Monday 23 April 2012

Ladyfur

This may well meander a little. An anonymous poster turned up to give his two-cents worth of personal distaste to my earlier post denouncing the shaving of the pussies & then later to say how 'gross' the hair that grows under girls arms is. My reply grew somewhat volumous (yes I know it's not a proper word but it pleases me) so I'm posting it here instead as a follow-up:


I see these arguments being played out over & over again on the internet, often getting more & more heated & vitriolic, & I don't want to fall into that trap here. Personally, I like a little ladyfur there. In my experience there's all sorts of amazing pheromones - if that's what they are - that disappear once hair is scraped away, so the smell of a shaven armpit can be a turn-off for me.

Be that as it may, the greater point of the post was how this issue is a perfect opportunity to observe how transient & artificially created so many of our most firmly-held personal preferences actually are. This should be obvious, to all, of course, because it's easily observable if we only just open our eyes & look around this great big world, at all the wildly differing beliefs people hold in it. But somehow people never seem to do that for very long, & even when they do just for a moment, they never turn that gaze upon themselves.

If you lived a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago - any other time in human history, in other words - you almost certainly would not find hair growing where it's meant to grow on a grown woman 'gross' at all. Because to be revulsed by a woman in her natural state would mean you were revulsed by all women, by the entirety of womankind. And so would never desire anyone enough to get laid.

Or another way of thinking about it: If you were stranded on a desert island with a collection of the most beautiful supermodels you can dream of, within a fortnight all of them would have the hair come back under their arms & around their sexes, just as you would also have grown a beard, because that's nature, that's how we are when we are left alone in our natural state.

Think about that. Are you really saying you would no longer desire the HB10 after a couple of days & the stubble started to show through? If so, doesn't that mean you believe that what we are in our natural state is wrong? Do you really want that to be the way you view the world? Do you really want that to be the way you view yourself?

*

What interests me most about this, as with the bizarre practice of American (non-Jewish) circumcision, which I've also raged about recently, is how new & demonstrably fabricated it is, & yet how quickly & widely accepted it has become, with almost no dissenting voices. They both have taken root in really only the past hundred years, & primarily - or at least initially - in America. Why? Why America?

"The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is."
- Aristotle

The story of the 20th century (& beyond, up til the present day) is the story of the human race's move into the imagination, away from the real, actual, physical world & into the virtual, transient, manufactured & fake. It is predominantly American culture which has brought this about, the birthplace of modern advertising & the ugly consumerism now colonizing the rest of the human planet. For the story of America - modern America, at least - is that of the triumph of the artificial, temporary & disposable over the real, vital & eternal.

A rock star friend of mine once told me he couldn't make sense of the USA, & refused to play there, the place just creeped him out. It seemed to him, he said, "the white man hit the ground running". What he meant by that was there were no roots, no connection to the spot where you are standing, no real history or shared traditions that weren't imported from somewhere else across the sea. Everything there is so new that the streets in New York don't even have names, just numbers, & they are laid out straight, on a mathematical grid, rather than winding around like live roots the way they do in the old European cities of Dublin, Venice, London, Paris, York, Athens or even Rome. The place names all borrowed from somewhere else: New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York...

I can't help but think that under those circumstances, selling inessential, fabricated goods & beliefs to the masses must be considerably easier than to a tribe in the rainforest or a Bedouin tent. You can't sell snow to an Eskimo. They know who they are. If you don't know what is real, where your food comes from, what you really need to survive, then people can sell you anything. They can make you do anything. And that's what has progressively become the norm the past hundred years or so - again, due to the rise of America as the post-war empire. It's not surprising such a society should become the birthplace of fake tits, botox, cosmetic circumcision, labiaplasty & the shaven pussy.

*

Let me try steer this back to the point:

The desire to fuck, particularly in men, is universal & overwhelming, & the basic mechanics of that biological imperative can't really be tampered with too much without it interfering with the survival of the human race. But the trimmings - the arbitrary individual preferences - are inessential enough to be shaped & manipulated by a society whichever way prominent voices within it choose without any immediately catastrophic repercussions. So, you can make people think sex is dirty & sinful, just so long as you give them a get-out clause where sex is allowed (marriage). You can place limits upon men's natural biological drive to spread their seed as widely as possible but you can't make the whole society of men not want to have sex at all. As long as there is some kind of outlet for the shoots of grass to break through the cement, life can still go on, & whatever you've laid on top of it will seem the most natural thing in the world.

Again, the same with circumcision: if the Rabbi or the 'doctor' took an extra half-inch off: no more Jews or Americans. But take only a little less & those same Jewish & American boys don't feel there is anything unusual at all in having their genitals mutilated as infants. They don't - can't - feel that they're missing anything, any sensations etc, because they've never known anything else. And no-one ever told them they shouldn't have to need to use hand-cream to beat off without it hurting.

*



Most people, of course, are no more complicated than sheep in the choices they make & the causes they support. The herd mentality makes people defend beliefs & positions they never chose. 'Outraged monarchists' will defend the Queen, who never did anything for them, stole their land, resources & money, keeping them as peasants. She doesn't even know those individuals are alive & yet they're ready to die for her - not for the dream of something she stands for, something she represents, just for her, just... because. Because... that's what we do here. Nothing more complicated than dogs defending their masters. The thing is, though, leave anything around for three generations or more & it will come to seem not only normal & ordinary, but an inviolable fact of reality, & one that needs to be defended at all costs, perhaps even with our lives.

The same goes with religion: almost every Christian I've ever met is utterly incapable of recognizing that they would be holding equally passionate but entirely opposing views on, say, Islam, if they had only been born in Morocco, Iran, or Afghanistan, all of which are more than 99% Muslim.

