Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2024

“… the rise in emotional disturbance among young women correlates precisely with the introduction of the smart phone”

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter sets off all the alarms with a proposal to address the burgeoning issue of social media addiction and the closely correlated rise in mental health issues among young women:

The psychic breakdown of the young Western female has been the defining political phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Women are suffering from depression, anxiety, neurosis, and dysphoria as never before, they’re drugged to the gills to deal with it, and they’ve got the SSREyes to prove it.

This isn’t only a problem for young women. Their suffering is everyone’s suffering. The romantic paranoia engendered by MeToo, a mass hysteria that has grown directly out of this plague of neurosis, has destroyed courtship among the young. As a result a shocking fraction of young men are virgin incels, while their femcel counterparts are contemplating a future where 45% of them will be childless. Driven by their neglected ovaries to latch on to surrogate children in the form of migrants and minorities, and entering into lesbian civil unions with the Mammy State, childless women overwhelmingly vote left – as always, the party of the psychically distressed thrives to whatever degree it cultivates psychic distress. The political derangement is downstream of their emotional derangement, and the two feed on one another in a vicious spiral of crazed minds pushing crazed policies that craze minds yet further, a cycle that threatens to break civilization, either gradually through steady demographic deflation and spiritual demoralization, or perhaps – if the young men alienated by a society that has ruined their women cease stupefying themselves with porn, and cohere as an army – more catastrophically.

There’s no real mystery as to why this has happened.

Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated at length and in extraordinary empirical detail that the rise in emotional disturbance among young women correlates precisely with the introduction of the smart phone, and the mass migration of social lives onto social media that immediately followed. The slot machine engineers of Silicon Valley trapped the world’s young women in a Skinner box by hacking their instinctive sexual competition strategies. Suddenly every young girl in the world was measuring herself against every other young woman, all viewing one another through the distorting filters of flattering camera angles, ruthlessly curated digital photographs, makeup, plastic surgery, and AI filters that smoothed wrinkles, removed blemishes, and reduced unwelcome poundage. On the Internet no girl is ever the prettiest girl in the room, or even the second or third prettiest. Meanwhile they’re flooded with a relentless barrage of that most intoxicating of drugs: male attention.

Of course they went mad.

They’re all wandering around in a state of selfie-shock.

QotD: The PUA (Pick-up artist)

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

If you’ve read The Game […] you can’t help being struck by how expensive all this must be, both in time and money. Mystery, the first PUA guru who kicked the whole “community” off by offering classes, charged something like $1-5000 for a week-long class — serious money back then, and that’s before you consider that guys were flying in from all over the country, indeed from all over the world, to take them. That aside, consider what it would take to hit at least three Sunset Strip clubs a night, three nights a week. I’m well past my bar-hopping days, but when I was in grad school, the “trendy” clubs in College Town charged $10-20 just in cover …

This was two decades or more ago, and College Town was in Podunkville. Imagine what they’re charging to get into the hot nightspots on the Sunset Strip. I bet just getting into the clubs costs these aspiring PUAs a couple hundred bucks, every week, for months. Then there’s all the other stuff Strauss said he did to transform himself into “Style” — laser-whitening his teeth, tanning beds, classes on elocution and posture, a whole new (and ever-changing) wardrobe, surfing. I can’t even begin to calculate it, but at one point he and three other PUAs are living in a Hollywood Hills mansion that once belonged to one of the Rat Pack — monthly rent, $50K. Then throw in the fact that all of this takes a tremendous amount of time, and consider the toll that must take on your body. I hit the sauce pretty hard back in my day, and one of the reasons I stopped was that the hangovers really started hurting — one night of bar-hopping now, and I’d be bedridden for days. I’m getting exhausted just typing this, and do you see what I mean?

