… in the same manner that many white people who initially signed on to the whole “don’t be a racist” program because it seemed fair were eventually alienated by the escalating rhetoric of “justice won’t be achieved until the last evil melanoma-prone ice devil baby is smashed dead against a rock,” many men — and even women — who had no problem with ideas such as equal pay and female suffrage started to get grossly turned off by rhetoric and policies that viewed being born male as an original sin that demanded eternal punishment.
Even though black women live longer than white men in the USA … and even though women control more disposable wealth than men do … and even though women are snagging most of the college degrees these days … and even though the law and public sympathy heavily lean toward women in any dispute between the sexes … and even though the media portray men as either bumbling incompetents or bloodthirsty rape-monsters … and even though men are far more likely to commit suicide, die on the job, or be homeless than women … we’re still lectured by these bitter fat blobs and their testosterone-free male enablers that misandry isn’t real because men still benefit from certain mysterious “systemic” and “institutional” advantages that none of these assholes seem able to enumerate even when calmly asked to do so.
It’s a funny sort of “patriarchy” we inhabit.
To allege that women are capable of malice and violence and deception is only to allege that they’re human. To expect anything less of them would be dehumanizing and patronizing — which, ironically, shares a root word with “patriarchy.” When feminism ditched the “equity” rhetoric in favor of a menses-splattered pagan goddess religion that depicts men as irredeemable worker drones and women as innocent angels, men who weren’t entirely asleep or pussy-whipped realized that the rules had changed and that they were under attack. But even to notice that a lot of women openly exult in hating men gets you labeled a “woman-hater.”
Misandry is real, and those who seek to deny or justify it deserve a stern paddling. And even if you acknowledge that it’s real, don’t try to make excuses for it using some postmodern gobbledygook, because then you become a misandry apologist — a misandropologist. Just admit that women can be every bit as mean, nasty, horrid, foul, vile, shitty, and hateful as men. It’s part of the human condition.
Naïve as it may be, I envision an enlightened future where there is no longer any misogyny or misandry — only a beautiful, sweet, shared sense of misanthropy.
Jim Goad, “Confronting the Misandropologists”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-05-08.
June 27, 2019
June 20, 2019
QotD: Elizabeth Warren
Camille Paglia, “Prominent Democratic Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton ‘Exploits Feminism'”, Washington Free Beacon, 2017-05-15.
June 16, 2019
QotD: Critical gender studies
But remember that the generic people we meaninglessly call “women” are beautiful and powerful and their arbitrary womanhood should be constantly celebrated. Women must band together and lift each other up. Women must be represented equally in all of our institutions. Women are truly wonderful, splendid, special creatures.
But there is nothing special about women. Literally anyone can be a woman. A woman is not anything in particular. A person with a penis can be a woman. A person with a vagina can be a woman. If a bucket of sand came to life and wanted to be a woman, it could be a woman. There is no aspect of womanhood that is ingrained or biological or inaccessible to males. And womanhood certainly has nothing at all to do with your body parts.
But if you don’t have a uterus then you shouldn’t be giving your opinion on women’s rights. No uterus, no opinion. That’s the motto. We’re tired of men making decisions about women’s bodies.
But there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Transwomen are women, too. A transwoman is just a much a woman as any other woman. There is absolutely no difference between the two and to suggest otherwise is the height of bigotry.
Matt Walsh, “Explaining Progressive Gender Theory To Right Wing Bigots”, The Daily Wire, 2019-05-14.
June 15, 2019
13-0
The US Women’s national soccer team eviscerated Thailand by an unheard-of 13-0 score in the group stage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. It was not a great day for sportsmanship, as the American women celebrated every goal as if they’d just broken a 0-0 tie in injury time of the final:
A screen capture from the highlight video at YouTube. Amusingly, if you try to watch this clip on the official FIFA Women’s World Cup site, you get an error saying “This video contains content from FIFA, who has blocked it from display on this website”
At American Thinker, Jonathan Keiler recounts the reaction to the game and the counter-reaction that followed:
On Tuesday the U.S. Women’s National (soccer) Team (WNT) obliterated a hapless Thailand squad in a 13-0 rout. That’s about 91-0 in football terms, but in a sense even worse, given soccer’s relative dearth of scoring. It would not be worth noting, except that many present and former WNT players recently sued the U.S. Soccer Federation claiming disparate treatment and pay, and to the general championing of all things female in a supposed age of “toxic masculinity.”
