WHY THERE ARE SO FEW WOMEN LEADERS
On Sunday, September 27, 2015,
Andrew Wilson preached to the New Jersey FFWPU. He said, “Scriptures like the Bible were written by men so the women are disadvantaged. Religions that privilege men as closer to God. How many women priests are there in the Catholic church? Behind the times. How many women leaders are there in the Unification Church? There are a few. Not enough. Maybe 80 or 90 percent Unification leaders are men. The heart of my concern and why I am enthusiastic the issue of gender equality. That women have been suffering for the last 6000 years because men have been denigrating women throughout history ever since the Fall.”
For 2000 years the Catholic Church has been patriarchal. Only men can be the Pope and only men can be priests. In conservative Christian protestant denominations like the Southern Baptists, the largest denomination, and in the Mormon church only men can hold positions of authority. Wilson says they are “behind the times.” It looks to me that Hyung Jin does not believe in taking that stand at his Sanctuary church. So I guess Andrew would agree he is not “behind the times.” Hyung Jin is clearly for men being the heads of their homes and therefore for patriarchy in the home. Andrew and everyone I have ever talked to at FF find that offensive and therefore view Hyung Jin and Yeonah as being "behind the times."
Andrew is critical of his own church for having so few women leaders. One prominent elder brother I know in the FF is critical of Father for not putting more women in leader positions. Andrew says that it could be as high as 90 percent male leaders in the FF. In several pictures at the FF website over the last three years Mother has been in charge I have seen 100% men leaders at some leader’s meeting with her. So maybe it is closer to 99% percent male leaders at FF. It took Mother 3 years to appoint a woman leader for a top position and then she chose her daughter, Sun Jin, to be the International president.
Why has human history been so patriarchal? Why is it so patriarchal at FF when their core value is feminism? The Women’s Federation for World Peace makes a strong statement for matriarchy at its website saying there will be world peace when women lead in every “sector” of society. Alexa Ward gave an interview shown on YouTube saying that there would be world peace if 50% of nation’s presidents were women. The FF often interprets Father mentioning an “age of women” to be the end of patriarchy that has caused all the misery in the world from domestic violence to bloody wars. Hyung Jin and Yeonah disagree with the FF and often put down the feminist power agenda.
Why isn’t there an “age of women leaders” at Familyfed when Father before he passed and Mother for the last three years did not and have not appointed women leaders en masse? Mother could make Familyfed a matriarchy with 100% women leaders at any moment. Why hasn’t she? Why doesn’t she do it today? It doesn’t seem she is ever going to do it. Also, why is it that men like Andrew who speak so glowingly for women in leadership as a core value voluntarily step down and why do all the feminist men in the FF who are offered a leadership position decline and push for a woman to take the position? Why didn’t Mike Balcomb, the president of the U.S. Familyfed not take the position and beg Mother to appoint a woman? Why doesn’t everyone at FF demand Mike step down and put a woman in charge such as he vice-president Alexa Ward? The tiny few members of FF have zero power or influence to change what they see as a sexist world where men dominate in all leadership positions in every “sector” of life. But the FF has total power of its own organization. Why is there such a disconnect between their strong feminist rhetoric and lack of action to live their values by demanding and getting Andrew fired and replaced by a woman at the seminary?
A distinguished sociologist explains why. Steven Goldberg wrote a powerful book in 1973 titled "The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Domination." Twenty years later he updated the book and his publisher insisted he change his title to "Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance." Goldberg says he likes the original title better but went along with the publisher. I believe what he writes. It makes sense to me. It also makes sense to many other people. Some very respected thinkers have praised his book. Margaret Mead said, “persuasive and accurate. It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so glibly made for societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed….men everywhere have been in charge of running the show….men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home.” Murray Rothbard says of his book, “The most significant work on sex differences in decades.” Daniel Seligman, Ernest van den Haag and George Gilder each call it “A Classic.” A well-known professor is Morton Kaplan, a personal friend to Sun Myung Moon, says, “coolly, tightly, cogently, even brilliantly reasoned.”
Goldberg is not religious. He writes as a social scientist saying it is biologically innate for men to lead women in the home and to lead other men in society. He says Feminists are wrong when they “view that differences between men and women” are “environmental” and “cultural”. He says that we have to take into account the hormones that drive men to be more aggressive to achieve dominance than women. Feminism “requires denial of truth.”
Conservative religious people know that God created men to be in the subject position. Hyung Jin and Yeonah use the vivid, graphic example of Head coach and Assistant coach to help everyone understand the God’s design for the family. They also teach God is a patriarch, the subject, who is the head of the universe and all mankind are His objects. Many people would call this conjecture: “an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information; speculation, guesswork.” I think it will be difficult for Andrew and Tyler Hendricks, the two main public supporters of Mother’s changes, to deny scientific facts. I would like to know what their arguments would be against Goldberg’s absolute belief that to fight patriarchy is to fight human nature, to fight reality itself. The campaign by FF to get women to get majority leadership in every “sector” of life is quixotic. He would tell FF, “you will lose.”
