Quotulatiousness

October 19, 2024

Changing gender balance in occupations and in higher education

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter ruminates on the likely downward path of many institutes of higher learning as current gender balance changes continue:

An occupation that flips from male to female dominance invariably suffers not only diminished prestige, but also a decline in wages … which, once again, makes sense in the context of sexual psychology. A man’s income is one element (and a big element) of a woman’s attraction to him, but the reverse is not true; if women are paid less, this does not really hurt their value in the sexual marketplace at all, and so they will push back against it much less than men would. This is probably what lies behind the tendency of women to be less forceful when negotiating salaries.

To the point: ever since the 1970s, women have overtaken and gradually eclipsed men within higher education. There is a gap in enrolment, consistent across racial groups:

[…]

Across all programs, at all academic levels, American universities recently reached the threshold of 60% of the student body being female.

This will be a disaster for academia.

Indeed, it’s already a disaster. About a year ago, I analyzed a Gallup poll which revealed that the confidence of the American public in the trustworthiness and overall value of the academic sector had declined precipitously over the course of the 2010s.

In that article I examined several factors contributing to this DIEing confidence in the academy: the explosive growth in tuition fees, even as continuous relaxation of academic standards dilutes the actual value of a degree; the deplorable state of scholarship, with endless revelations of fraud, a seemingly irresolvable replication crisis, and the torrent of psychotic nonsense that passes for ‘research’; the increasingly frigid social environment enforced by the armies of overpaid, sour-faced administrators. Almost all of these, however, are related in some way or another to the feminization of academia.

And it is probably going to get much worse before it gets better.

As discussed in this recent article by Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing, research on male flight indicates that a 60% female composition represents the tipping point beyond which men perceive an environment as feminine, which then leads to a precipitous decline in male participation. Davis appears to be some sort of feminist3, but I want you to look past that and give her article a read; it is very thorough, well-researched, and thought-provoking (and also the direct inspiration for this article).

[…]

Universities are belatedly starting to notice that male enrolment is dropping fast, particularly among white men (I wonder why…), and are starting to make noises about maybe thinking about perhaps looking into ways of trying to recruit and retain more men (albeit, not specifically white men).

This seems unlikely to succeed.

Even if universities are successful in setting up programs to increase male recruitment, they will be fighting an uphill battle against the sexual perception that has already set in. Once something is coded as being a feminine hobby, it is extremely difficult to change that code. While it’s very easy to list examples of professions that have switched from male to female dominance, off the top of my head I have a hard time coming up with examples of the reverse. This suggests that female dominance tends to be sticky. There’s no reason to expect this will be any different with academia, either within individual programs, or across the sector as a whole.

This is an entirely different problem from the one faced by female entryism. In the initial phases of female entry, the primary difficulty faced by women is that it is simply more difficult to compete with men – in the case of athletics, effectively impossible. Women must therefore either work extremely hard, or the work must be made easier for them. In practice, since the 1970s we’ve seen both of these, with “working twice as hard as the boys” predominating in the early years, and assistance from special programs predominating later on.

By contrast, the central obstacle faced by anyone trying to attract men to a female-dominated environment is that men are deeply reluctant to enter. As a third of young men told Pew when asked why they didn’t attend or complete university: they just didn’t want to. It isn’t because they can’t compete with women. They can, usually with ease, but competition is pointless because it will gain them nothing. Special programs to assist men are beside the point; if anything, they work against you, because the implicit message with any special program for men is that they need help to compete with women … thereby making competition even more pointless. “You beat a girl but you needed help to do it”, is going to impress the girls even less than beating a girl unaided.

October 17, 2024

Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Ancient Sparta

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published Jun 26, 2024

Were the Spartans actually the best warriors? Did they really throw their babies off cliffs? Did they … HUNT their slaves? Ancient Greek historian Roel Konijnendijk answers your most googled questions about the Spartans.

00:00 Intro
00:35 When did the Spartans live?
01:00 Were the Spartans Greek?
01:30 Were the Spartans a professional army?
03:00 Were the Spartans the best warriors?
04:46 How did the Spartans train?
06:43 Did the Spartans throw babies off cliffs?
07:42 Did the Spartans practise eugenics?
09:55 Did the Spartans steal food?
10:21 Were the Spartans vegetarian?
11:18 Were the Spartans better than Athens?
12:54 Did Sparta have a navy?
13:15 Why didn’t Sparta have walls?
14:22 Did the Spartans hunt their slaves?
15:30 Did the Spartans get their slaves drunk?
16:42 Did the Spartans have a king?
17:57 Was Sparta a democracy?
19:13 Why did the Spartans fight at Thermopylae?
19:45 Why did the Spartans only send 300?
21:30 Were the Spartans betrayed at Thermopylae?
22:42 Did the Spartans beat the Persians?
24:00 Were the Spartans muscular?
25:40 Did the Spartans have long hair?
26:25 Did the Spartans have same sex relationships?
28:27 Were the Spartan women equal?
(more…)

October 5, 2024

David Friedman on falling birth rates

Filed under: Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the west, generally speaking, female employment and economic power has been rising and birth rates have been falling, except among religious minorities. David Friedman provides some explanations:

“Tetra Pak® – Housewife at the dairy counter in a Swedish shop” by Tetra Pak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

One possible explanation is changes in norms and legal rules that make mate search more difficult. An example is a norm against dating fellow employees and a stronger norm against dating someone who has authority over you or you have some authority over.

