There’s this stereotype that says women love to talk and men don’t. There’s probably a little truth to that, but the real problem in that area between men and women tends to come from the topics women want to talk about. As a general rule, most men aren’t very interested in talking about their feelings. Also, the mundane details of their day? Where they went to lunch? Who said what to whom? Not only are men not interested in discussing these things, they’re afraid if they do, it might prompt the woman to spend 15 minutes telling him all the details of her day.
Also, because many women tend to over-analyze, they assign all sorts of deep meaning to trivial gestures and then demand explanations. Sometimes a rose is just a rose and five minutes of silence is just a man thinking about what he has to do at work tomorrow. You want to get a man to talk? It’s not hard. Ask him to explain what’s going on in a UFC fight or what his favorite sexual fantasy is and you’ll have trouble getting him to shut up.
John Hawkins, “5 Things Women Do That Secretly Annoy Men”, PJ Media, 2012-08-23.
January 18, 2020
QotD: Men and talking
January 5, 2020
More from Severian about modern girls at university
Having regaled us with shocking tales of the Basic College Girl (linked here), Severian now gets down to the not-very-salacious details of modern female mating behaviour at US colleges:
University College, University of Toronto (not one of the post-secondary institution Severian used to teach at).
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
When people find out I’m retired from “higher” “”education,”” if they’re anything but rabid Leftists they usually ask me a series of questions: Why are professors such hypocritical assholes? and Is there really any point to ___ Studies? and Why do they pay the football coach umpteen zillion dollars a year to never finish higher than third in the conference? If the questioner is a man, though, and we’re out drinking, after a few martinis they always get around to: But what about … you know … the girls?
Where to start? Since there’s no avoiding prurience here let’s get one thing out of the way up front. This is TLP, not me, but it holds for coeds, too:
These people are prone to two errors. A psychological one: fetishization; and a biological one: mistaking for beauty what is merely youth.
Taking the second first: I made the same mistake. I came to the ed biz later than most, having had a “real” job back in my other life, so when I first got to grad school I was amazed at how hot the girls were. Like everyone else I was a TA for Intro to Studies 101, but unlike everyone else I must’ve gotten the “sorority girls only” section, because every single chick in it was a knockout.
Now I’ll cop to being a little slow on the uptake, but I’m not that dumb. So I started looking a little closer — purely in the interests of science, you understand — and it wasn’t long until I realized that yeah, what I thought at first was smokin’ hotness was just youth. Back in the office I’d been surrounded by women who were equally attractive, but not equally young. A few years in a high-stress job puts a lot of miles on you.
But the other, fetishization element came into it too. Not like that, get your minds out of the gutter, let me explain:
I don’t think it ever really was, but if “coed” was a fetish its days are long past. In a country where the vast majority of people have at least a semester or two of college, not even “sorority girl” really moves the needle much. Rather, all the “fetish” stuff comes from the other side. After spending oh-god-sooooo-many hours getting harangued by the HR ladies about “sexual harassment,” even the most cynical teacher finds himself wondering what he’d do if some slinky young thing really did show up at office hours, close the door, and declare she’ll do anything to pass the class…
Which never happens, of course. I’ve never even heard of it, and I taught at lots of places, for many years, among male colleagues (and a lot of lesbians) who were desperately horny losers. The reason is twofold. The first, and most obvious, is that even if some girl really is that mercenary / sociopathic — and y’all have me on record, at great length, describing what little sociopaths modern kids are — there’s a much simpler alternative available: Straight-up bribery. But notice that’s the one thing you never even hear suggested, though it’s the easiest thing in the world. TAs get paid peanuts; I don’t know how low the bidding could’ve gone, but having seen the squalor in which lots of my fellow grad students lived, twenty bucks doesn’t seem unreasonable …
[…]
Ironically, I’d bet #MeToo and the rest of it actually result in more, not less, of this behavior. Like I always say, today’s blue-haired, nose-ringed slam poet is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer, and one of the main reasons I say it is that I’ve been around a LOT of college people. Shrinking violets who need “safe spaces” everywhere very obviously long to knuckle under to power, any power. Goofy losers who suddenly find themselves with a lot of power naturally start carrying on like Heinrich Himmler. Put them together in the closest possible proximity, in a place explicitly designed to shield them from the real world, and, well, you figure it out.
December 5, 2019
Edith Cavell, before her execution, “patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone”
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed relates the story of British nurse Edith Cavell:
Nazi Germany forced France to surrender on June 22, 1940. A day later, Adolf Hitler himself toured the conquered capital of Paris, where he personally ordered the destruction of two memorials to heroes from the First World War. Today — December 4, 2019 — is the 154th anniversary of the birth of one of them, a remarkable woman named Edith Cavell.
Edith Louisa Cavell
Photograph from the Wellcome Trust via Wikimedia Commons.Her story is an example of the age-old tragedy that repeats itself every single minute somewhere in the world: a genuinely good individual whose life is snuffed out by some lousy government for a pointless purpose.
Born in 1865 in Swardeston, England, Edith Cavell was 30 when she chose nursing as a professional career. The inspiration had come to her while caring for her father during a serious illness, from which he recovered. During her training, she worked at several hospitals and later traveled around southeastern England treating patients in their homes for diseases from appendicitis to cancer. She earned a sterling reputation for her attention to detail, a congenial bedside manner and, says one biographer, a “ferocious sense of duty.”
At the insistence of a surgeon in Brussels, she went to Belgium in 1907 and became instrumental in the founding of Belgium’s first school of nursing. According to Kathy Warnes of the website Windows to World History, Cavell was soon training aspiring nurses for three hospitals, 24 schools, and 13 kindergartens in Belgium. She became the first matron of the Berkendael Institute in Brussels.
[…]
When Germany occupied Belgium in the fall of 1914, the Kaiser’s troops allowed Cavell, a citizen of an enemy country (England), to stay in charge of her Institute but they kept their eyes on her as she treated combatants from both sides in the hospital and training school. […] German suspicions led to Cavell’s arrest on August 3, 1915. Accused of treason, she was court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to death by firing squad.
Among the notes she wrote while incarcerated was a September 14 letter to a group of nurses, thanking them for flowers they had sent to the jail. She ended it with these words:
In everything one can learn new lessons of life, and if you were in my place you would realize how precious liberty is and would certainly undertake never to abuse it. To be a good nurse one must have lots of patience; here, one learns to have that quality, I assure you.
At her subsequent trial, the prosecution posed only a dozen questions. From the first, she answered truthfully and boldly. Yes, she had helped hundreds to escape and she was proud of it. When asked if she realized what she was doing was “to the disadvantage of Germany,” she bravely replied that her preoccupation was “to help the men who applied to me to reach the frontier; once across, they were free.”
November 26, 2019
“Women’s sports are dying, and very quickly”
Mark Steyn outlines the rise and sudden fall of women’s sports:
Rachel McKinnon on the podium after winning the Union Cycliste Internationale Masters Track Cycling World Championship, October 2018.
When the Olympic Games was revived in 1896, it was assumed by all that, as in the ancient games of Greece, the competitors would be men. The inclusion of women, said Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympiad, would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect”.
By “uninteresting”, he meant that the innate differences between the male and female bodies ensured that women’s participation would require one to feign interest in races that were slower and jumps that were shorter. In a competitive celebration of excellence, what’s the point? So the first female Olympians were women who could hold their own with men and compete in the chaps’ events — such as Hélène de Pourtalès, who won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics as part of the Swiss sailing crew. A week later Mesdames Guerra and Moulin competed, unsuccessfully, in the hacks and hunter rounds of the equestrian events. In the croquet competition, seven men and three women participated, with the men taking all the medals.
And then came the tennis, for which they introduced a ladies’ singles event, at which Miss Charlotte Cooper (a five-times Wimbledon champ) prevailed.
These were the two models for female sportsmen, if you’ll forgive the expression: Compete in mixed events and spend most of your life losing to blokes, or compete only against other women where the lesser achievements are, as M le Baron saw it, “uninteresting”. In the case of certain activities, male sports felt obliged to spin off more genteel and (in Coubertin terms) even less interesting female variants — softball and netball, rather than baseball and basketball.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the latter model — female-only sports — prevailed, as part of what was understood by the general trend of “women’s rights”, loosely defined, and indeed more explicitly so by things like America’s Title Nine legislation.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Charlotte Cooper model is collapsing, very fast. Women are back to losing to rivals who, whatever their lipstick, skirts or breast implants, are biologically male with all the inherent advantages. Miss Hannah Mouncey, for example, is six-foot-two and 220 pounds, which is rather heavier than me and an inch taller. The average Australian woman is five-foot-four-and-a-quarter and just under 157 pounds. If you have to catch a ball, standing six inches above anybody else on court comes in helpful:
Seleção feminina de handebol da Austrália.
.
É só isso o tuíte.— Ana Paula Henkel (@AnaPaulaVolei) November 23, 2019
Did Miss Mouncey procure her advantages over her sisters through a rigorous workout regime? No. She gained them by being born male. She played for Oz’s national men’s handball team until 2016, when she revealed she was transitioning and thus would henceforth play for the women’s team. She also announced she was taking up Aussie football, again for the ladies.
November 21, 2019
QotD: Honour
Honor has got a bad rep lately. It’s been dragged through the mud, and its garments are draggled. Association of its names with such egregious ideas as “honor killings” has done it no good.
It’s particularly unjust since honor killings are more shame-killings. I grew up in a culture that still shows a lot of Arab influence, (well, they were there almost as long as the Romans, you know?) and I almost understand honor killings – if I squint and look sideways. I was, after all, raised in a village (so like Miss Marple I’ve seen all there is to see of human wickedness.) Of course Portuguese – at least civilized ones – don’t honor-kill their daughters. But we had a case in the village where a father shaved his daughter’s head because she was talking to a strange boy. And even with my family’s rather odd behavior, since we were all readers and a fair number of us engaged in creative work, I came across that “how could you talk to him when you were alone in the house? What will people think? You have shamed us all.” I came across it more than once, because I have trouble wrapping my mind across the nonsensical. And to me – particularly when this started, when I was about eight – seeing a little friend who happened to be a boy was no different from seeing a little friend who happened to be a girl.
But the overwrought minds of village spinsters and old women looked at this the way “enlightened” militant “feminists” do. Like the one who accused my nine year old of sexual harassment for touching a girl’s behind while trying to get her attention. (He didn’t fondle her. He reached through a crowd and poked her, to ask if she wanted to play a space exploration game.) If you’re a male you have lust and evil on your mind, and any woman allowing you near has lost her virtue. (They must live MUCH more interesting lives than I do.)
Anyway, honor viewed that way is more what the public thinks of you and what you allow the public to know. You can lose your honor through all sorts of stupid things that have nothing to do with what is in your heart and mind. You can be “disgraced” the way a regency maiden was disgraced because she tripped in public and fell across a gentleman, and didn’t immediately faint or whatever. (Well, at least in regency romances. I believe true society had more leniency. I mean, even in the village, even with my eccentric behavior and the fact I wore shorts outside the house – oh, the humanity! – only half the people considered me a slut.)
Sarah Hoyt, “An Affair of Honor a blast from the past from April 24 2012”, According to Hoyt, 2017-10-11.
November 7, 2019
QotD: Evolved sexual differences
Women co-evolved to try to make themselves look reproductively hot, though that’s not how we think of it. […] Because men are turned on by disembodied photos of boobs, butts, and coochies, they’re quick to pull down their pants, click their cameraphone, and text some woman they just met a close-up of their zipperwurst. Really bad idea.
Men who’ve done this should pick up a Harlequin romance, which is basically porn for women (from the ravishing by some hot gazillionaire to the final commitment-gasm).
See any photo spreads of male crotch shots tucked in there anywhere, boys?
This is not an error of omission. Women aren’t fantasizing about seeing your willy; they’re fantasizing that somebody in the royal family will pluck them out of suburbia and marry them in Westminster Abbey.
Amy Alkon, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, 2014.
November 2, 2019
When entertainment morphs into propaganda
One of the key elements aiding Hitler and the NSDAP to take power and stay in power in Germany in the 1930s was the constant, ongoing propaganda campaign orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. Hitler and the Nazi party were lauded as the perfect Germanic solution to every problem and Jews, socialists, homosexuals, and other undesireable elements were belittled and used as targets of hate. A big part of Goebbels’ propaganda revolved around one idea, the “Big Lie”:
Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Hess.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
By suppressing competing voices and having all the methods of reaching the people repeating the same story, the Nazis solidified their control on power in Germany that lasted until 1945, and was only demolished by massive military effort by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Commonwealth. Propaganda is a very powerful tool that works distressingly well to implant and nurture evil ideas in a subject population.
Modern propagandists in the west generally don’t have the power of the state aiding them, but if they get enough of the channels of communication — especially the entertainment channels — to co-ordinate the message, the effects can be very strong:
… I perfectly understand the legitimacy of feminist concerns regarding the portrayal of women in the media as consistently demure, retiring, and subservient to men. I grant that, in most of the action/adventure movies that I saw growing up, women would typically twist an ankle or get captured and then require rescuing by the swashbuckling male hero — and I realize how galling this must have been to generations of women. And therefore, a certain correction was undoubtedly in order. But what is problematic now is the Nietzschean quality of the reaction, by which I mean, the insistence that female power has to be asserted over and against males, that there is an either/or, zero-sum conflict between men and women. It is not enough, in a word, to show women as intelligent, savvy, and good; you have to portray men as stupid, witless, and irresponsible. That this savage contrast is having an effect especially on younger men is becoming increasingly apparent.