The game and the result might cause a reasonable observer to question popular progressive views on these issues, not because the U.S. women won, but how they did it.
[…]
This lack of competitive edge to the women’s game affects it at all levels, from youth leagues to international soccer. It’s not the individual players’ fault, but it’s a fact. I coached soccer for years (boys and girls.) On the women/girls side, routs like what happened on Tuesday are relatively commonplace in many leagues, up to and including high school — and obviously even after. And while this happens on the boys/men’s side too, it is less common and exaggerated.
So even leaving aside the issue of whether the men’s game is better in terms of speed/skill/aggression, the fact is generally the men’s game is more interesting and competitive more often. That puts additional fannies in seats, people watching on TV, and generates greater income, which is reflected in pay. Non-soccer aficionados may pooh-pooh the game’s rhythms and low scoring generally, but the fact is, first round games in the Men’s World Cup are far more interesting and exciting than the female version. So the WNT did themselves no favor in their legal case by making a major shortcoming of the women’s game painfully obvious.
They also did themselves no favors winning over international fans (and a lot of on-the-fence Americans) by their graceless destruction of the Thailand ladies. It’s not just that the WNT ran up the score, it’s that as they did so they acted as if they were heroes doing the impossible, rather than seasoned pros essentially carving up an amateur squad. They screamed, danced, ran around crazily, slid on the ground and the like, after every one of those thirteen goals. They didn’t act like children — they acted worse than children.
June 5, 2019
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
In the National Post, Chris Selley points out some odd blindspots in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:
“The violence the National Inquiry heard amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people,” the report declares. Among the first headlines was one noting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “avoided” using the G-word in his remarks on its findings, settling for “shameful” and “unacceptable.”
The inquiry’s legal analysis concedes it is a novel deployment of the term. It seems far more comfortable alleging a historical genocide against “Indigenous Peoples” that involved specific targeting of women — for example through forced sterilization, which is acknowledged as a genocidal technique in the 1948 UN convention — than it does a genocide against Indigenous women and girls specifically. But the insistence upon the term speaks volumes about this peculiar inquiry’s tortured birth, and about some of its more perplexing recommendations.
Indigenous women have certainly been targets for violence and discrimination in particular ways throughout Canada’s history. Today they suffer disproportionately from violent crime, relative to Indigenous men, in a way that non-Indigenous women do not. The rate of self-reported sexual assault among Indigenous women in the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) was more than triple that of non-Indigenous women. An astonishing 61 per cent of Indigenous women aged 15-25 reported violent victimization in the previous 12 months — nearly six times the rate for Indigenous men the same age.
But if Indigenous victims of violence even today can be said to be casualties of colonialist genocide, then the subset who are by far the most “especially targeted” — which is to say dead — are men. Between 2014 and 2017, Statistics Canada reports there were 139 Indigenous female homicide victims, and 428 Indigenous male victims — three times as many. (Similarly, non-Indigenous men were murdered two-and-a-half times more often than non-Indigenous women.)
[…]
But the obsession with half the Indigenous population leads to some bewildering recommendations, especially on the justice file. On the one hand the report inveighs against mandatory minimum sentences as a cause of Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system, and calls for more robust applications of Gladue principles for all Indigenous offenders, which is to say more alternatives to incarceration; on the other hand it supports legislation that would require judges to punish violent offences more harshly if the victim is an Indigenous woman, and to automatically classify homicides occurring after “a pattern of intimate partner violence and abuse” as first-degree murder. This would almost certainly have the effect of increasing the incarceration rates of Indigenous men and women alike.
