Is Equality like peanut butter? Does it spread evenly? Is equality like sunlight -- that shines harder or softer on different parts of the earth? Is a turnip equal to a tomato? Is a bull equal to a cow? Is a man equal to a woman? Or does it make no sense to ask these questions?

Is the Equal Gender Rights Debate destined to remain concentrated only upon issues of money and political power? Or is it finally time to take into account the tremendous sexual power -- relationship power -- that women wield over men?

In every human culture men create a protected zone for women. Men sacrifice their own bodies to create a buffer for women -- against war, against the rampages of nature, against toxic or pestilential conditions. Men succeed as political leaders ONLY in so far as they provide safety for women. A bull is not even acknowledged sexually until he can enforce a safe perimeter within which the cows can graze in peace.

Men WANT to protect and nurture women. Men WANT to do things that women like. Men go to war to maintain the protected zone. Men battle the forces of nature -- they work in coal mines, and drill oil, and lay bricks -- to make the money that ensures a secure environment for women. Heedful to the needs of women, men assume leadership in the political arena -- patrolling the outer boundaries of the protected zone. Traditionally, women assume leadership in the arena of human relationships that obtain within the protected zone -- the family and the marketplace. Yes, the Marketplace. Around the world, from Ancient Greece to any vegetable stand in modern day Bolivia or shopping mall in Chicago, the markets are driven by women. Buying, selling, the exchange of money for goods and services, is conducted for and by women. Women are more physical, more social, more materialistic than men.

Men seek money in so far as it affords them a way to please women. Money, for men, is a social currency -- a means to gain access to women. Simple stuff. It's why a falcon challenges a marauding eagle and brings back a rabbit to his nesting mate.

Men, the warriors, the perimeter-defenders, are deeply, personally concerned with saber-rattling in North Korea or what those grease-ball Spartans are up to now.

Women negotiate the costs of market items. Those costs are determined by what women are willing to pay for them. Women raise their daughters to be skilled at raising children and bargain hunting.

Historically, the education of boys was turned over to a male community -- a male spiritual community -- where boys learned to read the holy language so they could make direct contact with the values that pertained in their culture.

Raising kids and assessing products are essentially the same processes all over the world. However, the cultural terrain of a nomadic or agricultural, or mercantile, or manufacturing culture will be contoured accordingly. Nomadic cultures sensitize themselves to the movement of animals. Agricultural cultures must anticipate rain. Mercantile cultures develop protected trade routes. Manufacturing cultures are concerned with access to resources. This cultural menu of male activities is dedicated to the singular goal of serving up protected zones for women. Men must stay apprised of shifting cultural parameters because, when an alliance unravels, they need to make a decision about whether this is something they are willing to fight over, or not. Men cast a wide net in the ocean of life, and behind them, in the protected zone, women administer the daily affairs. That's balance!

And then, in one sudden historical blip, along came feminism and public education, which turned male culture inside out. Today 85% of teachers are white women. Boys, who used to be schooled by men, are now schooled by women. Boys, who used to learn from men how to be honorable and ethical and participate as responsible adults in their culture, are now being taught by women how to get a job. It's like training eagles to eat grass.

These boys can never become men because no one has showed them what men do! America has no culture because America has no male culture -- because America's men are being raised by women.

In ancient Athens the women ran the home and the marketplace. The men fished and fought wars and showed up in the public Forum to participate in the dialogue of the times. There men learned the price of olive oil in Crete and evaluated reports of Spartas new armaments. Men participated directly in the discussion, the Forum, that framed their culture. They invented Democracy, not merely by voting, but through debate and dialogue -- participation.

Nowadays, news is fed to us through a media lens which has been sensitized to the economic aspirations of women, while remaining callous to the relationship aspirations of men. In America men became over-involved in the marketplace, and were supplanted by female teachers in the schools. We switched roles.

The results are as predictable as herding open-ocean dolphins into fish tanks -- overcrowding, diseased emotional lives, violence, and frustration. American men do not have a vision of what this culture wants from them because this culture has never told them.

Now that women are returning to work in the marketplace men must return to their primary responsibility -- nurturing and educating young men. Women cannot turn boys into men, only men can do that.

Half of ALL grade school and high school teachers should be MEN!

60% of our marriages end in divorce and our youth associate in gangs where 95% of the boys were raised in homes without fathers. Whereas men used to be the protectors of women now government has become the protector of women. The balance is gone. The reciprocity is gone. Men still need women but women don't need men. Government provides economic and social safety nets for women in distress thereby making men even more obsolete.

