10. The Double Standard

Feminism does propose — as antifeminists accuse — that men and women be treated the same. Feminism is a radical stance against double standards in rights and responsibilities, and feminism is a revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom.⁶³63 Andrea Dworkin, op.cit., p.216.

One law for ox and lion is tyranny.⁶⁴64 Quoted in Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, Lagos: Pero Press, 1987, p.242.

Women who complain about the double standard almost always point to the general tolerance for male philandering and the contrasting censure of female philandering. Feminists additionally cite such things as unequal pay for equal work, as well as the traditional assignment of unpaid housework and child rearing to women, and of money-earning work outside the home to men. But are these all there is to the matter? In what other areas of life does the double standard operate? And who, on balance, gains or loses more from the overall double standard — men or women?

Here are a few other areas, from the symbolic to the substantive, where the double standard operates:

1. In the Western World, the wife of a king is queen; but the husband of a queen is not necessarily king. Otherwise, why is Prince Phillip, husband to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, only a prince and not king? And why was Prince Albert, husband to Britain’s Queen Victoria, only a prince and not king? Such is the double standard in royal nomenclature.

2. The rites of love require that if a man loves a woman, he show it by giving gifts to, and doing things for, her; however, if a woman loves a man, she is expected to show it by accepting gifts and services from him. Thus, for him, it is better to give than to receive, while for her, it is better to receive than to give.

3. Men are expected to provide economic support for women, but women are not expected to support men. Indeed, in nearly every culture, a man supported by a woman is looked upon with considerable disapproval. Whether in marriage or outside it, a kept woman is all right whereas a kept man is not. This double standard is enshrined in some Western wedding vows in which the man’s pledge “all my worldly goods with thee to share” is not reciprocated by the woman. This non-reciprocity was long enshrined in law in the USA. There, the husband was legally obliged to support his wife, regardless of her income and wealth, but the wife had no obligation to support her husband. Her income was entirely her own, to spend how she pleased. She had no obligation to contribute money to support her family, unless her husband was unable to earn a living, and would otherwise become a public charge.

4. A mother and a father are not equally responsible for the financial support of their children. The responsibility is primarily with the father; only if he died, or was manifestly unable to support them, would the responsibility become the mother’s. This is so under US law, and customary in many other lands.

5. Beauty and virginity are valued in women; but physical strength and economic ability are valued in men. Moreover, if a man cons a girl out of her virginity, it is viewed with disapproval: in fact, where pre-marital loss of virginity is deemed to dishonour a girl’s family, a man could be murdered by her vengeful relatives. But if a woman cons a man out of his wealth, neither a crime nor an act calling for vengeance is deemed to have been committed. The fellow is simply dismissed as a fool, while the girl’s acumen may be greatly admired. Without the double standard, both acts would either be censured or commended.

6. Everything possible is allowed (such as adverts with images of nude females in provocative poses, as well as live women in scanty dresses on the streets) which puts men in a state of sexual unrest; but little or nothing is allowed into the environment which would similarly disturb women. Thus, the environment is polluted into a sexual stimulant for men, but is left sexually serene for women.

7. Men are trained to initiate sexual contact; women to be restrained, and even to offer coy resistance to sexual advances from men. This difference in conditioning puts control of sexual encounters in the hands of women, for the one who needs sex less (or who makes a good show of needing it less) gets to control the encounter.

8. Whereas the world of high risk is reserved for men, the world of maximum safety is reserved for women. This is most blatant in war, where women are exempt from the risks of bearing arms, risks which are obligatory for men. Even in those extreme cases where endangered societies have felt it necessary to prepare their entire population, male and female, for war, women are rarely obliged to share frontline duty equally with men. This double standard grants men the sweet privilege of being killed off in early youth. And if a city is sacked, the men’s usual fate is to be put to the sword. As for the women, their lives are usually spared and, at the worst, they are married or enslaved by the victors. In any case they live on.

