On relationships, the Soviet Union – and Russia before and after – were schizophrenic. There was a traditional Russian influence that was very brutal and misogynistic. There were also many writers, poets and intellectuals who fought that influence and spoke in favor of love.

In real life this played out in a terrible manner. A man would fall in love with a woman and treat her like gold. Then his work mates, his drinking mates or his sports mates would stuff his head with Iago-type nonsense, leading him to be paranoid of his wife or to think that she was a bad person. Many would say such things as that women do nothing but screw men over or that he owed it to his gender to keep women down or that his feelings were unmanly. The result was even the best marital situations becoming abusive.

Of course I took objection to that state of affairs. For a while I had the irrational view that women were better than men. My experiences with American feminists cured me of that error. I did not replace my stance with that of Eminem or Osama Bin Laden. I replaced it with a rational stance – that anything human, male or female, was capable of choice, and anything capable of choice could be good or bad.

From this came the conclusion that the gender was was not the solution; the gender war was the problem. The gender war has been teaching everyone involved the worst possible behavior. Both men and women are being encouraged to be horrible people. The perpetrators on both sides have neither the power nor the guts to reach one another. Instead they take it out on the people who have done the least to cause either problem – the feminists on men nearest the liberal centers of learning and culture who are for the most part the least misogynistic men out there; and the real misogynists on women in the inner city, Muslim communities and right-wing communities who have done the least to cause Third Wave feminism. This results in horrible attitudes and behavior being encouraged and rewarded, and better behavior and better attitudes getting people abused.

The gender war being the problem, the solution is the opposite. The solution is men being good to women and women being good to men. I recommend this achieved through a combination of better thought and better incentives. There should be more thought and entertainment convincing people to be good to the other gender. The other part of this is what I call the economic solution. Let men from the first side of town get together with women from the second side of town. That way men who are willing to be good to women will be with women who are willing to be good to men, creating much better relationships than they stand to have at home. And the offending gender on either side will have a real-world reason to improve their treatment of the other gender, or else see the other gender leave in large numbers to be with people who are willing to be good to them.

https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatbiography