Quotulatiousness

July 29, 2024

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

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

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

Screencaps from the Zoom call.
Reason magazine.

“Karens for Kamala?” actress Connie Britton joked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 21, 2024

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

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

    Do you have any examples of BCGs recuperating?

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

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

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

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

July 13, 2024

Did you blink and miss Gender Empathy Gap Day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 23, 2024

QotD: Shoes

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

Mismatched shoes are also nicely subversive. There is somewhere in the clothing code a notion that holds over from the Elizabethan era that says a person’s shoes must show that they are in the Elizabethan lingo, unconcussable. Shoes, especially the shoes of the male and the young, are meant to show that the wearer is, all apologies, grounded. (High heel shoes take their semotic precisely from the way they break this rule. The wearer, a female, demonstrates her vulnerability, her fragility, her elegance, her powers of evocation by showing herself not at all grounded.)

Grant McCracken, “Cotton, Converse and co-creation”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-07-27.

May 30, 2024

QotD: Is a “Pickup Artist” just an amateur method actor performing “fake it until you make it” drills?

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

The underlying principles of Game are sound, because they come from the world of advertising. Heartiste was very good about referring to the marketing background — sociobiology may have provided the theory, but marketing, particularly Robert Cialdini’s seminal Persuasion, provided the practice. Social proof, consistency and commitment, all that jazz, it’s just marketing, and marketing certainly works … as far as it goes. I’m not privy to the numbers (not being a senior exec at a major corporation), but I’m pretty sure that an ad campaign that verifiably produced a 5% increase in sales would be a smashing success. An ad campaign that got 10% would make you Don Draper, a legend in the field who is also complete fiction.

Which forces us to consider a second question: How much of Game’s “success” is just practice? I’d wager very long money that no one, in the history of seduction, has ever said “I hit on fifteen girls a day, but I never seem to get anywhere”. And that of course is the very first thing the Game gurus have you do — just approach girls, dozens of them every day. Practice any skill for an hour a day and you’re bound to get a lot better pretty quickly. If you stink at golf, for instance, go hit a bucket of balls every day after work; in a month you’ll be dramatically better than you were, even if — make that especially if — you were terrible to start with.

Then throw in the marketing-style success rate. A 5% sales increase might not seem that big, but it’s millions of dollars. So, too, “scoring with 5% of your approaches” is a stunning success rate compared to 0%, especially since, you know, it’s sex, which our culture has taught us is the only meaningful standard.

Finally, though I will cheerfully admit to never having been a PUA, or anything close to it, I’ve read a fair amount of their stuff, and it seems to me that what they’re teaching is “how to fake self-confidence”, which is to say, they’re teaching Method acting. The theory is that you “fake it ’til you make it” — that is, by acting self-confident at all times, eventually you’ll really be self-confident. That virtue is as virtue does, and vice versa, goes back at least to Aristotle, so I’m certainly not going to argue with it. I’m simply going to point out that self-confidence, though of course very real, is more than just a set of behaviors, though our culture makes it very difficult to distinguish the two … and, worse, makes both of them very difficult to distinguish from “just being an asshole”.

Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

May 28, 2024

QotD: Women’s voting interests

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I was young, then. Imbecilic stupidity is common in the young, who are subject to fashionable excitations. My mother, on the other hand, was older. As a Tory, she of course doubted whether women should vote at all; but as my father was of old Ontario Methodist farmboy stock, his congenital propensity to vote Liberal had to be acknowledged.

“I have to vote Conservative, for his sake,” she reasonably explained.

She had compounded his characteristic error in 1968, however, and felt she owed an explanation to her son. This began by reminding me of her fragile, female sex.

“One thinks of the party leader on the analogy of going for a date.”

And true enough, the Tory leader, Mr Robert Stanfield, was the sort of man you could present to your father. He could be relied on, to get you home safely, and on time.

“But there are times when a woman does not want to get home on time,” mama added.

She, a registered nurse acquainted with the eccentricities of mental patients, called my attention to a phenomenon I had not previously noticed. Whenever a truly monstrous (male) psychopath is strapped away in gaol, the prison receives adoring letters for him, from women. These correspondents have never met him, and know him only from accounts in the yellow press. He may have been found guilty of heinously murdering a succession of wives and lovers. But they promise to be waiting for him on the steps of the penitentiary; and as the police will confirm, they are still there.