And all this without getting a single girl. I think everyone here has been in at least one relationship, so we know that no matter how casual you keep it, bare-bones relationship management, even of pump-and-dumps, takes a fairish bit of time (so I’ve heard, anyway). I might be misremembering, but at one point Strauss claims he was managing something like four or five more or less long-term hookups simultaneously. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day …

Much better, then, to just say you’re a PUA. To do it Tyler Durden style, in other words. I’m pretty sure you could sell the illusion of yourself as a hardcore PUA with one not-too-expensive night on the town. Just dress up like one of these goobers, hit up one bar, and take selfies with a bunch of girls, making sure to alter the shot angles enough that no one can tell you’re in the same bar the whole time. Post one or two stories of your conquests a week, and you could portray yourself as some kind of pickup master in no time at all.

Of course, that’s if you want to consciously fake it. I have no idea what “Tyler Durden” was doing, not being a sociopath myself, but as Strauss tells it, his disciples got snookered into it. They really did want to learn how to pick up girls, but since dressing up like a PUA and talking about getting girls is much easier than actually getting girls, a night on the town with those guys ended up being an endless series of “approaches”. Again, it’s how you define “effective”, and Strauss lets the cat out of the bag a bit when he informs us of the PUA’s weird lingo for “closing”. There’s the “f-close”, of course, which should be obvious, but there’s also the “kiss close” and even the “phone number close” … and both of those count as complete successes.

Severian, “Mental Middlemen”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-05.

February 6, 2024

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 1 – What Makes the Greeks Special?

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 1, 2024

This first lecture in the course makes a case for the Greeks as the exceptional people of the Ancient World. They were not saints: they were at least as willing as anyone else to engage in aggressive wars, enslavement, and sometimes human sacrifice. At the same time, working without any strong outside inspiration, they provided at least the foundations for the science, mathematics, philosophy, art and secular literature of later peoples.
(more…)

January 19, 2024

QotD: How the internet changed the dating world

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

Before online dating, the available dating pool was just the people in your town: the people at your local bar, at your church, at your office, etc. Online dating expanded that pool by orders of magnitude, which changed how we think about dating in general. Which makes sense: When people have millions of people to choose from instead of hundreds, lots of things start to change.

First, preferences get formalized. 90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. This also makes sense: When people only spend 2-3 seconds per app, superficial qualities rise to the top.

Online dating also changes our expectations regarding relationships more broadly. Since we now date outside of our circles, it’s now easier to cheat or ghost or just otherwise leave if the relationship isn’t perfect. Why stay in a non-perfect relationship, the logic goes, when there are millions of other potential matches at your fingertips?

This perhaps explains why breakup rates for couples who meet via apps are twice as high as couples who meet via friends and family. Friends and family not only refer better, but there’s a higher incentive to stay in a relationship when there’s the social encouragement of family and friends.

What online dating does is enable hypergamy at a massive scale. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to want to date the best men, no matter where the woman is in the hierarchy. Men also want top women of course, but they’re on average willing to settle for any woman, at least for casual sex, whereas women are much more discerning, which makes sense given women have a much bigger risk than men when it comes to sex, since women can get pregnant. It’s basic biology: Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive.

What we see with algorithmic online dating isn’t a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we’ve created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% of women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them).

Algorithmic dating conflates two markets, the market for relationships and the market for sex under the ambiguous banner of “dating”. What happens then is men on apps try to match with as many women as possible and women try to match with a small selection of higher status men. That leads to the situation where a dating app’s natural equilibrium is that a narrow set of men have “dating” access to almost all the women if they choose to, and they typically do. Even with the best intentions, these men aren’t interested in long-term relationships with all these women. The more options a man has, the less inclined he is to want one single relationship.

To put some numbers on it:

  • Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men.
  • 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.
  • A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile.

And if the majority of women are vying for these men and ignoring the rest of them, that creates both a large amount of lonely women and men. Indeed: 28% of men under 30 have reported no sex in the last year, which has doubled in the last decade. This celibacy level is reminiscent of feudal medieval times. In the old days these men would have become monks or cannon fodder for the war. But these days, they just watch porn and play video games (don’t give up, guys!).

Erik Torenberg, “The Matching Problem in Dating”, Erik Torenberg, 2023-09-23.