For many people, their job is the only context in which they routinely interact with lots of other people, the best environment for mate search. The interaction often provides a way of evaluating someone for characteristics such as honesty and competence as well as compatibility, much harder to do in the context of dating, harder still in computer dating. It works better for people who not only are fellow employees but are actually working together, which often means one just above the other in the office hierarchy.

The same issue arises in the university context. Undergraduates are free to date each other — mate search is arguably one of the main functions of college. Junior faculty members, likely to be unmarried, are commonly not supposed to date students, even students not taking classes from them, certainly not students who are. I am not sure what current norms are for graduate student/undergraduate interaction, expect graduate student/faculty romance to be at least somewhat frowned upon, especially if the faculty member has some authority over the student which is likely if they are in the same field, the context in which they are most likely to get know each other.

Another cause for declining birth rates might be changing norms of courtship. I have not been part of that market for over forty years but I gather from what younger people say online that many men believe that making advances that do not turn out to be wanted is not only embarrassing but dangerous, that they risk being accused of harassment or some related offense. In the student context, many men believe that if a romantic partner changes her mind she can get him into a great deal of trouble by taking advantage of a college disciplinary process heavily biased against men. I do not know to what degree that belief is true but many men believe it is, which could be expected to discourage courtship.

Along related lines:

    Also, when I was working for a big time international consulting firm, they tried to come out with a formal rule that said that you were allowed to ask out a co-worker, but only one time. If they said no, you could never ask again. Apparently the Italians howled with laughter and insisted that if this rule was enforced in Italy, no one would ever have kids, as the typical Italian courtship approach involves like a dozen rejections before ultimately the woman finally gives in. (GoneAnon)

That cannot be the full explanation since Italian birth rates are down too. Since birth rates are down in all or almost all developed countries and many less developed ones, it is worth investigating how widespread the relevant norms are.

Housewife Becoming a Low Status Profession

For a very long time, the default system for producing and rearing children was a married couple, with the husband producing income and the wife in charge of running the household and rearing the children. Over recent decades, the woman’s role in that division of labor has become a low status activity, lower status than making a living in the marketplace, much lower than professional success.1 Being an unmarried adult woman used to be, in most contexts, low status, on the presumption that if she could have caught a man she would have. At present, in much of western society, that has reversed — being a married housewife is lower status than being an employed single woman.

    …arguments from the stay-at-home moms I know, who say people are constantly giving them grief about it, and who are often looking for some part-time make-work job they can take just so people will stop giving them grief about being a stay-at-home mother (Scott Alexander)

It is possible for a married woman to have both a job and children or for an unmarried woman to have children, but the former is more difficult than for a full time housewife, the latter much more difficult.

October 1, 2024

TikTok’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The more we experience the joys of widespread social media, the more people seem to discover ways to bring attention to themselves for genuine or dishonest reasons. Freddie deBoer looks at the DID-sufferers on TikTok and assesses the chance that such a rare disorder can have had so many newly discovered sufferers:

Let me turn back to the TikTok “systems”, the strange, maybe-shrinking world of adolescent women on social media who pretend to have an incredibly rare and debilitating mental illness and treat it as a fun and quirky alternative lifestyle.

This piece from The Verge, though a little misguided, is a good jumping off point for this topic. The basic story is pretty simple. Dissociative identity disorder (DID), long referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a remarkably controversial diagnosis that has long captured the public imagination. It’s not hard to see why; the idea of someone who switches from one personality to the other is lurid and dramatic, making it easy fodder for television. (The number of episodes of legal dramas about DID is immense.) The condition also invites a particularly stark consideration of the question of individual agency and culpability for bad deeds. As you can imagine, pretending to have “alters” can be very convenient; a notorious case involved an embezzler whose only defense for his crimes was that he had multiple personalities and one of them stole the money. There have long been researchers and clinicians in psychiatry who doubt the very existence of DID, and even among those who are friendlier to the concept, the disorder is known to be incredibly rare. Many prominent cases of DID have proven in time to be fraudulent. The most famous American case, that of “Sybil“, was particularly tragic. The woman who supposedly suffered from the disorder, who faced a childhood of abuse and neglect, would go on to admit to her psychiatrist that she had made the alternate personalities up. (We know because we have the letters.) But the doctor, who had been made wealthy and famous thanks to her work with Sybil, threatened to withdrawn her financial support if Sybil did not recant that confession. Having no other choice, she did.

What DID TikTok asks us to believe is that, in the span of maybe half a decade, tens of thousands of adolescent women developed DID, an exceedingly rare disorder marked by symptoms entirely unlike those on your For You page. The Verge article, written by Jessica Lucas, is typical of the media’s take on this issue, to the degree that they’ve written about it at all: relentlessly sympathetic to the DID TikTok adolescents even when grudgingly admitting that there’s a lot of fakery. And admit that she does, as it would be essentially impossible to pretend otherwise. Even the wokest wokie couldn’t help but look at this shit and conclude that a lot of it is bullshit.

