The concept of a primeval matriarchy may be regarded, on one level, as a modern incarnation of the Golden Age myth, a belief found in primitive societies throughout the world that during the infancy of the human race mankind lived in perfect peace and harmony in a world of abundance. The Garden of Eden is the biblical take on the legend. In the Bible story however, as in all traditional accounts, there was a “Fall” from grace, after which strife and hardship entered the world. The Fall, or Original Sin, represented an implicit acceptance of human imperfection and in a way accounted for the violence and discord of life by pointing the finger of blame at humanity as a whole and the individual in particular. The essential imperfection of human nature was recognized by all ancient societies, and is a theme which we encounter in the works of the Chinese philosophers as well as those of India and Greece. With Rousseau and the Enlightenment, however, there came a change. Reacting against the rationalism and industrialization of the eighteenth century, Rousseau and his fellow proto-romantics adopted a sentimentalized view of ancient and primitive man, arguing that human nature, in its pristine form, was not “fallen” at all, and that human beings had in modern times been corrupted by an exploitative and degenerate economic system.
Rousseau’s Noble Savage has caused untold harm over the past two centuries as totalitarians of various hues sought to foster and free the inherent nobility of humanity by destroying the corrupt and exploitative economic systems which had supposedly turned people into butchers and criminals. Both fascism and communism trace a direct line of descent to Rousseau, as do anarchism and the various extremist ecology movements of our time.
Feminism, too, is a branch of Rousseau’s tree, though it has other wellsprings. Marx and Freud, of course, with their negative attitudes to Christianity and Christian civilization in general, contributed much to feminism. Marx in particular emphasized how “bourgeois” Christian society had oppressed women, and called for the abolition of the family and complete sexual liberation. Freud contributed by his claim that neuroses and mental illness in general were the result of sexual repression. But the myth of a primeval matriarchy also owed much to students of mythology such as James Frazer and (more especially) Robert Graves. Archaeology too played its part, as scholars began to uncover ancient images of goddesses and female deities from various parts of the globe. The Palaeolithic epoch, the earliest age of homo sapiens, revealed small statuettes of clay, ivory and bone, depicting some form of Mother Goddess. Perhaps the most influential archaeological discoveries, however, came from Crete, where between 1900 and 1905 Sir Arthur Evans uncovered a splendid pre-Greek civilization where women and female deities apparently enjoyed a privileged position.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
March 4, 2018
QotD: Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” myth
February 22, 2018
The worst episode of The Avengers? “How to Succeed … at Murder”
In a column ostensibly devoted to the British Labour party’s ongoing ructions over their “all women shortlist” problems, David Cole recaps what he calls the worst episode of the brilliant 1960s British TV show The Avengers:
(Image via Aveleyman.com)
When I think of The Avengers, what comes to mind is not the bloated comic-book franchise in which overpaid actors cavort in front of a greenscreen for the masturbatory pleasure of nerds. No, to me, there is and will always be only one Avengers, and that’s the 1960s British crime and espionage TV series. As a kid, it was my favorite show, and I have fond memories of rushing home from elementary school every day to catch Emma Peel (my favorite of John Steed’s female partners) in action.
Among Avengers superfans, there is one episode that is generally considered the worst. Indeed, the episode is outright despised, because in a series lauded (and properly so) for being a trailblazer when it came to presenting strong, intelligent, and independent action heroines, the episode “How to Succeed…at Murder” is seen as a giant chauvinistic step backward. It’s known as the “anti-feminist” episode, the one that took the show’s message of female empowerment and stood it on its head. “How to Succeed…at Murder” was first broadcast in March 1966. The setup is typical Avengers-style mystery. Prominent businessmen are being murdered by unknown assailants, and it’s up to Steed and Peel to get to the bottom of it. It turns out, a group of sexy female ballet students have created a secret society dedicated to the destruction of powerful men. They use their feminine charms to get hired as secretaries, only to quickly begin taking control of the business to the point that when they murder the boss, ownership falls to them. The society’s motto is “Ruination to all men.”