January 9, 2024

QotD: Women versus PUAs

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

I don’t think the PUA crowd has any solution to the problem of how men and women can stop treating each other like shit. Nor do they claim to; the PUA attitude is that you just have to play your cards as best you can under a set of constraints that is intrinsically tragic. But I think the spotlight glare they’re putting on actual mating behavior — as opposed to the lies we tell ourselves about how we behave, or how we think we ought to behave — is a valuable first step.

The truth hurts, but it also helps. Understanding that you’re being yanked around in unhelpful ways by your instincts is the necessary first step to gaining more control of your choices. This is why I think the people who should be paying most attention to PUA theory are women — and not for the most obvious defensive reasons, either.

If you are female, you may be thinking “OK, I should learn game so jerks won’t be able to play me”. Well, that’s nice, but almost completely irrelevant. Because what both evolutionary psych and PUA tell us is that in cold fact you want to be played by an alpha – and failing that, at least someone a bit taller, a bit older, a bit smarter, and a bit higher-status than you. The fact that you want to be better at detecting imitation alphas changes nothing essential; women have been polishing that counter-game as long as men have been practicing theirs.

No. The reason women need be paying attention to PUA goes much deeper than just notching up another escalation in the jerk-vs.-bitch arms race. It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men. In pervasive female self-honesty begins the only hope of not training up more generations of jerks. And it’s there that the pitiless, revealing glare of the PUA spotlight might help.

Yes, I know what kind of reflexive screaming that last paragraph is going to trigger. Feminists will lash at me for suggesting that this is womens’ problem to solve; shouldn’t at least half the burden of self-awareness and change fall on men?

In fact, it can’t be that way, and it can’t be for a brutally simple reason. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a member of a culture in which women have far more power to control mens’ sexual experience than the reverse. The only exceptions to this rule have been barbaric hellholes in which women were treated as chattel.

Ladies, with having more power over sexual outcomes there comes more responsibility. And there’s this, too; just suppose the great mass of men stopped thinking with their dicks and 99% of them suddenly became sensitive New Age guys eager to commit. Until most women stopped being cruel to betas and rewarding men who behave like dominating jerks with sex, nothing … nothing would change. PUA game would still work. The tragedy to which it is a minimax response would still be in motion.

I don’t have any final answers either. But, gentle reader … if you’re a beta male and not a natural, learning some PUA game might sound icky but it would sure beat masturbating to porn for the rest of your life. And if you’re female, think hard about the last guy you slept with and the last guy you friend-zoned. Maybe you owe yourself a rethink and friend-zone guy an apology, of the kind best delivered naked.

Eric S. Raymond, “A natural contemplates game”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-03-03.

January 3, 2024

“One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive”

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

In The Critic, Victoria Smith outlines the history of medical misogyny from Aristotle to modern-day “trans healthcare”:

The neglect of female bodies in medicine has a long history. The male-default bias, writes Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women, “goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a ‘mutilated male’ body (thanks, Aristotle)”:

    The female was the male ‘turned outside in’. Ovaries were female testicles (they were not given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum. […] The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to.

As Criado Perez notes, this bias lives on in male-centric medical research and undifferentiated treatment recommendations. “Women are dying,” she notes, “as a result of the gender data gap.” The belief that there is nothing specifically different about female people — cut a bit here, add a bit there, and we’re the same as men — has led to our symptoms being ignored and our pain dismissed.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of books — Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, Cat Bohannon’s Eve, Leah Hazzard’s Womb, to name a few — which have aimed to correct the imbalance. This is important both to save lives and ease suffering, and because, on a very basic level, it is insulting for half the human race to have our bodies treated as lesser, imperfect versions of a male ideal. We are more than that. We exist in our own right.

There are many in medicine, however, who still seem to think that Aristotle was right. Last week, for instance, the World Health Organisation announced it would be developing new guidelines into “the health of trans and gender diverse people”. While this might sound positive, as Eliza Mondegreen notes, many of those leading the development group hold highly regressive views about sex, gender and bodies. It is only possible to believe that a person could change sex if you have not given much consideration to the “second” sex at all.