Goldberg posits there will always be patriarchy. “Goldberg proposes that if patriarchy is indeed biologically based, it will prove to be inevitable; unless a society is willing to intervene biologically on the male physiology.” (
Wikipedia.com).
Goldberg writes:
What is crucial here is that men and women differ in their hormonal systems and that every society demonstrates patriarchy, male dominance, and male attainment. The thesis put forth here is that the hormonal renders the social inevitable.
We are what we are, and there is not the slightest shred of evidence that our most basic elements, the biologically based emotions that flow from our male and female physiologies and that guide our behavior, have changed significantly since man first walked the earth.
Anatomy sets limits on destiny.
The biological element of male aggression will manifest itself in any economic system. It is useless for the Marxist to attempt to disprove the inevitability of male attainment of authority and status positions by demonstrating that males attain such positions in a capitalist society. They do so in societies with primitive, feudal and socialist economies also.
At the bottom of it all man’s job is to protect woman and woman’s is to protect her infant; in nature all else is luxury.
In every society it is women who are responsible for the care and rearing of the young, the single most important function served in any society or in nature itself.
The physiological factors that underlie women’s life-sustaining abilities — the qualities most vital to the survival of our species — preclude them from ever manifesting the psychological predisposition, the obsessive need of power, or the abilities necessary for the attainment of the significant amounts of political power that men have.
One cannot transcend one’s fate until one has accepted it. Women who deny their natures, who accept men's secondhand definitions and covet a state of second-rate manhood, are forever condemned. Sex is the single most decisive determinant of personal identity; it is the first thing we notice about another person and the last thing we forget. It is terribly self-destructive to refuse to accept one’s own nature and the joys and powers it invests.
The experience of men is that there are few women who can outfight them and few who can out-argue them, but that when a women uses feminine means she can command a loyalty that no amount of dominance behavior ever could. … Women follow their own psychophysiological imperatives and don’t choose to compete for the goals that men devote their lives to attaining. Women have more important things to do. Men are aware of this and that is why in this and every other society they look to women for gentleness, kindness, and love, for refuge from a world of pain and force, for safety from their own excesses. In every society a basic male motivation is the feeling that the women and children must be protected. But a woman cannot have it both ways: if she wishes to sacrifice all this, all that she will get in return is the right to meet men on male terms. She will lose."
Goldberg says that “The vast majority of women” can’t “imagine why any woman would want to deny the biological basis of the enormous powers inherent in women’s role as directors of society’s emotional resources” and compete with men for power and position. At his website
www.goldberg-patriarchy.com Goldberg has a long statement about why societies have always been patriarchal. Here a few quotes:
Should a non-patriarchal, hierarchical society be found to have existed, presently exist, or come to exist, I will be the first to jettison the theory I present.
“Why in every society is it males who dominate the hierarchies? Why has there never been a matriarchy or “equiarchy”?” … Much of my career has been devoted to discovering, demonstrating, and explaining the universality of—the presence in every society that has ever existed—certain sexually-differentiated institutions.
A. (Patriarchy) The upper positions of the hierarchies of every one of the thousands of societies on which we have any significant evidence are overwhelmingly filled by men (patriarchy). A Queen Victoria or a Golda Meir is always an exception in her society and is always surrounded by a government of men. (There were more female heads-of-state, queens when no royal male was available, in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century than the first two-thirds of the twentieth. There has never been a “matriarchy” or “Amazonian society.”(There have been a very few, tiny societies with relatively little hierarchy, but in all such societies an informal male dominance played a role similar to that of patriarchy.)
B. (Male Status Attainment) The highest-status (non-maternal) roles are occupied primarily by males. The high-status roles are high-status not primarily because they are male (ditch-digging is male), but because they have high status. This high status elicits from males, more strongly than from females, the behavior required to attain the status.
There is not a scintilla of evidence that modernization renders likely the demise of the universals. To be sure, no modern society could preclude women’s playing any suprafamilial role as some non-modern societies did. But it is also true that no modern society is likely to give women the high status some other (matrilineal-matrilocal, but patriarchal) non-modern societies gave the woman’s maternal roles. In any case, even the Scandinavian societies often claimed to be “non-patriarchal”—called this despite the fact that they feel the need of cabinet departments to deal with the “inequality of women”—are, in fact, overwhelmingly patriarchal. An interesting fact about the Scandinavian countries is that, some political scientists argue, the political plays a less-important role than does the corporate, relative to other countries. While female membership of parliament is the highest in the world (though still far from equal), male control of the corporate world is absolute; there is no corporate “glass ceiling” issue because hardly any women rise high enough to see the “glass ceiling”.