Mrs. Peel infiltrates the group and learns that the girls take their orders from a female marionette, which seems to speak and move on its own. In a voice somewhat resembling that of a drag queen, the marionette explains the group’s mission: “To take woman out of the secretary’s chair and put her behind the executive desk. To bring men to heel and put women at the pinnacle of power.”
The marionette’s “helper” is Henry, the clumsy, doughy owner of the ballet school where the secret society meets.
Emma is soon exposed as an infiltrator, and it’s up to Steed to confront the evil ballerinas on their home turf. “No man will dominate us again,” the girls crow as they hold Steed at gunpoint. However, the unflappable Steed quickly deduces that the marionette is actually being controlled remotely by…Henry. Yep, these women had a male boss all along! Revealed as the mastermind, Henry tearfully explains that following the loss of his late wife’s ballet company at the hands of greedy investors, he vowed vengeance against powerful businessmen (it’s also revealed that the marionette is crafted in his wife’s image, and Henry, his mind bent by grief, actually believes he’s his dead wife when he gives the puppet voice). To achieve his revenge against the business world, Henry took advantage of the anti-male sentiments of his students. “No man will ever dominate you?” Steed mockingly asks the girls. “You’ve been taking orders from a man all this time!” As the murderous dancers stand crestfallen, their mouths agape, their boastfulness sapped, Emma disarms the lead girl and beats the living crap out of each and every one of them.
You cannot read a review of this episode on any Avengers fansite without encountering the words “sexist,” “reactionary,” or “misogynistic.” The vitriol stems from the fact that the man-hating feminists turn out to be gullible morons. In their fanatical crusade against male domination, they inadvertently allowed a weak, delusional man-who-believes-he’s-a-woman to dominate and control them.
February 18, 2018
How WWI Got Women to Start Wearing Bras
Today I Found Out
Published on 3 Oct 2016In this video:
Corsets dominated the undergarments of wealthier women in the Western world for centuries, until WWI. So how did the war help popularize the bra? In a word, or two words in this case: metal shortage. The making of corsets required quite a bit of metal. Thus, in 1917, the U.S. War Industries Board asked American women to help their “men win the war” by not wearing or buying corsets.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
February 17, 2018
How a Concubine became the Empress of China – Wu Zetian l HISTORY OF CHINA
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 5 Aug 2015Wu Zetian was the first and only Empress of China. Skillfully, she worked her way up, entering the imperial court of Emperor Tang Taizong as a concubine. After his death she would marry his son, Emperor Kaozong. Later she would ruthlessly dethrone two of her own sons and take power herself, effectively introducing an interregnum to the Tang dynasty. During her very own Zhou dynasty she was known as a kind and fair ruler and made Buddhism state religion. Learn all about the Biography of one of the most popular and at the same time merciless women in Chinese history in today’s episode of IT’S HISTORY.
February 16, 2018
Differences in interest drives gender disparity in STEM fields
David C. Geary and Gijsbert Stoet examine the STEM fields’ renowned gender disparities:
Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men than women in some of these fields. There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing.
The concerned academics have been especially effective in convincing others, or at least intimidating them, into accepting their preferred interpretations regarding the source of these sex differences (as illustrated in the Google memo debate). These interpretations are not surprising and they include sexism, stereotype threat, and more recently implicit bias and microaggression. Each of these ideas has gained traction in the mainstream media and in many academic circles but their scientific foundations are shaky. In this essay, we’ll provide some background on the STEM controversy and consider multiple factors that might contribute to these sex differences.
[…]
We’ve recently found that countries renowned for gender equality show some of the largest sex differences in interest in and pursuit of STEM degrees, which is not only inconsistent with an oppression narrative, it is positive evidence against it. Consider that Finland excels in gender equality, its adolescent girls outperform boys in science, and it ranks near the top in European educational performance. With these high levels of educational performance and overall gender equality, Finland is poised to close the sex differences gap in STEM. Yet, Finland has one of the world’s largest sex differences in college degrees in STEM fields. Norway and Sweden, also leading in gender equality rankings, are not far behind. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as this general pattern of increasing sex differences with national increases in gender equality is found throughout the world.
