Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2023

“It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing”

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

Janice Fiamengo on the blatant disregard for violence as long at that violence is not directed at women:

The news headline by the CBC, Canada’s state-funded broadcaster, could hardly have been more blatant: “Ottawa had 16 homicides in 2022—and nearly half of the victims were women or girls“. In other words, more than half of the victims, as is always the case, were boys and men, a state of affairs that no one at the CBC has ever found troubling enough to lament or even notice. Only when the female homicide rate approaches gender parity in one (unusual) year is it a “collective crisis”, as the subheading alleges.

It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing.

[Author’s note: Perhaps I should have stopped here. What more is there to say about the extraordinary indifference of most people, men and women, to violence against men and the craven desire to deny female culpability? There’s nothing new in this essay, no new angle or stats, no rousing call to action, nothing beyond the marshalling of dreary evidence and sadly sarcastic observations unlikely to change any mind or cause any gynocentric cheek to blush. I had intended to finish it in time for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men, on November 18, but was stymied partly by a sense of helpless anger, the weight of which pressed down on every sentence. The section at the end, about the death of Benjamin Rain, was the last straw.]

Feminists have long touted their concern for victims, yet that is never in shorter supply than in their one-sided discussions of violence, in which the only deaths allowed to matter are female deaths, presented for readers’ contemplation with poignant circumstances, names, and expressions of horrified sadness, as in the above-mentioned article. Dead men remain largely anonymous, and few readers could guess from the typical reports of feminist organizations that women are ever lethally violent.

Indifference to male suffering and death are the norm all over the world, of course, but the Anglophone feminist movement has markedly increased it, fudging numbers and manipulating language to focus empathy exclusively on women and girls. The CBC article devotes significant space to discussing the risible concept of femicide, a relatively recent coinage that makes no secret of its female supremacism, purporting to highlight how women and girls are killed “simply for being women” and “primarily by […] men”, as if every woman, even one killed by accident (as we’ll see), is evidence of gender bias.

The idea that women are killed because they are women is preposterous, impossible to support with evidence, and obviously intended to solidify the impression that women outnumber men as victims of murderous violence. An organization called the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability provides an elaborate taxonomy of forms of femicide to drive the idea home, deliberately blurring the lines between intimate partner homicide, a favored focus, and other killings of women, which are collectively deplored as “brazen acts of hatred“.

Even a cursory reading of the details, however, exposes the vacuousness of the terminology as well as the sleight of hand by which men’s alleged misogyny is misleadingly linked to the totality of the women’s deaths. Only two of Ottawa’s seven murdered women were killed by current or former intimate partners. One of the dead women was attacked and killed by her two adult daughters (an act called “non-intimate femicide”), while another was the victim of a stray bullet that killed her by accident and was probably intended for a man (if you can believe it, the Canadian Femicide Observatory calls this type of death “associated/connected femicide”).

It is impossible to conclude that all or even most of these — certainly unfortunate — deaths can logically be said to have occurred, as the mantra holds, “due to the existence of gender norms and stereotypes, discrimination directed toward women and girls, and unequal power relations across genders“. The determination to find gender discrimination at the root of all female suffering — and thus to justify yet more programs, initiatives, and taxpayer dollars for feminist organizations, as well as more collective shaming of men — seems unstoppable.

November 22, 2023

QotD: American universities, “sportsball”, and wealthy alumni

Filed under: Education, Football, Politics, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is, or at least used to be, a truth universally acknowledged, that the Athletic Department was the only bastion of sanity left in higher “education”. I love watching Marxists squirm, so the start of football season was always my favorite time back in my professin’ days. Every year, the doofus Marxoid faculty would write their annual complaint about sportsball — “not germane to the purpose of a university”; “takes away too many resources from academics”; “toxic masculinity” and so forth — and every year, the President and Board of Trustees would tell the eggheads to go pound sand.

NOT, I hasten to add, because the Prez and the Trustees (hereafter: The Administration) were some kind of normal folks. Oh God no — quite the opposite, in fact. No open conservative has been hired to any position in academia for the past thirty, forty years; to make it into the ranks of The Administration, you have to be #woker than #woke. Rather, it was because The Administration were among the few mortals privy to the college’s balance sheet. Seriously, those things are more closely guarded than our nuclear launch codes … but The Administration sees them, and draws the only possible conclusion: Without sportsball, the whole university system is toast.

But alas for the bottom line, Intersectionality is a jealous god, and xzhey will have none before xzhem. The Administration knows — they must know, they can’t not know — that all the stuff that makes big league college football go comes from “boosters”, i.e. rich idiots with way more money than sense, and their corporations. But since The Administration is full of even dumber Marxists than the faculty — yeah yeah, I know, I didn’t think it was possible either — they’ve apparently decided to assume, in true Leftist style, that since the money has always just kinda, you know, been there, it will continue to, you know, somehow, someway, continue to be there.

I mean, what are those rich oilmen from Texas gonna do, not watch football?

Severian, “Ludicrous Speed Update: The NCAA”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-14.

November 18, 2023

Believe all women … unless they’re Israeli

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Kristin Raworth and Ariella Kimmel protest against the objectively pro-Hamas silence of so many feminist organizations about the terror attacks of October 7th:

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and committed the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. More than just a massacre, Hamas tortured their victims, including brutally raping women, young and old. Yet the silence of many women’s organizations and leading voices who stand tall, claiming to be “strong feminists”, is deafening.

When the #MeToo movement started, the mantra was “believe all women”. As high-profile women spoke out, the feminist movement stood with them. So why, in the wake of the most horrific terrorist attack in Israel’s history, which included rape, do these women not deserve the same solidarity?