But, of course, they would, & so would everyone else they know - what are the odds it could be otherwise? But still they believe that their set of assumptions, the set of assumptions they were brought up with, which only make sense within their particular culture & over a particular period of time, are the one & only Truth.

*

In any culture you lived you would find women you desired & want to be with. The cultural norms of this specific age are temporary, in this instance only 20 years in the case of the scraping of the punanis, & shaven armpits are only really as old as Hollywood. These societal norms are arbitrary & have no actual value or meaning in themself. We could just as easily have been made to find eyelashes or fingernails ugly & unsightly, & so be offered the opportunity to rip them out by the roots at beauty salons.(For a fee, of course, but then beauty comes at a price. In this culture, anyway). I'm asking you to see, Anon, that much of what seems to be your own revulsion is societally created. It doesn't belong to you, even though it very much feels that way.

We all believe things we have never questioned. We all have beliefs we never chose.

If we take that as our starting point, we can at least begin to attempt to approach the universe as it is, & perhaps start to make a little sense of it. As long as we cling to rigid, codified ideologies, the only thing we can be assured of is that we will never even begin. We may not be able to transcend fully the set of neuroses we were told were normal for the society we were born into but we can do our best not to pass those hang-ups onto the next generation.

We can blindly accept the propaganda of our times & location or question how we got to where we now are. Thinking about why we think the way we do, asking ourselves 'What is this in front of me? Beyond what I have read, beyond what I have been told, what am I actually seeing here?' seems to me a far more beneficial occupation of one's time than illusion & blind obedience, & the only way we know of to liberate ourselves from that game, that lab-rat maze.

It's funny the things that can set you to thinking.

Monday 16 April 2012

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap


Okay, so two things: first a piece by Carrie Lukas that was published in The Wall Street Journal about this time last year, that I thought bore another look-see. At the time it predictably came in for quite a lot of criticism from feminist quarters, though I took a little look & as far as I can see there was no substantial argument against Lukas' figures or basic premise, just a few angry women saying 'childcare & office work are not easy jobs' - no facts, no figures, no reasoned debate, nothing. 
So that was easy.

And I was just getting ready to post that when I came across this video of Thomas Sowell effortlessly taking apart feminist claims of discrimination in a television interview from way back in the 1970's. What strikes me is how the argument used in both pieces is basically the same, & the figures that don't add up today didn't add up then either. In other words: the Pay-Gap today is a myth, & perhaps it always was.

*
So anyway, first the video, then the Lukas piece, 40 years apart.




There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap by Carrie Lukas

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.

In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.

Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.

The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.

Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.

Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.


Ms. Lukas is executive director of the Independent Women's Forum.

Saturday 14 April 2012

Titanic Day

A little post-feminist song to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago today.


Wednesday 4 April 2012

Feminists Killed Kurt Cobain


Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot change

Little heads filled up with lies
Raised only to apologize
For thousand-year conspiracies
In gender-studies histories

Put down at home, drugged up at school
Helped to sit still & follow rules
Help follow what their teachers say
Look, see how well the girls behave

Men chastised, demonized,
Healthy males pathologized
A man is just a dirty ape
Longing, lust, desire: all rape
Your body is a loaded gun
And all that it has done is wrong

Girls demands are sacrosanct
Boys complaints beneath contempt
A ‘good’ man knows his sex is bad
The life of ease that he has had
A good man turns his back on men
Puts women first in everything

White knights, on their hobbled steeds
Still cling to laws of chivalry
Passed over by the queens they save
A joke to all the other slaves

Ashamed of all their endless wealth,
Those riches that they’ve never held,
The privilege we’ve never felt
Only endless shame
All of us the sons of Cain
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain.

Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Who’d rather die than bear that blame
That curse he carried from the womb
Still with him laid out in the tomb

He screamed onstage & pierced his flesh
Put on make-up, wore a dress
Numbed the pain when he could score
Then shot his face across the floor

Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Men my age are all the same
Generations X & Y
Hate themselves & want to die

Too late for them, too late for me
We’ve been what we were made to be
Can’t turn back, can’t start again
But then no-one can, I wonder when
The tide will turn, the waves will part
Our lives were laid out from the start

A man today’s no easy ride:
Three-fourths of all the suicides
Nine-tenths of all the deaths at work
And more in war, dead in the dirt

Under hateful ideology
Hatred becomes ordinary:
A man in pain should make us glad
A man in pain should make us laugh

Each loss for men, each tragedy
Crowed over like a victory
A victory for who? Are we
not one? Are we not family?
Does our thirst not match your need?
If you cut us, don’t we bleed?
Don’t we grieve, just like you do?
Your loved ones torn away from you?

We used to walk in sunny glades
& share the cup of blessed rain
Warm each other winter nights
Watch children play through summer’s light
Work together in the fields
Share the bounty of their yield
Stand together, sacrifice
& not be bought for any price

Now the girls get told get what you can
After all, he’s just a man
You’re right to think it’s right to take
Yes you go girl, you make him pay
The girls get taught they must get on
Like work empowered anyone:
To sell your life for dollar bills
Taking calls & stacking shelves
In offices & factories
Fulfilment sought in drudgery

I’m dreaming of a brighter age
Where all are loved, where all are praised
For what they are, what nature made
Its words are heard & ways obeyed

Where prison rape is not a joke
To decent, well-raised gentlefolk
And mutilated genitals
A horrifying spectacle
No matter which land they occur
Regardless if they’re his or hers

I’m dreaming, & I dream alone
This world’s insane, as we all know
I sit & wait, I hope, I pray
The human race will find its way,
Again

Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot change
Too late for them, too late for me
I can’t say what is going to be
This age will pass, & all within
& these words too, & me, & him
Where to next, nobody knows
The light is dim. But still it glows


(February 20, 1967 – April 5, 1994)