touch with their feelings (like all men, you know, Wordsworth, Elgar, Shakespeare - emotional illiterates one and all).

As far as the female presence on the screen is concerned, the feminist creed appears to be `What's yours is mine and what's mine's my own'.

Thus subjects such as child rearing, home making and nursing which have traditionally been seen as female territory have continued to be dominated by female presenters. But now, thanks to positive discrimination (do burglary and mugging become OK if you stick the word `positive' in front of them?) women are also being favoured in traditionally male areas.

Watch snooker, which even today is hardly seething with female players, and you are likely to find it being presented on TV by Hazel Irvine. Turn to a soccer round-up and there's Gabby Logan. Switch to racing and you see Clare Balding or Tanya Stevenson.

All are good at their jobs, though the switch from men to women in such positions seem to be a one-way street. Are Chrissie Reidy, Helen Willetts, Sarah Wilmshurst and Helen Young so much better at doing the weather than any of the men available?

There are other women whose suitability to their jobs is so clear that no one would question their appointment. Katie Derham is an outstandingly good newsreader with no silly pronounciation habits. Ruby Wax is unmatched in asking embarrassing questions with a smile. Well, all right, a mad grin. Davina McCall may be loud and brash but in the jobs she does that is needed.

Yet there are others, more and more of them, who prompt the question: `Is she there because her employers honestly think she's the best (how could they?) or because she's a woman?'

Yet it is not head-counting or even the counting of programme titles which bring out most vividly what is happening in TV's great sea change but a sequence of more subtle alterations in attitude.

Time was when when the ideal of manhood would be exemplified on TV by a Royal Marine commando or an explorer: someone with great courage or daring, willing to face huge challenges and lead others on dangerous missions, breaking boundaries, whether geographical, scientific or military.

Today, TV's ideal of manhood appears to be David Beckham, a football player much given to new hairdos, who sulks and adds an Alice band to his earrings and necklace in order to show off his eyebrow when it is accidentally grazed by his boss.

Beckham exemplifies the Diana-fication of Britain, in which the old virtue of the stiff upper lip is replaced by a determination to wallow publicly in shared emotion, preferably tearful. The phenomenon can be seen daily in such soul-baring sessions as The Oprah Winfrey Show and Trisha.

However, for the most vivid, indeed lurid, proof of the feminisation of TV you have to go to the commercials. The infantilisation, emasculation and ridicule of men has become one of the mainstays of advertising. In virtually every commercial break, men are shown as:

More stupid than women (the bloke with his head under the basin looking for something with which to wipe the lavatory when his gorgeous wife waltzes in and does the job in a flash with an expensive pre-moistened disposable towelette);

More Neanderthal than women (the grouch who starts out in the morning as, literally, an apeman and turns into a vaguely acceptable human being only be eating delicious Wheaty Pops);

More inept than women (the marathon-running ninny who tries to consume powdered soup at a drinks station while the svelte female runner speeds off gulping a proper drink);

More ignorant than women (the gormless middle-aged chap shoving a washing machine along the pavement while the beautiful young woman achieves all-day freshness with a simple packet of Sudso);

More pathetic than women (`Don't you want me baby?' wails the wimp to his feisty inamorata);

Or, of course, sexually inferior to women (the pitiful cur licking the entire house clean at the behest of a beer-drizzling dominatrix who, at the end, is enraged because she has run out of alcohol with which to trick him into licking her body, beer and not passion being the only reason for today's emasculated man to do such a thing).

Ah, say the feminists, you protest too much. This is merely part of the balancing up process needed after all those decades when women were belittled and ridiculed in commercials.

Oh yes? Then it would be interesting to hear the names of three or four which subjected women to such denigration.

My impression is that the furthest the advertising industry ever dared to go in that direction was to portray women as ditzy but charming, vague but beautiful. The notion that commercials ever portrayed women repeatedly as sexless, ignorant and inept is another feminist fantasy.

So far men have been astonishingly calm and quiet about the feminisation of TV; imagine the squawking if the Manolo Blahnik had been on the other foot.

Today, the Americans who were first into the feminism jungle appear to have emerged on the far side.