The cases of DID that are considered to be particularly valid or believable are very few, and the people who have suffered in them have been people living absolutely wasted lives, lives filled with abuse and instability and addiction and misery; the overwhelming majority of DID TikTokers appear to be living perfectly stable and successful adolescent lives. Those with DID have almost never professed to be able to switch from one alter to another on command; many DID TikTokers playact that exact behavior for their viewers. Alters are notoriously uncooperative towards each other; TikTok DID videos routinely feature alters happily participating in “roll calls” in which they switch from one identity to the next, conveniently timed for the creation of #content. (The DID people claim that really they’re just opportunistically capturing organic switches, but a) it’s very clear that many of these videos are filmed in one day and b) that would still require alters to willingly turn the camera on and get into the costume etc, which is not at all how alters have traditionally acted.) In the DID literature alters are almost never aware of what’s happening when another alter is “fronting”; on DID TikTok they almost universally are, justified with the convenient idea of “co-consciousness,” which is one of many evolutions of DID these people have implemented to allow their little pageant to continue. Most people with DID diagnosis, historically, have not been photogenic women with an interest in getting more followers. I could go on.

Lucas’s piece is particularly useful for the remarkable, remarkably depressing story of Dr. Matthew Robinson, a clinician and researcher from Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital. (The site of Girl, Interrupted, among other things.) Like a lot of people in psychiatry, Robinson noted with alarm that his hospital had “been inundated with referrals and requests from schools, parents, and our own adolescent treatment and testing services to assess for symptoms of what [patients] call DID.” He proceeded to discuss the difficulties this sort of situation provokes in an already-overtaxed mental health system, and spoke frankly about the fact that a considerable number of the people presenting with this disorder obviously do not in fact have it. He stated plainly that which many are too circumspect to say, which is that these TikTokers are faking. The consequence, of saying this in a lecture with his professional peers, was review-bombing of the hospital online, threats, a call to have Robinson’s medical license revoked, and sufficient harassment that McLean pulled online videos of the lecture. The online mob engaged in the typical social justice-vocabulary freakout campaign, McLean folded, and as stated in the piece, most researchers are now too scared to publicly comment on this absurd situation. If someone tells you that there is no such thing as a social justice-inflected cancellation campaign, you can point to this exact scenario and to the vicious and vengeful disability rights movement in general.

To be clear, I think that probably literally zero of the people who perform DID on TikTok have the disorder. Zero. I imagine that a significant portion of them have deluded themselves into thinking they do. But I’m quite confident that most of them are very well aware that they’re faking.

September 30, 2024

British and Australian schools are teaching boys to hate themselves

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo discusses the sort of things British and Australian boys are being taught about themselves and their role in society:

For years, feminists in the English-speaking school systems have done everything they can to psychologically destroy a generation of boys, calling their masculinity “problematic”, “hegemonic” and “toxic”.

At their least malign, feminist teachers have made it clear to boys that their perspectives and experiences aren’t as important as those of girls. Many businesses and organizations support programs aimed at girls’ academic success; there are no equivalent programs for boys. When study after study shows boys lagging behind girls in school, many feminists don’t even pretend to care, blaming the boys, as did Australian feminist Jane Caro, for their alleged privilege. Such ideologues continue to call for more feminist teaching, and moreover take direct aim at schoolboys’ maleness in what scholar Paul Nathanson has identified as a form of identity harassment, a pervasive psychological assault that creates doubt, shame, and alienation.

Under the feminist model, boys learn from a young age that their sex is responsible for violence and other serious harms, and that they must take personal responsibility for it. A few years ago, it came to light that the female principal of an Australian school thought it a good idea to hold an assembly in which the boys were to apologize for male misbehavior to the girl next to them. Naturally, no girls are ever expected to apologize to boys for the misdeeds of the female sex.

Calls regularly circulate, as in the West Australian‘s “How We Stop This Kid Becoming a Monster“, for teaching to address the problem of predatory masculinity. Unless the feminist deprogrammers can get to work in the early years, we’re told, the boys will succumb to their inner monster. Boys learn that they can hurt girls and women even without meaning to, just by looking at them or holding traditional views. As we’ll see, any boy who objects to his own vilification will learn that objecting itself is a technique of domination.

Teaching Toxic Masculinity

A recent report on UK schools provided a glimpse into what feminist instruction looks like, revealing that terms such as “hegemonic masculinity” and “toxic masculinity”, until a decade ago part of the radical feminist fringe, are now in the mainstream of pedagogy even in the lower grades.

The Family Education Trust surveyed materials used by UK schools in their sex education classes. Out of 197 schools that responded to a request for information (more than 100 did not respond), 62 schools confirmed that they were teaching about toxic masculinity. 10 schools even admitted to teaching that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society“. (One would be relieved to hear that the principals of such schools and all participating teachers were immediately sanctioned, or at least told to stop such claptrap — but of course such has not occurred.)

