Women: DOWN through the Ages by Jerry Schaefer

About the book

What if we never really tried "human nature" to see if it works? To see if "Life" could work. That's the implicit thesis behind this satirical story of women. Women: DOWN through the Ages makes clear the connection between men's ownership of the world and their domination over women. And the subsequent catastrophes that follow: social, political, and today, natural.

Civilization, which had its beginnings with the agricultural revolution, marks the end of women's more-or-less equal collaboration with men, common during Paleolithic times. Once men shoved her aside, they made sure she'd never come back. That's been true from 5000B.C. to A.D. 2007, despite some cosmetic improvements along the way, changing her status from "property" to almost-person.

Today, men have convinced women that they have indeed "made it," and there's no need any longer for those old, has-been-ideas like "women's" lib or "feminism." Meanwhile, violence, rape and incest against women continued unabated.

"Civilization" (should it be "fissionization?) entails constant war and bloodshed to keep the booty you plunder and to plan for the next sortie. This is testosterone territory, even though women produce the would-be warriors whose blood will be shed. More prone to peace and inclined toward the human art of compromise, women are shut out from the enterprise of war.

The other side of the coin, if not all of it, is the lust for money and power that energizes the daily/monthly male cycle. An outgrowth of the fear that "they'll be found out," men are addicted to owning the world and keeping women in the dark, something at which they've succeeded.

It is also fear that fuels the continued dislocation of men's relations with the female sex: fear of women's sexuality, as well as their own, and fear of their own loss and emptiness. It is this profound fear that makes them fearless.

About the author

Growing up on the windy plains of Montana, groomed in his high school years on the banks of the smelly Fox River near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Jerry Schaefer has always been curious about the other sex. Raised on the usual diet of snatched-information from the one-room town library and gossip, he was shocked to discover, while studying to be a priest, that women enjoyed sex. Imagine that!

Leaving the seminary behind (not for that reason), he interrupted college for a short-as-possible stint in the Army, and then graduated from St. Norbert College before entering graduate school at Marquette University (theology) and the University of Iowa (English) in 1971. With his theology degree he taught at an all-girls college in Iowa for a short time, and with his English M.A., at a junior college in Illinois for two years.

Influenced by the "free love" of the late 60's and 70's, he and his wife of ten years decided to have an "open marriage." Though it was his idea, she took advantage of it while he smoldered on the sidelines. They divorced in 1974, but remained friends, while she took custody of their two young children.

Even so, he could see that women always got the shaft, and he wondered what was behind it. He gradually came to realize that it was men's fear of women which prompted men to pull them down. He acknowledged his own fear, and realized that, at the age of forty, he was still ignorant when it came to women and sex. He doubted he was unique. Now in his second marriage, he decided to find out why sex was such an open, yet curiously hidden, topic. Sexual relations between men and women, he realized, was a quagmire that gets to the core of women's low standing.

He retired early from the Los Angles Unified School District in 2000. While there, he was struck by the ease with which some women teachers were able to control difficult classrooms. He himself had problems with his learning handicapped middle schoolers.

With more time to read, he discovered Eve's Seed, a thought-provoking book by Robert McElvaine in 2001. He continued his journey of discovery as he researched books about women. The rest, as they say, is mystery.

Jerry now lives in Long Beach, California with his wife Bea. They've been married nearly twenty-five years. Once in a while she asks him, "How come you're so interested in women?"