-= Trigger Alert! =-

Can't Get Enough Of Girl Writes What

2012-02-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Latest video from the presently reigning coolest woman in the world, GirlWritesWhat. Let me take this opportunity to state, for the record, that I agree with & support everything I have ever heard her say one hundred & ten percent. That means I could backtrack 10% & still be 100% behind her. Hear her roar:

Lord Shiva & Parvati

2012-02-03T01:34:00.000-08:00

"The inseparability of the male and female entities in the Universe was recognized by Indians as early as the Vedic times. This beautiful sentiment is manifested through the representation of Goddess Parvathi (Uma) and Lord Siva (Maheswara), known as “the parents of the Universe”, as UmaMaheswara or Ardhanareeswara (half-man, half-woman). This representation indicates that while both the female and male forms have their own individual identities and strengths, they are still interdependent. They complement each other and, it is only by combining their individual strengths that they are able to create and nurture life in the Universe. This divine couple is considered by Indians as an example to be emulated by all human beings.

"Import of Western thought on individualism over the last few centuries has led to the erosion of many wonderful Indian values, including the one of male-female unity. Equating individualism with independence has caused many cracks in the much-envied Indian family structure. Radical feminist ideas, which are based on anti-male, anti-family ideologies, have resulted in a gender war. Consequently, divorce rates, numbers of fatherless children, violence against men and numbers of men committing suicides are all on the rise. The time has come to remind ourselves of our pride-worthy Indian values and to restore stability in the society by promoting harmony between men and women."

- Uma Challa, https://uchalla.wordpress.com/. Thanks to Fidelbogen for first pointing this out.

On Not Being A Victim

2012-01-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

by Mary Gaitskill

In the early 1970s, I had an experience that could be described as acquaintance rape. Actually, I have had two or three such experiences, but this one most dramatically fits the profile. I was sixteen and staying in the apartment of a slightly older girl I’d just met in a seedy community center in Detroit. I’d been in her apartment for a few days when an older guy she knew came over and asked us if we wanted to drop some acid. In those years, doing acid with complete strangers was consistent with my idea of a possible good time, so I said yes. When I started peaking, my hostess decided she had to go see her boyfriend, and there I was, alone with this guy, who, suddenly, was in my face.

He seemed to be coming on to me, but I wasn’t sure. My perception was quite loopy, and on top of that he was black and urban-poor, which meant that I, being very inexperienced and suburban-white, did not know how to read him the way I might have read another white kid. I tried to distract him with conversation, but it was hard, considering that I was having trouble with logical sentences, let alone repartee. During one long silence, I asked him what he was thinking. Avoiding my eyes, he answered, “That if I wasn’t such a nice guy you could really be getting screwed.” The remark sounded to me like a threat, albeit a low-key one. But instead of asking him to explain himself or to leave, I changed the subject. Some moments later, when he put his hand on my leg, I let myself be drawn into sex because I could not face the idea that if I said no, things might get ugly. I don’t think he had any idea how unwilling I was–the cultural unfamiliarity cut both ways–and I suppose he may have thought that all white girls just kind of lie there and don’t do or say much. My bad time was made worse by his extreme gentleness; he was obviously trying very hard to please me, which, for reasons I didn’t understand, broke my heart. Even as inexperienced as I was, I sensed that in his own way he intended a romantic encounter.

For some time afterward I described this event as “the time I was raped.” I knew when I said it that the statement wasn’t quite accurate, that I hadn’t, after all, said no. Yet it felt accurate to me. In spite of my ambiguous, even empathic feelings for my unchosen partner, unwanted sex on acid is a nightmare, and I did feel violated by the experience. At times I even flat-out lied about what had happened, grossly exaggerating the violence and the threat–not out of shame or guilt, but because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts. Every now and then, in the middle of telling an exaggerated version of the story, I would remember the actual man and internally pause, uncertain of how the memory squared with what I was saying or where my sense of violation was coming from–and then I would continue with my story. I am ashamed to admit this, both because it is embarrassing to me and because I am afraid the admission could be taken as evidence that women lie “to get revenge.” I want to stress that I would not have lied that way in court or in any other context that might have had practical consequences; it didn’t even occur to me to take my case to court. My lies were told not for revenge but in service of what I felt to be the metaphorical truth.

_______

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I could not bear to watch movies or read books that I considered demeaning to women in any way; I evaluated everything I saw or read in terms of whether it expressed a "positive image" of women. I was a very PC feminist before the term existed, and, by the measure of my current understanding, my critical rigidity followed from my inability to be responsible for my own feelings. In this context, being responsible would have meant that I let myself feel whatever discomfort, indignation, or disgust I experienced without allowing those feelings to determine my entire reaction to a given piece of work. In other words, it would have meant dealing with my feelings and what had caused them, rather than expecting the outside world to assuage them. I could have chosen not to see the world through the lens of my personal unhappiness and yet maintained a kind of respect for my unhappiness. For example, I could have decided to avoid certain films or books because of my feelings without blaming the film or book for making me feel the way I did.