My mother had never comprehended how a woman could be so crazy. But when she realized that she had herself just voted for “Pierre” [that’s Trudeau the elder, to clarify], she suddenly understood.

David Warren, “The women’s vote”, Essays in Idleness, 2024-02-22.

May 24, 2024

“[I]t is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but … men must help women reach theirs“

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

There has been a lot of online outrage after Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker spoke at the graduation ceremonies at his alma mater:

“Stop giving men microphones,” wrote one of the signers of the petition to have NFL kicker Harrison Butker fired.

“As a woman living in post-Roe America,” declared another, “I’m exhausted from men telling women what to do with their lives.”

“How offensive to imply women are put here on this planet to help a man reach his full potential,” fumed a third. “We should be empowering women to achieve greatness however that looks for them. Having children or being a mother isn’t the currency we must pay to be treated as equal members of this society.”

And on and on they go in predictable, and predictably incoherent, statements. Apparently, it is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but, in the next breath, men must help women reach theirs.

At a time when women encourage one another in “rage rituals” and feminists like Mona Eltahawy call for perpetual anger as the route to liberation, few can be surprised by the hysteria that followed National Football League kicker Harrison Butker’s speech to the graduating students of Benedictine College in Kansas. It is a rage that has led well over 200,000 of the furious, mostly women, to sign a petition demanding he be fired by the Kansas City Chiefs.

Manufacturing outrage is what feminist journalism does best, and its audience is eager for cosplay rebellion and narcissistic posturing even when, as in the case of the speech, the hyperventilating is far in excess of the fact. That even Benedictine nuns have joined the chorus shows how many women in all walks of life find such posturing near-irresistible.

Of course, if Butker had addressed the Benedictine College graduates to say that Catholicism was riddled with misogyny and homophobia, no popular petitions would have been launched. If he had said that abortion was a gift to humanity and that female priests would lead the church to glory, his words would have sparked dissent only in the most marginal of venues.

Let a man praise his wife for her devotion to family, and we witness a stampede of foul-mouthed nasties to their bullhorns.

May 23, 2024

QotD: The “creepy male feminist”

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

Christopher Hitchens used to have a cast-iron rule when it came to hardline Christians and the condemnation of some very particular sins of the flesh. […] I am beginning to wonder whether a similar trend is not emerging with another group, specifically that variety of men whom the internet — with its unerring ability to get to the cruel point — has come to describe as the “creepy male feminist”.

It is a distinctly 2010s phenomenon: the sort of chap who likes to present himself as a great spokesperson for, and defender of women and overdoes it so much that you just know that something else is going on.

He will invariably go beyond the usual courtesies and head some way past the point of merely regarding women as his equal. Instead, the creepy male feminist pulls a number of simultaneous moves. These include (though are not limited to):

  1. Presenting the plight of women in our society as distinctly worse than it is.
  2. Suggesting that everybody knows this but that some people (especially men) are deliberately covering for that fact.
  3. Making the suggestion — sometimes insinuated, often explicit — that nothing and nobody is more willing to stand between women as a whole and such rampaging patriarchs than the male in question. Anyone still unfamiliar with the type might recognise it under another entry in the lexicon of modern ignominy: “White knight” (n).

And a trend can now be observed, which is that with unnerving regularity the type of man who presents himself as the foremost protector of the entire female sex is precisely the person who shortly thereafter is exposed as having tried to help himself in distinctly un-gentlemanly ways.

Douglas Murray in “Beware the creepy male feminist: ‘White knights’ like Robert De Niro often turn out to be less than chivalrous”, Unherd, 2019-11-15.

May 10, 2024

QotD: The artificially induced public interest in women’s football

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics, Quotations, Soccer, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sometimes I think (or is it feel?) that we are living in a propaganda state, not like that of North Korea, of course, in which the source of a univocal doctrine is clear and unmistakable, but one in which we are constantly under bombardment by an opinion-forming class that wants to make us believe, or be enthusiastic about, something to which we were previously indifferent or even hostile. There is no identifiable single source of the propaganda, and yet there seems also to be coordination: for how else to explain its sudden ubiquity? It is more Kafka than Orwell.

For example, quite recently there has been a concerted attempt to persuade the European public that women’s football (soccer) is interesting and exciting. The newspapers and online publications suddenly carry stories about it, with pictures, reports, profiles, and the like, whereas, shortly before, most people were only vaguely aware that women even played football.