A month later it is not just the complete silence of the women’s organizations that causes pain, it is the active justification and gaslighting of the Jewish community, which has including denying the truth of what happened on October 7th, by demanding proof, rather than believing survivors. Many may recognize these tactics as those used as abusers against their victims in cases of domestic and sexual violence, a tactic that has become known as “DARVO” — Deny, Attack, and Reverse, Victim Offender.

When reports first surfaced of the sexual assaults committed by Hamas, many of us took to Twitter, the only place where we knew to raise our voices. Immediately our replies were filled with folks who otherwise would believe survivors, but were seemingly comfortable demanding immediate forensic evidence in this case. Survivor accounts were not enough; even a video released by the Israeli government that painted a clear picture of Hamas’ brutality was not enough. Hamas terrorists themselves recounting their actions was not enough.

Sarah Jama, an MPP in Ontario, has gone so far to publicly state that the accounts of rape are a lie pushed forward by the “zionist lobby”.

We have seen people like Ghada Sasa, a former board member of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, going on a podcast and not just claiming that Hamas treated civilians fairly, but that Israel was to blame for the massacre at the Nova music festival.

Meanwhile member of Parliament Niki Ashton claimed that a “feminist government” would call for a ceasefire; yet she has not once condemned the use of rape by Hamas as a war crime. This is a highly selective read of feminism.

November 13, 2023

Winners and losers of the “sexual revolution”

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

Janice Fiamengo missed her trip to London this week due to illness, so she also missed a panel discussion at the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) Conference that raised her ire:

On the subject of widespread sexual promiscuity, family breakdown, and fatherless homes, pundits Jordan Peterson, Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, and Stephen Blackwood carefully ignored the hulking feminist elephant in the room, arguing that the primary victims of the sexual revolution have been women (and children as well, as something of an afterthought). The primary beneficiaries have been a few psychopathic men who have left a trail of broken hearts and rudderless children in their wake. It’s a convenient thesis in a culture terminally averse to criticizing women, but it avoids some important facts.

The whole discussion, actually, begins from a false premise. If there was ever a sexual revolution in which we all simply consented to do what we wanted sexually, as Louise Perry claimed, that revolution ended over 30 years ago when Anita Hill complained before a Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, should not be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice because he had once joked to her about a pubic hair floating on his Coke. At that point, the alleged sexual vulnerability of women, whose sensitive ears must not be subject to comments by male colleagues about pornography or penis size — and the need for legislation to protect and accommodate them at the expense of male freedom of expression — reasserted itself with a vengeance. The feminist claim that women merely wanted equal rights and an end to sexual double standards was exposed as a feeble lie.

Sexual harassment legislation soon made it a potential firing offence for a man to make a female workmate uncomfortable, whether by standing too close, looking too intently, or making the wrong joke or comment. Later, the #MeToo movement proclaimed it righteous that any man who had ever been sexual with any woman (or even just any man, who didn’t even have to know the woman smearing his name) could be accused of sexual misconduct, fired from his job, and permanently disgraced (the DAMN Handbook contains an extraordinary list of celebrity men destroyed by allegations in 2017 alone; see pp. 8-17). Free love, if it ever existed, has been dead for a long time, and some of the same women who cheered on the idea of sexual freedom were the ones who killed it.

But #MeToo, false allegations, the ever-expanding territory of sexual misconduct, and the anti-male tenor of nearly every public discussion about sex—these were emphatically not the focus of the ARC panel, which zeroed in on female sexual victimization. The goals that countless women have proclaimed necessary—sexual freedom, abundant birth control, single motherhood—were criticized as harms for women. We heard that the medium to long-term well-being of women and children has been sacrificed to the short-term gratification of a minority of men; and that these men also tend to be, according to Peterson, possessed of psychopathic, Machiavellian, narcissistic, and sadistic tendencies. Amongst the fallout are the 50% of British children raised in homes without fathers.

It was stirring stuff, certainly, though not exactly a new proposition. Radical feminists like Sheila Jeffries have long argued (in her book Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution and elsewhere) that the sexual revolution merely affirmed and updated the victimization of women by men while conservative non-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly pointed out how feminist policies and laws have disadvantaged women.

Yet even those of us without doctorates in psychology might wonder how it could be true that so many women have been the innocent and unwitting victims of men even when they themselves chose those men. Are there not women who engage in abundant casual sex with as much blithe indifference as the men; some of them too psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian and cruel? Why have so many women over the years championed the loosening of sexual mores — including the availability of abortion, never mentioned by any of the panelists — if it was not in their own best interests to do so?

Or are these panelists saying that women cannot be trusted to know their own best interests and those of their children? Why do so many women continue to embrace sexual hedonism, abortion, and divorce? In reality, the epidemic of fatherlessness, as nobody on the panel was interested in exploring, is not the result of the sexual revolution per se, but was made possible specifically by the rise of no-fault divorce and child support laws that, in feminist-compliant family courts, made it highly attractive for women to discard their husbands while still living off his earnings (divorce is today initiated by women in about 70% of cases, and is one of the major reasons so many young men today are averse to marriage). It may well be that nobody’s long-term well being is served by this reality, but it is what women have been choosing with their eyes wide open for many years, and it is a bit rich now to pretend it was something done to them without their consent.

November 7, 2023

Birth Gap, the future none of us expected

Filed under: Europe, Health, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson takes the warnings of infertility from BirthGap quite seriously:

Jordan Peterson’s face morphed through a series of changes as he realized that nine out of ten women who don’t have children, wanted them. Ready to blame the culture of narcissism, he stalled confused, wrestling his face to neutral. I knew that fact from experience. For the many women I know who don’t have children, it is an abiding sorrow. From country to country, class to class, race to race, the sorrow is coruscating and it is ignored or diminished.

