M writes back, and interestingly enough, declines to declare her major:
As for your opening gambits, your beef seems to be more with women focusing on education at all, not what kind they get. So if I answered “Neuroscience” or “Engineering”, what I could expect to get is the same as if I said “Philosophy” or “International Relations”. In short, you already answered your own question: “It will make you very employable, I’m sure.” While categorizing all of your critics into either “frothing feminists” or “ignorati” is pretty much unworthy, I can’t really blame you when people come out with “I’m an exception to your article because I’m ________ degree and so cool.”
First, it’s not that all of my critics are frothing feminists or ignorati, it’s just that the vast majority of them demonstrate serious reading comprehension problems, an inability to see the forest for the trees or an unshakeable allegiance to feminist dogma even when it flies in the face of demonstrable reality. As anyone who read the Fark comments knows, there wasn’t a single substantive critique in the lot. I’m always quite happy to engage a serious critic, unfortunately they are very few and far between.
Second, very few men or women realize that “education” is largely a crock. I speak two foreign languages, one of which I learned in high school. While I do not speak the language I studied in college and for which I received a major from an expensive private university, I am quite comfortable in a language in which I have never been “educated”. Education is not wholly synonymous with learning and a degree is not proof of knowledge, let alone proven expertise.
Furthermore, most college educations are completely wasted. Except in the most demanding technical fields, one’s career seldom bears much relation to one’s education in the United States. It is very different in Europe, where the educational tracks are guided, but here in the States I’d be surprised if 5 percent of the countless Sociology, Women’s Studies and International Relations majors ever spend a single year working in a job that is even tangentially related to those academic fields.
And for this it’s worth sacrificing marriage, children and the Western cultural tradition? Some might think so. I disagree.
What I’m more interested in at the moment is where you left the other half of your argument, and why. Statistics don’t show that we’re in the middle of a population crisis here. In fact, the situation is just the opposite. The birth rate for natives is a little above replacement, and that is admittedly mostly due to the national emphasis on education and career rather than family during the most fertile years of our lives. This is true of most developed countries, with the US at a 2.1 fertility rate, and most European countries hovering between 1.2 and 2.0. However, in the US, the rate of replacement due to immigration (and high immigrant fertility rates, both legal and illegal) more than makes up for our close call on the native fertility scales. This has become a big political issue in the past decade because immigrants are ceasing to absorb into our society, learn our language, etc. Therefore, I can really only come to the conclusion that you left the other half of your argument behind… that you are not calling for women to have more babies, you are calling for white women to have more babies. If you wanted to seem more PC, you would say native women or “US citizens”. I’m somewhat curious as to why you are so willing to be branded a misogynist, but hang back from the racist brand.
I don’t know how accurate that last sentence is, considering that more than a few commenters here and on Fark weren’t shy about applying the racist label. To which I can only say that if that were true, I would imagine that my career as a NCAA D1 100m sprinter would have been a lot more difficult, given that it’s not exactly a massive Caucasian’s club.*
And while I don’t care greatly about the color of the babies of tomorrow, I am very much concerned with who is having them. As Europe is learning, third-world immigrants from countries which have not had the benefit of 500 years of the Western tradition are not an adequate substitute for native-born citizens who have. Even from the liberal point of view, is an illiterate Argentine who is more familiar with Peron than George Washington really an adequate substitute for a female Boston Brahmin who teaches political geography at Harvard?
Isn’t it at least possible that importing a significant percentage of people with no cultural tradition of free speech, limited government or even monogamous marriage just might have some effect on Western countries’ ability to continue their traditions? In Britain, for example, not only Piglet but even the Cross of St. George – the national symbol – is being banned in public due to immigrant sensitivities.
This is precisely why I have asserted that the Equalitarian Society will come to an end in the intermediate future. It simply isn’t sustainable, not even by its own lights.
*A few years ago, I was working out with free weights in Washington DC with three giant bodybuilders. They were black and they were freaking enormous, doing leg presses with six (6!) 45-pound plates per side. I was going through my martial arts phase at the time and my head was shaved clean, which led the biggest guy to ask why it was shaved – while I was on the bench with 285 pounds over my throat and he was spotting me.
“White supremacist” I told him. “Now let go of the damn bar!” He correctly grasped the sarcasm in the situation, burst out laughing and finally took his hands off. This was necessary because he was the worst spotter ever. I think I did twelve or thirteen reps that set because Mr. Ebon Steroid Freak was curling ninety percent of the weight for the first ten.