No one can object to their doing so, of course, but the fact remains that they are not very good at it, at least not by comparison with men. They may be good — but with for women always appended. It is not the fault of women that they are not very good at football, any more than it is the fault of fish that they are illiterate, but the fact that everyone pretends not to notice it and dares not say it, at least in public, is surely a little sinister. A man of seventy may still play a good game of tennis, but it is always for his age: one wouldn’t expect him to win Wimbledon, nor would one expect excited, breathless reports on an over-seventies’ tennis tournament. The sudden interest in women’s football thus has a bogus feel about it, like the simulated enthusiasm of a crowd for the dictator in a communist state.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Propaganda & uglification”, New English Review, 2023-12-21.

May 6, 2024

Kulak on banned fantasy novels hated by Feminists

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

There are books that get banned for all sorts of reasons — histories that tell the “wrong” facts, books beloved by terrorists, political tracts by wild-eyed fanatics, etc. — but they’re not the ones Kulak is talking about here:

… the fiction books that are banned are usually fictionalized versions of those, works like Camp of the Saints, or The Turner Diaries, despite their ability to move people emotionally are not banned for their emotional content but for their political content (and in the case of The Turner Diaries its accurate instructions on bomb making)

HOWEVER! There is one series that was driven from bookstores, and by the late 90s was almost totally disappeared based purely on the … “feelings” … it generated in its readers. A fantasy series set entirely on another world with more or less nothing to say about politics back on earth, awakened … stirrings … in its readers so disturbing to the powers that be it had to be stopped.

The Chronicles of GOR by John Norman (Pen-name of Philosophy Professor John Lange)

Begun in 1966 and continuing to … today (he’s 92), the 38 book series is a Pulp Science Fantasy series in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” series (shout out to John Carter of Postcards From Barsoom)

It has a lot of neat fantasy/historical/military hypotheticals to get the young male mind going “what if Vikings raided Japanese samurai cities with flying monsters?” but the thing that outraged the feminists and what they’d never admit enraged them, was its effect on female readers.

Norman has a lot of theories about sex … theories which his millions of books sold suggest are very true. Theories which recent DNA discoveries have confirmed.

At SEVERAL points in the genetic record you and nearly everyone on earth, have approximately 17 female ancestors for every 1 male ancestor.

This was of course the result of patriarchal warfare, polygamy, and sexual slavery … The kind familiar to any readers of the Iliad.

Indeed Norman cites Homer, Freud, and Nietzsche as the primary influences on his philosophy.

But whereas this produced the ancient and then modern warfighting man boys and young men idolize from the Iliad, through Rome, to the Mongols, to the adventures and conquests of early modern Europe. And whose feuds and daring consume half the plot of Norman’s stories …

The real controversy is what it produced of the women.

Women are natural slaves Norman tells and in the later books shows (the books greatly improved over time: don’t read them in order)

While these periods of slaving warfare between peoples and tribes produced modern technical, competent, highly coordinated and cooperative man … In women it produced natural slaves. Women who’d long for the chain, women who’d desire nothing so much as to be owned and to submit to a powerful violent man not of their choosing … women who’d never feel so “””empowered””” as when they obey, and surrender the spirits, bodies, and wombs which they cannot defend. Who’d never feel so loved and wanted as when they are abused and disdained.

This is the world and theory of mind Norman paints with a philosopher’s attention to completeness … 38 books deconstructing and undoing not only modern feminist ideas of equality, but Christian ideas of the equality of the soul and nobility of the feminine spirit. By any standard maybe the most sexist misogynistic books ever written, not out of ignorance or resentment but a philosopher’s indifference to any social or ethical preening that might impede the truth …

And women freaking loved it.

I encountered Captive of Gor at a mainstream book store in Mississauga in about 1975, and I was amazed that it was available for sale in still-pretty-conservative Ontario. I read several of the other books in the series, but I had no idea the author was still adding new volumes down to the present day. I can’t remember the last time I saw one for sale, but I guess the fans can still get their hands on them even if ordinary book stores no longer carry them.