In the midst of a “you-go-girl” feminist culture, many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive. If you want concrete proof of this, take a look at the statistics contrasting female and male success at the university level. And you can see the phenomenon in films such as Fight Club and The Intern. In the former, the Brad Pitt character turns to his friend and laments, “we’re thirty year old boys;” and in the latter, Robert De Niro’s classic male type tries to whip into shape a number of twenty-something male colleagues who are rumpled, unsure of themselves, without ambition — and of course under the dominance of an all conquering female.
It might be the case that, in regard to money, power, and honor, a zero-sum dynamic obtains, but it decidedly does not obtain in regard to real virtue. The truly courageous person is not threatened by another person’s courage; the truly temperate man is not intimidated by the temperance of someone else; the truly just person is not put off by the justice of a countryman; and authentic love positively rejoices in the love shown by another. And therefore, it should be altogether possible to hold up the virtue of a woman without denying virtue to a man. In point of fact, if we consult the “all conquering female” characters in films and TV, we see that they often exemplify the very worst of the traditional male qualities: aggression, suspicion, hyper-sensitivity, cruelty, etc. This is what happens when a Nietzschean framework has replaced a classical one.
My point is that it is altogether possible — and eminently desirable — to say “you go boy” with as much vigor as “you go girl.” And both the boys and the girls will be better for it.
October 24, 2019
QotD: “Binders full of women”
I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men … I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks?” and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Now, I’ll happily grant that the phrase “binders full of women” is an awkward one. It sounds like the menus they bring out on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane when Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein settle in for a weekend getaway.
But here’s the thing: What Romney did was exactly what feminist groups insist elected politicians should do. He saw that there were “too many” men in the applicant pool, so he reached out to some feminist groups and asked for help. Some feminist groups reached out to him — and he listened to them, too. And then he hired more women.
The monster!
Here’s Jon Stewart mocking him for it. Here’s Ronan Farrow. And here’s Bill Maher, a man who must be sweating like a hooker in church over Hollywood’s post-Weinstein zero-tolerance for piggishness toward women.
Jonah Goldberg, “Binders Full of Asininity”, National Review, 2017-10-13.
September 27, 2019
A visual masterclass in trolling
For all that Donald Trump is known for trolling his opponents on Twitter, he’s certainly not the only one, as these makeshift posters in Massachusetts illustrate:
The locals are outraged, but as Alaa Al-Ameri describes, they’re not quite sure how to safely express their fury:
Think of Posie Parker’s billboards quoting the dictionary definition of the word “woman”. The power of such acts comes from two things. First, they acknowledge – usually with irreducible simplicity – that something that went without saying a moment ago has suddenly become unsayable. Secondly, the outrage they provoke does not come from any epithet, caricature or insult, but rather from having the nerve to draw the viewer’s attention to an act of cognitive dissonance that we are all engaging in, but would rather not acknowledge.
The result is that those who attempt to explain why the act is offensive end up simply tying themselves in knots, while revealing that they have never given a moment’s thought to the position they find themselves defending. This seems to generate even more anger, with the inevitable online mob quickly joined by politicians, journalists and other public figures, eager to see that the heretic is made an example of.
At their best, these acts of public disobedience are examples of real-life Winston Smiths pointing out to the rest of us that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”. Their persecutors, like his, are those who know and fear the truth of Smith’s next sentence: “If that is granted, all else follows.”
The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement “Islam is right about women”. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.
The reason for their dilemma is obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention. Western society has managed to convince itself (at least in public) that any statement criticising any aspect of Islam is, by definition, bigotry. As a result, Western societies have effectively decided to enforce Islamic restrictions on blasphemy, and called it “tolerance”.
The strain of conforming to this lie is evident in the fumbling attempts by the interviewees to explain their objections. Do they believe that Islam is right about women? If so, why the objection? Do they believe that Islam is wrong about women? If so, in what sense is the statement an attack on Islam or Muslims? Do they believe that the author of the poster is saying that “Islam is right about women”, but doing so ironically? In which case, the objection can only be that the author is guilty of a thoughtcrime by stating that “two and two make five” with insufficient sincerity. Or do they worry that they are guilty of thoughtcrime for noticing the irony?