One slide from a lesson on toxic masculinity stated that while “masculinity in and of itself is not necessarily a harmful thing […] the way that masculinity is traditionally defined in society can be problematic”. Some of the materials don’t even make sense, as for example the statement that traditional masculine traits “can be limiting for women, girls and other people who don’t identify as men, who are not expected to display these traits”.

September 28, 2024

The rise in niqab and hijab use among Muslim women in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Conservative Woman, Gillian Dymond discusses the cultural significance of Muslim women’s distinctive styles of clothing in modern Britain:

AS I WENT to the shops the other day in Whitley Bay, a strangely incongruous figure passed me. It was a woman in a niqab. In a recent article on his Substack, Joshua Trevino wrote an elegy for London: “I had not seen this many women in hijabs since a brief stint working in Jordan decades ago, and I had never seen this many women in a niqab, ever.” Up here on the north-east coast of England, it is different. True, even in Newcastle hijabs proliferate, but I had never before encountered the full niqab there, let alone in the small seaside town where I live.

The Government, I understand, are considering bringing in a law which would criminalise Islamophobia, as defined by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims. “Islamophobia,” this states, “is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness“.

This, as Andrew Doyle points out here, is nonsense, incorrectly conflating a belief-system with racial identity. Let’s be accurate: Muslims can be of any race, English included. Moreover, different Muslims exhibit different kinds and degrees of “Muslimness”, from the Sufi, mystically seeking the divine, through the undogmatic, many of whom happily dispense with headscarf and hijab and the more bellicose interpretations of the holy books, to the kind of male fanatic who, on seeing a female co-religionist wearing Western dress and sporting lipstick, seizes her by the hair and slams her head on the dashboard of the car she has been shamelessly driving.

There is a variety of “Muslimness”, in short, whose intolerance cannot be tolerated in a tolerant society, and whose existence requires not protective legislation, but public acknowledgement of its incompatibility with the British way of life.

I do not know how the woman whose eyes peered through the slit in her black draperies felt about parading her glaring lack of integration on a street in north-east England. Did she go proudly and self-righteously into the alien throng, or had she been forced out of the house, heart pounding, to run the gauntlet of raised eyebrows in her eye-catching gear? What did she think of the women around her, hair and faces exposed, arms bare to soak up every last ray of autumnal sunshine, some of them, fresh from the beach, wearing shorts? Did she despise their “immodesty”? Did she envy them?

Who knows? There can be no casual breaching of the niqab’s anonymity, no spontaneous communication, when confronted by a garment which puts up barricades against the usual signals and responses of easy human intercourse.

On the other hand, the mentality of the men who insist on enveloping their wives and daughters head-to-foot in long black shrouds before they are allowed out in public is very clear indeed. These men have been taught to view women as assets to be protected, and they no doubt believe that the heavy-handed protection they impose is necessary, because they take it for granted that no man is able, or should be expected, to control his sexual urges in the face of female allurements. As for any woman who does not remain decently covered in deference to the male’s helpless susceptibility, she should know the consequences, and deserves everything coming to her.

August 22, 2024

QotD: The changing role of the Medieval housewife in England

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The transition may also have driven broader cultural shifts. In 1523, Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandrie gave a list of a housewife’s jobs (“What warkes a wyfe shulde do in generall”) that included the household’s cooking, cleaning, laundry, and childcare, all of which are typically part of modern housewifery, but also milking cows, taking grain to the miller, malting barley, making butter and cheese, raising pigs and poultry, gardening, growing hemp and flax and then spinning it, weaving, winnowing grain, making hay, cutting grain, selling her produce at market — and, as necessary, helping her husband to fill the dungcart, plow the fields, or load hay. Roles were still highly gendered, but compared to eighteenth and nineteenth century household manuals this is a remarkable amount of time spent out of the house, and the difference holds even when you compare the work hired maids were doing in both periods. Around the time of the advent of coal, though, our descriptions of women’s work increasingly portray it as contained within the walls of the home — or, at most, in the dairy or the poultry yard. Of course social transformations are never monocausal, and the increasing specialization and mechanization that moved some production out of the household probably nudged things along, but Goodman suggests that “the additional demands of running a coal-fired household might have also helped push the idea that a woman’s place is within the home”. After all, if your cleaning takes twice as long, there’s simply less time available for all that agricultural labor and small-scale commerce.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.

August 20, 2024

Folk tale fictions about childbirth in “traditional cultures”

Filed under: Books, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jane Psmith finds that “everyone” has been doing certain “traditional” things during and after childbirth that she somehow wasn’t informed about until just a short while ago:

I just had a baby, which means I have once again been immersed in a sea of advice about how “traditional cultures” do things. And miraculously, every single kid, I discover some new practice I’ve never heard of but that apparently just everyone did until about five minutes ago. This time it was vaginal steaming. (Don’t Google, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.)