April 17, 2024

QotD: The mid-life crisis, male and female versions

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

Most men get over the strippers-and-sports-cars overreaction pretty quickly, generally to be replaced by a new outlook on life. The guys who have come through the midlife crisis are generally a lot better people — more focused, more outgoing, far less materialistic — because they’ve taken up, however briefly, the perspective of Eternity. If you’re religious, you wonder if you’ll merit heaven. If you’re not, you wonder how you’ll be remembered. Either way, you start thinking about the kind of world you want to leave behind you, and what you’re going to do to achieve it with whatever time is left to you.

Which is why I’ve found the COVID overreaction so bizarre. Realizing your own mortality changes things. You can always tell, for instance, when it has happened to a younger person — when they come home, combat vets often act like middle-aged men going through a midlife crisis. Readjustment to civilian life is hard. Read the great war narratives, and it’s clear that none of them ever really “got over it”. Robert Graves and Ernst Junger, for instance, both lived to ripe old ages (90 and 103, respectively), and were titans in fields far removed from battle … and yet, the war WAS their lives, in some way we who haven’t been through it will never understand, and it comes through in every line they wrote.

If the Covidians were really freaking out about COVID, then, I’d expect one of two broad types of reaction: Either party-hearty midlife crisis mode, or a new determination to get on with whatever’s left of life. Obviously neither of those are true, and I just can’t grasp it — these might be your last few weeks on Earth, and that’s how you’re going to spend them? Sitting in your apartment like a sheep, wearing a mask and eating takeout, glued to a computer screen?

If you want a measure of just how feminized our society has become, there you go. Call this misogyny if you must, but it’s an easily observed fact of human nature — indeed, it has been observed, in every time, place, and culture of which we have knowledge — that post-menopausal women go a bit batty. Though a man might know for certain that he dies tomorrow, he can still keep plugging away today, because he’s programmed to find real meaning in his “work” — we are, after all, running our snazzy new mental software over kludgy old caveman hardware.

Women aren’t like that. They have one “job”, just one, and when they can’t do it anymore, they get weird. In much the same way high-end sports cars would cease to exist if middle aged men ceased to exist, so there are entire aspects of culture that don’t make sense in any other way except: These are channels for the energies of post-menopausal, and therefore surplus-to-requirements, women. You could go so far as to say that pretty much everything we call culture — traditions, history, customs — exist for that reason. Women go from being the bearers, to being the custodians, of the tribe’s future.

Severian, “Life’s Back Nine”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-11.

April 9, 2024

Historical examples of social contagion

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

Andrew Doyle discusses how social contagions of the past resemble the current gender identity boom among western young people:

… social contagions are especially common among teenage girls, and that there are numerous historical precedents for this. I have written elsewhere about the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, in which a group of girls began seeing demons in the shadows and accusing members of their own community of being in league with the Devil. Then there were the various “dancing plagues” of the middle ages which seemed to impact young women in particular. In 1892, girls at a school in Germany began to involuntarily shake their hands whenever they performed writing exercises. And when I visited Sweden last year, I was told about a local village where, during the medieval period, the girls all inexplicably began to limp.

It’s perfectly clear that the latest social contagion to take hold in the western world is that of girls identifying out of their femaleness, either through claims that they are trans or non-binary. Whereas in 2012, there were only 250 referrals (mostly boys) to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), by 2021 the figure had risen to more than 5,000 (mostly female) patients. Gender activists like to claim that this is simply the consequence of more people “coming out” as society becomes more tolerant, and at the same time insist that it has never been a worse time to be trans. Consistency is not their strong suit.

Of course there are no easy answers as to the explosion of this latest fad, but surely the proliferation of social media has something to do with it. Platforms such as TikTok are replete with activists explaining to teenagers that their feelings of confusion are probably evidence that they have been “born in the wrong body”. For pubescent girls who are uncomfortable with their physiological changes, as well as sudden unwanted male sexual attention, the prospect of identifying out of womanhood makes complete sense. These online pedlars have some snake-oil to sell. And while a limping epidemic in a medieval village would be unlikely to spread very far, social contagions cannot be so confined in the digital age.

Much of this is reminiscent of the recovered memory hysteria of the late twentieth-century, when therapist cranks promoted the idea that most victims of sexual abuse had repressed their traumatic memories from childhood. It led to numerous cases of people imagining that they had been abused by parents and other family members, and many lives were ruined as a result. One of the key texts in this movement was The Courage to Heal (1988) by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, which made the astonishing and unevidenced claim that “if you are unable to remember any specific instances … but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did”.