September 18, 2019
QotD: Debunking the notion of “peaceful” Vikings
[…]
Which brings us to the next part. All through the exhibit, people told us over and over again that the Vikings were — contrary to legend — peaceful, peaceful I tell you. Most of the Vikings were, after all, farmers and householders.
I wasn’t buying it. Yeah, sure, most Vikings, if you count women, children, and people to old to go aViking, just stayed put. But no civilization where dying in bed gets you sent to Hel (which was cold rather than hot but much like our Hell) is a peaceful one. In the same way I didn’t buy the continuous reassurances there were as many women as men aboard those ships. Cooeeeeee! Really? The men saddled themselves with a liability likely to get pregnant, give birth, etc AND be weaker in battle? That’s … amazing. Oh, I forget. The idiots writing these cards think women are naturally as strong and physically as fast as men and that the “patriarchy” is a six-thousand-year-old conspiracy to hide this. Sure, there probably was the occasional female in a male role. Contrary to much bleating on the left, the patriarchy didn’t enforce strict gender roles, life generally did, and there are always outliers, and Helga the Ugly who could lift a pig under each arm, probably was allowed to join the guys in their expeditions. For one, who was going to tell her no? For another, no guy ever got drunk enough for her to be at risk.
Other than that, sure, there were as many women as men aboard Viking ships. Coming back from a raid. They called those women “slaves.”
[…]
But no, like the beliefs in powerful women Vikings, (who apparently can ONLY be powerful by pillaging and plundering. Being mistress of a farm is not enough), and in peaceful Vikings too they’re simply an upending of long-held beliefs about something. I.e. if Western culture has long believed something, progressives will believe the opposite, because that’s about as hard as any of them can reason, and congruent with their initial mission to topple civilization so perfect communism will emerge.
Sarah Hoyt, “I Aten’t Dead”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-27.
September 11, 2019
QotD: Male versus female social structure
Female social structure is more fluid. It’s based more on group identity than on individual characteristics. You tend to have one woman who is kind of in charge, your queen bee as it were. Those in her favor circle around her, and the circles continue outward until you have the women who are not part of the group. They aren’t at the bottom of the pile, they pretty much don’t exist. At least, if they’re lucky they don’t. One’s position in the social hierarchy can change at any time, to include who the queen bee is. Remember the scene in Mean Girls where Regina tries to sit at the lunch table with the other plastics but isn’t wearing the right color clothes? She was just knocked out of her position in the social hierarchy.
In a social structure like this, there’s no room for difference of opinion or people who stand out too much. If an individual, even by noncompliance, threatens the group identity; she will gain the ire of the entire group. They will hunt her without mercy until she complies with the demands of the group, is removed from their reach by either death or physical distance (which is getting much harder with the internet), or manages to win enough females to her side to either form a new group around her or replace the existing leader. The last option allows her to push her standard on the group as a whole. There is no option to live and let live. In other words, female social structure is closer to the Borg than the complex world we currently enjoy.
I can already hear the cries of, “But women aren’t violent!” If you’re talking about direct violence, you’re mostly right. Women are not men, and we don’t hunt in the way that men do. Our weapons are usually words and emotions, not direct violence. Instead of a brawl in which two people fight it out and determine which is the strongest, you’re looking at extreme emotional abuse for anyone who is outside the group and unlucky enough to have their attention. Emotional abuse attacks a person in the most deeply personal of ways, and the scars it creates are more damaging than the physical scars of a beating. We wonder why girls who stand out grow so bitter, but if you’re a little too pretty or a little too different, other girls swarm on you and rip you apart with constant emotional abuse. They attack who you are at the base of your being, your very self-perception. This is why you see truly beautiful women who struggle to see their worth. Other girls have been ripping into them since the nursery, and it only gets worse as they get older. Boys court you and try in their awkward boyish way to get your attention, but you’re mostly convinced that it’s a cruel joke they’re playing on you, because of course you aren’t pretty or smart or special. The scars run deep and never fully heal.
“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.
September 4, 2019
QotD: Goth problems
Dan Savage, The Onion A/V Club, 2004-08-04.
September 3, 2019
When “raising awareness” works too well
Dylan Gibbons reports on a recent finding from the Harvard Business Review:
A new study published by the Harvard Business Review shows that in addition to men’s growing fears about women in the workforce and potentially being falsely accused, women are becoming more aware of the backlash and are actually less likely to hire certain women, specifically attractive women.