Only one in ten women actually don’t want children. One in ten is infertile, but the rest who don’t have children and that is one-third of us and counting, wanted them. By the time they are in their 40’s and incapable, badly.

Steven F Shaw searches for answers in Birth Gap, his masterwork documentary, the first part of which you can watch here. The most obvious is that they waited too long, thinking it was possible, their “career” taking precedence. He interviews two prominent women in their late 30’s, both journalists. One of whom has a child, and having had one, wanted more but it was too late. “No one told us”, she said. Throughout her childhood and education, no one told her that the hammer would come down, that fertility drops off a cliff in your 30’s. That if you are 30 and childless, there is a 50% chance you won’t have children. The other, Megan McArdle, who writes for the Washington Post, left it too late. McArdle is a brilliant woman. If she didn’t know she was playing with fire, who could?

The catastrophic statistics run across all cultures but sub-Saharan Africa. Every industrialized country is racing to the bottom, which is to say extinction within four or five generations. Cities left to ruin, old people without help, decaying schools, hospitals, and no employees to be found. The unretrievable extinction of the culture and its people. I’ll leave it to you to follow Shaw’s math, but it is convincing. And he is by no means, alone in his analysis.

Europe, Japan and especially South Korea are by far the most in trouble. But Spain, Italy, the Scandis, are not far behind. America’s massive migration is masking the effect now, but, as Shaw doesn’t point out, but others have, immigrants quickly default to the current zeitgeist. Even in Muslim countries, pace Mark Steyn, women are choosing to not have children until too late. And forget multiples, even for the devout, it’s no longer on the cards.

To me, one underlying reason is the firehose of overpopulation propaganda that we have endured for the past fifty years. Women, in general, as kids, are good girls, accepting of authority, and compassionate. When told their desire for children is stressing the earth, they are more likely to accept that nonsense without question if it is coming from every authority figure in every sector of the culture. Today from kindergarten on, we are taught that we are a virus, a plague on the earth. Who among us, at the age of 15 or 25, can contravene that level of brainwashing? Contrast Peterson saying this week, “we can make the deserts bloom”. When was the last time you heard that sentiment from anyone in authority?

October 17, 2023

Those problematic “AI girlfriends” – men suck and women suffer because of it

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

Janice Fiamengo discusses a recent CNN program that woman-splained why young men paying for “AI girlfriends” are yet another way that misogynistic men are harming women:

Last week, CNN aired a must-watch episode with the somber headline, “AI girlfriends are here and they’re posing a threat to a generation of men”. If that sounds as if the show might possibly express some compassion for young men and for the “epidemic of loneliness” referred to in the show, it was not to be. Even an expert, Scott Galloway, profiled briefly on how society is “failing men”, felt the need to express contempt for their alleged conspiracy theories, online misogyny, and even (gasp!) climate change denial. With friends like these …

The segment is fascinating, however, for its revelation of some pundits’ uneasy awareness of male discontent.

[…] The expert is Liberty Vittert, a statistician and professor of data science at Washington University’s Olin Business School. But she might as well be an AI feminist, so predictable was her analysis of the male entitlement allegedly driving the turn to AI girlfriends. Though a statistician, Vittert gave no data about the numbers of men who are paying to access AI content. While the CNN host, Michael Smerconish, seemed open to the possibility of exploring men’s points of view, the expert could only emphasize male failure.

She condemned young men for “choosing AI girlfriends over real women”. The choice means, according to Vittert, that “they don’t have relationships with real women, don’t marry them and then don’t have and raise babies with them”.

But wait, aren’t marrying and raising babies a patriarchal imposition on women — part of the “comfortable concentration camp” that Betty Friedan so memorably indicted?

Professor Vittert says nothing about the decreasing number of young women willing to marry and procreate. Her (botoxed) mouth turns down in disapproval as she explains that the increasing realism of AI is “enabling this entire generation of young men to continue in this loneliness epidemic”. It seems that men prefer sterile self-pleasuring and facile scopophilia to the “hard work” of relationships with real women. Like Joaquin Phoenix’s hapless character, these men, she says, are so fixated on perfection that they “are not able to deal with ups and downs, not only in a relationship, but in life in general”. The glibness of the condemnation is remarkable, though far from unusual.

It’s not clear if Professor Vittert has ever talked to actual men about why some of them (not “an entire generation”) might choose an AI relationship. Does she know any young men who have tried for years without success to find a marriageable girlfriend? Many discover that such prizes are remarkably thin on the ground, many of them unsuitable to be considered as future mothers. Even worse, perhaps, does Vittert know anything about what can happen to an inexperienced young man who pursues the wrong woman or women (there are a couple of heartbreaking examples in Sons of Feminism)? How many times does a young man who has failed repeatedly need to hear that no woman owes him love or sex before he starts thinking that giving up on them might not be a bad idea? Meanwhile, women laugh at his loneliness and drink “I bathe in male tears” mugs.

To give him credit, CNN’s Smerconish asks a few questions about the male point of view: “What’s going on with the women?” Has the power dynamic shifted in their favor? Are they less approachable than formerly? These only scratch the surface, but he’s chosen the wrong expert for such a conversation.

Vittert freely admits that there are now many more women than men at university (thanks, affirmative action!) and that far more women than formerly are choosing career over homemaking (thanks, feminist propaganda!). But those are good things, and young men simply need to adapt. Calling any of this debacle women’s fault, she declares, would not be “the right way to go”.