9. In the division of labour, within each class, women get the lighter and less risky tasks, whether in the home or outside it. Outside the class of the idle rich, in which neither husband nor wife need work at all, both do work in the home. Lest we forget, the husband’s housework includes physically maintaining the house, or even building it; mowing the lawns, mending the fences, splitting firewood and guarding the compound from intruders. All this is in addition to whatever he does outside the home to earn income for the entire family through farming, trading, or salaried employment. As for work outside the home, in the poorer classes, both husband and wife have to earn income. In the “working” and middle classes, the wife has the option not to earn income, but the husband does not. In the upper classes, it is not respectable for the wife to earn income. All this too constitutes a double standard that is to women’s advantage.

10. It is also an example of the double standard that male chauvinism is declared sexist, but female chauvinism is not. In fact, female chauvinism goes largely unrecognized and uncriticised.

This list could be much extended; but the general picture should now be clear: the brunt of the double standard is borne, not by women, but by men. Yet, those women who gripe about “the double standard” do not point to the cases here outlined; and feminists who claim to be crusading for equality don’t demand equal treatment in these areas.

Incidentally, on closer examination, even the notion that men have more sexual freedom than women proves to be illusory. Since it takes two to tangle, men, as a group, cannot have even one more instance of coitus with women than women have with men! If there are more philandering men than women, then the average philandering woman philanders more than the average philandering man! Why, then, is there the belief that men are more promiscuous than women? In part, this may be due to men’s tendency to boast. But, as we have just shown, that men boast more does not mean that they fuck more. The arithmetic is against that! Also, the average promiscuous woman tends to keep quiet about the matter. She conducts her multiple affairs with great discretion. The result is an illusion that men are more promiscuous than women. Thus, women’s complaint about not having equal rights to sexual promiscuity turns out to be a complaint about appearances, not about realities.

And even in this matter of promiscuity and infidelity, where the double standard ostensibly works against women, they manage to turn it to good use in controlling men. A wife turns it to her advantage in this way: “No philandering for me?” she asks. “Okay, then. If I am to stay faithful, you must pay my price. You must meet my every wish. If you don’t give me all the money I want for my pleasures, I’ll get it from other men. Your failure will force me to it. It would be your fault.” Terror at the prospect of his wife prostituting herself for what she wants keeps many a man toiling away, like a galley slave, to support her in whatever lavish style she would like.

The plight of such a husband ought to be compared with what happened when a young woman, Solange, threatened to go into prostitution if her mother, French novelist Aurore Dupin, alias George Sand, refused to support her in the style to which she aspired. Her mother simply called her bluff, and in very revealing words.

Solange had separated from her husband, and was living in a convent on an allowance from her mother. She wanted an increase in her allowance to enable her start a new and better life in Paris. Solange, therefore, wrote her mother, Aurore:

Having to live in this isolation, with the sound and movement of life all around me — people laughing together, horses galloping, children playing in the sunshine, lovers being happy — it is not so much a matter of being bored as of being made to despair. People wonder how it is that girls without minds of their own or any sort of education allow themselves to drift into a life of pleasure and vice! Can even women with judgement and warm affections be sure of being able to steer clear of all that…?⁶⁵65 Karen Payne, op.cit., p.87.

Faced with this subtle blackmail, Aurore promptly wrote back:

The only thing which will console you is money… and a great deal of it… I could only give you what you need by working twice as hard as I do now, and if I did that I’d be dead in six months, since even my present programme is beyond my strength — besides, even if I could work twice as hard and keep at it for a few more years, what is there to say that it is my duty to turn myself into a galley slave or a complete hack merely to supply you with money to burn? What I can give you you shall have.

So you find it difficult, do you, being lonely and poor, not to step into a life of vice?… It is all you can do to endure being cooped up within four walls while women are laughing and horses are galloping outside? ‘What a horrible fate!’ as Maurice would say… All right then, just try a little vice… just try being a whore. I don’t think you would make much of a success of it… a woman has got to be a great deal more beautiful and more intelligent than you are before she can hope to be pursued, or even sought out by men who are eager and anxious to pay for her favours… men with money to spend want women who know how to earn it.⁶⁶66 Ibid., pp.87, 88.