Their broadcasters now create lots of post-feminist drama that appeals to men as well as women - The Sopranos, 24, The West Wing, Six Feet Under.

Of course, British broadcasters should give women equal opportunity - but they should also give men equal programming.

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Women Roar! The New Economy's Hidden Imperative

Tom Peters Times - March 2003

Tomorrow belongs to Women...

The evidence is clear! (1) WOMEN ARE BETTER LEADERS THAN MEN (under the conditions of the New Economy). (2) WOMEN ARE THE WORLD'S BIGGEST MARKET OPPORTUNITY (BY FAR) ... and are wildly underserved. The stakes amount to TRILLIONS of dollars. Our story: WOMEN ROAR. WOMEN RULE. Believe it!

Why would a self-proclaimed "Very Old White Crusty Profane Male" care about women's issues?

Tom answers his own question in Women Roar: The New Economy's Hidden Imperative. "I am a business person. An analyst. A pragmatist. The enormous social good of increased women's power is clear to me; but that is not my shtick. My business is haranguing business leaders ... about my fact-based conviction that women's increasing power -- leadership skills and purchasing power -- is the strongest and most dynamic force at work in the American economy today. Dare I say it as a long-time resident of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley ... this is even bigger than the Internet!"

Tom divides his 10,830 word essay into two sections. Part I focuses on the inside of the organization and passionately argues that women should rewrite the rules. "Women in leadership positions represent a staggering opportunity. Talent defines success in the new economy. Here is underutilized talent source #1. Talk about a no-brainer!"

Part II deals with opportunities outside the organization. It is women as marketplace power #1. "Women are under-served by the marketplace. Which is insane. Because they buy the bulk of stuff, commercial as well as consumer. Research I've pulled in over the years, mainly from the United States, Canada, and Australia suggests the following numbers: Women are responsible for 83% of all consumer purchases. Home furnishings ... 94%. Vacations ... 92%. Houses ... 91%. Consumer electronics ... 51%. Cars ... make 60% of purchases, significantly influence 90%. Services the same story: choice of a new bank account by women ... 89% of the time. Health care ... 80% of decisions, over two-thirds of all health care spending."

Book Available at www.tompeters.com

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New York Times - March 16, 2003

Men start out ahead: 115 males are conceived for every 100 females. But it's downhill from there.

The male fetus is at greater risk of miscarriage and stillbirth.

Male births slightly outnumber female births (about 105 to 100), but boys have a higher death rate if born premature: 22 percent compared with 15 percent for girls.

Overall, more newborn males die than females (5 to 4).

Sudden infant death syndrome is one and a half times as common in boys as in girls.

Boys are three to four times as likely to be autistic.

Boys are three times as likely to have Tourette's syndrome.

Mental retardation afflicts one and a half times as many boys as girls.

Dyslexia is diagnosed two to three times as often in boys as girls.

As teenagers, boys die at twice the rate of girls.

Boys ages 15-19 are five times as likely to die in a homicide.

Boys ages 15-19 are almost 11 times as likely to die by drowning.

Boys ages 16-19 are nearly twice as likely to die from a car accident.

Men are 16 times as likely as women to be colorblind.

Men suffer hearing loss at twice the rate of women.

Though women attempt suicide two to three times as often as men, four times as many men actually kill themselves.

The male hormone testosterone is linked to elevations of LDL, the bad cholesterol, as well as declines in HDL, the good cholesterol.

Men have fewer infection-fighting T-cells and are thought to have weaker immune systems than women.

Men have a higher death rate from pneumonia and influenza than women.

By the age of 36, women outnumber men.

Men ages 55-64 are twice as likely as women to die in car accidents.

Men ages 55-74 are twice as likely as women to die of heart disease.

In the United States, men are twice as likely to die from parasite-related diseases (in part, some speculate, because their greater average size may offer parasites a bigger target).

Among people 65 and older, men account for 84 percent of suicides.

Stroke, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and accidents -- all among the top causes of death -- kill men at a higher rate than women.

American men typically die almost six years before women do.

By the age of 100, women outnumber men eight to one.

The good news? Men who live to be 100 tend to be in better shape than their centenarian female counterparts.