Which cultures, exactly? Oh, you know … the traditional ones, the ones whose folk wisdom is untrammeled by Western medicalization, where the pregnant woman is treated to the most nutritious foods, birth is a joyous event surrounded by supportive kin, the new mother puts her baby to the breast the minute he’s born, and she’s waited on hand-and-foot in bed for a month afterwards. So, you know, not the Ngongo of central Africa, who forbid women from eating meat, or the Netsilik Inuit or !Kung, both of whom send laboring women off to give birth in silent isolation, or any of the peoples from Fiji to northern Alberta who delay nursing for days … In fact, you might be excused if you began to suspect that the real measure of how “traditional” a culture is boils down to how much it resembles the practices of crunchy WEIRD people. You might even, if you had a nasty suspicious frame of mind, conclude that all this discussion of “traditional cultures” is just a disguised way of asserting our own preferences.

None of which is actually unique to the babies. (I’ve written about the babies before.) It’s not even unique to our era. The idea that we have been corrupted by civilization, that more primitive societies lead purer, nobler, more harmonious lives and enjoy access to truths and virtues we have lost, goes back millennia.1 And so, naturally, does the practice of using the supposed superiority of those other cultures as clubs to beat our own. Tacitus’ Germania, for instance, is a fun read if borderline useless as a source on the actual Germanic tribes — but it’s a wonderful guide to the angst of the early Empire and the pervasive fear that greed, luxury, and ambition had replaced the nobility, valor, and honor that had once characterized the Romans. Nowadays, of course, no one writes about the barbarians’ fides and virtus; instead you’ll get paeans to their idyllic existence lived in harmony with nature, their peaceful sense of community, and probably their joyful embrace of gender and sexual diversity. But either way, most of the books about small-scale societies are actually books about us and what the people writing the books think we lack.

Even professional anthropologists tend to assume that small-scale (this is a polite way of saying “primitive”) societies are more satisfying, meaningful, and fulfilling than complex ones. But in their case it goes hand in hand with another, allied assumption: that these societies have developed beliefs, practices, and institutions that work well for them. After all, the thinking goes, we know that people change their tools and their behavior when their environment changes, abandoning anything that no longer serves their needs and adopting new ways of life. Therefore, anything they haven’t abandoned must be somehow adaptive. Sure, these “primal communities” might do things that seem odd to us — things like torture, infanticide, ceremonial rape, cannibalism, and so forth — but they must serve some useful function or they wouldn’t have persisted. Thus, for example, the classic ethnography of the Navajo argues that their overwhelming fear of witchcraft, which led to pervasive anxiety, a hypochondriacal obsession with magical curing rituals, and of course regular violence perpetrated against suspected witches, actually had great benefits because it allowed the Navajo direct their stress and hostility at marginal members of the community and “keep the core of the society solid”.

The problem with this framework becomes obvious as soon as you mentally translate from some strange foreigners with funny (or no) clothes to, say, a business in the industrialized world. (Which can easily be larger than the kind of small-scale society that interests anthropologists.) No one would ever say, “Well, sure, the leadership of this company allows their mediocre employees to bully their highly productive peers out of the department so they do better in the stack ranking, but the company hasn’t gone bankrupt so it must be a savvy business move. Probably the solidarity created by banding together to surreptitiously delete someone else’s code enhances productivity more than losing a 10x engineer detracts from it …” But this is exactly what anthropologists (professional and armchair) are tempted to do when they set out to understand and explain another culture. Yes, sometimes apparently bizarre behavior contains a deep and hidden wisdom, but sometimes it’s just messed up.

That’s the case the late UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton set out to make in Sick Societies: that some primitive societies are not actually happy and fulfilled, that some of their beliefs and institutions are inadequate or actively harmful to their people, and that some of them are frankly on their way to cultural suicide. The mere fact that people keep doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually working well for them, but just as the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, your society can stay dysfunctional longer than you can stay alive.

    1. At least in the Occident. My informant tells me that the Noble Savage is a less common trope in, say, China. Maybe the Blue savages are just less noble.

August 11, 2024

Tears are still a powerful weapon for female politicians

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo on the tactic available to — and resorted to frequently — only females in politics, turning on the waterworks to generate sympathy and support:

Recently, a friend sent me a news article that illustrates, in small, the world of Anglophone politics, in which notions of what is owed to women, who are understood to be far more sensitive and fragile than men, operate alongside stern interdictions against stating that women are in any manner unsuited for strenuous, high stress roles.

Last week, an ABC News report detailed years-old allegations against a former aide to Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania who was, at the time of the article, one of Kamala Harris’s touted VP possibilities (she has since chosen Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota). Shapiro’s former staffer, Mike Vereb, who resigned in 2023 over a sexual harassment allegation, is said to have brought a woman to tears in 2018 with threats made over the phone (“You will be less than nothing by the time Josh and I get done with you”, he is alleged to have said).

The woman, who runs an advocacy group, was left “weeping and in shock standing alone in a parking lot”. She did not report the alleged incident until she heard about the aide’s resignation five years later.

[…]

With the staffer long gone from Shapiro’s administration, the story had legs only because it was about a man who made a woman cry.