June 2, 2019
QotD: Explaining modern female sexuality
I have a theory that for many women, sex, or rather agreeing to have sex is difficult, and especially so for the first time with a new partner. How else to explain the fact that so many women admitted that their first time with a new man was generally experienced in an alcoholic haze? (For those who haven’t been keeping up, the source data is here.) So if confronting herself about her “slutty” behavior (even if the sluttiness is only in her own mind), a woman would like to have an excuse like “Oh, but I was drunk…” and thus can excuse away or justify the indiscretion. Or else, as the original study showed, women can even explain away the drunkenness as just a regular part of the dating process, so therefore it’s okay.
I also believe that this is why so many women have rape fantasies, because “Oh, he forced me to do it…” is likewise an expression that denies the woman’s [shameful] complicity in the act. (Of course, now that it’s become okay to accuse a previous partner with actual rape as part of the excuse, the whole thing has become considerably more sinister, especially as such accusations can take place months or years afterwards and still be considered valid by law enforcement. But for the sake of argument, let’s treat this scenario as but a blip on societal consciousness which will disappear at some point when women regain their sanity. We can only hope.) Certainly, this explains female submissiveness (outside a natural submissive personality anyway), which can be regarded (by women) as a kind of watered-down rape fantasy.
The only time, I think, when self-delusion disappears is when a woman encounters a universal object of female desire, such as a hunky actor or popular musician. Even then, there is a “safety in numbers” excuse — “OMG everybody is crazy about him!” — which makes it okay, or at least, provides a figleaf of an excuse for irresponsibility and sexual licentiousness. You only need a sliver of an excuse, and it will be acceptable, in other words.
Kim du Toit, “Seeking Excuses”, Splendid Isolation, 2017-04-24.
May 25, 2019
Zuby breaks the women’s deadlift record while (briefly) identifying as a woman
Spiked talks to Zuby about his (her?) world-beating achievement:
Men’s and women’s sporting competitions have historically, with a few exceptions, been separate. But in recent years, it has become more common for trans women (biological males) to compete in women’s events. Trans women have competed against biological women in the top flights of several sports, including athletics, cycling, handball, volleyball and weightlifting. Most famously, Rachel McKinnon, born male, won gold in female track cycling at the 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships.
Many argue that male biology confers certain unavoidable advantages and so women could lose out if women’s categories are opened up to biological males. Zuby, a rapper, podcaster and fitness coach, set out to prove this. He has produced several viral videos in which he breaks British women’s weightlifting records while ‘identifying’ as a woman. spiked caught up with him for a chat.
spiked: Why did you decide to identify as a woman to break the women’s deadlift record?
Zuby: I already have a lot of footage of myself working out, including the video of me ‘breaking’ the women’s record. Around the time I posted the video, there were multiple news stories popping up about transgender athletes – technically biological men – competing against biological women. They were winning races and competitions in all kinds of sports. I’d seen this kind of thing springing up over the years, but in a very short period of time it seemed like there were lots of cases
Out of curiosity, I googled what the British women’s powerlifting records actually were and I saw that I could beat all of them. So that video I posted, that wasn’t me lifting my maximum – the women’s record is 215kg and my maximum is 275kg. It’s similar for the bench press. And the women’s squat record was roughly the same as my own personal best. So I tweeted the video:
I keep hearing about how biological men don't have any physical strength advantage over women in 2019…
So watch me DESTROY the British Women's deadlift record without trying.
P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight. Don't be a bigot.
pic.twitter.com/dYRraHCB42
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) February 26, 2019
I think that adding ‘PS I identified as a woman… Don’t be a bigot’ is what made it go viral. I just tweeted it out there. At the time I had about 19,000 followers. I knew it would resonate with my audience. I thought they would find it funny and that would be that. But within 10 minutes the video had over 10,000 views – by the time I went to bed, it had over 300,000.