Men still do the heavy work, the dirty work, the dangerous work. We still rely on men to fight wars. Clean work in bureaucratic and information jobs is inundated with female employees while the competition for labor jobs has become so fierce that construction workers have not received a raise in 20 years. School teachers salaries have surpassed those of working men, so the argument that men won't teach because it doesn't pay enough no longer holds water.

The average man -- black, white or brown -- is being relegated to a servile labor class. And, due to overwork and divorce, he is being denied access to the minds and bodies of his own children. An under-utilization of the human spirit. Like hiring priests to work at MacDonald's.

Equality, if it means anything, must come to mean equal human relationship rights for men.

Our society is ruled by men who were raised by women. Our politicians are men who attract female voters. Our business leaders are men who appeal to the buying habits of women. Our religious leaders appeal to the social habits of women. Our media caters to the opinions of women. Our educators have created schools that emphasize job training and ignore wide-ranging ideas and concepts -- thinking!

We are a culture in free-fall. We will not endure unless we regenerate healthy male culture in America. We are in the dire position of having allowed female values to shape our cultural focus, meanwhile, denying men contact with their kids. Let women have the jobs -- we want the kids!

Despite cultural conditioning to the contrary, it must be recognized that men are superb team players. That's how we got to the moon. That's how we crossed the Atlantic. That's how we hunted buffalo. Our opponents, most often, are NOT other men. We rally to engage outer space, or the open ocean, or starvation. Men are experts at building community and working as a team. We always have been. Men are less focused on what individual rights we have, and more focused on what individual rights we are willing to give up to benefit the team. This prudence is what we are equipped to pass on to young men.

And, it's the diametric opposite of what women teach their sons. While women articulate what rights they have, men negotiate what rights they will relinquish in order to play on a larger field and entertain a grander goal -- a goal beyond individual ego. Boys learn more about life on the sporting field than they ever learn in school.

It's time for men to play catch-up-ball in the arena of human relationships. Women live 8 years longer than men. 19 out of 20 people who die on the job are men. Within two years of divorce men commit suicide at 10 times the rate of women. In divorce a man will lose his kids unless he can afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars trashing his ex to prove she is morally unfit as a mother.

And here's the ghost that bewitches our intellect. We live in a society that actually believes women are morally superior to men. That women automatically know more about what is good and right than men do.

Men are overwhelmingly, biologically, attracted to a shapely female form. It's not learned. It's DEEP biology -- how a bare breast or curved behind grabs our attention like a train whistle in a tunnel.

Women say 'no' to sex. They project a loftier moral attitude which increases the value of their sexual currency. Men impute this marketplace savvy to women's higher moral nature and end up assuming that women are more honest, more ethical, more truthful, in all things, than men. It's like believing that cannibals eat other people because they need the vitamins.

WOMEN know that women are not always kind and caring and sharing. Sometimes they are mean and conniving and manipulating. It's men who cannot face up to the notion that women are not morally superior to men -- because if that's true, our society is built on wet sand. If that's true a cleansing rain drenches the paper maché palace of 90's culture and the turrets of integrity collapse and the walls of decency implode. And we're left staring at a soaked pile of paste and paper.

Despite the protected zones men have always provided for women, men have been labeled as the oppressors of women. Vastly more than half of America's wealth is owned by women. Women earn less money, but spend more money, than men. Men are routinely denied involvement in raising their own children. Yet we are the oppressors of women. And elephants speak French.

The most reckless omission in our one-sided Equal Rights Debate concerns how important the presence of a child is to the development of a healthy man. When a man is around kids he is clean-spoken and ethical and consistent. Interacting with kids raises a man to a higher level of his being. It's been like that for hundreds of thousands of years. Men raise kids and kids raise men. Human beings thrive on this reciprocity.

Is equality our goal? Is balance what we want? Would we like to see inner city kids stop gunning each other down? If so then it's time to regenerate male culture in America.

Let's keep fathers in the home. Let's get men into the schools. Let's facilitate mentoring programs in every school and religious community in this country. Let's reapply ourselves building male community. Let's recreate all male clubs and all male activities. Women do that.

Let's introduce young people to men they can admire and respect -- men who reciprocate by being genuinely involved and concerned with the lives of these kids.

Men are team players. Men build community. That's what we do best. Let women run the marketplace. Let men build community. We will no longer permit ourselves to be regarded merely as a wallet. We are the visionaries of human civilization. That's our true historical role.

We put men on the moon and brought them back. Let's decree a national goal of creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, pan-religious American male culture that will become a model for the rest of the world. 1000 years from now this noble achievement could be viewed as America's true contribution to human history. It's a stimulating, attainable, worthy goal.