Aurore was having none of it, and said so in blunt terms. A husband faced with the same threat, would fear social disgrace, and would buckle and become a “galley slave”, all because he had undertaken to economically support his wife! Yes, what even a woman’s own mother would not put up with, her husband is required to endure.

Mindful of this threat of prostitution, whereby wives can blackmail their husbands, some men in the world’s more pragmatic cultures operate on the principle that, no matter what a man provides his wife, she may still prostitute herself for more; therefore, give her as little as possible, and turn a blind eye to her whoring, but collect your children from her when they grow big enough. This is illustrated in the following fictional episode:

‘Don’t let’s waste time, Alhaji, my children… are at home’ Folake said shaking her enormous buttocks to him as she walked to the bed and undressed at the same time. Karimu, shaking all over his body, followed up in a school boy’s obedience.

In five minutes when they lay spent on the bed, he continued his research.

‘I’m confused Mama Toyin, but why disgrace your husband? You mean he doesn’t feed you?’

‘Oh, are you a stranger in Yorubaland?’ she asked slowly and gasped for more breath. ‘I think this country ranks among the leaders in the rate of adultery in the world…’

‘Why?’ he feigned seriousness.

‘I will tell you. You see what you men here do is that when the woman joins you in the matrimonial home, you give her some paltry sum of money to start some business, in most cases trading. That is all. All that the woman and the children will need; feeding and clothing and everything, is financed from this trade. What they refuse to know is that the profit from the trade may not always be enough to support the incurred expenses. That means that money has to be taken from the capital of the business. You do that and the business starts to decline. There is nothing you can tell the husband to win his sympathy…’⁶⁷67 Kowus Bisi-Williams, "Why Women Flirt", Vanguard (Lagos), March 17, 1989, p.12.

Under that situation, some women reciprocate by bearing children for different men, with or without formally marrying any of them. They then collect from each as hefty a sum for business or child support as they can extract. An aspect of this practice is reported in this story from a Lagos hairdressing salon:

Omoba announced her intention of making a name change. She, formerly known as Mrs Omoba Y was now to be addressed as Mrs Omoba Z. I can’t give you a report on whether all documents were to remain valid or not. My guess though is that there are no documents!… Omoba was changing her (marital) status for the sixth time because she had just had her sixth child for the sixth man! That is to say, every time Omoba had a child, she took on the last name of the man… Omoba’s point was that, it was all well and good to want or expect a man to make a commitment formally but, ‘what if he couldn’t or wouldn’t?’ She believed the next best thing for a woman’s protection is to adopt his name. Omoba believed that having a child for a man was as major an event as marriage itself.

As we have seen, each double standard, including that which is most on women’s minds, works to men’s disadvantage, and helps to guarantee at least one of women’s numerous privileges. Yet feminists purport to crusade against the double standard in order to remove its disadvantages to women! Now, wouldn’t it be nice if feminism really wanted a single standard of human freedom? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single code of conduct for the lioness and the ox? And wouldn’t it be nice if that code specified that neither should devour the other? Wouldn’t that be simply wonderful for the ox?

But alas, given their complementarity, requiring men and women to be treated the same, to have identical rights and responsibilities, would be like forcing right hands into left gloves. Yet some brilliant feminists would have us believe that that would be freedom!

While some double standards are inherent in the complementarity of male and female, there are many which are not: the latter could be abolished without harm, except to women’s privileges. Dress codes could be either drab for all, or sexually provocative for all; adverts could flaunt the appropriate male characteristics, as ubiquitously and provocatively as they do female sexual characteristics, so that the environment is as erotically unsettling for women as it is made for men. Women could be treated the same as men in war, so they can risk death equally.

If every abolishable double standard were abolished, many of men’s handicaps in life would vanish. With a mountain of male disabilities thus removed, men would begin to rise toward equality in hardships and privileges with women.