A common feature of social contagions is that they depend upon the elevation of intuition over material reality. Just as innocent family members were accused of sexual abuse because of “feelings” teased out by unscrupulous therapists, many girls are now being urged by online influencers to trust the evidence of their emotions and accept a misalignment between their body and their gendered soul. We are not talking here about the handful of children who suffer from gender dysphoria, but rather healthy children who have been swept up in a temporary craze.

April 5, 2024

In the still-ongoing “war of the sexes”, when can women just accept they’ve won and cease hostilities?

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

At the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery, you can see a scorecard for the war of the sexes that has been ongoing since I was a child and seems no closer to ending than back in the 1960s:

I say this to make it absolutely clear that unlike a lot of boorishly banal material you might encounter within the wretchedly named “Manosphere”, this is not intended to be a whiny article. I’m not complaining, nor am I calling for societal change or action. I’m simply wondering exactly how dominant female privilege has to get before they declare victory and take their boot off the necks of men. I really don’t know the answer to this question, but we’ll speculate about that below after the wall of graphs. HWFO loves graphs.

Herein we will go point by point through as many measurable societal markers as I can think of, leaving no marker unmarked, and put together a Gender War Scoreboard describing as accurate a snapshot as possible of the current state of the United States. Then we’ll close with some analysis about how badly it would have to get before the women finally just declare victory and move on. This post shall be too big for email.

To assign our score, we will look at sets of data that fall generally into two categories. For victimization ratios and similar, we’ll just look at percentage by gender. For comparing two uncapped sets of data, such as life expectancy, we’ll look at a ratio and make them both add to 100 for an apples-to-apples comparison. Then we’ll add them all up at the end to tally the score.

Salary

HWFO covered the gender wage gap in 2022, but I’ll summarize it here so you don’t have to read back. According to a 2008 analysis by the Department of Labor, now 16 years old, the raw gender wage gap was 20.4% in 2007:

Most of the gap was explainable by career choice and lifestyle choice differences:

When compared properly that looks like this:

Sixteen years ago, the bits of the gender wage gap that weren’t explained by career and life choice differences only totaled 6%. This fact has been known for a decade and a half and is constantly hidden from view by Pew, the NLWC, and any other major organization that profits from the perception that this gap is large and persistent. It has also assuredly closed to narrower than that 6% in the ensuing decade and a half, but nobody’s replicated the Department of Labor analysis. Look closely at the effects in the green bar identified by the Department of Labor. “Child birth” is how you become a mother. “Child care” is something mothers do. “Working part time” is something mothers do. “Time out of the labor force” is something mothers take. “Occupational choice” is something women change when they become mothers. Here are some graphs from Kleven et al, March 2019:

The solid lines are women. In every studied area, the women make equal or more than the men do up until the birth of their first child, and then they make less. The gender wage gap difference is in the choice to have children. Women choose to make professional concessions to raise a family while the men don’t. Is this fair? Some might say no, but only if they also don’t want to be the primary caregiver for their kids. Some would say yes, for the following two reasons: (1) women choose this, especially in feminist societies, but also (2) men are punished socially for choosing this. If you do not believe me, go make two fake male Tinder profiles with identical cute photos in them, and in the bio of one say “corporate lawyer” and the other say “part time daycare worker” and see which one gets more hits. Then do the same with a female profile. Men are socially punished by women for making the career concession, women are not socially punished by men for making it.

Often when these sorts of “equal pay for equal work” studies are properly controlled for mothering and career choice, they find that men are paid less than women for equal work. Google was pretty famously forced by their neo-progressive staff to do an internal analysis of the subject, and uncomfortably discovered they were overpaying women for being women on an “equal work” basis. The results were twofold. First Google paid all the men a one time bonus, then Google quietly never investigated it again so they could get back to paying women more.

March 29, 2024

“TamponGate” at Vanderbilt

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

Suzy Weiss at The Free Press relates a story that’s just too weird not to share:

No one is ever going to let me guest-host this digest again, so I might as well tell you about some Vanderbilt girl’s tampon. This all started yesterday morning, when a wave of undergrad students rushed Kirkland Hall, where Vanderbilt’s chancellor’s office is located. Thus began their sit-in — a response to the college administration shutting down a student government vote over whether the school should divest funds from Israel.