Everything just blew up and I started getting contacted by news organisations across the globe. It was weird on all levels. I tripled my social-media following.
Most people understood the point and found it funny. A very small percentage got upset and angry at me – but none could articulate why. I stoked the fire a bit by then breaking the bench-press record and doing multiple reps.
May 15, 2019
QotD: Women competing against other women
There are women out there who still see dressing to please a man as some sort of Stockholm syndrome thing — participating in your own (flouncy, spaghetti-strapped) subjugation. So, it’s possible that those advising you “Don’t change for a man!” are just trying to help you be a modern and empowered woman. Of course, one could argue that actually being a modern and empowered woman means you don’t have to dress like you’re hoping to get a call to clean out a sewer line.
Maybe those in your advice coven really do believe they’re acting in your best interest. Maybe. Social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge report that it’s widely believed that men drive the “cultural suppression of female sexuality” — which could include shaming women for how they dress. However, in reviewing the research, they make a persuasive case that it’s primarily women (often without awareness of their motives) who work to “stifle each other’s sexuality.”
This is right in keeping with research on female competition. While men fight openly — “Bring it! I will ruin you!” — women take a sneakier approach. As female competition researcher Tracy Vaillancourt explains it, women fight for their interests using “indirect aggression,” like gossip, mean looks, disparaging remarks, and other underhanded tactics to “reduce the mate value of a rival.” Underhanded tactics? You know — like suggesting you’re selling out womankind if you wear a skirt or winged eyeliner.
Amy Alkon, “Casual Coroner”, The Science Advice Goddess, 2016-09-20.
May 12, 2019
Mechanisms for redressing employment gender imbalances
We’ve often been told that too many men occupy positions of power and influence in the working world, but what would it take to meaningfully address those imbalances?
Equity … is based on the idea that the only certain measure of “equality” is outcome — educational, social, and occupational. The equity-pushers axiomatically assume that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systematic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) must be at play. This assumption has as its corollary the idea that there are perpetrators (the “privileged,” for current or historical reasons) who are unfair beneficiaries of the system or outright perpetrators of prejudice and who must be identified, limited and punished.
[…]
Now it doesn’t seem like mere imagination on my part that all the noise about “patriarchal domination” is not directed at the fact that far more men than women occupy what are essentially trade positions. Nor does it seem unreasonable to point out that these are not particularly high-status jobs, although they may pay comparative well. It is also obvious that none of these occupations and their hierarchies, in isolation, can be thoughtfully considered the kind of oppressive patriarchy supposed to constitute the “West,” and aimed at the domination and exclusion of women. By contrast, the trade occupations are composed of cadres of working men, with difficult and admirable jobs, who keep the staggeringly complex, reliable and essentially miraculous infrastructure of our society functioning through rain and snow and heat and gloom of night and who should be credited gratefully with exactly that.
Let’s assume for a moment that we should aim at equity, nonetheless, and then actually think through what policies would inevitably have to be put in place to establish such a goal. We might begin by eliminating pay scales that differ (hypothetically) by gender. This would mean introducing legislation requiring companies to rank-order their sex representation at each level of the company hierarchy, adjust that to 50:50, and then adjust the pay differential by gender at every rank, so that the desired equity was achieved. Companies could be monitored over a five-year period for improvement. Failure to meet the appropriate targets would be necessarily met with fines for discrimination. In the extreme, it might be necessary to introduce staggered layoffs of men so that the gender equity requirements could be met.
Then there are the much broader social policy implications. We could start by addressing the hypothetical problems with college, university and trade school training. Many companies, compelled to move rapidly toward gender equilibria, will object (and validly) that there are simply not enough qualified female candidates to go around. Changing this would mean implementing radical and rapid changes in the post-secondary education system, implemented in a manner both immediate and draconian — justified by the obvious “fact” that the reason the pipeline problem exists is the absolutely pervasive sexism that characterizes all the programs that train such workers (and the catastrophic and prejudicial failure of the education system that is thereby implied).