QotD: Representations of sex work in SF

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

Whether they were “Socialators” in Battlestar Galactica, or “Companions” in Firefly, or any number of other euphemisms, one SF trope that seems particularly insidious, especially in movies and TV, more-so than in literature, although it is still prominent there, is turning the world’s oldest profession into something glamorous and honorable, even exalted. I recently had the misfortune to read a book where they took “Make Love, Not War” literally, and all women were drafted at 18 to serve a couple years in a sex corps to keep the peace, under the idea that a free and easy sexual outlet was all it took to quell man’s violent nature. (This was only a background element, not the main focus of the story, but on the other hand, the primary plot about laser light shows being the most highly regarded form of art wasn’t particularly compelling either. And don’t get me started on how unlikable the characters were.)

Maybe it’s a relic from when SF was just another facet of Men’s Adventure magazines, or maybe it’s capitalizing on the stereotypical basement-dwelling Geek’s desire to have high quality women to command at the wave of a few credits or gold pieces. Or, more cynically, it’s the desire of Hollywood producers who actually DO have high quality women at their mercy, career-wise, to further normalize the idea that “Sex work is real work” to help smooth away the resistance to their hamfisted efforts on the casting couch.

TV Tropes has a number of entries about this, from “Unproblematic Prostitution” to “High Class Call Girl”. Writers like to call up the imagery of the Geisha, and make their Space Hookers come across as brilliant sexual artists, with additional talents that help the protagonists, such as advanced degrees or connections to corporate executives and high ranking government officials. (Funny how they are not corporate movers and shakers or government officials themselves …). They forget, of course, that Geisha were not actually prostitutes, and only rarely took lovers. There were still actual brothels in Japan for that sort of thing.

Science Fiction has gotten a lot more difficult to write as the frontiers of reality have pushed back against the flights of fantasy. We have had to accept that you can’t get to the moon inside a Victorian upholstered artillery shell, or set foot on the Jungles of Venus. And maybe that’s why a lot of SF in recent decades has turned towards the softer sciences where theories are more prominent than scientific facts, making it simpler to speculate.

However, even in our understanding of society, there are some realities that can’t be ignored. A few of them are listed in the aforementioned “Unproblematic Prostitution” entry. The primary social reality that undermines all of the tropes is that when you commodify sex, you are putting women on sale. Maybe it’s just fractionally, for a few hours out of her lifetime, but when your fantasy/SF hero comes along and waves a few C-notes to get a woman to do what he wants, it’s not the “Combination of Sex and Capitalism” (“… which are you against?” the excuse goes) but the sublimation of Sex TO Capitalism.

“Sex work is real work,” they like to say, but when you turn sex INTO work, it strips it of all of its better qualities. “Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life,” is another lie. I’ve known too many artists who go from having a fun hobby to chasing unsatisfying commissions, eventually burning out from endless requests by cretins for illustrations of their vilest fantasies. So the idea that our happy Space Hookers are having fun and getting paid, and what’s wrong with that, turns into burnout in pretty short order, because the kind of guys who go out looking for “That kind of girl” are not interested in the parts of sex that make it as enjoyable as it is for a compatible couple. They don’t have girlfriends for a reason. So the trope that Prostitution is just Sexy Fun Time falls by the wayside in the face of human nature.

SF also likes to postulate that science will make sex consequence free with perfect contraception and cures for all diseases. Writers and Producers fail to see the actual social costs and secondary effects, some of which we are finally running afoul of today, as women are aging out of their “Hookup culture” days and finding themselves alone and with few prospects for a lasting relationship, while at the same time human reproduction is falling below the replacement rate worldwide. And of course, nature being what it is, there will always be new diseases from new planets or new alien races or who knows WHAT our horny young space cadets have been sticking their dicks into. Human biology has less security in its OS than a Commodore 64.

Dr. Mauser, “Space Hookers Must Die!”, Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas, 2023-07-16.

October 9, 2023

Janice Fiamengo finds a reason to watch the Barbie movie

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I generally don’t watch movies these days, so I was never in the target audience for Barbie, but Janice Fiamengo has changed her mind about whether you should watch it:

I have changed my mind about Barbie. When I discussed it last week with my good friend Tom Golden (you can see our conversation here), I advised against viewing it.

I now recommend giving it a watch, not for pleasure or even ideological interest — it is too dull and humorless for that, with a senseless plot, wooden dialogue, and a coy voice-over — but for clarification. The high-grossing movie offers a vivid encapsulation of our culture’s view of men and women, complete with its own inadvertent self-subversion. Watching it is a leaden but useful reminder that feminists really are this self-destructively stupid, and really do want to destroy “patriarchy”, by which they mean masculine freedom, self-respect, and leadership. They no longer even pretend to value equality.

Men and boys (and the women who love them), take a good look.

In Barbie, men are at best second-class citizens who by movie’s end, in an improvement over their former nullity, are content to follow banal female directives about their attitudes and identity. In a jaw-droppingly condescending scene after the failed Ken Rebellion, Ken is counseled on how to find himself. He is told that it’s okay to cry (as he bawls like a baby) and is admonished to “figure out who you are without [Barbie/woman]”. He and the other Kens seem grateful for the puerile admonition and willing to be male on Barbie terms: sexless, rudderless, effeminate. They certainly can’t be equal, the film makes clear, because they make a mess when they’re in charge.

Keeping men in check means shielding them even from images of patriarchal (meaning competent, self-directed, masculine) men: Ken runs amok only after seeing a world (the “real world”) in which men are allegedly respected merely for being men, one of the more risible feminist lies in the movie. Feminists have never understood that men earn respect. But in the feminist vision, any possibility that men may perceive themselves as essential to their society — and as owed acknowledgement for the goods they bring — must be suppressed. Only women are essential.