The problem is that women do cry rather frequently in politics. And complain. And perform their sensitivity to criticisms, monikers, crude jokes, the faux terror of J6, and bantering innuendo. Far too often such women make politics about them as women and about the trouble men allegedly cause them.

Such was the case with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who earned plaudits from feminists in 2012 for a fury-filled speech in the House of Representatives about sexism, in which she accused the opposition leader of misogyny for a number of statements he’d made that were not at all misogynistic, including that women were likely under-represented in Australian institutions of power because men were “more adapted to exercise authority”. Gillard also said she was “personally offended” (a more serious state of affairs, one assumes, than simply being “offended”) by the opposition leader’s contention that abortion was “the easy way out”. (The text of her speech is here.) “Julia Gillard’s Attack on Sexism Hailed as Turning Point for Australian Women” ran one enthusiastic headline. And perhaps it was, signaling the point at which women in politics stopped thinking they should accommodate themselves to the rigors of public life, and decided that politicians must instead accommodate themselves to the rigors of women’s demands.

Even seemingly tough-as-nails Hillary Clinton has been allowed to go from interview to interview revisiting the now years-old indignity of her election loss in 2016, like a once-popular debutante who can’t believe she didn’t make the cheerleading squad. No man would ever be given such a prolonged pity party. Having contended for years that it was misogyny that prevented her from beating Donald Trump, she more recently pointed her finger at female voters’ failures of confidence: “They left me [in the final days of the campaign] because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect“, she explained in May, 2024. No one seems to have informed Clinton that nothing reveals her crippling unsuitability for leadership than her embarrassing refusal to stop feeling sorry for herself.

And she is, alas, far from unique. Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, sat and sobbed at last winter’s Covid-19 Inquiry in Edinburgh, deflecting critical questions about her government’s actions during the pandemic by proclaiming that she would carry the impact of them for as long as she lived. Forget the thousands of Scots who suffered or even died because of those decisions: the woman in charge was the one in need of compassion. Sturgeon had previously made a career of complaining about the sexism that allegedly put obstacles in the way of female politicians. Her focus on her own emotional discomfort at the Covid inquiry did more than any naysayers to indict the feminine style. How refreshing if either of these women could simply accept responsibility for their failures.

August 5, 2024

Current culture is failing teenage girls very badly

Filed under: Books, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Kat Rosenfield contrasts her own teenage years with the situation faced by teenage girls today:

The Genius of Judy, a new book by Rachelle Bergstein, suggests that I was not alone in believing that Judy Blume was the ultimate source of knowledge on all things teenage girl. “Her characters and stories were more than just entertainment,” Bergstein writes. “They were a road map.”

Blume’s stories offered a powerful counterpoint to a culture that sought to limit women’s choices by surrounding their bodies and sexuality with shame and stigma — a culture that treated the lives of teenage girls as frivolous and insignificant. She spoke frankly and authentically not only of girls’ struggles but also, crucially, of their survival. She offered a glimpse of how beautiful life could be on the other side.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret at once demystifies the bodily changes associated with the onset of puberty, and approaches the idea of becoming a woman with a sense of wonder. Her 1981 novel Tiger Eyes tackles loss, grief, and family upheaval — all of which shape its main character’s identity, but do not shatter her. Forever (1975) dares to tell a story about two teenagers who fall in love and have sex — responsibly, and without dire consequences.

Blume “taught young readers”, writes Bergstein, “that we were allowed to expect more from our lives than the women who came before us”.

I was struck, reading Bergstein’s book, that today’s youth may need Blume even more desperately than my cohort did. If the path to womanhood was once too taboo to talk about, today’s cultural landscape is flooded with narratives that make the entire enterprise seem like an unmitigated horror.

Puberty, rather than the exciting sign of maturity experienced by Margaret and her friends, has become a battleground for a gender ideology whose first response to a pubescent girl’s anxiety about her changing body is to suggest that perhaps she’s not really a girl. Meanwhile, the one-two punch of #MeToo followed by the fall of Roe v. Wade has fueled a consensus that to be a woman is to exist in a nightmarish state of perpetual physical vulnerability — if not to the torments of pregnancy and childbirth, then to the predations of men, who are of course written off en masse as “trash” by the pop-feminist commentariat. Dating and sex, in particular, are positioned as a minefield of traumas best avoided in favor of celibacy, which has been rebranded by Zoomers as a trendy new practice known as going “boy sober“.

The result is an entire generation of girls who are not just terrified of becoming women, but actively distressed by narratives that depict the process in a realistic way. One of the more interesting observations from The Genius of Judy is that Gen Z seems to have particular trouble with Blume’s Forever, in which the protagonist, Katherine, is wrestling with the question of when and whether to have sex, while her boyfriend Michael, who is not a virgin, is extremely and vocally in favor. Bergstein describes watching a TikTok in which the young female poster rants that “Michael is like a predator. This man pressures her so many times into sexual intercourse that I feel like she eventually just gave in.”