The protesters remained there for nearly 21.5 hours — blowing Harvard’s 12-hour “hunger strike“, also known as a good night’s sleep — out of the water, before police began removing and arresting students, some of whom have since been suspended.

There are many dumbfounding moments from this latest campus frenzy — for example, when the students, arms linked, called the black police officers protecting the chancellor “puppets”. When food was brought in from Panera Bread by the administration for the officers but not the students, it was treated like a human-rights abuse.

But the tampon takes the cake. (Major props to Steve McGuire for compiling the best episode of the internet since yesterday.)

Here’s what went down: during one of those 21.5 hours of the protest, probably at an ungodly one, a few of the student demonstrators decided to call 911. That’s because their friend, who was part of the sit-in, had to change her tampon.

Specifically, she was “being denied the right to change her tampon that has been in for multiple hours, which leads to an increased risk of toxic shock syndrome.”

The frankly Zen-like 911 operator, who deserves a raise, was understandably confused. “Ma’am, do you have an emergency?”

Um, yes?! The student on the phone requests urgent medical assistance.

“You’re telling me your friend in Kirkland needs an ambulance. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Then in another video, one of the protesters—in a keffiyeh and a mask—approaches the police and an administrator, who was indeed in a sweater vest, demanding to know WHAT. WILL. HAPPEN. to her friend, should she leave the sit-in to change the tampon in question. The adults calmly explain that she won’t be arrested if she leaves the building. But can they confirm that she will never be arrested, ever?!

“She does not feel safe,” someone says off-screen, punctuating it with claps.

This whole thing makes the Nick Christakis Halloween costume struggle session look like a teachable moment. It must be seen to be believed. Watch all the videos in Steve’s thread here.

For starters, if having a tampon in for “multiple hours” is grounds to call for an ambulance, I should have been dead years ago. Second, this student was being denied no such right. All she had to do was get up, leave the protest, and find one of the hundreds of bathrooms that she had access to elsewhere on campus. Pro tip: wear a pad to the all-night protest. The First Amendment doesn’t come with a heating pad.

It’s all very Karen, to borrow a trope from 2020, especially when a protester demands the administrator find someone who can get them some answers. Just like middle-aged women who think dressing down the manager will somehow earn them a full refund, these students have convinced themselves that by linking arms and screaming “shame” at their college’s chancellor, they are stopping a war in the Middle East.

Don’t these authority figures realize they are standing in the way of a global intifada, which is also — obviously — a totally good thing?

We find out in a subsequent video that indeed the tampon was removed, though not in any bathroom. Reader, it came out at the sit-in, like so much urine in so many plastic water bottles. A woman on the microphone calls it “the most depraved shit I’ve seen in my entire life”.

Hard agree.

March 10, 2024

Viking longships and textiles

Filed under: Europe, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Virginia Postrel reposts an article she originally wrote for the New York Times in 2021, discussing the importance of textiles in history:

The Sea Stallion from Glendalough is the world’s largest reconstruction of a Viking Age longship. The original ship was built at Dublin ca. 1042. It was used as a warship in Irish waters until 1060, when it ended its days as a naval barricade to protect the harbour of Roskilde, Denmark. This image shows Sea Stallion arriving in Dublin on 14 August, 2007.
Photo by William Murphy via Wikimedia Commons.

Popular feminist retellings like the History Channel’s fictional saga Vikings emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial women’s work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.

One of the central characters in Vikings is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.

In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.

Ignoring textiles writes women’s work out of history. And as the British archaeologist and historian Mary Harlow has warned, it blinds scholars to some of the most important economic, political and organizational challenges facing premodern societies. Textiles are vital to both private and public life. They’re clothes and home furnishings, tents and bandages, sacks and sails. Textiles were among the earliest goods traded over long distances. The Roman Army consumed tons of cloth. To keep their soldiers clothed, Chinese emperors required textiles as taxes.

“Building a fleet required longterm planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce,” Dr. Harlow wrote in a 2016 article. “The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.” Spinning and weaving the wool for a single toga, she calculates, would have taken a Roman matron 1,000 to 1,200 hours.

Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They don’t manufacture essential goods.

Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied. “The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.

Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the world’s poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined. But that “great enrichment” had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of women’s historic contributions to one of humanity’s most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment. “In the West,” Dr. Harlow wrote, “the production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.”

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