Perhaps the feminist director of Barbie intended the portrayal of the Kens to reflect the situation of women under patriarchy (one searches in vain for a coherent analytical perspective). In Barbie Land, Kens are objects (not sex objects since there is no sex or even heterosexual desire) who exist only to compete, fruitlessly, for Barbies’ attention.

In the real patriarchal past, of course, women were never so reduced precisely because of male sexual longing, love, familial affection, chivalry, religious ideals, empathy, reasoning about justice, and the desire for procreation. All such longings or allegiances are absent from Barbie life. If the Barbies desire children and family — never made clear in the movie, though perhaps gestured to in the final scene when Barbie, now human, visits her gynecologist — theirs will likely be families without Kens. Whether in the real world or in Barbie Land, men are peripheral at best, dangerous at worst, and often mildly contemptible and tiresome with their “egos and petty jealousies”. The only good thing about Kens is that they are easy to manipulate.

The disdain is fathoms deep.

Women, in contrast, are complete in themselves, sufficient for each other in a world in which all positions of power — from President to CEO, doctor, pilot, astronaut, ambulance worker, professional athlete, and Nobel Prize-winning journalist — are occupied by women (and a few trans people, it seems), and in which neighborhoods function without any dirty, dangerous jobs, external threats, heavy machinery, complex repairs, or strenuous labor.

This aspect of the movie, by the way, is a striking illustration of the inability of the feminist mind to remember or even understand what men actually do: the risky, body-wearying and ingenuity-demanding work that feminists only rarely, if ever, advocate for women and which they are frequently hard-pressed even to name. One of the many magic tricks of feminism is its continual disappearing of distinctive male inventiveness, skill, adaptability, and heavy-lifting.

QotD: Roman views of sexual roles

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today.

For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else.

A Roman woman, if she’s of citizen status, can’t be used willy-nilly — but pretty much anyone else can. That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. It’s your dependents; your slaves. You can use your slaves any way you want. And if you’re not doing it, then there’s something wrong with you. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate”, so the orifices of slaves — and they could be men, women, boys or girls — were seen as the equivalent of urinals for Roman men. Of course, this is very hard for us to get our heads around today.

The most humiliating thing that could happen to a Roman male citizen was to be treated like a woman — even if it was involuntary. For them, the idea that being trans is something to be celebrated would seem the most depraved, lunatic thing that you could possibly argue. Vitellius, who ended up an emperor, was known his whole life as “sphincter”, because it was said that as a young man he had been used like a girl by Tiberius on Capri. It was a mark of shame that he could never get rid of. There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low.

Tom Holland, “The depravity of the Roman Peace”, UnHerd, 2023-07-07.

September 26, 2023

“Passport Bros”

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

Few online people are less tuned-in to the mainsteam zeitgeist than me, so perhaps I’m once again one of the last people to be clued-in about “passport bros”. Here’s Janice Fiamengo‘s post on the “bros” and the women who apparently spend a lot of time criticizing them:

Female commentary on so-called Passport Bros is not hard to find on the internet: women are angry, contemptuous, and incredulous that men are looking for women overseas and encouraging other men to do the same — not for sex tourism (which feminists loved to criticize until they discovered that women are doing it too, in which case it is acceptable), but for a long-term relationship, including, in many cases, marriage and children. These men will partially or entirely relocate to the women’s home country in order to start a new, non-western (and non-feminist) life. The angry internet women claim not to care personally: let the losers go is their expressed attitude. Yet the sheer number and vehemence of their responses suggests they do care.

The angry commentary follows a standard pattern in which the women claim to know why a significant minority of men are giving up on western women as mates. The reason never has anything to do, of course, with faults in western women or their unrealistic expectations […]

Likewise, the reason never has anything to do with western divorce laws — in which a man can be ejected from his home, imprisoned, forced to undergo a psychiatric exam, fleeced, and deprived of his children by a grasping ex-wife — or with the fact that women are the ones who initiate divorce in upwards of 70% of cases (and are often applauded for doing so).

The reason has nothing to do with women’s openly expressed attitudes of superiority, resentment, and anti-male bigotry, which are rampant in western cultures, especially Anglophone ones. It has nothing to do with the #MeToo/Believe Women climate of baseless accusation that regularly sees men accused and disgraced purely on a woman’s say-so. It has nothing to do with the institutionalized discrimination of “equity” hiring that makes it difficult for men to find and advance in careers in order to be acceptably successful to the kind of women who now deride them for their failure.

According to the angry women online, men are leaving the west (particularly North America) to find partners because they aren’t good enough for western women. The men are allegedly “terrible, and don’t want to stop being terrible”, according to one gleefully irate commentator. Their only chance is with women so poor as to be grateful for a “terrible” man; in return, such women will have to “subject themselves to [his] advances”, according to another critic’s Victorian-style phrasing.

[…]

Many such women — protected by our pro-woman culture and deferred to by men terrified of female wrath — reach adulthood without ever having received any serious criticism. If and when they are criticized, their response is a howl of outrage and wounded self-regard. This is precisely what is happening in reaction to the Passport Bros.

Underneath the anger, there is perhaps a hint of fear. It’s not fear that men will leave the west in droves (they don’t see that happening yet, and neither do I), but it’s fear that men are not, after all, entirely under female control. Not yet, and maybe never. Some men are sick of the anti-male abuse and starting to do something about it. They are critically examining women’s characters and attitude; they’re drawing back from the acquiescence they’ve always been expected (and been willing) to give. Some are walking away and telling other men to do the same.

These women are used to dishing out the denunciation, reveling in justified grievance; they are infuriated to find that now they are the ones being judged and found wanting.

Don’t be that girl.

September 20, 2023

Christian views on men and women

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The most recent book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith discusses Brian Patrick Mitchell’s Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female:

The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.