The recent uptick in interest in concepts such as stereotype threat, implicit bias, and microaggression may be a reaction to the low female STEM participation in highly developed nations. At one time, there were substantive social and educational impediments to women’s participation in these (and other) fields, but as explicit sexism and restricted educational opportunities faded into history, the sex differences (e.g., fewer women than men physicists) attributed to them should have faded as well. Some of them have even reversed, such that more women than men attend and graduate from college and women may now have structural advantages (e.g., hiring practices) in STEM fields. Even with these changes, many other sex differences remain or have become larger over time. The latter are serious problems for anyone with strong beliefs about purely or largely social influences on sex differences; if the obvious social causes have been addressed, then there must be other, more subtle oppressive factors afoot. This is where stereotype threat, implicit bias, microaggression and related concepts enter the oppression narrative.
We believe that with economic development and advances in human rights, including gender equality, people are better able to pursue their individual interests and in doing so more basic sex differences are more fully expressed. The differences in STEM are related in part to student’s personal and occupational interests and relative academic strengths. Sex differences in occupational interests are large, well-documented, and reflect a more basic sex difference in interest in things versus people. Men prefer occupations that involve working with things (e.g., engineering, mechanics) and abstract ideas (e.g., scientific theory) and women prefer working with and directly contributing to the wellbeing of others (e.g., physician, teacher). The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science.
Programs designed to steer women into inorganic STEM fields would in effect steer these same women away from the life sciences. Such programs would, in our opinion, only be justifiable if women are not provided a fair opportunity to pursue inorganic STEM fields (for which there is no good evidence). The main argument from gender activists is that inorganic STEM fields are a better choice for women either because these jobs lead to higher incomes or that there is a labor market demand for them. Both arguments are fundamentally capitalist and dehumanizing in the sense that considerations of personal interest are overridden by considerations of societal demand. This is ironic, given that the agenda arguing for more women in STEM seems most popular among left-leaning people.
February 10, 2018
Protecting (some) women from their own decisions
Kirio Birks on the Formula One “grid girls”:
Objectification, we are told, is degrading. Why? Because any job that requires employees to be sexually attractive and gazed upon for that reason necessarily dehumanises them. It encourages others to treat them as pretty ‘things’ rather than as autonomous people with their own lives, passions, thoughts, and desires. Or so the thinking goes. ‘Grid Girls’ – models employed by Formula One for promotional purposes – have just discovered that their role is to be discontinued. As Formula One’s managing director of commercial operations explained: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”
But in their hurry to spare Grid Girls the indignity of the male gaze, nobody making this argument seems to have stopped to wonder whether Grid Girls might have an interest in defending what they do. Instead, a collective of ostensibly progressive voices leapt to their defence without bothering to ask the girls themselves if they needed defending at all. In response, Formula One abandoned its Grid Girls so that it can be seen to be moving with the times and hip to contemporary mores. In doing so, Formula One’s executives have implicitly conceded that they have spent too long objectifying women instead of empowering them. They would like it to known that they’d rather see women driving the cars, or as members of the engineering teams, or just about anywhere other than track-side holding a driver’s name-board and looking beautiful.
What baffles me is that a move supposed to empower women came at the expense of other women, and only because a minority of outsiders found Grid Girls inappropriate, problematic, and otherwise an offence against good taste. But even if Grid Girls are being objectified, then – contra the explanation offered above – it’s not at all clear that objectification is wrong in and of itself. It is acceptable to use people as a means to an end – that’s called employment. Grid Girls obviously know that they will be objectified and they make an autonomous, informed decision to take the job anyway. They are not harmed, they are paid for their time and their work, and many of them have come forward to say, with understandable indignation, that they enjoy what they do. Needless to say, this has not impressed those feminists who applauded their redundancies. But surely a woman has a right to be the object of somebody else’s desire if she wants and surely it doesn’t matter if she is being paid for it?
