Tag: women

On surviving gossip

And it doesn’t require Hercule Poirot to determine why men might be disinclined to pay attention:

The typical woman spends five hours a day – more than a third of her waking hours – chatting and gossiping, a study has revealed. Whether at home or work women natter for about 298 minutes every day, it found. Discussing other people’s problems, who is dating who and other people’s children form the basis of most of the chat.

One of the things I find fascinating about social etiquette is the way that what is frowned upon in the Bible, considered a mortal sin by the Catholic Church, and considered to be a deathly bore by nearly half the population is nevertheless considered nearly de rigueur in casual social situations. Many women don’t seem to understand that gossip is actually less interesting and more painful to most men than listening to an engineer with Asperger’s drone on about thermodynamics or tax law is to most women.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I still laugh every time I think of my father’s summary of a dinner in which he was seated between two well-known social butterflies. “Now I know what Hell is like.”

Now, I don’t personally have a problem with the aforementioned female nattering so long as I am not expected to listen to it. I am fortunate in that Spacebunny has a relatively low tolerance for it herself. And sometimes, if it’s occurring in the background while I am reading a book or something, it can even be amusing to track the circular pattern as two women run out of gas on a subject, cast about for a new one, and then find their stride again by simply revisiting a topic that has been discussed already, in some cases repeating the previous discussion almost verbatim. It’s hilarious.

This repetition makes no sense to men because they don’t derive the same chemically-derived sense of pleasure from a communication process that has been discovered to release oxytocin and serotonin to the brain. But once you realize that women who are repeating themselves in this manner are simply doing the equivalent of a lab rat repeatedly hitting the bar that provides it a nice hit of coke, the whole thing makes a lot more sense. This may help explain why women have a tendency to keep repeating an ineffective punchline when they’re telling a joke or story as if it’s going to be funnier the second or third time. It appears to be a technique that works effectively in gossip mode that doesn’t translate well to storytelling mode.

On the other hand, if a woman wishes to be taken seriously by men, she has to avoid doing this sort of thing in front of them at all costs. There are few things that will relegate a woman to the “pay no attention ever” zone faster than being the sort of woman who is unable to discuss anything except people that she knew in high school or college. Sometimes, when listening to a female acquaintance babble and burble on about complete strangers, it takes every bit of my conscious focus to refrain from politely asking “on what planet do you believe that I give even the most infinitesimally airborne, electroniscopically small flying fornication about these people, who, based on the distressingly fulsome stream of data you have so thoughtfully provided, are not only terminally uninteresting but quite clearly retarded as well?”

Or, alternatively, pretending to be plastered to a rock like the woman in Aliens.

Anyhow, in the same way it behooves the intellectual to learn something about sports, television, or current events in order to be able to function in society, it is wise for the gossip to do the same in order to not be a crashing, soul-killing bore that no one with an IQ over 100 takes seriously.

The basic social principle by which I operate is one I believe to be both effective and fair. If you don’t subject me to a monologue or dialogue about the personal affairs of people I don’t know or don’t care about, I will not subject you to a monologue on the rules of Advanced Squad Leader, the argumentative structure featured in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, or the way in which a Japanese naval invasion of the American West Coast in 1942 was an extremely remote improbability bordering on the impossible, being militarily useless, logistically problematic, and historically unplanned. That seems fair, doesn’t it?

And thanks to technology, there is an even better solution now readily available to all and sundry. If people insist on being rude enough to engage in conversations that are intrinsically exclusive by nature, just whip out your phone or ebook reader and happily ignore them. This is particularly effective if one is being subjected to the most extreme form of gossiper, the “performance conversationalist”. I’m not saying that men can’t be crashing bores too. Of course they can be; I probably have exceptional potential in that line myself. But there is no reason why female bores should be suffered with any less reluctance and resistance than male bores.

Ever more efficiently killing girls

It is interesting, if entirely predictable, to see how the equalitarian perspective is rapidly shifting from the mother’s right to kill her unborn child to contemplating a legal ban on the mother being permitted to know the sex of her unborn child:

Blood drawn from expectant mothers could offer parents an earlier sneak peek at their baby’s sex than methods currently used in the U.S., researchers said Tuesday. The test may be particularly valuable for families that harbor sex-linked genetic disorders like hemophilia, they add. Because such disorders mostly strike boys, knowing that the baby is a girl could spare the mother diagnostic procedures, such as amniocentesis, that carry a small risk of miscarriage.