Bergstein sees this as a sign Forever hasn’t aged well. To me, it is a sign of how poorly today’s teenagers have been served by contemporary sexual discourse, and how badly they need Blume’s countervailing narrative. Forever articulates an important set of truths: that every girl approaches sexual readiness on her own timeline, that the desires of two individual people are rarely in perfect alignment, and that many, if not most couples have to negotiate that misalignment in the normal course of a relationship. In Forever, as in the real world, a girl can be at once desirous of sex but not yet ready for it — until, one day, she decides she is.

Having been a teenage boy in the 1970s, while I thought it was a bad suite of experiences (afterwards, with a bit of life perspective: at the time I thought it was hellish), it seems that teenage girls today are even worse off.

August 2, 2024

46-second beatdown in Paris – Olympic hypocrisy on full, disgusting display

Filed under: France, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to the Olympic boxing travesty of a male boxer being in the ring with a female boxer:

I have mixed feelings about the beatdown of Angela Carini at the Olympics and the feminists complaining that she should never have been put in the ring with a biological male.

On the one hand, yes, it’s disgusting that a man pretending to be a woman battered Carini to the point where she threw the match in justified fear of being killed in the ring.

On the other hand, this travesty seems like such an obvious consequence of feminist doctrine and the feminization of politics that I think most of the women (and “male feminist” allies) decrying it should shut the hell up until they seriously rethink their premises.

It wasn’t “the patriarchy” or defenders of traditional gender roles pushing for this. It was a consequence of decades of insistence that men and women are interchangeable, that gender roles are “socially constructed” – mutable at whim, and that people’s feelings about their own victimization and self-assigned identity trump objective facts.

Feminism and political correctness put Carini’s face in the path of Imane Kelif’s fists. It’s the same ideological cluster that has led to an epidemic of rapes by biological males in women’s prisons and homeless shelters.

Most women – and far too many weak-kneed men – said nothing for decades as this fantasy ideology of feelz laid waste to our cultural norms. And in news that I’m completely sure is utterly unrelated, over 50% of young women identifying as “liberal” have a diagnosed mental disorder.

Maybe, just maybe, feminists and postmodernists and critical theorists ought to stop punching Angela Carini’s face?

August 1, 2024

QotD: Sex and dating in the internet dating age

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… as they encounter each other in the chambers of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and OkCupid, the climate between men and women is frosty. Everyone is cross and fed up with everyone else for being so rubbish that they have to keep swiping.

In 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones helped women realise that half the human race (men) might usefully be called “fuckwits” when it came to dating and romance. The dynamics of internet dating, with its illusion of graspable sexual paradise, has either created a new tsunami of apparent fuckwits, or it has made the sheer extent of them inescapable.

Meanwhile, the boredom and jadedness stitched into heavy use of apps (“nope”, “like”, “nope”, “nope”, “nope”, “like”) has produced a ubiquitous undercurrent of queasy unpleasantness. The result is that men, formerly seen as an alternating source of fun, trouble and heartbreak, become “men: ugh”. Women, once the promised land for many a Romeo, become bitches, gold-diggers, game-players, and, most significantly, for a depressing bloc known as “women: meh”.

This sexual stand-off, characterised by simmering distrust and putrid fatigue, oozes off internet dating portals. I’ve often found myself, after a night of binge-scrolling, surprised to remember that dating is filed under “romance”, which is supposed to be — at least at the start — a little about positive, fuzzy feelings or the potential to develop them.

Zoe Strimpel, “Why the young are falling out of love with sex”, UnHerd, 2019-11-25.

July 29, 2024

“… those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the increasing, conscious racial segregation of supporters of Kamala Harris, in this case the “Karens for Kamala” Zoom call for white women:

Screencaps from the Zoom call.
Reason magazine.

“Karens for Kamala?” actress Connie Britton joked.

Britton was one of two celebrities, several politicians, and, reportedly, more than 100,000 others on a Zoom call advertised as a way for white women to “show up for Kamala Harris”. What transpired echoed advocacy around Hillary Clinton eight years ago. It was also oddly reminiscent in tone, if not substance, of missteps we’ve seen from conservatives like Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), in which those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings.

Also, pop star Pink was there. And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) told a story about her and Britton having to drink toad venom after eating bad seafood.

The virtual gathering was organized by gun control activist and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, who modeled the meeting after recent calls set up by and for black women and black men who want Harris for president.

According to Elizabeth Minnella, who served as a sort of master of ceremonies of the call, more than $1.8 million was raised last night. Urging viewers to group chat their friends with a fundraising link, Minnella said she would be dropping it into her favorite group chat, titled “Witches for Harris”.

“I am here tonight, embracing myself in your incredible, profound white women midst, because we’ve got a fucking job to do, y’all,” said Britton, who has starred in shows like Nashville, American Horror Story, and The White Lotus. She went on to suggest that because Vice President Kamala Harris is a woman, she will “listen. And lead with empathy, integrity, and the power of the truth”. When President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee and endorsed Harris to take his place, “the world blew up. Did you feel it?” asked Britton. “It was seismic. Cosmic, even. And since then — have you seen it? Have you seen Kamala glisten in the brilliance and shine of her true power and leadership? And what does that feel like? Feels like self-love.”