Get me on @thismorning so I can defend us #gridgirls
Because of these feminists, they’ve have cost us our jobs! I have been a grid girl for 8 years and I have Never felt uncomfortable! I love my job, if I didn’t I wouldn’t do it! Noone forces us to do this! This is our choice! pic.twitter.com/PUWcyB5BeG— Lauren-Jade (@laurenjadepope) January 31, 2018
Opponents may suggest that Grid Girls have internalised their own oppression in a society shaped by patriarchal values, but not without making two claims: (1) that Grid Girls are unable to adequately think for themselves because of the society they live in and (2) that thinking for yourself is only evidenced by acknowledging the existence of a patriarchal status quo and resisting it.
February 6, 2018
February 4, 2018
QotD: Modern feminism
Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call “encouraged helplessness” (from psychologist Martin Seligman’s “learned helplessness”—the feeling that there’s nothing you can do to escape your fate).
In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism — instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them.
That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it — because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out.
If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me — count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become.
This doesn’t require you to be fearless. You just need to shove your fears aside and do what needs to be done — say, getting up on your hind legs and telling some co-worker, “Stop saying that thing to me” or “…treating me this way.”
Now, if they persist after you’ve told them to stop a few times, that’s harassment and you can seek support to get them to stop. But consider that it’s less likely to get to that point if you simply act like men’s equal—act as if you’re powerful — instead of acting like you’re a feminist.
Amy Alkon, “Are Women Really Victims? Four Women Weigh In”, Quillette, 2017-11-22.
January 29, 2018
Cheng I Sao – Pirate Queen – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 27 Jan 2018She was the most ferocious pirate China had ever known. She was a powerful fleet commander, a sharp businesswoman, and a consummate strategist. She was Cheng I Sao, leader of the Pirate Confederation, and she lived her life on her terms.
January 23, 2018
The unintended consequences of Ontario’s steep minimum wage hike
Colby Cosh on the unpredictable outcomes of Ontario’s recent minimum wage increase:
In Thursday’s edition of this paper, Marni Soupcoff wrote an entertaining column about how Ontario’s fairly aggressive minimum wage increase had suddenly raised the costs of labour-intensive goods and services for consumers — the ones, that is, who don’t benefit themselves from a minimum wage increase. Child care, which is a very pure purchase of labour, is the example that is being exasperatedly discussed this week. The headline did not have “duh” in it, but that was the spirit of the thing.
Soupcoff pointed out that this not only could have been foreseen; an explicit warning of it was given in the pages of the Toronto Star, by the paper’s social justice reporter Laurie Monsebraaten. Our Financial Post section could perhaps easily be called the Social Injustice Gazette, but anyone at FP who got such an early jump on an economics story would be rightly pleased with himself.
Soupcoff’s major point was that the broad-sense law of supply and demand is not some plutocratic swindle devised by the Monopoly Man and his fatcat pals; even believers in “social justice” have to take it into account, as they take gravity into account when they are moving an old couch to a charity shop or sending cosmonauts into orbit. This is obviously right as far as it goes, but the words “supply and demand” are not enough, on their own, to predict the precise market response to a change in a price control — which is what the minimum wage is.
That, perhaps, is the true key point amidst all the various ideological struggles currently in progress over minimum wage levels, which are being yoinked upward in Alberta as well as in Ontario. A minimum wage is a price control. The minimum wage is not really so much a labour standard as it is the abolition of labour bargains that feature a nominal wage below the minimum. And price controls are a blunt instrument. Most economists, whatever their political orientation, instinctively resist them.
The incidence of a price control — the precise place upon which the economic burden of it falls — is not, in fact, foreseeable without other information. In the market for hired child care, for example, it could turn out, with time, that the real effect of increasing a minimum wage is that some parents drop out of the labour market and tend to their own children. It’s just not what one would actually predict, because the need for professional child care is something that a family tends to plan for well in advance, with a longer time horizon than any government’s. (Also, we haven’t invented dependable babysitting robots yet.)