“It could reduce the number of invasive procedures that are being performed for specific genetic conditions,” said Dr. Diana Bianchi of Tufts University School of Medicine, who worked on the new study.

But other researchers voiced concerns, saying it could be misused to terminate a pregnancy if the baby isn’t of the desired sex.

“What you have to consider is the ethics of this,” said Dr. Mary Rosser, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York. “If parents are using it to determine gender and then terminate the pregnancy based on that, that could be a problem,” she told Reuters Health. “Remember, gender is not a disease.”

Au contraire, Dr. Rosser. If you accept the abortionist position, then fetal gender is a terminal disease if the mother determines it to be so. Needless to say, with this new scientific advance, we can expect the ratio of male/female births to increase significantly in the next ten years. Isn’t feminism wonderful? Thanks to feminism, women can vote for Democrats, work full-time even if they don’t want to, compile impressive STD collections and own all the cats they want… assuming they can manage to survive the increasingly hostile environment of their fully informed mother’s wombs.

The equalitarians appear to have failed to consider that if demographic concerns and sexual birth ratios are to be considered a legitimate basis for legal policies, there should be no qualms about passing federal laws requiring women to get married and bear their first child prior to the age of 25.

The imitation of Man

Susan Walsh highlights a fundamental feminist deceit to which far too many women subscribe:

As you can see, there is considerable confusion about the concept of the feminine among contemporary young women, as well as decidedly different political philosophies….

I’m not qualified to give advice on how to be feminine. I’m guilty of having nurtured the feisty tomboy persona myself. That’s why I’m all ears when men describe what femininity is and why they value it. It’s clear they know it when they see it. In closing, I’ll share with you reader detinennui32′s first of 10 Commandments for Women:

1. Thou shalt cultivate a feminine demeanor and bearing. Thou shalt not try to be, look like, or act like a man. Thou shalt observe and obey this Commandment above all others.

First and foremost, it is important to understand that the vast majority of men are not attracted to men or male qualities. Around two percent of the male population is and those men are called “homosexuals”. Logic therefore dictates that cultivating an attitude and behaving in a manner that appeals to a very small minority of men who are not sexually interested in women will be counterproductive for the woman who wishes men to find her attractive.

One of the core components of feminism has been to provide social incentive for women to imitate male behavior. This is reflected in the increasingly androgynous female attire over the last fifty years as well as the increasingly masculine appearance of women who are held up as paragons of female achievement in the media. (Also, so few women genuinely look good in jeans that it’s really best to avoid them altogether.) Consider Madonna, who is one of the leading examples of female accomplishment, and yet was likened to “a piece of gristle” by her ex-husband, Guy Ritchie.

Now, since what is feminine is by definition the opposite of what is masculine, one can readily determine feminine traits by considering masculine ones. Confidence, courage, independence, ambition, strength, decisiveness, straightforwardness, simplicity, and self-reliance are all core masculine traits.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon the woman who wishes to be perceived as feminine to avoid exhibiting these traits. This doesn’t mean that a woman needs to be cowardly or weak, only that she should avoid projecting her manly fearlessness even in the unlikely case that it is genuine and not the customary false female bravada that crumbles the moment it is challenged. Of course, since even the most masculine woman is less masculine than the average man, the attempt to imitate these masculine traits tends to ring false, hence the inherent humor in young women who march about asserting how strong and independent they are as they visit their therapists on Daddy’s dime.

Get the feminine attitude right and the superficial aspects will eventually follow. Men are attracted to women who smile, who bat their eyelashes, who blush, who are supportive rather than challenging, who trouble to make themselves pretty, and above all, who appeal to their sense of play rather than their sense of work.

And finally, since it’s been reported that about a third of tomboys grow up to be lesbians, it should be apparent that imitating male behavioral patterns is likely to send unintended messages to men and women alike.

Mailvox: the tide turns

Slowly, admittedly, one woman at a time. But it turns:

We hosted a wedding at our home this past weekend that brought in family we haven’t seen for a while, to be sure one couple we haven’t talked with since my new understanding of the nature of women and the destructiveness of feminism. I’m committed to do my part to address it whenever I see it so I thought I’d share with you one of the discussions we had. I’m embarrassed to admit that a year ago, I would have agreed with this woman. I am so thankful that I have come to understand men, more importantly, my husband. I cringe now when listening to feminist women and their rants.