I have changed a lot from the PC teenager who walked out of movies that portrayed women in a demeaning light. As I've grown older, I've become more confident of myself and my ability to determine what happens to me, and, as a result, those images no longer have such a strong emotional charge. I don't believe they will affect my life in any practical sense unless I allow them to do so.

I am not idealistic enough to hope that we will ever live in a world without rape and other forms of sexual cruelty; I think men and women will always have to struggle to behave responsibly. But I think we could make the struggle less difficult by changing the way we teach responsibility and social conduct. To teach a boy that rape is "bad" is not as effective as making him see that rape is a violation of his own masculine dignity as well as a violation of the raped woman. It's true that children don't know big words and that teenage boys aren't all that interested in their own dignity. But these are things that children learn more easily by example than by words, and learning by example runs deep.

___

A few years ago I invited to dinner at my home a man I'd known casually for two years. We'd had dinner and comradely drinks a few times. I didn't have any intention of becoming sexual with him, but after dinner we slowly got drunk and were soon floundering on the couch. I was ambivalent not only because I was drunk but because I realized that although part of me was up for it, the rest of me was not. So I began to say no. He parried each "no" with charming banter and became more aggressive. I went along with it for a time because I was amused and even somewhat seduced by the sweet, junior-high spirit of his manner. But at some point I began to be alarmed, and then he did and said some things that turned my alarm into fright. I don't remember the exact sequence of words or events, but I do remember taking one of his hands in both of mine, looking him in the eyes, and saying, "If this comes to a fight you would win, but it would be very ugly for both of us. Is that really what you want?"

His expression changed and he dropped his eyes; shortly afterward he left.

I consider that small decision to have been a responsible one because it was made by taking both my vulnerable feelings and my carnal impulses into account. When I spoke, my words came from my feeling of delicacy as well as from my capacity for aggression. And I respected my friend as well by addressing both sides of his nature. It is not hard for me to make such decisions now, but it took me a long time to get to this point. I only regret that it took so long, both for my young self and for the boys I was with, under circumstances that I now consider disrespectful to all concerned.

___________

Originally published in Harper's Magazine, March 1994. The full article, which is long but very much worth your time, can be found here:
http://genedseminars.umb.edu/engl273-2/spg09/documents/HarpersMagazine-1994-03-0001592.pdf

The Reformed Buddhist

2012-01-22T03:53:00.000-08:00

Just a shout out to & plug for a new blog I've discovered, TheReformedBuddhist.com by Muso, an entertaining sort who writes in equal parts about Zen Buddhism & Men's Rights - a unique mix which brings with it some insights that resonate with me.

A recent post, Socially Acceptable Bigotry: Men are Humans Too, had this well-put together list of present-day imbalances & inequalities facing men that I felt deserved a repost:

Unsheltered Homeless (2009) [1]
Women – 12,000 – 4%
Men – 240,000 – 96%

Life Expectancy (2006) [2]
Women – 80.8 Years
Men – 75.7 Years

Suicides (2008) [3]
Women – 7,585 - 19%
Men – 28,450 - 81%

Deaths by Homicide (2004) [4]
Women – 3,856 – 20%
Men – 14,717 – 80%

Deaths from Cancer (2004) [4]
Women – 269,819
Men – 290,069

Deaths from HIV/AIDS (2004) [4]
Women – 3,357
Men – 8,756

Federal Funds for Sex Specific Cancer Research [5]
Women – Breast Cancer – $631,000,000 - 40,000 Deaths
Men – Prostate Cancer – $300,000,000 - 33,000 Deaths

Deaths on the Job (2010) [6]
Women – 355 - 7%
Men – 4,192 - 93%

Injuries on the Job (2007) [10]
Women – 36%
Men – 64%

College Enrollment (2009) [7]
Women – 58% - 11,658,000
Men – 42% - 8,770,000

Affirmative Action Education Programs (Gender Specific) [8]
Women – Yes
Men – No

Unemployment Rates (2010) [9]
Women – 8.6% – 6,199,000
Men – 10.5% - 8,626,000

Average Hours Worked Per Week (2010) [11]
Women – 36.1
Men – 40.2

High School Graduation Rates (2005) [12]
Women – 72%
Men – 65%

Incarceration Rates (2009) [13]
Women – 114,979 - 7%
Men – 1,502,490 - 93%

Child Custody Rates [14]
Women – 11,268,000 custodial mothers
Men – 2,907,000 custodial fathers

US Military Deaths From 1950 – 2010 [15][16][17]
Women – 139 - 0.01%
Men – 100,063 - 99.9%

Federally Funded Battered Shelters [18]
Women – 2,000+ $300,000,000 per year
Men – None – $0

Federally Funded Health Offices and Research 1970 – Present (not including cancer research) [19]
Women Only – Office, Projects and Programs 70+ – Funds – $100,000,000,000
Men Only – None – $0

Forced Selective Service
Women – No
Men – Yes

Drug and Alcohol Addiction and Abuse Rates (2010) [20]
Women – 5.8%
Men – 12.2%

I like the cut of his jib.

