This crucial truth has to be drummed into women's heads: men have totally messed up the planet. They're also responsible for our addiction to violence and killing. War is men's path, the one they chose. Women were not consulted.

Men went with the chimpanzee's proclivity to violence, rather than our other cousin's, the bonobos, predilection for peace. The bonobos diffuse conflict by resorting to sexual play. There's no rape among the bonobos. The females make sure of that.

Gross Negligence and Incompetence of Males

It's now time for women to fill in the dots. Despite its successes, feminism has largely failed by not taking the fight to men and their "accomplishments," the world they've created, the one we've inherited and live in today. That world is a failure. True, it's the only world we've got and the only one we know. But it's still a flop, and that's what women need to convey. The male enterprise has lost not only its invincibility, but its credibility.

This is obvious in the current fiscal meltdown. This present "chapter" in their story illustrates how men's economic empire—of course there are women involved but we know who pulls the strings, who's smoking the cigars—is a sleight-of-hand game perpetrated on the masses.

It's a sham—the Ponzi scheme of Wall Street and Washington—built upon a sham—the idea that we should buy more and more of what we don't need then throw it away—built upon another sham—that third world countries exist for our benefit to give us things to throw away.

Men have Done It on the Cheap

Feminists need to ask two questions: How could men they have been so terribly wrong? And why have they relied on violence and war to solve their problems for 10,000 years? Even dogs know better than to let size alone rule.

The answer's easy. Men failed simply because they decided to go-it-alone. They didn't want women to muck up the works—especially the works of war—so they devalued women back at the beginning of civilization. Women became property—no longer human beings--owned by men. Even today, little girls grow up learning to be deferential to boys.

But in the process, men undermined their own identity. They purged their own feminine traits, thus creating an artificial hybrid, an out-of-balance, hybridized human being.

Men as Hybrids

Men are, by nature—their hybridized nature—out-of-balance. What could they create but a world off-balance, one that made little sense, one that utilized next to nothing of humanity's collective creativity and imagination?

Despite our great inventions and works of art, we've been living with basically the same stultifying, false notions that have plagued us for 10,000 years. These racist, sexist and elitist beliefs have resulted in constant conflict and war. Men—to make their story "work"--decide that constant warfare is normal. Violence and rape against women—par for the course. Genocide for breakfast—bring it on.

Men Trash Sex

Another part of men's story has to do with sex. Here too their version is unraveling. Men have tainted sex, made it off-color. They've devalued the most beautiful, meaningful act of pleasure and intimate communication possible between people on this planet, sexual intercourse.

Certainly feminists would be forgiven for hitting men below the belt on this one—men deserve it and they have been taking cheap shots at women "there" for thousands of years.

When patriarchal men made women property (in the Old Testament and before), they took control of their bodies and of their sexuality. Women were to be "pure." The male "magic wand" came into existence. With a wave of his wand, he could declare a woman impure and ruin her for the rest of her life. Basically, women's sexuality—their life-giving force—belonged to men (and once again they're taking it back).

Remnants of this ancient belief exist today on campuses of middle schools and high schools in the USA. Girls are still held to a higher standard of purity than boys. They're still expected to behave according to male dictates. Men (boys) hold power over females.

As a result of this twisted logic and manipulation of women's sexuality, men's and woman's sexual relationships have always been difficult. Most men see sex as a mysterious chasm that's dangerous to navigate. They're confused about women, especially about sex, the dark secret.

Men Scared Fitless

If women were to ask men why they trashed the world, including women and men, they would have to answer: because we're scared.

There's no man, no matter how powerful, that couldn't be brought to his knees by a tiny, diminutive female--with no discernible effort on her part--merely by her act of being female. That's the nature of the beast, as they say. And that's why men decided long ago that women must be shamed, tamed, and made to blame for whatever ails men, never mind that men had brought on all the ailing.

Men's fear of women is expressed in different ways. Muslim men's fear forces women to cover themselves from head to foot—while accepting the blame for having to do so.

Rape, the Male's Weapon of Choice

In India the gains made by middle-class urban women have sparked a male backlash that has expressed itself in sexual violence and harassment. According to the Guardian Weekly (10/17/08), newspapers have dubbed New Delhi the "rape capital" of south Asia. A similar situation exists south of our own border, in Mexico, with death accompanying rape and torture.

Rape and violence toward women is practiced throughout the world by men. The ultimate trick is to get women to do harm to themselves. Women are coerced—socially, it's their choice—to mutilate, burn, and/or freeze parts of their bodies in order to be more pleasing to men.

Women need to take advantage of this historic coming-apart of men's carefully stitched-together narrative. They've blown it. The planet's headed towards a meltdown; the Ponzi scheme of economics' voodoo is floating in the water; and men's fear-based scheme of derailing women sexually has made a quagmire out of everything touched by sex.

Women in general and feminists in particular need to zero in on the connection between men's disastrous attempt at "civilization" and his decision to dispense with women. Only then can men and women together begin the construction of Civilization 2.0.