John: You know dear, we’ve been writing this book review Substack for eight months now, ever since that crazy New Year’s resolution of ours, but we still haven’t done “the gender one”. And I feel like we have a real competitive advantage at this, since both sides of the unbridgeable epistemic chasm between the sexes are represented here. So let’s settle some of the eternal questions: Can men and women be friends? Who got the worse deal out of the curse in the Garden of Eden? And what’s up with your abysmal grip strength anyway?

I was perplexed by these and other questions, but then I picked up this book on the theology of gender, and it all got a lot clearer. The author is Deacon Brian Patrick Mitchell, an Eastern Orthodox clergyman and retired military officer. In a previous life, Mitchell testified before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces and then followed that up with a book called Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, so he’s been interested in the differences between men and women for a while.

People have been observing for centuries that Christianity can be a little bit schizophrenic on the subject of gender relations. From the earliest days of the Apostolic era, there are two strains in evidence within Christianity: one which shores up the gender divisions common to most agricultural societies, and another which radically transcends them. Oftentimes both strains are visible within a single person! Thus you have the Apostle Paul on the one hand saying in his letter to the Ephesians:

    Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

But then in Galatians:

    There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

For as long as Christianity has existed, there have been people emphasizing one of these tendencies as the “true” Christian message on gender while attempting to minimize the other. Sometimes these arguments are interesting and sometimes they bring out something important (I’m a fan of Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People on the one side, and of Toby Sumpter’s fiery homilies on the other), but I think in both cases they’re falling into the error of trying to simplify something that is actually complicated. There’s a certain kind of person who can’t handle inconsistency, and that kind of person is going to have trouble with Christianity, because to a finite being the products of an infinite mind will sometimes appear inconsistent. Does Christianity want women to be subject to men, or does it want men and women to transcend their natures? The answer is very clearly both.

Mitchell’s book is compelling because it doesn’t try to minimize or hide one of these tendencies, but acknowledges up front that they’re both there and both have to be struggled with. It then advances the novel (as far as I know) argument that these two tendencies with regard to gender relations actually reflect the two major ethnic and cultural influences on the early Church: Hebrew and Greek.

The ancient Hebrew attitudes towards male and female are apparent from the beginning of the Bible: God creates Eve from out of Adam’s rib, and she is called Woman because she was taken out from Man. Thus the woman is subordinated to the man, yet fundamentally made of the same stuff as him. God calls the division of humanity into men and women good, He blesses families and helps barren women conceive, He commands His people to be fruitful and to multiply, and He promises Abraham that his seed shall be numbered as the stars of heaven. The entire Old Testament is a story of families, sometimes dysfunctional families, but families nonetheless, as opposed to lone men roaming the earth as in the Iliad or Bronze Age Mindset. Male headship is assumed, but it’s also assumed that men are fundamentally incomplete without something that only women can give them: a home, a future, and the thing that makes both, children.

So in Mitchell’s telling, the Hebrew legacy is responsible for the more “trad” side of early Christianity. What about the Greeks? Well we already discussed in our joint review of Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City how ancient Greek society was basically the world of gangster rap: honor, boasting, violence, women as trophies, women as a way of keeping score, women torn wailing from the arms of their parents or husbands and forced into marriage or concubinage or outright slavery. You will be shocked to learn that this culture did not hold a high opinion of women, procreation, or the marital union. Greek philosophy is a massively complicated and diverse beast, but there’s a strong tendency within it to associate women with physicality, nature, and brute matter, and to disdain all of these things in favor of rationality, spirit, and the intellect (all coded as male).

Our readers are probably thinking, “Hang on a minute, I thought the Hebrews were the patriarchal ones, do you mean to say that the hyper-masculine and hyper-misogynistic culture was the one that decided maleness and femaleness didn’t matter?” Well yes I do, and it’s pretty easy to see why if one hasn’t been totally brainwashed by modernity, but maybe it’ll be more convincing if a woman explains it to them.

Jane: Well, I think you gave a pretty accurate description of actually-existing ancient Greek culture, but we have to remember that the Church Fathers weren’t classicists poring through the corpus trying to accurately characterize the past. Rather, they were men of late antiquity, mostly educated in a “Great Books” canon heavy on the classical philosophy — and the worldview of philosophers is often quite different from the general norms and presuppositions of their society as a whole. (Not that modern — by which I mean post-1600 — classicists have always recognized this; E.R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational is considered a seminal work of classical scholarship precisely because it undercuts a long tradition of taking the philosophers as representative of their culture rather than in conflict with it.)1 So the direct influence on early Christians wasn’t the world Fustel de Coulanges describes (which covers roughly the Greek Dark Ages through the Archaic period), but the texts of the period that came after, as interpreted by an even later era. It’s a bit like looking at our contemporary small-l liberals, who draw heavily on a tradition that rose out of Enlightenment philosophy, which in turn was an outgrowth of and/or reaction to the medieval and early modern worlds: they’re not not connected to all that, but Boethius is not going to be the most helpful context for reading Rorty. You should probably look at Locke instead.

September 15, 2023

The old “war of the sexes” has been won decisively by women … and the aftermath won’t be pretty for any of us

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I saw an article earlier today in The Free Press on the plight of young men in the dating scene these days (discussed earlier this month here and in July here). In short, men who don’t meet certain arbitrary minimums will have almost no chance with modern women in their age cohort. If you’re not at least six feet tall (males average 5’9″ worldwide), earn at least six figures (US men average under $60K per year), and have a penis at least six inches long (official estimates say American men average 5.1″ to 5.5″), you might as well give up on the dating scene.

Tom Knighton links all that from the Free Press article with some advice for young men on the off-chance they ever do have a date:

First, let’s look at this from Fox News, where a mother laments some of the issues at college with regard to Title IX and rape accusations.