“Most of the reaction to #MeToo was celebratory; it assumed women were really going to benefit,” said Leanne Atwater, a management professor at the University of Houston. However, Atwater was skeptical. Rather than seeing an endless trail of steps forward before her, she and her colleagues forecasted a backlash.
“We said, ‘We aren’t sure this is going to go as positively as people think — there may be some fallout.'” And so, they tested their hypothesis.
The study began in early 2018. Two surveys were created, one for men and one for women. These surveys were then distributed to workers in various professional fields. In the end, they collected a large amount of data from 152 male and 303 female responders.
According to the study, 74% of women now say they are more willing now to speak out against harassment, while 77% of men anticipated being more careful about potentially inappropriate behaviour.
As for the idea that men do not know what constitutes harassment, the researchers found the opposite was true. Both genders appear to both know what constitutes harassment, and women may be more lenient with some of their own definitions of what constitutes harassment.
According to the report, “The surveys described 19 behaviors — for instance, continuing to ask a female subordinate out after she has said no, emailing sexual jokes to a female subordinate, and commenting on a female subordinate’s looks — and asked people whether they amounted to harassment.”
“Most men know what sexual harassment is, and most women know what it is,” Atwater says. “The idea that men don’t know their behavior is bad and that women are making a mountain out of a molehill is largely untrue. If anything, women are more lenient in defining harassment.”
Another recent action intended to increase the number of women in STEM subjects at an Australian university — by selectively lowering academic standards for admission — will almost certainly not achieve its stated goals, but will work to increase negative views of those women in the working world:
[A female engineer] also rightly points out that this lowering the bar for women is unfair to men losing the university places to women with lesser qualifications.
She points out that male students will notice that women are struggling more with the course material — the women allowed in because the bar was lowered.
She feels this is a net negative for women in the engineering sector in general, and I have to agree.
How, she asks, can employers be expected to see a woman’s engineering degree the same as a man’s if the employer knows the women got a break getting into the program?
She uses the term “positive discrimination” to describe the leg-up practices, and I really prefer that to “affirmative action” to describe it because the word “discrimination” is plain in it. And that’s exactly what it is. Discrimination against qualified people that will ultimately harm women who are qualified.
As she puts it, the only way to ensure that a woman’s qualifications mean as much as a man’s is to have equal hurdles for women.
I’m completely with her.
August 29, 2019
QotD: Imagining a world made up only of women
So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.
When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.
“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.
August 26, 2019
QotD: Princesses
How do you spot a Princess? She’ll be keen on pampering to an extent which indicates to the casual onlooker that her natural self must be extraordinarily rank if it takes such effort and expense to keep in check. (Princesses shouldn’t be confused with Professional Beauties, most of whom retain a healthy contempt for the business of exchanging physical gifts for fiscal rewards, from Hedy Lamarr saying “Any girl can be glamorous — all you have to do is stand still and look stupid” to the catwalk models who invariably live in jeans and sneakers after shrugging off the stupid clothes which Princesses pine for.)
The Princess believes that retail therapy is the answer to everything, even though the rest of us avert our eyes from this most obvious manifestation of the essential hollowness of a life that an over-enthusiasm for clothes-shopping invariably indicates in anyone out of their teens. They’ll have long nails, ostensibly to show that they’re ladies of leisure, but signalling to the rest of us that they’re very likely parasites with low sex-drives. They like big weddings — and as a liking for big weddings often goes hand in hand with humourlessness, they often have very short marriages. They are in short practitioners of the Violet Elizabeth Bott school of feminism – less about equal rights and fulfilling one’s potential than about stamping your foot till you get what you want.
They dislike men, seeing them not as flesh-and-blood people so much as platinum-and-titanium meal-tickets, and they mistrust women, seeing them as competition. An ageing Princess is more than likely to end up lonely — and with no life of the mind to comfort her, this loneliness may make her mentally addled at a comparatively young age. Once the sheen is off her skin, the Princess has nothing that would make one seek her out; like a lot of people over-keen on spangles and glitter, they are at heart rather drab people — drains not radiators, personality-wise — who never make things happen or drive things forward but rather wait to be rescued. They tend to find themselves eternally in the passenger seat of their life’s journey, stranded on the hard shoulder with their souvenirs, waiting in vain for hunky help to arrive.
Julie Burchill, “The Princess generation needs to grow up”, The Spectator, 2017-07-18.