One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive despite having evolved from — and continuing to rely on — an understanding of sex difference which is regressive, male-centric and superficial. Because no one wants to admit it, this has led to a plethora of articles along the lines of “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary” and “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic“. While these claim to be adding extra detail and nuance to our understanding, what they do in practice is revert back to privileging the male default. Sex is all so varied, all so different, they tell us, we might as well not bother setting any standards for what counts as “femaleness”. We’re all just human, aren’t we? Only some bodies have tended to be considered more human than others. Rebranding “the male default” “the sex spectrum” is a sneaky way of insisting, once again, that female people are nothing more than males with a few minor tweaks.

This is the new medical misogyny, built on the back of the old version. Unfortunately, because it positions itself as anti-conservative and even pro-feminist, many writers of texts that address the old version feel obliged to go along with the new. It’s not difficult to see why. Who wants their work to be undermined by bad faith accusations of transphobia? Isn’t it easier just to say “it’s clear that trans women are women” — as Bohannon has done — on the basis that at least this will enable you to challenge the centring of male bodies elsewhere?

December 14, 2023

Whatever it is, it sure ain’t Stoicism …

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

Freddie deBoer doesn’t have a catchy name for this, but you’ll recognize it instantly from the description:

For years now, I’ve written once or twice annually about a phenomenon that I’ve struggled to name but which everyone understands. It’s a particular kind of social and aesthetic culture, not exclusive to Instagram but very heavily associated with it, that merges girlboss feminism with the contemporary therapeutic imperative, a strange syncretic mysticism involving horoscopes and “manifesting”, and a blanket excuse for narcissism and selfishness dressed up in quasi-political and self-help terms. You know what I mean.

Some of these memes are comically ridiculous, most of them are fairly innocuous, and a few of them make me deeply sad. But they all reveal a tangle of conflicting attitudes and ideas that are quite confused. You would never assemble these various impulses into a life philosophy on purpose; they’ve been grafted together mostly thanks to the weird rhythms and path dependence of social media. Either way, I’ve argued that they present an essential problem with any kind of “I can have it all” philosophy — millions of people absorb this stuff, and because many of the things we want in life are zero sum, not all of them in fact can have it all. Almost all of them, in fact, will get very much less than it all. You have this absurd manifesting/The Secret stuff, where grown adults genuinely convince themselves that they can will what they want into being simply through wanting it. Well, alright: what if two people want the same promotion at work, and they’re both manifesting it? The clod philosophy this is all attached to says that whoever wins wanted it more, and since wanting can’t be quantified, no one can ever prove that isn’t true. (Convenient!) Regardless, in the case of the singular promotion and two people manifesting for it, only one of the people who has read endless memes like these actually ends up being self-actualized by success. This is OK; life can be full of contentment and disappointment at the same time. Part of what makes this kind of messaging pernicious, though, is that it suggests that not getting everything you want is always a personal failure you shouldn’t accept.

It is not possible that God promised the whole garden to everyone. (That’s not how fractions work, even for God.) It is not socially responsible to believe that you are entitled to the whole garden. And setting yourself up to see anything short of the whole garden as failure is a recipe for making yourself miserable.

That’s related to another point I’ve made, which is that these memes create an unachievable expectation that healthy, successful women aren’t in possession of ordinary confidence but of lunatic confidence, a kind of confidence rarely seen outside of Michael Jordan or bipolar mania. In a particularly perverse irony of the sort that seems to usually afflict women, this demand for outrageous self-confidence becomes just another bar that women feel like they can’t meet. A whole affirmational culture that ostensibly exists to help and affirm and praise women ends up being just one more on the long list of expectations that our society heaps on them: hard-charging and career-oriented but always putting family first, well put-together but always effortless, sexy but not slutty, Madonna and whore, you know the whole deal. I’m sorry that this stuff is so gendered, but it is, and I’m sorry that I’m the wrong messenger on this topic, but no one else is making these arguments, so I must. Yes, I concede that for most people who indulge in this stuff, it’s a harmless hobby that maybe pushes them to be a little better to themselves. But as time goes on, the messaging has grown more and more deranged, and young people are very susceptible to this sort of thing. And my job is to worry.