    If my two sons were starting college this Fall I would tell them this: be doubly sure you get consent — for her sake and yours. Maybe even record that consent (how romantic!). Your education and future may depend on it.

    Under Biden’s proposed Title IX rules, if a college student is accused of sexual assault or harassment, he will no longer have the right to a live hearing, to cross-examine his accuser and witnesses, or to be represented by an attorney. Instead, a school administrator can decide to forgo a hearing and weigh the “credibility” of each party on his own, acting as investigator, judge, and jury in the case.

    The standard for determining guilt will also be weakened from “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance of the evidence” — in other words, that there’s a 50.1 percent or greater chance an assault occurred. Not great odds in what are often “he said, she said” cases.

    …

    College students — mainly young men — should be worried. Biden’s Title IX changes are a reversal of rules implemented by the Trump administration in 2020, and a return to the “believe all women” attitude laid out in the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter.

This suggests a fraught landscape for young men, many of whom might just decide not to risk it.

As it is, our educational system actually favors women in many ways.

The primary, middle, and high school classrooms are constructed in a way that actually favors the way girls typically learn as opposed to how boys do. As a result, girls tend to get better grades and a leg up on getting into college.

Further, as a protected class, even before the recent Supreme Court ruling, women had a bit of an edge at being accepted to college under affirmative action guidelines, though race did tend to play a larger factor.

Now you’re favoring women’s position in a “he said/she said” environment of sexual assault allegation, even when there’s no other evidence. I say this because I’ve covered these stories off and on for years now. That’s how it happens in a surprising number of cases.

It’s a situation where young men are disfavored and operating at a disadvantage from day one, then it gets worse from there.

Schools often have all kinds of support services for female students on top of the support services open to all students. Guys, however, get no such help.

With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that women graduate college at a much higher rate than men.

The relationship between graduating university and earning a higher salary isn’t as robust as it used to be, but it’s still financially advantageous to have a degree in most careers. More and more women do and fewer and fewer men do. That means more higher-income women are competing for fewer high-status men. That tiny proportion of men benefit disproportionally from their increasing rarity in the dating pool.

Men aren’t graduating college at a similar rate to women? Well, who cares? At least women aren’t being kept out of education.

Men can’t find romantic partners and instead, turn to online porn? Well, who cares? At least women are empowered enough to be picky.

I’m not saying we should dictate anything to do with people’s personal choices, but we could at least start to realize that young men are in crisis mode and that we might want to do something about that before we have real problems.

Then we have the potential decrease in the population as fewer and fewer families are starting and I just don’t see good things happening going forward.

Large numbers of angry young men with no chance at forming relationships with women and generally under- or unemployed? This is not a scenario for a happy or stable future.

September 5, 2023

“… the misogyny myth persists because both sexes want to believe it”

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In City Journal, John Tierney disassembles the “misogyny myth” of modern culture:

Misogyny is supposedly rampant in modern society, but where, exactly, does it lurk? For decades, researchers have hunted for evidence of overt discrimination against women as well as subtler varieties, like “systemic sexism” or “implicit bias”. But instead of detecting misogyny, they keep spotting something else.

[…]

If you haven’t heard of this evidence, it’s because of the well-documented misandrist bias in the public discussion of gender issues. Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore — or work to suppress — the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect”, based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly — women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence — and it’s obvious in popular culture.

“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning”. Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.

Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies — and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.

The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males — a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.

Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.

September 3, 2023

Online dating apps

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

The modern dating scene is evidently catastrophic for the majority of men:

After all, dating apps digitally castrate 85 percent of men.

On Bumble, sixty percent of women say they’re looking for a six-foot-tall or taller man. Just 30 percent will drop their requirements one inch lower. Just 15 percent of women would consider a man just one inch shorter than the average 5’9 man. Shorter than that? Your chances fall with each descending inch. Understandably, 80 percent of men lie about their height. Why? Dating apps are merciless, Latin American economies. Most women on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble seek the top 20 percent of men, leaving the rest to compete for a small portion of the dating pool. Reader, I’m not bearing a tall grudge from a short height, I’m six-foot-two.

When I was younger, we used to meet people in person. This antiquated exercise was meritocracy in action.

For the genetically ungifted, that is, the ordinary 80 percent of men, this was the great leveller.

No matter how short or aesthetically unblessed, meeting in person gave all a fair hearing. As the great Christopher Hitchens once wrote, there’s a good reason why men employ humour and why women tend to value a man’s mastery of humour.

Dating apps are anti-merit. Essentially, they provoke a biological feudalism that determines your prospects before you escape the womb.

The 5’9 guy with good humour, high intelligence, seasoned wit, and good manners? Nope.

Social media mutates the ideal into the ordinary. Every man is six-foot-plus. Every woman resembles a Reality TV star: big lips, ballooning bum, bouncing boobs.

In this strange, digital landscape, some porn-addled men use dick pics as a greeting. Three-quarters of women have endured such “greetings”.

Dating apps are a primitive world in which some men say “hello” by showing you their rather ugly organs.

Offline, leery weirdoes masturbating vigorously (Is there any other way?) on the night Tube often end up in jail or in the newspaper. Endearingly, the Daily Telegraph still calls this “performing a sexual act” as if on a stage before a ticket-waving audience and a shrivel of critics.

Reader, I’m no reactionary prude — I’m spiritually French — the only people on earth a majority of whom think adultery is an invigorating hobby rather than a grave sin.

The business of life works better without a screen and an algorithm.