The most likely solution — and the one most likely to be attractive to those who believe in such sexism — would be to establish strict quota systems in the relevant institutions to invite and incentivize more female participants, once again in proportion to the disequilibria in enrollment rates. If quotas are not enough, then a system of scholarship or, more radically (and perhaps more fairly) women could be simply paid to enroll in education systems where their sex is badly under-represented. Alternatively, perhaps, men could be asked to pay higher rates of tuition, in some proportion to their over-representation, and the excess used to subsidize the costs of under-represented females.
May 8, 2019
May 6, 2019
“Casual sex” isn’t actually all that casual to most women
Suzanne Venker makes the case that the innate physiological and psychological differences between men and women accounting for most women’s much lower comfort level with “no-strings-attached” sexual encounters:
The differences between women and men are vast, and in no domain is this more true than sex. Our bodies alone prove this in spades! If one body carries life and the other doesn’t, this clearly makes the sexes unequal. Newsflash: The birth control pill doesn’t change a woman’s inherent nature — it merely gives the illusion she’s just like a man.
She’s not. A woman’s need to bond with a man, to feel safe and loved and committed to, is crucial for her to feel secure enough to let down her guard sexually. That’s why she feels uneasy about one-night stands. Her body won’t cooperate.
It’s also why men, not women, are the ones who gain the most from casual sex. (To be clear: I’m not arguing that it’s “OK” or even good for men to sleep around; I’m simply pointing out why, from a physical standpoint, they aren’t angst-ridden when they do.)
Women just aren’t designed for one-night stands. What do we think all those films and television programs are about where the man and the woman have sex and he doesn’t call her the next day, so she thinks he’s a jerk? If women were “just like men,” this would never be a theme in the first place.
When it comes to uncommitted sex, women are playing a game they can’t win. Feeling “used,” or like a “booty call,” is the most common experience of women who engage in casual sex, or “hookups,” whether they’re teenagers or grown women. That just isn’t the case for most men.
Every American over the age of 40 knows this to be true, and adults in schools and at home are failing our youth by not passing this wisdom along — particularly when young people are bombarded with the lie that casual sex is empowering.
May 3, 2019
The power of the patriarchy
As we are often told, men have distinct advantages in modern society that women are still struggling to achieve for themselves. Daphne Patai doesn’t seem to have got the memo, however:
In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the job, are not required to go to war, take better care of their health, and for these reasons and many others enjoy a lifespan significantly longer than that of men.
In this society, men use their physical strength, when necessary, on women’s behalf. Women claim to be equal partners when that suits them and claim to be entitled to special consideration when that suits them. They insist on autonomy in maintaining or aborting pregnancies, but at the same time, they determine the fathers’ duties-and rights, if any. Women claim child support. They can either demand or impede fathers’ continuing involvement with their offspring, as the women see fit. The result is that women have advantages over men in child custody suits, just as they have learned to use charges of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Though dozens of studies show that women, by their own account, initiate violence against their domestic partners as often as (if not more often than) men, and cause as much injury when weapons are involved, somehow the social mythologies of this country keep that fact from gaining broad public attention, let alone credence.
But worst of all, in terms of the interactions of daily life, are women’s emotional demands on men. At home, men routinely sit through harangues that demonstrate women’s greater verbal skills and emotional agility. Men, inarticulate, try to figure out what is required of them in a given situation. Not by accident, verbal therapies in this society archetypically began with men listening and women speaking. Even as little boys, males learn to be in awe of girls’ verbal fluency. The feeling of ineptness, of being no match for females at the verbal and emotional level, is the common inheritance of all but a few exceptional males.
The matriarchy here described, structured to protect women’s interests as against men’s (and, ironically, having conned men into defending such a set up) puts a premium on women’s special social and emotional skills. Everywhere, women engage men and one another in personal conversation, offering and receiving disclosures, demanding commiseration, giving advice, spreading censure. Men, trained to keep to their workhorse style, are uncomfortably cornered by women, in the workplace, and at home, demanding that they speak from the heart. When asked “How are you?” women give a detailed and precise accounting. In offices, they spend valuable time discussing personal matters.