“Women, when we are capable of opening up to our own voices and gifts, can access a love of self that is reflective … and can shine outward to unknown depths,” Britton continued. “Which brings me back to us. Beautiful, beautiful white women. Here we are gathered together.”

If Britton sounds a bit gender essentialist, a bit patronizing, a bit woo-woo — well, that was just in keeping with the overall vibes of the call. At least Britton’s “Karens for Kamala” joke was one of the few moments in which speakers weren’t positively radiating self-seriousness.

If there was an underlying theme, it was that white women needed to use their privilege to elect Harris — or else.

“White women, we have 100 days to help save the world!” Watts said.

July 21, 2024

QotD: There’s no recovery mode from being a Basic College Girl

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Do you have any examples of BCGs recuperating?

Sadly, very few. Part of this is just in the nature of the biz — I don’t see too many former students out and about, since they all leave College Town for the big wide world — but I do know this: Scratch a Karen, find a BCG. In fact, you could go so far to say that “Karen” simply IS the BCG after she hits The Wall. The faster the impact, the bigger the Karen (this is a testable hypothesis — given that our gal Taylor Swift is currently impacting The Wall at about Mach 3, if I’m right, she’ll soon unleash the kraken of Karens on an unsuspecting world).

I also strongly suspect that BCGs can’t recover. As any shrink will tell you, Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders are almost impossible to treat. For one thing, treatment requires believing that you have a problem, and believing you don’t have a problem is pretty much diagnostic of those two syndromes. And while I’m not sure the BCG is clinically diagnosable with either of those, what they actually are is close enough that I’m betting whatever therapies “work” on actual clinical cases would “work” on them … but see above.

Finally, I guess I can’t really blame the BCG for not realizing she’s got a problem, because she obviously doesn’t have a problem. Look around — society rewards this shit. AOC, for example, is going to be La Presidenta por Vida de los Estados Unidos here in a decade or so; if that’s a problem, I can’t really blame them for not fixing it. Eventually, of course, reality will intrude, and your BCG will be screaming for a real man to come save her … but, thanks to her BCG antics, there won’t be any real men around. Or, you know, we’ll all be in the OPFOR, so good luck with that, beeyatch.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag /Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.

July 13, 2024

Did you blink and miss Gender Empathy Gap Day?

Filed under: Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Don’t worry, unlike so, so many other formal days (or months, or seasons …) in the calendar devoted to this or that or the other real and imagined causes, celebrations, or acknowledgements, Gender Empathy Gap Day isn’t observed anywhere:

Remember these examples of virtue signalling? Can you imagine them doing the same for boys or young men?
Image from The Fiamengo File.

Few people have heard of Gender Empathy Gap Day, a day inaugurated in Germany in 2018 to raise awareness about our societies’ remarkable indifference to the suffering of men and boys. Not surprisingly, it has no official status in any country.

Most people, if asked, will insist that it is women and girls who suffer. We expect men and boys to apologize for their advantages and educate themselves about issues affecting women and girls. Animus against men is socially acceptable, even approved. “I bathe in male tears” is a popular feminist slogan, and university professors write mainstream opinion pieces with unironic titles like “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”

The Gender Empathy Gap Day doesn’t advocate a contest over which sex has it worse. It does advocate recognition of our collective inability or unwillingness to see the full humanity of men.

Academic researchers Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic have compiled data showing that both females and males tend to have more positive associations with women than with men. Researchers have also confirmed a much higher in-group bias amongst women, meaning that women feel more empathy towards other women than towards men, while men also feel more empathy for women.

Whether it’s homelessness (61% male), homicide (78% male victims), suicide (79% male), workplace fatalities (93% male), prison incarceration (93% male), or a host of other issues, men and boys do suffer. Yet according to the research of Dr. Tania Reynolds, we tend to associate agency with maleness and the capacity for victimhood with femaleness, seeing men and boys as active doers rather than as sufferers deserving concern.

As a result, we are tolerant of harsh punishments for male criminal offenders, but not for women. In 2012, Sonja Starr, a professor of Law, published the results of her study of discrepancies in criminal sentencing that showed a very large gender gap in the punishment of women for the same crimes committed by men. Starr’s extensive study found an average 63% sentencing gap that harshly disadvantaged men. She also discovered that “Female arrestees are […] significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted”.

The gap in punishment results because we all — including prosecutors, judges, and juries — incline to the belief that women who commit crimes were led into their law-breaking by others, usually men, and had limited choices because of poverty, childhood abuse, mental illness, or addiction. We hesitate to deprive young children of the care of their mothers, while we are content to see fathers behind bars. As Starr points out, however, male offenders have also “suffered serious hardships, have mental health or addiction issues, have minor children, and/or have ‘followed’ others onto a criminal path”.

Author Glen Poole has noted that such indifference to male difficulties is built right into the stories our society tells about itself. He points out that when a large number of men are killed — whether in war, accident, or natural disaster — mainstream news sources report on people killed, making the sex of the victims invisible. It is not news when men and boys die.

When women or girls are killed or harmed, they are rarely if ever referred to as people. Their suffering is news.

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