Esther Vilar – the_manipulated_man ebook download free pdf
It is worth reading becus it gives a much needed breath of fresh air from the usual social constructivist feminism by… being social constructivism antifeminism! I didnt even know it existed.
It is worth reading becus it is full of funny remarks and witty penetrating comments.
It is worth reading becus it is short. One can easily read it in one day.
There are plenty of reasons it is not worth reading: 1) social constructivism, 2) extreme unfair misogynism (it’s so extreme that even i provide a warning!), 3) all the claims are unsourced, there is no scientific rigor.
Some quotes:
Housework is so easy that in psychiatric clinics it is traditionally performed by those
patients who have become so feeble-minded that they are no longer suited to other
kinds of work. If women complain that they are not paid extra wages for this work
(they demand very little, about the wages of a motor mechanic!), it is only a further
proof of how attractive this `work’ is to them. Furthermore, such demands are
shortsighted, since they may one day lead to an actual evaluation of women as a
work force, with commensurate wages. That would reveal to what extent they live, at
man’s expense, beyond their means.
She was right about this.
Here are a few examples, with a translation into male language. (next page)
CODED
A man must be able to protect me.
DECODED
A man must be able to spare me from all forms of discomfort. (What else could he
protect her from? Robbers? An atom bomb?)
These remind me of the mutitude of times that i have been at a party where some particular girl leaves it, goes out more or less randomly wandering around in the cold night (expecting?) to be rescued found and brought back. Self-caused damsel in distress! As it is, i did go out and save find them.
CODED
I must be able to look up To a man
DECODED
To be a possible candidate as a husband, he must be more intelligent, responsible,
courageous, industrious and stronger than I am. Otherwise, what purpose would he
serve?
Right about the hypergamy.
When women are among themselves, discussing the desirable qualities of a specific
man, they will never declare that they want someone to look up to, someone who will
protect them. Such twaddle would he greeted with the laughter it deserves. They are
snore likely to say they want a man with such and such a job: jobs are synonymous
with income level, old-age pensions, widows’ endowments, and the ability to pay high
life-insurance premiums. Or a woman might well say, `The man I’m going to marry
must he a little older than I, at least half a head taller, and more intelligent.’ By which she means that it looks ‘normal’ for a somewhat older, stronger, more intelligent
human being to provide for a younger, weaker, more stupid Creature.
She is unbelievably harsh. :P And i’m only quoting the good stuff, leaving out the stuff where she is extremely rude and also wrong.
It has almost become commonplace that a really successful man, he he a company
director, financier, shipping magnate, or orchestra conductor, will, when he reaches
the zenith of his career, marry a beautiful model – usually his second or third wife. Men who have
inherited money often take such a supergirl as their first wife – although she will be
exchanged over the years for another. Yet, as a rule, models are women of little
education who have not even finished school and who have nothing to do until they
marry but look beautiful and pose becomingly in front of a camera. But they are
`beautiful’ – and that makes them potentially rich.
Right again.
–
There is a pretty good review of the book on Amazon which i will quote word for word below:
By V. E. Lane
HL Mencken defined a misogynist as “a man who hates women almost as much as women hate one another”. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the only truly woman-hating book ever to be written in modern times (or at least ever to be accepted by a mainstream publisher) was penned by a female hand.
Turning feminism on its head, Esther Vilar views women as “dim-witted parasitic luxury items”, living at the expense of productive male breadwinners. Women, in her cynical gaze, are little more than overpriced prostitutes. However, compared to the street prostitutes whom they so despise for undercutting their prices, they even the virtue of honesty about what they are doing.
Interestingly, Mencken himself authored a work (In Defense of Women) similar to that currently under review. Not only is its theme similar but it also adopts a similarly semi-satirical tone as the work currently under review. The principle difference is that, whereas Vilar describes women as less intelligent than men (see also Lynn 1999), Mencken purports to believe that women’s exploitation of men is evidence of their superiority. However, as in much of Mencken’s work (and perhaps in Vilar’s too), it is not entirely clear to what extent his claims are tongue-in-cheek.