We talked with this couple that I’m related to until the early morning hours two nights in a row. The more comfortable they got with us, the more truth came out about their seemingly perfect relationship. The situation is typical; she has a “career,” divides everything equally, their marriage is 50/50, he brings her coffee in the morning and takes the kids to daycare, she is overwhelmed with her career, household tasks, children etc… oh, and she is on anti-anxiety medication and repeatedly denies sex with him due to her “not being in the mood.”

She told us about one night, while relaxing in the hot tub, he confessed to her, “I have never cheated on you.” The response that followed is far from what he expected. She became enraged…. The intimate and honest moment completely backfired on the guy. She went on to explain to us that she is not impressed with his ability to remain faithful, after all, it is what is expected. She piously expressed what is required to remain married to her. The first of which is faithfulness. As he started slumping in his seat, I decided to deliver a beat down, it went something like this: “You should feel honored and respectful of him for the commitment he’s made to you.

While he’s been working with hot young women, traveling with hot young women, propositioned by hot young women, and selling clothes to more hot young women, he has remained faithful to you. He’s watched as other men, friends of his, have not done the same. (Across the table he is nodding in agreement.) He has overcome demons and lustful thoughts and has kept his fidelity. You should have told him how blessed you are to have a man of strength, but you don’t understand the nature of men. You don’t understand just what he was telling you.

So in your overreacting, irrational nature, you verbally destroyed him. His confession was met with disapproval and rejection. Had you taken a moment to think rationally about the situation, you would have seen this as an intimate moment of truth and honesty. You do not belong on a pedestal, you are just as fallible. And with all of your glaring weaknesses, he is faithful to your marriage.”

My husband was able to discuss a bit about Game with him and will do so more when we see them again in a few weeks. The focus I will maintain with her is overcoming this dominating princess mentality that she has had.

It’s quite impressive that a woman, particularly one recently converted out of feminism, should be bold enough to take another woman publicly to task in this regard. And while I don’t disagree with anything she has written, she does appear to have missed what most men will assume to be the logical explanation for the burst of inappropriate anger: the woman has already been unfaithful herself and his confession of faithfulness was heaping coals on her head. This isn’t necessarily the case, but it was my read on the situation.

After all, the cynical voice of male experience muses, the marital expectations can’t possibly be the real reason for the rage or the woman would not have said they were.

The Conscious Women’s Manifesto

Now that the text is done, where is the video?

I appreciate the great gift men gave to women – civilization. I apologize for refusing to acknowledge just how nasty, brutish and short my life would be without this gift. I apologize for not acknowledging that men created civilization because women are incapable of doing so because of our limited capability for and general aversion to abstraction. I promise to remember that without men, civilization would grind to a halt in short order. I promise to remember that men build houses and women live in them.

I’m not sure which I find more amusing, the Manifesto for Conscious Women or the fact that the Huffington Post was afraid to publish it: “We submitted this to the Huffington Post in December 2010, but they felt it was too “edgy” and “not a fit” for their audience.” Either way, it is as humorous as it is historically true, although it could never hope to reach the inadvertent heights provided by the GammaConscious Men video.

Naturally, it took a man to write the first draft….

The lady postures too much

Naomi Wolf explains that she likes herself better and is actually more attractive now that she’s in her late 40s and no one wants to have sex with her. Unsurprisingly, now that she’s gotten older, she has concluded that age, like beauty, is also a myth:

Recently, I was at a party, and a man who, like myself, was in his late 40s, arrived with a woman 20 years younger. It took only a few moments of conversation before the rest of the group realized that the two had very little in common. And yet I did not feel the frisson of envy among the men present, nor did I see a bristle of jealousy from any of the stylish, accomplished women in their 40s. In fact, the mood of both genders was tender, almost pitying. The man may have imagined that he was showing off the youth of his date the way he might show off a new Maserati; but parading her around like an acquisition seemed only to make his friends feel sorry for him….

There are many other delightful surprises about being at this stage on the journey. I don’t miss the brutal sexual harassment that young women receive from men — and I love the far gentler flirtation or civil compliments from cab drivers and park chess players my own age or older. On the street, young women are told: Give me some. Older women hear: I love your eyes.

It is certainly amusing to see a woman whose entire literary career was based on her attractive-by-New-York-writer standards try to rationalize away the fact that she is past her sell-by date. It’s also remarkable that she managed to write about the changes in women’s attitudes and bodies over the last two decades without once seeing fit to mention the enfattening of America; Naomi has clearly packed on more than a few pounds herself.