Women, in particular, organize lives and careers around whether they expect their own labour force participation to be able to cover care expenses. Indeed, couples adjust family size for these expectations. We can even imagine circumstances in which a province’s extreme, credible commitment to a very high future minimum wage influenced birth rates.
January 21, 2018
ESR responds to Megan McArdle’s column on disempowered women
A couple of days ago, I linked to one of Megan McArdle’s columns that discussed the oddity that modern day women often feel themselves to have even less agency in their own lives than their mothers or grandmothers did. ESR left a comment at Bloomberg View and then expanded on that comment on his own blog:
It’s not complicated, Megan. You actually got most of it already, but I don’t think you quite grasp how comprehensive the trap is yet. Younger women feel powerless because they live in a dating environment where sexual license has gone from an option to a minimum bid.
I’m not speaking as a prude or moralist here, but as a…well, the technical term is ‘praxeologist’ but few people know it so I’ll settle for “micro-economist”. The leading edge of the sexual revolution give women options they didn’t have before; its completion has taken away many of the choices they used to have by trapping them in a sexual-competition race for the bottom.
“Grace” behaved as she did because she doesn’t have a realistic option to hold out for romance before sex; women who do that put themselves at high risk of not getting second dates, there are too many others willing to play by the new rules. So she has to do sex instead and hope lightning strikes.
Couple this with the fact that as women get on average more educated there are fewer hypergamically-eligible males at every SES, and you have the jaws of a vicious vise. It’s especially hard on high-status women and low-status men. The main beneficiaries are high-status men, who often behave like entitled assholes because the new rules tilt the playing field in their favor even more than the old ones did.
(That last is not aimed at Ansari, who seems to me to have behaved quite like a gentleman, acceding to every request “Grace” actually made. It’s not his fault he couldn’t read her mind.)
I don’t have a fix for this problem. As you imply, if women were able to coordinate a retreat to withholding early sex they would regain some of their lost bargaining power, but I don’t see any realistic possibility of this today. The problem is that the refuseniks from such an agreement trying to form, and the defectors after it formed, would be rewarded with more sex with high-status men, which is exactly what every player on the female side is instinctively wired to want.
January 18, 2018
Why do young women today feel they have less agency than their grandmothers did?
Megan McArdle on the weird path young women have taken in recent years that earlier cohorts did not:
I have now had dozens of conversations about #MeToo with women my age or older, all of which are some variant on “What the hey?” It’s not that we’re opposed to #MeToo; we are overjoyed to see slime like Harvey Weinstein flushed out of the woodwork, and the studio system. But we see sharp distinctions between Weinstein and guys who press aggressively — embarrassingly, adulterously — for sex. To women in their 20s, it seems that distinction is invisible, and the social punishments demanded for the latter are scarcely less than those meted out for forcible rape.
There’s something else we notice, something that seems deeply connected to these demands for justice: These women express a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, even though they are not being threatened, either physically or economically. How has the most empowered generation of women in all of human history come to feel less control over their bodies than their grandmothers did?
Let me propose a possible answer to this, suggested by a very smart social scientist of my acquaintance: They feel this way because we no longer have any moral language for talking about sex except consent. So when men do things that they feel are wrong — such as aggressively pursuing casual sex without caring about the feelings of their female target — we’re left flailing for some way to describe this as non-consensual, even when she agreed to the sex.
Under the old code, of course, we had ample condemnatory terms for men who slept with women carelessly, without much regard for their feelings: cads and rakes, bounders and boors. Those words have now decayed into archaism. Yet it seems to me that these are just the words that young women are reaching for, when instead they label things like mutually drunken encounters and horrible one-night stands as an abuse of power, a violation of consent — which is to say, as a crime, or something close to it. To which a lot of other people incredulously respond: now being a bad lover is a crime?
This isn’t working. And perhaps a little expansion of our moral language will illuminate not just our current dilemma, but the structural reasons behind it. I’m thinking of a fairly recent paper by political scientist Michael Munger, which introduced the concept of euvoluntary exchange. Put simply, though we talk a great deal about voluntary exchange, the fact is that we often think voluntary exchanges are morally wrong. After all, the quid pro quo offered by Weinstein was in some sense voluntary, and yet also, totally unacceptable. Likewise price gouging after natural disasters, blackmail and similar breaches.