Let's call men up to their higher nature. Let's start treating men as the moral and spiritual equals of women.

Is it not the very meaning of citizenship that the citizen of a state is obligated to protect and defend that form of government which affords her the privileges and protections of citizenship? How come, when women got the right to vote, they were not instantly saddled with the responsibility to fight in war to defend their right to vote? What mysterious, archaic gender paradigms populate our psyches, blinding us to the actual spectrum of issues which constitute "equality" and "citizenship"? Who has managed to control the gender equality debate to the extent that Selective Service registration has remained absent from it for 70 years? Why do they do it? What deeper paradigms are they skirting, glossing over, concealing? And...given that men are expected to fight in war and women are not, is it not possible to conclude that men are NOT the oppressors of women, but that men are, in fact, the PROTECTORS of women?

Right now I am somewhat willingly stranded on a small island in the South Pacific. There are no roads, no cars, no electricity, no phones. My hosts are in great part a hunter/gatherer culture. I spend my days with the men, fishing and collecting fruits: papaya, breadfruit, coconuts, bananas. The women stick close to home, sweeping the packed earth around their coconut leaf huts, shooing pigs out of the garden, collecting shellfish off the reef at low tide. Both men and women cook and tend the infants, depending upon who is not engaged in some other activity at the time. As other researchers have pointed out, there is less division of labor in both hunter/gatherer and "information age" societies than in the agricultural and industrial societies of recent epochs.

But the dangerous work is still done by the men. Women don't climb coconut trees (fat as I am, neither do I). Women don't ride small boats out into huge waves to catch fish. Women are not drafted in time of war. As in Europe and America, most families here are de facto matriarchies, governed by the iron will of the eldest surviving family member -- almost always a female. Men appear to have a great deal of autonomy while they're alive, but they simply do not last as long as women. While young women complain about social restrictions and lack of freedom, old women govern the wealth of the family -- in Europe, America, and the South Pacific. Thus, the very things that feminists complain about, are the things that ensure women's eventual dominion over the accumulated resources of the family. The men lead tough, dangerous lives, die sooner, and the family wealth devolves into the hands of the elder women.

"Equality" is not age specific. It's meaningless to ask whether men and women are treated equally at the age of 18, 35, 72. Equality embraces a lifetime of events. And it's clear -- in Europe, America, and the South Pacific -- that over a lifetime women possess more security and authority than men. Why? Because men willingly sacrifice their well being for women. Because men are the protectors and defenders of women. Because men die for women.

Why do they do it?

Because women are widely regarded to be more valuable than men. Women make babies. A deep biological imperative within men supports the notion that women and babies must be protected and defended. That's why there are male feminists. Male feminists are men expressing their innate urge to protect and defend women. Challenging and critiquing women runs against our character. We hate fighting with women.

So what about military service? Is draft registration a moot point since we're not at war? A young man I know of was recently booted out of an Ivy League school -- lost his admission and scholarship -- when it was discovered he had neglected to register for the draft. The school received federal funds, one requirement of which is that all males over the age of 18 must be registered for the Selective Service. The school could lose it's federal money if it doesn't comply, so the young man gets the "heave ho" -- instantly -- no appeal. Female co-eds need not worry about this sort of career disruption.

Bills have been sponsored in the U.S. Congress to register women for Selective Service. They did not pass. They got no feminist support. Moreover, since it is the policy of the Pentagon that women cannot be forced to perform combat duties, the issue of drafting them was deemed irrelevant. Tell that to the guys getting shot at.

I talked to some marines from Somalia. Their beef about women soldiers is that, while the guys are sent into the desert or on combat missions, the female marines guard the embassies and toady about with the diplomats and generals -- ensuring their own promotions.

It is a well-known fact that, during the build-up to the Iraq War, droves of female soldiers became suddenly ill or, more remarkably, temporarily pregnant -- many with pregnancies which seemed, miraculously, to vanish when the hostilities ended. Is military service just another career track for women? Another way to get a paycheck and a pension without having to risk too much?

And...while the engines of feminist propaganda inflamed the nation over the issue of admitting young women to military academies, the real issue -- registering ALL women for Selective Service in combat roles -- was cleanly swept under the rug.

Why do feminists, male and female, dodge this issue?

Because it is the death knell to their movement.

On every radio show I've ever done with ideological feminists -- where I was able to raise the Selective Service issue -- I was met with a prolonged pause, then a gush of unanimous and unequivocal agreement that women should be compelled to register, then the topic was swiftly changed to something else -- a peculiarly feminine technique for avoiding unpleasantness. They'll talk about it. But they won't do anything about it. Why won't feminists proactively advocate this issue?