Any time you see a woman describe “magnetic and dynamic women my own age” you know perfectly well she is referring to childless women fast approaching menopause who are filled with boundless hate for the young women their male peers are dating. Wolf’s attempt at a bemused zen-like pose is about as convincing as unemployed female college graduates babbling about how “strong and independent” they are as they move home to spend a year deciding what graduate schools Daddy is going to pay for.

The punchline which reveals the entire point of the article is this pathetic attempt at a neg: “[I]n my own circles, at least, it is considered more macho for a man to have an accomplished woman his own age on his arm. His ego, it is understood, can take it.”

Right, because men pursue beautiful young women in order to be macho. It’s not sex and beauty that interests them, but female approval. This woman clearly doesn’t know the first thing about men. One of these days, someone is going to have to inform women that their endless shaming tactics only work on other women and gamma males they don’t want to have sex with in the first place.

Don’t worry, you’re not too pretty for science

A female scientist desperately wants you to know that someone told her she was pretty, the bastard, and now she can’t wait to tell you about ithow angry that makes her!

I’m ticked off and venting via dashed-off blog rant…. I know Mr. Salesguy was trying to be nice and probably thought he was flattering me, but fer chrissakes, that is NOT the way to go about it. Women in science already frequently feel like “The Other,” that we’re “too XX” to be good at what we do, that our possession of breasts surely must mean that we’re too much of a fragile flower to be able to handle the “man’s work” involved in science and academia, and that we need to go above and beyond what our male colleagues do just to feel the same level of acceptance and appreciation. I’m sure Mr. Salesguy has never thought about the plight of women in science before tonight (and I doubt that my conversation really made him think about it for more than a few fleeting seconds), but it really dragged down what had otherwise been a very nice few days of unadulterated sciencey goodness.

This is a beautiful example of what is one of my favorite female faux outrage poses. Certain women, usually those of average appearance, love to pretend to be furious because someone complimented them, which they believe gives them an excuse to talk to everyone they can get their hands on about the fact that someone thinks they are pretty or whatever. You’ll notice you never see any genuinely gorgeous girl getting her thong in a twist over someone happening to recognize the obvious; she knows she’s hot and it’s no big deal.

And the idea that one can be somehow damaged by one’s looks defying the expectations of one’s occupation is a ridiculous attempt to justify the “look at me, look at me” behavior. At my second book signing, which was a large Barnes & Noble event at which there were some 10 or 12 other much bigger-name SF/F authors, including Gordon R. Dickson, there must have been at least 10 people who told me I didn’t look like a SF writer. I didn’t take any offense, of course, or agonize about how this made it terribly difficult to be taken seriously as a writer. It was not exactly hard to ascertain what they meant by the comment given that in addition to being the youngest one there by a decade or more, I was also the only weightlifter in the bunch. SF/F writers are often fascinating conversationalists and I quite enjoy spending time with them, but as a general rule they tend not to make for the most physically imposing specimens of humanity.

So, Ms Dr Smith needn’t worry. As an expert observer of the opposite sex, I don’t think she’s too pretty for science. I don’t think she’s pretty at all. I’m confident she can rest assured that most men who aren’t of low sexual market value, like the scientists and atheists by whom she is customarily surrounded, will not take any notice of her unless she happens to perform some spectacular feats of science. Which is probably unlikely, since she’s such a transparently superficial twit that she’ll find it hard to pull her narcissistic nose out of her navel long enough to observe anything scientific.

Mailvox: a profound change of thinking

MK writes to tell how she has found the dreadful miasma of misogyny that engulfs this blog to not only have adjusted her thought processes but also aided her marriage:

It occurred to me yesterday what a profound change in thinking I have had as a result of reading your blog and one of the books you referenced (Married Man’s Sex Life). In my youth in the 70’s, I was happy to soak up the happy horse-sh#$ that popular culture sold about roles of men and women. My marriage of [two decades] has been a difficult struggle owing in part to my desire to see my husband as a badly designed female.

For his part, in my assessment, my husband still struggles with the reality that I am not a man – that is, that I lack career ambition, aren’t that good at finishing what I start (except household duties), and would prefer he initiate sex. It might be harder for him to give up the desire for me to share the providing than for him to give up on primary child-care duties (when that was needed) and housework. The upshot: it is a relief to accept I am not the woman Madison Ave. promoted who wants and can bring home the bacon, serve it up in a pan, and also provide hooker style sex services to my man. That never was me and I always felt inadequate.