December 5, 2023

“Why should a criminal act be punished more or less severely depending on a victim’s ability to emote in public about it?”

Filed under: Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo with a column that, had it been written by a man, would merit universal condemnation from the mainstream media (instead, if they pay any attention to it will probably dismiss it with hints of “false consciousness” or “Stockholm syndrome”):

For years, activists told us that part of the horror for sexual assault survivors was the fear of not being believed, the feeling that one was alone with an experience no one else understood or even acknowledged. Fair enough. Now, decades into the near-constant discussion of all varieties of such assault, many quite trivial yet treated with great seriousness, women don’t seem to have become any better at dealing with the ostensible horror — quite the opposite. The unending focus on sexual victimization seems only to have created more victims.

A case in point involves the infamous sexual crimes of Dr. Vincent Nadon, a now-disgraced GP at the University of Ottawa Health Clinic, who in late 2018 was sentenced to eight years in prison after he pled guilty to many dozens of counts of voyeurism and sexual assault during a 28-year medical practice. (The exact number of charges was hard to determine, seeming to change in every report). Much of what Nadon pled guilty to — mainly the recording of women via his cellphone while they were undressing or undergoing breast exams — was a type of deeply unprofessional conduct that might have gone forever unnoticed by the victims if one intrepid woman had not seen the cellphone’s recording light winking at her from a cabinet and gone to investigate. There were also allegations of sexual assault nearly indistinguishable in their details from regular medical touching — the main distinction being that the touching was “for sexual purposes”. Witnesses at Nadon’s sentencing hearing spoke of what had occurred, in some cases many years previously, as if it had been the worst possible betrayal.

A report of the sentencing hearing described women wiping away tears as they told of “feelings of powerlessness, embarrassment and even guilt”. Others said they had become distrustful of men after learning of Nadon’s actions. One woman, having been shown by police a cellphone recording made of her in Nadon’s office, claimed that she felt physically ill and “has not been able to go to another doctor, and is uncomfortable undressing, even in front of her husband”. Another woman said she felt “violated and betrayed”, and now “looks for hidden cameras everywhere, is obsessed with locking doors, and has developed a medical condition that can be caused by stress”. Many alleged that they feared seeing videos of themselves on the internet though there is no indication Nadon ever uploaded any of his recordings.

In a separate report about fallout from the charges against Nadon, some women expressed outrage at authorities they saw as complicit in their victimization, with one woman complaining that University of Ottawa Health Services failed to “help [her] tell [her] story and come forward”. This woman, who told how she had not been provided with a gown to wear during a pap smear procedure with Nadon, was also furious at the University of Ottawa for failing to more closely monitor its health service provider. Her anger was sustained and wide-ranging: “Obviously I’m super traumatized. I feel extremely violated and so sick to my stomach. It’s really, really disgusting.” “It’s even hard for me now to find a therapist I can trust.”

I can’t get inside these women’s heads, of course, but their statements seem hysterical and irrational, far in excess of the facts, and perhaps willfully exaggerated in order to garner the maximum of attention and sympathy. It was disturbing to see such statements presented as if they proved something about the severity of Dr. Nadon’s actions. They prove nothing except the climate of alleged female sexual fragility in which we are all now forced to live.

Victim impact statements are often of dubious value in criminal justice proceedings — why should a criminal act be punished more or less severely depending on a victim’s ability to emote in public about it? — but in a case like this, with damsel-in-distress melodrama having already been stoked by multiple media reports at every stage of the investigation, the victim statements took on a particularly staged, formulaic quality. One had to make an effort to remember that many of the complainants would not even have known they were harmed if police hadn’t shown them that they were. Their pain may have been real, but it was also almost entirely self-generated.