Because they know their constituents. They know that the feminist movement would endure an 80% desertion rate led by those gender opportunists who go by the name of Equity Feminists if the ideologues began openly advocating draft registration. Far and away most women do NOT want to register for the draft. They do not want equality -- not if it means they REALLY have to fight for it.

And how about the people who don't believe in war?

Welcome to a bigger problem.

I didn't believe in the Vietnam War. I was drafted anyway. The women with whom I had pursued undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago sailed blithely off to graduate school, while I went underground dodging the F.B.I. It was no fun. And it certainly wasn't Equality.

200 years ago a flurry of democratic revolutions established that a person willing to fight and risk his life could be liberated from monarchy and gain the right to vote for his governors. 140 years later women obtained the right to vote, without being obligated to fight for, or risk anything. Is this not simply another instance of men affording special protections for women? It was men, after all -- the guys who fight and die -- who granted women the right to vote.

Have we not lost sight of what citizenship in a democracy is all about? How can our media focus on the "glass ceiling" and ignore this obvious inequity? I have no problem with women becoming senators, CEOs, or Supreme Court Justices. I DO have a problem with the idea that these women never, ever, have to fight to defend the form of government which permits them to attain these high positions.

Aristocrats are a privileged species of human being. Aristocrats are not expected to perform hard, dangerous, physical labor -- no bricklaying or asphalt pouring or oil well drilling for these folks. Aristocrats are not expected to serve as common soldiers in time of war -- for them are reserved positions of command and supply, far removed from the front lines. Are we not creating an aristocracy of women? Are we not breeding a race of privileged creatures, with guaranteed rights for advancement into positions of authority, who are not expected to perform nasty physical labor nor fight in time of war? It seems to me democracy is circling back on itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail, recreating a type of aristocrat, a privileged individual, one who wears a slightly more attractive gown, yet one who is, as in the olden days, endowed with favored status from her time of birth. Is it possible we are recreating an aristocracy of women?

All the feminist issues of the last 30 years rolled up into one pale in comparison to the image of the male draftee, getting shot at, by people he doesn't know, in a war he doesn't believe in. This is TRUE powerlessness, not TV hype.

Equality is not just about money and political power. It is also about human relationships. Whether it's a father who isn't allowed to see his children, a coal miner or bricklayer working a job he hates to feed his wife and kids, or a draftee getting shot at, the stark oppression of men in the entire arena of human relationships is perhaps the major untold academic saga of this century. We need much more serious academic inquiry into why men get stuck with the hard dangerous jobs, and why men get stuck fighting wars. Draft women. Let them get shot at -- or run from the F.B.I. That's real equality. That's civic responsibility. If women cannot accede to registering for Selective Service their very right to vote, much less their right to become senators, judges and CEOs, is called into question. Equality means equality of responsibility. Women can NEVER be equal without it.

But we -- bio-imprinted males that we are -- will continue protecting them and defending them while they rail at us for being their oppressors. Like cocks in a barnyard, no matter what injustices and outrages we female sympathizers foist on the rest of the male species, we will carry on blithely protecting and defending women and advocating their favorite issues. That's how we were made. Men compete with each other for the privilege of protecting women. And the guy who does the best job of that wins the emotional reward that women offer -- and I'm not just talking about getting laid.

But the joke's on us. Women live longer. Women control 65% of America's wealth (Forbes magazine). Women don't need our protection. Women don't have to fight in war.

Oops...please excuse me. I have to go. It's windy and raining, dark clouds lashing across the lagoon, but the guys want to go fishing and I should go too. Don't ask me why. I'll never understand. It's just something guys do -- enduring pain and discomfort to gain sustenance for the women and kids. That's not likely to change. Not in Europe, America or the South Pacific. Men take natural pleasure in protecting and providing for women. It's part of our bio-make-up.

And it doesn't run in the opposite direction. Few women are dedicated to protecting and providing for men. Few women will lay bricks or mine coal for a husband who stays home cooking pancakes. Equality between the sexes? It's about as germane an issue as financial security for sea urchins. If women want equality tell them to register for the draft. If not, tell them to stop yapping about it.

It's cold and wet out here. There are wild, wind-whipped waves and razor-backed reefs and mean-toothed fish to haul into the boat. It's not ideology. It's not something you discuss in climate controlled rooms. It's something you do.

Rich Zubaty is the author of Surviving the Feminization of America.

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