QotD: The key difference between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged
Reading Goddess of the Market much later in life, I finally met the woman behind the philosophy. Rand doesn’t start out so bad, at least in Burns’ telling. Who can blame the Russian-born Rand, watching helplessly as Communists seize her father’s pharmacy, for growing up to be a furious foe of collectivism (and realpolitik compromise), whose übermensch heroes fight back against the “parasites, moochers and looters“, and win?
Yet the sprinklings of patriotic, almost Capra-esque populism that softened The Fountainhead’s unavoidable elitism are absent entirely in her follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, replaced by an almost hallucinatory misanthropy. What happened, Burns wonders, in the intervening thirteen years?
The answer seems obvious to me now, rereading her book in my 50s:
Menopause.
Ayn Rand, the avatar of adolescence, was going through The Change.
“Now in her forties,” writes Burns of the author between novels, “Rand struggled with her weight, her moodiness, her habitual fatigue.” Already dependent on the crazy-making Benzedrine she’d been popping to help her meet her Fountainhead deadline, Rand was hurtling toward what we’d now recognize as a midlife crisis.
Enter Nathaniel Blumenthal. He’d begun corresponding with Rand while still a high school student, but unlike her thousands of other teenage fans, he’d even memorized The Fountainhead. At UCLA, he’d coauthored a letter to the campus paper, declaring that a professor with suspected Communist ties who’d killed himself deserved “to be condemned to hell.” Then he changed his surname to “Branden” because it had “Rand” in it.
So, basically a nut.
Kathy Shaidle, “The Danger of Ayn Rand”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-04-18.
April 29, 2019
Queen Nzinga – Rise of a Legend – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 27 Apr 2019Nzinga didn’t start out as a queen — but when she saw how incompetently her brother was running affairs in Ndongo (what would become Angola), she took advantage of his decision to send her to negotiate with the Portuguese — much to his grief later. Nzinga established herself against colonial forces and did not budge.
Queen Nzinga of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms, a scion of the Mbundu people, will spend forty years standing between the Portuguese and their ambitions, using everything at her command — her cunning, her ruthless intellect, her military acumen, even the bodies of her people — whatever it takes to succeed.
Thanks again to Cassandra Khaw for guest-writing this mini-series!
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April 26, 2019
“Rose Wilder Lane may be the most controversial woman nobody’s ever heard of”
NPR‘s Etelka Lehoczky interviews cartoonist Peter Bagge about his new book, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story:
Journalist, novelist and polemicist Rose Wilder Lane may be the most controversial woman nobody’s ever heard of. Today she’s known primarily for her turbulent collaboration with her famous mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the Little House on the Prairie books. But Lane’s story doesn’t end there — far from it. A fire-breathing libertarian, she denounced Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and grew her own food to protest World War II rationing. From the 1920s through the 1960s she wrote one of the first libertarian manifestos (1943’s The Discovery of Freedom), hobnobbed with Ayn Rand, penned six novels and amassed a 100-plus-page FBI file. In Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, cartoonist Peter Bagge illustrates Lane’s hurly-burly life in his own inimitable way.
Lane isn’t the first controversial woman Bagge has chosen to write (and draw) about — he published books on Margaret Sanger in 2013 and Zora Neale Hurston in 2017. In an email conversation, he told me why he decided to focus on these particular women.
“I was ready to do a book-length comic-book biography, and while reading about people’s life stories I noticed there were women during the years around the world wars who pretty much did exactly what they wanted,” he says. “It struck a note in me just because there’s been — and it isn’t just with women, it’s with everybody these days — this obsession with safety. You know, ‘I don’t feel safe,’ or, ‘Because of how I identify myself, there are people trying to hold me back.’ These women never, ever stopped for a single second in doing what they wanted to do. In the back of my mind I thought this would be something of a demonstration of how people could be and — I would argue — should be.”
