Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter, which, curiously, has stimulated
me to reflect on issues which I have difficulty in formulating 
and expressing.

The revision of social norms in favor of women as advocated
by feminism and endorsed by you, seems to me clearly an action
which is not individual but communal, a phenomenon, so far as
I know, not much studied by psychologists or sociologists, and
altogether unrecognized by the law, both in theory and in practice.
The nearest legal approximation is the concept of conspiracy;
and yet when the members of a conspiracy are held individually
responsible, the communality of their actions evaporates.
Communal action seems to me prevalent and pervasive in all societies;
poorly understood, at least by me; and therefore very much worth
thinking about.

I interpret the feminism which you extol as a protest not against
the injustice inflicted on women by nature, but as a protest against
the injustice inflicted on women by masculine, or male-dominated
society. Is it not correct then to denominate feminism as 
anti-masculinism? Accepting, for the purpose of argument, your
valuations, feminism - or anti-masculinism is beneficial to the
world order, but aryanism - or anti-semitism is deleterious to the
world order. Do I understand you correctly? If so, can you explain
to me why, if anti-semitism is bad, as we both agree, anti-masculinism
should be good?  Do not the anti-masculinists, (the feminists) degrade
men, (male chauvinists) in order to secure themselves and their clients,
in much the same manner that anti-semites degrade Jews in the process
of asserting their own superiority?

It is my intuition that to stigmatize and to degrade a class
of fellow human beings to buttress ones own power, be it a class
of Jews, blacks, or males, has unavoidable, deleterious consequences
to the community of us all.  What am I missing, what do I not
understand? Please enlighten me.  I can't vouch for my unconscious,
but ever since fifty six years ago, I married a woman who will
neither scratch nor bite, feminism has posed to me no threat at all,
at least no threat of which I am aware.
 
You write:

> Society is more sensitive to women's suffering
> and dismemberment than to men's. 
> Men are more easily considered expendable. 

I was under the impression, that feminism was premised
on just the opposite assertion: That society was 
insensitive to women and systematically degraded them.
Please explain.

Presumably, as a zoologist persuaded of the correctness
of Darwin's theory of natural selection, you interpret
the success of the human species in populating the globe
as validating its procreative dispositions. The fittest
have survived as consequence, in part, of the social
order governing the relations between the sexes. The
premise of feminism, if I understand correctly, is that
the relationship between the sexes is severely out of balance.
The mission of feminism is to redress that imbalance,
to make women equal to men, and to impose on women equally
the tasks presently assigned to men.  Relying in your
zoological expertise, what, if anything, do you expect
to be the effect of such equalization on the birth rate,
on population totals, and on the gene pool, assuming 
feminism were triumphant and its achievements endured
for the next ten thousand years?

Jochen