The whole story of Dr. Nadon the beloved physician turned super-predator seems to have been largely manufactured, first and foremost by police, who were so eager to find as many complainants as possible that they repeatedly put out calls through the media for more “victims” to come forward. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, with police stating publicly that they feared there were likely more victims, and issuing “a public plea for help”. What did they expect to happen?

November 27, 2023

QotD: The PUA (Pick-up Artist)

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

… the women the PUAs are after aren’t the kind that interest me, much of “game” as described in the PUA culture fills me with a mix of recognition and revulsion. And a third, more complex reaction that is the real reason I’m writing this essay.

One one hand, I recognize techniques like kino escalation. Oh, do I ever! Adroit use of that one has gotten me into the sack more times than I can count. On the other hand, I’m basically incapable of what PUAs call the neg; I can’t insult a woman even by implication unless I think she’s done something to specifically deserve it, and the thought of flinging negs to score sex disgusts me in a very fundamental way.

On the gripping hand … I recognize a harsh truthfulness in a lot of what the PUAs are saying. Crudely put, the “game” advice for most men (the population PUAs call AFCs or “Average Frustrated Chumps”) reduces to behaving like an asshole so women will mistake you for an alpha. I really am an alpha, so I don’t have to asshole-fake it — but it is nevertheless quite clear to me that the PUAs are on to something. This is frequently a successful strategy; I’ve been outcompeted by it myself on several humiliating occasions. Furthermore, the PUAs are probably correct in asserting that for many AFCs it is the best strategy available, and never mind that the thought of running it myself turns my stomach.

In the PUA’s disturbingly persuasive analysis, I’ve had the luxury of not treating women like shit only because I have often had USPs for the brighter-than-average women I was interested in, notably in the combination of alpha-male qualities with high intelligence and expressive skills. Without those USPs, argues the PUA, my choices would have reduced to “frustrated loser” or “sexually successful douchebag” — and, looking at my own experience and that of my less successful peers, I find myself unable to refute this.

That is kind of horrifying if you think about it. Possession of USPs is rare by definition, and if you have one you’re more than averagely likely to be an alpha anyway. The PUA is telling us that human beings are designed in such a way that the most reliable way for the large majority of beta males to get sex is to behave like narcissistic, dominating, emotionally-unavailable jerks. This would be appalling enough as pure theory, but the PUA makes it worse by applying it to actually have lots of sex. “Success” one blog unsparingly observes “is defined by penis in vagina”. Never take your eye off that ball, says the PUA. Much as one might like to dismiss this as crass reductionism, evolutionary theory makes any countercase rather difficult to argue.

How did our poor species get into this hole? The PUA community gravitates to evolutionary-psychology explanations for human behavior as much as I do, it’s one of the interesting things about reading their stuff. It’s remarkable how often they manage to apply facts about human reproductive biology in a tactical way. The use they make of evo-bio concepts like hypergamy, peacocking, and sexy-son theory is, I find, sound and justified. The kind of pitiless clinical eye they turn on human mating interactions could scarcely be bettered by most scientists.

But the PUAs don’t, at least so far as I’ve yet seen, have a generative explanation for why women friend-zone nice guys and fuck bad boys. They accept this as the foundation of game without asking what circumstances in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness stuck women with apparently counterproductive wiring.

I’ve thought about this, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must have been reliable indicators of superior status. Perhaps they were much more risky to fake in a small society where beta males were almost constantly under they eye of senior alphas with hard fists.

Meanwhile, back in modernity, we’re stuck with the consequences – men who have been trained to be imitation-alpha jerks and abusers by women who are sexually fickle, manipulative and cruel towards beta males. It’s not a pretty picture, not if you’re looking in from halfway outside it like me and certainly not if you’re stuck in the middle of it as an invisible AFC or a woman wondering why she’s surrounded by douchebags.

Eric S. Raymond, “A natural contemplates game”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-03-03.

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”.

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