The Family

Nina Katherine married down (Seymour) to escape her family in Wisconsin and to have a husband she could dominate. She used her husband to produce her children, Burge and Ruth, and then discarded him in order to pursue her own goals in life. She opened a business in Elkhart.

Ruth married down (Lund) to escape her family in Wisconsin and to have a husband she could dominate. She used her husband to produce her children, Zoe, Althea, Jack, Marilynn, and Burge, and then discarded him in order to pursue her own goals in life. They moved to Seattle.

Zoe married down (Schiller) to escape her family in Seattle and to have a husband she could dominate. She used her husband to produce her children, Nancy, Joseph, and Mary Katherine, and then discarded him in order to pursue her own goals in life.

These women have typically used their sons to promote their own interests by steering them into careers of interest to them and maintaining control of them after their own marriages, typically causing the son's marriages to fail.

By failing to support their husbands, they have destroyed them, one and all. Lund became a hermit, Schiller was dominated by his own weaknesses, and Seymour is no longer visible. They are viewed as a necessary evil in order to produce children and then rejected to keep them from influencing their families any further.

This is naive feminism at work. These women concluded that to succeed as feminists they had to dominate their families and this is the method they chose. They compare very well with the black widow spider, who, after copulating consumes the male.

Joseph married a woman, Stephanie, that compares very favorably with his mother. She also used him to produce a male child and then rejected him and tried to keep him from influencing his family further. Joseph, however, is very smart and moderately strong. He studied his family and feminism until he knew it thoroughly and then determined to revive the male sex in the family. He married a strong woman with a minimalist commitment to feminism and set about establishing a strong family structure with himself as the head, though making room for his wife to express herself as fully as she wished while still fulfilling her responsibilities to her family. Her mother hasn't been happy about being used as a cure for Joe's family's illness.

He continued to study feminism and to write what he discovered about it so that his son could benefit from it. He continued to function as a dutiful son to his mother in the interests of strengthening the family until he found further progress was blocked by that relationship. It is not possible to be, at one and the same time, dutiful to your mother and patriarch (in feminist times, this isn't a good word but no other yet exists) of the family. The roles are inherently in conflict and this conflict is exacerbated by Zoe's tendency to belittle her son. He cannot allow her to do that without relinquishing his position.

None the less, he has allowed it to go on as long as he perceived continued progress towards his goal. When he became sensible of the fact that he was no longer progressing, he concluded that his mother had become a blockage and had to be removed. He therefor terminated his role as dutiful son.

This mother/son relationship has damaged Joseph's relationships with his sisters because of the inherent distrust of men taught to the daughters by the mother which also applies to him. She, having to justify her rejection of the father has been at pains to represent him as negatively as possible by emphasizing his weaknesses in describing him, even to the extent of stating that her reason for divorcing him was his homosexuality, difficult to believe given his heterosexual relationships. In this effort, Zoe has had complete support by her extended family. The family has thus, blamed him for his life, not understanding that few men can avoid destructive tendencies in their character without the support of a faithful wife.

Men are inherently dependents. They must rely on their mothers to survive and don't become nurturers in their own right and cannot, therefore ever escape their dependence on women. Ultimately, they are needed for only the amount of time necessary to transfer their sperm to the woman. Their real value lies in their ability to supply what is missing from their wives. Only a man and a woman together can make a complete being. In order to survive, males and females must specialize and collaborate.

Joseph's conclusions regarding feminism are that feminism must come to dominate because it is essential to the survival of the species that the earth be worshipped. However, in his view this requires the ascendancy of feminine values, not domination by females which is inherently contradictory because of feminine passivity, and would doom the culture should it actually come into existence. There has never been, outside of mythology, a female dominated culture. However cultures with ascendant feminine values are common, are in fact normal. Cultures with dominant masculine values are rare and destructive because of their excessive creativity.

Feminine values are passivity and compassion. Masculine values are aggression and creativity.