We have an intuition, says Professor Munger, that in order for an exchange to be really valid, both parties need to have a minimally acceptable alternative to making the deal. And in the case of sex, I think that often women no longer feel they have those alternatives. So expanding Professor Munger’s analysis to consensual sex — we might call it euconsensual sex — may give us some insight into what’s gone wrong.
My generation of women was not exactly unfamiliar with casual sex, or aggressive come-ons. But we didn’t feel so traumatized by them or so outraged. If we went to a man’s apartment, we might be annoyed that he wouldn’t stop asking, but we weren’t offended, nor did we feel it was impossible for us to refuse, or leave.
January 15, 2018
QotD: Adultery
But my dear, it’s only philandering when men do it. When women do it, it’s philanthropy.
Lucy Ellmann, “What Made Helen Run? The saucy life and times of the Cosmo queen, more or less in her own voice”, Bookforum, 2016-06.
January 8, 2018
Sex is a Basic Instinct – Sigmund Freud l HISTORY OF SEX
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 30 Sep 2015The psychologist Sigmund Freud spent much of his life trying to understand how the human psyche functions. Famously sorting the human consciousness into the it, the ego and the superego. He was particularly interested in the instinct for sex and satisfaction of lust, a phenomenon he called the libido. Many of his theories were highly disputable, such as his theory on infantile sexuality and the societal influence on sexuality. Learn all about the father of psychoanalysis on ITS HISTORY!
January 7, 2018
Now we know how to get more women in the STEM fields
Toni Airaksinen reviews the findings of Professors Parson and Ozaki, who believe they’ve identified the key factors holding back young women from studying STEM subjects:
Two professors believe that “masculine STEM ideals”—like “asking good questions” and “putting school first” — are to blame for the lack of women in math and science courses.
Laura Parson, a professor at Auburn University, and Casey Ozaki, who teaches education at the University of North Dakota, advanced the notion in an article published in the latest issue of the NASPA Journal About Women in Higher Education, noting that women are not only “less likely to major in STEM fields” than are men, but those who do study science, technology, engineering, and math are less likely to graduate than their male classmates.
Together, Parson and Ozaki interviewed eight female students majoring in math or physics to learn more about why women struggle in STEM. From their interviews, the professors learned that many women feel pressure to conform to so-called “masculine” norms.
According to the professors, these masculine norms include “asking good questions,” “capacity for abstract thought and rational thought processes,” “motivation,” the expectation that students would be “independent” thinkers, and a relatively low fear of failure.
“This requirement that the average student asks questions and speaks in class is based on the typical undergraduate man,” they contend.
Unfortunately for the female students, many of them indicated difficulty embodying these traits, reporting that they tend to ask fewer questions in class than do their male peers, and have noticed that other women in their classes share the same inclination.
So what’s to be done? How can we ensure that female students significantly outnumber men in the STEM departments as they now do in most other university departments?
Parson and Ozaki spell out a few recommendations for STEM programs, saying for instance that academic departments should “redefine success by changing expectations,” such as letting women write down questions instead of asking them out-loud. They also recommended that more women are hired, but notably did not mention any concerns over merit.
They also declare that “an important aspect of changing the masculine nature of STEM is diversifying STEM fields,” and suggest that hiring more female faculty members could lead to increased enrollment of female students because “women faculty have been found to increase participation, feelings of inclusion and belonging, and women’s perceptions of identity compatibility.”
Achieving “a critical mass of women” in STEM, the professors predict, would serve to weaken “the masculine STEM discourses of individualism and competition” while promoting “connectivity and relatedness,” which they believe will help to create the sense of “community” desired by the students they interviewed.
“Improving the chilly climate in STEM fields requires revising the STEM institution from one that is masculine to one that is inclusive for non-men, non-White students,” they conclude.
I mean, it’s obvious now that they’ve spelled it out for us, isn’t it?