The Wealth of Women and the Fundamental Fallacy of Feminism
With wit and style, Vilar exposes what may be regarded as the Fundamental Fallacy of Feminism – namely the assumption that because men earn more than women, this means men are better off. As Jack Kammer (If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules: and other radical thoughts for men who want more fairness from women) writes, “Looking at men in business and government and saying they have all the power is like looking at women in the supermarket and saying they have all the food” – just as women shop for the whole family, men earn money and exercise power for the benefit of the whole family.
The feminist fallacy is therefore twofold. It ignores:
1) The greater effort and risks men undertake in return for higher wages; and
2) The fact that much of the money earned by men is spent on and by their wives and girlfriends
As Schopenhauer observed in `On women’, his much-maligned masterpiece of misogyny, “women believe in their hearts that a man’s duty is to earn money and theirs is to spend it”.
Vilar, perhaps inevitably given the satirical and polemical style, does not cite any data in support of her assertions. However the data is available. Writers like Warren Farrell (Why Men Earn More) and Kingsley Browne (Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality) have documented that men work longer hours than women, in more dangerous and unpleasant conditions and for a greater portion of their lives. As Vilar observes in respect of feminism, “the army of suppressed women eagerly awaiting the moment of liberation simply never materialised”, for the simple reason that “it is not much fun to repair water pipes, to lay bricks or to lug furniture” and “unlike men, women can choose whether to do drudgery”.
However, despite this additional work and the higher earnings that result, men are not financially better-off. As Vilar observes in the introduction to the 1998 edition of her book, “it is well established that women make the majority of purchasing decisions”. This assertion is supported by data in provided in books like Pocketbook Power: How to Reach the Hearts and Minds of Today’s Most Coveted Consumer – Women, according to which women make approximately 88% of retail purchases in the US.
How is it that men earn more money than women but women spend more than men? The answer lies in sexual and romantic relations between the sexes which function to redistribute wealth from men to women. Indeed, the entire process of human courtship seems designed to achieve this end – from the social obligation on the man to pay for dinner on the first date to the legal obligation imposed upon him to financially support his ex-wife and her children for anything up to twenty years after he has belatedly rid himself of her. In other words, behind every successful man is a woman taking a portion of his earnings in addition to her own. As David Thomas observes “If… one class of person does all the work and another does all the spending, you do not have to be Karl Marx to conclude that the second of these two classes is the more privileged” (Not Guilty: The Case in Defense of Men).
Tellingly, research establishing women’s disproportionate control of consumer spending has been conducted, not by feminist academics, but by researchers in the marketing industry. Concerned with the bottom line of maximising sales, they cannot afford to manipulate, misinterpret, suppress or sugar coat their findings for purposes of political expediency (what Kammer calls `Data Rape’: Op.Cit.). Rather their research results must reflect reality.
As Vilar puts it:
“The advertising man does not idealise women from any masochistic tendency. It is purely a question of survival. Only his exploiters, women, have sufficient time and money to buy and consume all of his products. To supply the woman inhabiting his ranch home with purchasing power, he has no choice but to cultivate legions of other women who have as much satisfaction as his own wife in spending. They will then buy his goods and keep his wife in pocket money. This is the beginning of a vicious cycle.”
Consumers are conventionally viewed as the victims of advertising, manipulated and deceived into wasting their money on the latest fad. Vilar turns this logic on its head. Who, she demands, is really being exploited: “Is it the creature whose innermost wishes are sought out, coddled and fulfilled, or is it he who in his desire to retain the affections of the woman, seeks out coddles and fulfils them?”
Housework: Unpaid labour or Overpaid Laziness?
Feminists would no doubt claim that this analysis ignores women’s so-called `unpaid labour’ in the home from which husband’s purportedly benefit. Actually, it is doubtful that men benefit significantly from the housework undertaken by women. “Most men” Vilar observes, “prefer the plain and functional” and have “no need of lace curtains or rubber plants in the living room”, nor of pink carpets and flowered wallpapers. Frankly, most men have better taste.
The best evidence for this is the fact that single men do less housework than single women. Far from shirking on their fair share of the housework, it simply appears that men do not think the same amount of housework is necessary as do women.