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Women Dominating Medical Schools

BBC News - July 3, 2002

Too few men are training to become doctors, the British Medical Association's annual meeting was told on Wednesday. For the first time ever, more women than men graduated from medical schools.

Six out of ten present students are women, according to figures, and some are worried that medicine may become overly-dominated by women in the future.

Members of the BMA voted in favour of a motion calling on the government to look at ways to encourage more male students into medical school.

James Coulston, from the association's Medical Schools Committee, said that the disparity was the "next big problem" for the profession.

He said that women were proving far more attractive candidates - both physically and because their "A" level grades were better.

Stephen Sanders, another committee member, told the conference that at his school in Nottingham there were two women to every man.

"It is not that we have a problem with women being doctors - they are fantastic doctors - as are me - the issue is about not discriminating against men.

He said that just as it had been wrong in the past when the profession was male-dominated, it was equally wrong that the pendulum should swing too far the other way.

Dr Michael Crowe, a GP from Leicester, said that there had been eight men to every woman during his time at medical school, but now the balance had shifted too much.

"There is a major problem brewing and it needs correcting."

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As Leaders, Women Rule

New studies find that female managers outshine their male counterparts in almost every measure

Business Week On-line

Twenty-five years after women first started pouring into the labor force--and trying to be more like men in every way, from wearing power suits to picking up golf clubs--new research is showing that men ought to be the ones doing more of the imitating. In fact, after years of analyzing what makes leaders most effective and figuring out who's got the Right Stuff, management gurus now know how to boost the odds of getting a great executive: Hire a female.

That's the essential finding of a growing number of comprehensive management studies conducted by consultants across the country for companies ranging from high-tech to manufacturing to consumer services. By and large, the studies show that women executives, when rated by their peers, underlings, and bosses, score higher than their male counterparts on a wide variety of measures--from producing high-quality work to goal-setting to mentoring employees. Using elaborate performance evaluations of execs, researchers found that women got higher ratings than men on almost every skill measured. Ironically, the researchers weren't looking to ferret out gender differences. They accidentally stumbled on the findings when they were compiling hundreds of routine performance evaluations and then analyzing the results.

The gender differences were often small, and men sometimes earned higher marks in some critical areas, such as strategic ability and technical analysis. But overall, female executives were judged more effective than their male counterparts. ''Women are scoring higher on almost everything we look at,'' says Shirley Ross, an industrial psychologist who helped oversee a study performed by Hagberg Consulting Group in Foster City, Calif. Hagberg conducts in-depth performance evaluations of senior managers for its diverse clients, including technology, health care, financial-service, and consumer-goods companies. Of the 425 high-level executives evaluated, each by about 25 people, women execs won higher ratings on 42 of the 52 skills measured.

Bias of Experience: "I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work," says Shukla, who recently sold her Web software company for $390 million.

The growing body of new research comes at a time when talent-hungry recruiters are scrambling to find execs who can retain workers and who can excel in the smaller bureaucracies of New Economy companies. Women think through decisions better than men, are more collaborative, and seek less personal glory, says the head of IBM's Global Services Div., Douglas Elix, who hired two managers within this year--both women. Instead of being motivated by self-interest, women are more driven by ''what they can do for the company,'' Elix says. Adds Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of the 20-year-old management classic, Men and Women of the Corporation: ''Women get high ratings on exactly those skills needed to succeed in the global Information Age, where teamwork and partnering are so important.''

It's no surprise, then, that some executives say they're beginning to develop a new hiring bias. If forced to choose between equally qualified male and female candidates for a top-level job, they say they often pick the woman--not because of affirmative action or any particular desire to give the female a chance but because they believe she will do a better job. ''I would rather hire a woman,'' says Anu Shukla, who sold her Internet marketing-software company Rubric Inc. earlier this year for $390 million. ''I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work, I know I'm going to get a certain dedication,'' she says, quickly adding that she's fully aware that not all women execs excel. Similarly, Brent Clark, CEO of Grand Rapids-based Pell Inc., the nation's largest foot-care chain, says he would choose a woman over a man, too. Women are more stable, he says, less turf-conscious, and better at ''all sorts of intangibles that can help an organization.''