Tag: women

The demise of equalitarianism

Logic is now beginning to lead others to conclude something I asserted here long ago. And that assertion should never have been any more controversial than a statement that water is wet or increasing the labor supply reduces wage rates. Sexual equality is not societally viable:

The question becomes: what are we going to give up? Family formation? Sexual equality? Sexual liberty? (By sexual equality I mean the presumption that women should be legally, economically, and educationally equal to men. By sexual liberty I mean both an absence of formal legal sanctions and an absence of guilt and psychological repression.) It looks very much as through we can’t have all three of those sustainably, and (this is the thought that really disturbs me) we may not even get to have more than one.

If we give up family formation it’s game over; we’ll be outbred by cultures that don’t. So that’s off the table. Following out the logic, the demographic future will belong to cultures that give up either sexual liberty or sexual equality, or both.

But those options aren’t symmetrical. Because, remember, the problem with today’s sexual economics is not symmetrical. It’s not women who are bailing out of the marriage market in droves, it’s men. Accordingly (as the author of the NY Post recognizes) the odds of rolling back sexual liberty are close to nil. Men don’t have to play on those terms for fundamental bioenergetic reasons (release of semen is cheap), and women post-Pill are demonstrating an unwillingness to try to make them. Because, you know, more sex (see “miswiring”, above).

I am led to a conclusion I don’t like. That is: Sexual equality is unstable. If women can’t buy marriage with sex, they’ll have to bid submission instead. This tactic also combines well with hypergamic desire – if the mean social power of men is automatically higher than that of women, more potential pairings constitute marrying up.

I don’t have a submissive wife and never wanted one. I like strong and independent women. It therefore horrifies me to reach the conclusion that sexually repressive patriarchies may after all be a better deal for most womens’ reproductive success than the relative equality they have now is. But that’s where the logic leads.

I don’t have a problem with it myself, since I don’t believe in the nonexistent fairy tale called equality. But Raymond’s logic is correct. It’s all about the demographics and the future belongs to those who show up for it. The feminist version of equality was never any more viable than the Communist one.

A silver lining in the economic cloud

The consequences of the global depression aren’t all bad; more women might actually stay home to raise their children. But once it becomes clear that a working mother doesn’t actually make any net profit from her job, it should be readily apparent that she is only “working” in order to socialize and avoid the harder work of raising her children:

Every day, dozens of middle-class mothers decide they cannot afford to return to work after having a baby. It’s not because they believe a woman’s place is in the home — many love their jobs and want to return to well-paid careers — but because it’s cheaper to stay at home.

In the past 12 months, on average, household bills have soared by 20 pc, National Insurance has risen by £70 a year, £545 in child tax credits has been taken away, and child benefit was frozen. Childcare costs have rocketed, too. According to children’s charity the Daycare Trust, parents pay 25 per cent more to send a two-year-old child to nursery than five years ago.

And the situation is going to get worse. From next year many families earning more than £25,000 will be stripped of even more child tax credits because of Government cuts. And from January 1, 2013, any household with a higher-rate taxpayer paying 40 per cent tax will lose child benefit worth £1,752 a year.

Figures Aviva has compiled for Money Mail show the cost of childcare is already so high that a mother of two children earning £25,000 a year — and with a husband earning £43,000, just over the higher tax threshold — would have just £300 left a month once childcare and the commuting costs have been taken into account.

And after child benefit is stripped away next year for families with a higher-rate earner she will have just £153 a month left from a month of full-time work — a figure which will drop further if childcare costs and fuel prices keep rising. Her husband’s salary must cover all bills, housing costs, clothes and food and savings.

This article highlights something I pointed out some years ago, which is that about half the female participation in the workforce is detrimental to society. It lowers wages, it harms the development of children, it decreases the quality of marriage, it increases infidelity and divorce, and it reduces workplace productivity. And all for nothing. There are no positive societal consequences from the increased involvement of women in the workforce; many suffer and no one benefits except for four relatively small groups.

1. Daycare providers. An industry exists where one wasn’t required before.

2. Corporations. The increased supply of labor has pushed media male wages down to a level last seen in 1968.

3. Divorce lawyers. “Compared to non-working women, those with a full-time job have a 29 per cent higher odds of divorce.”

4. Retired old men. In 1950, 45.8 percent of men over 65 worked. In 2000, 17.5 percent did. In 1950, 86.9 percent of men 55-64 worked. In 2000, 67.3 percent did. Young mothers are leaving their children in daycare and working in order to pay for old men to play golf. This is not the most sustainable of societies, and as Instapundit likes to say, that which cannot continue won’t.

There are exceptions to every rule and about 30 percent of women have always worked. But society needs middle class young women to marry, stay home, and raise children. It doesn’t need them making Powerpoint demonstrations and having affairs with the married sales manager.

What feminism is

In Gloria Steinem’s own words:

“Feminism starts out being very simple. It starts out being the instinct of a little child who says ‘it’s not fair’ and ‘you are not the boss of me,’ and it ends up being a worldview that questions hierarchy altogether.”

In other words, it is an intrinsically childish ideology founded on an abstraction and defies empirical reality and the entire historical record of Man. That sounds about right.

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.