Women frequently complain that men do not contribution enough to house cleaning. However, as Kammer (op.cit.) observes “you never hear a man complaining that his wife doesn’t do her fair share of polishing the chrome on the Camero”.
Data cited by Kingsley Browne (op.cit.) shows that, in America, the average married man does only one hour less housework per week than the average single man. This is hardly sufficient recompense for the level of financial support he provides for his wife. Housework therefore seems to be, not unpaid labour, but rather overpaid laziness. A person is no more entitled to remuneration for cleaning their own house than they are for cleaning behind their ears in the bath.
Much the same analysis can be applied to childcare provided by women. After all, unlike men, who are denied any say in the choice whether to abort a foetus yet nevertheless obliged to pay maintenance, women have children out of choice, presumably because they see caring for children (or at least for their own children) as inherently rewarding.
Under Vilar’s relentless cynicism, children are relegated to “hostages” used to extract more money from men, ostensibly to provide for the children, but in reality for themselves. Thought extreme, there is some merit in this view. It is indeed the case that child maintenance is typically paid to the mother, rather than direct to the child and, whereas there exist extensive draconian mechanisms to ensure its payment, there are essentially no mechanisms to ensure that the money paid is actually used for the benefit of the child.
Feminism
Vilar sees feminism as missing the point entirely. Feminists were interested only in the purported privileges of a small minority of relatively privileged men “and not the prerogatives of, say, soldiers”. The early feminists, she argues, were bitter because they had failed to attract a man to support them and had, like men, to support themselves (albeit without the additional obligation to support a wife and children). Vilar sees them as no better than other women (“there is no virtue in ugliness”).
Now, however, feminists are no longer ugly. On the contrary, feminism, she perceptively observes, has descended into “a branch of American show business”.
Outdated?
It may be protested that Vilar’s views are outdated. She describes a situation where the majority of married women are not in paid employment. Obviously things have changed since Vilar first published this book forty years ago. (Fitzgerald’s delightfully titled Sex-Ploytation purports to provide an update.)
However, things have changed less than one would think. In the UK in the 21st century, whereas 95% of married men work full-time, the majority of married women do not work at all, and, even among married women without children, only 58% work (Liddle 2003 p18). According to Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory (p111), wives earn, on average, between one fifth and one third of the total income of the couple and this pattern has remained stable in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the US, even those women who work only earn about a quarter of the total household income.
Although much has changed, the reality of women’s manipulation and exploitation of male labour has changed little. This suggests, I would argue, that it is rooted, not in arbitrary cultural conditions, but in innate sex differences.
It is here that I part company from Vilar, who claims that “men have been trained and conditioned by women [mothers, girlfriends, wives], not unlike Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves”. My own view is that the exploitation of men by women is not conditioned, but biologically-based.
According to David Buss (The Evolution Of Desire), “the evolution of the female preference for males who offer resources may be the most ancient and pervasive basis for female choice in the animal kingdom”. Since it is innate and based in nature, the key female advantage, namely their control over, what might be termed in quasi-Marxian terms, ‘the forces of reproduction’, is unlikely to be reversed.
Perhaps the only hope for the salvation of men lies not in social reform or revolution, but in technological progress which may eventually liberate men from the need for women. With the development of virtual reality pornography and `sexbots’ (see Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships), soon men may be achieve sexual satisfaction without the expense and inconvenience of real women. Instead, these ‘virtual girlfriends’ will be designed according according to the precise specifications of their owners, will not nag, cheat, spend your money nor even grow older and uglier with the passing years and can be handily stored in a cupboard when not required. Given that, like all technological advancement, they will surely be invented, designed, built and repaired by males, women will be bypassed and cut out of the equation altogether.
After all, technological progress has already rendered coutless professions obsolete – from cobblers and blacksmiths to thatchers and telegraph operators. Soon perhaps the oldest profession itself will go the same way. If this happens, women may find themselves reduced from their current privileged status to mere historical curiosities or museum exhibits.
For men, the future is bright. The REAL sexual revolution has but barely begun.
References
Liddle R (2003) `Women who won’t’ Spectator 29 November
Lynn, Richard (1999). “Sex differences in intelligence and brain size: a developmental theory”. Intelligence 27: 1-12.