I hate to say, I think my husband does view me as inadequate (he works with many woman/mothers who earn big bucks alongside him, not to mention his mother was a dynamo working wife/mother out of monetary necessity). The blog has helped me, however, to accept that I am who I am and more importantly, he is who he is as a he. I have a newfound respect for that. Little by little, I am changing my behavior and attitude and while my husband may always feel he got ripped off because I really wasn’t the career woman he thought I was (I had a job when we met, was good at it, liked it, and parlayed it into working from home so I could take full-time care of and homeschool our children, not because I needed to work for my identity or the money; rather, I did it because I knew my husband wanted me to make money).

I am a Christian of [more than a decade], and this has been an area that the church we were involved with was no good at leading (male/female roles). I have a friend who has been a Christian all her life, but struggled in her marriage. She did not marry a devoted Christian and longs for leadership, but from our conversations, it is clear, she’s at least 50% of the problem. I have shared insights with her from the blog and it is changing her too. Thank you and please keep doing what you’re doing.

I’m glad she’s found the blog to be helpful. I think it’s interesting to see how MK’s email shows the flipside of the female employment issue. Whereas many men don’t want their wives to work so that the women can focus on their careers as wives and mothers, those who do marry working women often expect them to continue working so the men do not have to shoulder the responsibility as the sole income provider. This is dangerous ground, because it is a potential deal-breaker should the woman decide she wants to unilaterally change the arrangement ex post facto.

While women tend to feel they always have the right to change their mind, consider it from the male perspective. What wife would appreciate it if her husband told her that he wasn’t happy with his job and had decided to stay home and master Guitar Hero instead? Would she be delighted that he was pursuing his dream or would she be upset that he had, in a single stroke, suddenly put pressure on her to figure out how to increase her salary by at least 50 percent or accept the necessary reduction in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed? Even though MK’s decision was beneficial for both her marriage and her children in the long term, it’s perfectly understandable that her husband would feel as if he had been played with a bait-and-switch, because it would appear that he was, at least to some extent. There are no shortage of men who have discovered that housework isn’t as unpleasant, stressful, or time-consuming as office serfdom and they are more than happy to divide the responsibilities as they have been told that women want them to do. Naturally, they will resist a sudden demand that they to return to a more traditional role for which they are completely unprepared, and indeed, might even consider to be evil and sexist.

It’s also noteworthy that she has found the church to be useless with regards to offering support for traditional male and female roles. Churchianity is relentlessly feminized and feminist, which is only one of the many reasons to reject it as a pale, bureaucratic, heretical imitation of Christianity.

But I am pleased to hear that MK and her friend have derived a modicum of personal utility from this blog, and I’m sure Athol could use the encouragement as well.

WND column

Marital Roulette

There has been an amount of discussion of a marriage strike in recent years as various male and female commentators alike attempt to explain the continuing decline in marriage rates throughout the advanced nations of the West. As more and more men have become aware that women file for most divorces and that family courts are now little more than thieves’ dens designed to funnel financial resources from men to women by any means or legal-sounding excuse necessary, they have understandably become considerably more marriage-averse.

Why Vox Day is chick crack

Over at Alpha Game, Susan Walsh has posted about a recent scientific study which delineated certain aspects of male and female appeal for the opposite sex. The key summary, at least as it related to the post title, was provided by the headline of one article related to the study.

“Brooding, Proud Guys Score High on Sex Appeal”

As I mentioned in the comments to Susan’s post, this provided Spacebunny with no little amusement, given her observation that my tendency to brood is apparently on par with that of Heathcliff and Darcy. My protests that I merely engage in the moderate amount of contemplation that is necessary to anyone dwelling in this vale of tears were met with a) a burst of incredulous laughter, and b) an appeal to the dictionary: “to dwell on a subject or to meditate with morbid persistence”. Emphasis, it would appear, on the morbid….

(Full confession: I tend to think of “brooding” in the sense of incubating eggs rather than a gerund indicating contemplative activity, which in part accounted for my protest.)

As for the other part, well, I am informed that every so often, I am inclined to comport myself in a manner that is indicative of an inclination to consider myself in a rather favorable manner. I would merely point out that these things are relative and is not that I think so well of myself, only that I am so often given reason to think little of others.

In any case, this new scientodical expansion of scientage may help explain why women continue to email me and send me their pictures after expressing their outrage concerning my written opinions and threatening not to have sex with me. I’d like to say that it is hard being an intellectual sex symbol, (although let’s face it, the bar is an extraordinarily low one), but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.