I would add to the above one other core and essential fact: women as 'dependent species' who cannot survive independently of men. Her role is as a dependent entity and it seems that this fact would be and should be the core predicate of her understanding of herself and her relations with men.
Curiously we have in the post-Sixties era especially seen concerted efforts to avoid the whole issue; or reactions against these fundamental truths: when feminist analysis saw and labeled the basic truths (through a Marxian lens), many women recoiled against the horror of those straight facts but failed to identify their first and primordial enemy: the biological system that produced them, i.e. Mother Nature, the cruelest of all mothers. And so there was great confusion: run to Nature for self-definition? Which is to say to the female role? And live it, embody it? Define it, own it, make it the basic, 'empowering' discourse? Or deny it all. Locate and label men as the enemy, the captor, the controller. So many of the discourses borne of this 'pathology of reaction' (in processes of self-awareness) are tinged with the pain of seeing accurately into 'reality', and at the same time so much of that discourse is 'reaction'.
The encapsulation offered by Pye reads as the final chapter in a long, long essay. A movement within late 20th century cultural philosophy, politics, a whole sweep of realization, reaction, counter-formulation ... that can be said to wind up in a closed loop, a blind alley, a no-place, the end of the line (no beginning).
I note the following: GF philosophy represents and defines (upholds) a divorce from the core and very fundamental biological-existential facts. They see it all, they see what it is and where it leads, and they opt out. But this is totally artificial, is reactive, and in any case can never endure. It is a temporary philosophical maneuver for men stung by 'the horror' of their insight.
Similarly, women stung by the horror of their insight have gone into whole chains of reaction. To attempt to define a 'life' apart from men; lesbianism in all its ramifications and mutations; women's communes, or celibacy; politics to achieve a status within culture through recourse to the State. (If you wanted to have a sense of the extreme points to which women have gone, and can go in these areas see: 'Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire'. Lifetimes spent in the pursuit of alternatives to the shocking and terrible truths of biologically-based life. And it all ends up in a dead-end road).
All these cultural alternatives in their desperation, their absurdity, their surrealism, their escapism, their folly, their pain, their awareness of the horror of it all, will instantaneously fall away if the supporting, artificial cultural system would happen to be disrupted. Social chaos, crop failure or something along those lines. These possibilities exist only in a contrived social and cultural circumstance. One has to have the freedom to pursue such extremities of possibility. In a very essential sense, then, it is this cultural and social possibility that men's efforts create, and woman comes along for the ride as a dependent. But the core power: defining power and power to construct arises within man. Man holds that power and all depends on what he does with it.
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I would modify this somewhat and say that man is a creature who has been forced by circumstances to have to use his physical power and his wits (metis which is a predator's polished skill and all those possibilities) to determine his place in the reproductive loop. This is the core fact, the core truth, the core reality. Everything that is Man arises from this basic condition and, I think, resolves back to it.He needs a place in the reproductive loop, as every living thing that can, does secure the knowledge of which offspring are theirs to invest in.