Unsurprisingly, presenting oneself as a product on the “dating marketplace” degrades self-esteem, afflicts mental health, and corrodes our sense of reality. I’m no philosopher, but maybe our burgeoning mental health crisis has something to do with our living as if products on a shelf to be thumbed over by complete strangers.

As Rob Henderson reported last year, the world of dating apps is a hellscape for everyone but the tiny minority of men who get a “swipe right” from vast numbers of women:

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

August 10, 2023

“… most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school … boys are treated as defective girls”

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sarah Hoyt on the plight of boys and young men these days:

It’s far worse for the kids, because most of them are not even working at what they trained for. Or if they are, they are working at a level as though they were never trained.

But there is a bigger problem: most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school. If you’re older than me, you might think I lost my mind. Heck, if you’re younger than me, and never looked closely at what your kids’ school is doing, or you have no kids, you might think I’m nuts.

Well, I might be nuts but not on this. Starting at about middle school, boys are treated as defective girls. Because women are the majority and treated like a protected minority, every school is afraid of not “treating them fairly” which means giving them primacy. Now just your boy’s behavior as a boy will be punished, but assignments are geared for how girls/women think (which means they also annoy the living daylights of atypical females like myself), they are oriented to group work (which by and large punishes males, though again, atypical females ain’t too happy either), and they’re geared to at least external compliance (which again is a female trait.) Most of the teachers are not just women, but they’re women indoctrinated in a system that tells them that male work is superior and that women are unfairly discriminated against for “being kept out of it.”

If at this point you’re puzzled over my referring to male and female characteristics, and to male work, let’s take the gloves off and speak like adults, instead of the mush most of us have been fed our entire lives.

While we’re rational, thinking creatures, and creatures with our own will power, and therefore can work on a lot of our characteristics and change them: there are differences between men and women. Innate, inborn differences, starting in the uterus with the “hormone baths” that guide development of different sexes. Period.

No real scientist would ever deny that, unless of course he/she feared for his/her job.

… and because we live in retarded times, let me explain that though our bodies and brains are completely different and run on two models, yes, how much that difference manifests is a spectrum. First, because development has glitches. I.e. some people don’t get the right hormones at the right time, and might outright have a brain that leans more the way opposite their body. This is very rare. It is also, btw, not covalent with gender dysphoria. It’s mostly 100% living frustrated by the rest of humanity and assumptions made. But there are other issues. Other types of characteristics might emphasize/mitigate/mimic the way of thinking of the opposite sex. Autistic females tend to think more like males (go figure) and ADHD women might appear to (though it’s not necessarily true.)

Also, like every gendered characteristic, there is a spectrum. Gender doesn’t exist on a spectrum (mostly because it’s a grammatical construct and those are very binary/trienary) but GENDER EXPRESSING CHARACTERISTICS do. Every adult knows tall, hairy men with deep voices, and slight, almost hairless males who are tenors. And every combination thereof. This without regard to maleness/fertility/orientation. And every adult knows vavaboom females that look like they should be painted on the nose of WWII planes, and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females and every combination in between. And these women might or might not be straight/fertile without regard to those combinations.

And yes, all of us know strong women and weak males, though testosterone unreasonably favors males from early development.

[…]

Look, to level set: if you have a son, even a relatively high performing one, chances are he’s working under a level of throttling-down. And most boys are checked out. They no longer care. They’ve been told they’re oppressors and evil by reason of being born male from the moment they were conscious of being male. They no longer care. They no longer want to do anything. Burned out before they even start their lives.

And under it, because they’re males, with testosterone, there’s a level of anger that women will never understand, unless they live surrounded by males and really, really work at understanding. This means that this treatment of boys is creating that much ballyhooed “toxic masculinity” which idiots confuse with “being male”.

Yes, some boys are finding their way into professions the feminists have no interest in, and bless Mike Rowe, whatever his issues, for showing the way to a bunch of males.

But that’s not going to solve our problems as a society in general. Because, sure, we need machinists and HVAC technicians. But we also need engineers who are more fascinated with the “thing” that is the main part of their job, than with office politics. We need researchers who will work hard at figuring the problem, and not spend most of their time figuring out on whom to step to get higher. We need doctors who are gruff and not particularly good at “customer service” but view disease as an enemy to be conquered. (I could go for days about medicine. I’m not going to. But part of our favoring women in medical school is that we are importing most of the people involved in actual day to day doctoring — a dirty, unpalatable position educated women tend to disdain — from countries without the same standards of training. This is one of the idiotic consequences of denying biology in favor of bizarre Marxist social engineering. And not that, yes, I have several female doctors among the regulars. Yes, females can be good and passionate doctors. And several of them are. But those who read here are old enough they were admitted on an equal footing with males. No one was trying to make it 80% female, which is what I’m complaining about. That level of discrimination distorts everything down the line.)

We are INTENTIONALLY blocking males from pursuing their interests and talents, while pushing women to pursue what are traditionally male interests and talents.

This extends from professions to modes of behavior. Women are encouraged to join the hook up culture, with no emotional attachments and behave like BAD and IRRESPONSIBLE men of the 50s (or at least the popular image of those. None of us lived them. Wait. Some of you did. But I didn’t. And those who did as adults are, at this point, a minority.)

The only possible conclusion is that our culture has gone insane and thinks that male modes of work, and male modes of social behavior are VASTLY superior to females. And that females would normally behave like males, unless they were prevented. So, women must have been prevented for MILLENNIA. MILLENNIA. And now, we’re taking revenge for all those oppressed women, by making men behave like women and women like men. Ah. See how they like being oppressed!

Stated like this, openly, it sounds completely insane. It’s like these people are bizarrely misogynistic aliens, who never met a human. Which is largely true. They’re Marxists, for whom every human is a widget, interchangeable with every other human.

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