There's a lot of good stuff over there, some of which you will most likely be familiar with, but dealt with extremely well, clearly & comprehensively, & with a lot of good humour thrown in. Like the writer, it comes from a good place.

*

The Top Ten

2012-01-03T05:24:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple of years now that I've been on this road, whatever this road is. And in that time I've read anything & everything I can on the subject of misandry in our society, along with the kinds of feminism it originates with, false-rape accusations, the domestic violence & sexual harrassment industries, political correctness, biological differences between the sexes, evolutionary theory etc etc. I am of the opinion the following ten are the most accessible, fair-minded, well-researched & persuasive books I have so far found, & the ones I recommend to anyone who asks. There is no-one I can think of in our present society who would not benefit from reading one or all of them.

So, in no particular order of preference:

Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers
The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers
Why Men Rule: A Theory Of Male Dominance by Steven Goldberg
The Myth Of Male Power by Warren Farrell
Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind The Pay Gap, And What Women Can Do About It by Warren Farrell
Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson & Katherine K.Young
Legalising Misandry: From Public Shame To Systemic Discrimination Against Men by Paul Nathanson & Katherine K.Young
Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men & Women by Anne Moir & David Jessel
The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine
Heterophobia: Sexual Harrassment And The Future Of Feminism by Daphne Patai

There are other books out there, of course, but each of these says a specific essential point better than anything else I've read, & you won't go far wrong with them.

I used to be a feminist. These are the books that helped me change my mind.

Practical Sexism

2011-12-30T08:46:00.000-08:00

Over Christmas I came across a comment I'd made over at HUS a couple of months ago, & wondered why I hadn't dusted it off & posted it here before, as it still says a lot of what I want to. It began in response to some quotes from Esau, one of the regular commentators over there:

Male dominance as a default posture is practical sexism, and I still don’t see any way to integrate it with the egalitarian feminism that I was raised with and which still largely controls mainstream “polite society” culture. But the hope is that someone with more imagination will succeed me, and I wish them luck.

The difficulty, and here I certainly include myself, is that I don’t think polite American society is ready for even a controlled return to practical sexism, which I believe is what widespread acceptance of Game knowledge would entail. This is a huge subject which I can’t even start to cover in a comment, but I’ll just put in one note by way of example which is on the word and concept of “dominance”. You can read a lot on HUS to the effect that “typical men should be more dominant” or “women like to be dominated”. But whenever you try to liberate the word from highly abstract or even circular definitions (“dominance is acting with assertiveness, to be assertive is to act with confidence, and one shows confidence by acting dominant”) and get down to real-world examples of behavior, every single one falls into the category that I would refer to as “being a sexist jerk”.

Now, more than anything else this is likely more a statement about how I was educated and brought up, rather than anything about the world at large. To me, my visceral reaction to nuggets of wisdom/advice like “men must lead” or pushing the “captain/first officer model” is, first and foremost, “sexist == jerkery == bad”. Even if you showed me evidence, proof positive that both the men and the women of the world were in sympathy with these ideas, I would still find them hard to swallow. But, that’s just me — and a few tens of millions of other guys from my generation. Re-education may be mentioned, but I don’t think we’ll ever be comfortable with a return to a sexist outlook, no matter how practical or desired it may be from both sides’ POV.

And so, maybe it would be best to have the waters of history simply close quietly over my own generation, leaving us a failed experiment and a warning to the future. Best of luck to all the younger folks out there in finding a new way.

To which I added:

I am feeling all this profoundly myself at the present time. If you were born anywhere from the late 1960's to the late 1980's, you were raised in a feminist, politically correct society. The values of that ideology are your values, to some degree - the values of your world. You didn't have a choice in it any more than boys & girls raised in Victorian society had a choice on whether they wanted their sexual development to be thoroughly mangled by their upbringing. But no matter what changes we go through, our generation is very unlikely to be able to throw off that programming completely.

If people from the Victorian age were alive today, they would still have deep remnants of the hang-ups that were instilled in them in childhood. They would still on some deeper level feel sex was something 'dirty' & 'sinful' & feel ashamed of their naked bodies. Children drafted into the Hitler youth, I'm sure, had conflicted feelings later on in their life trying to tally up the values of the world of their childhood with the world that came after. How much more entrenched would those ideas have been had the Third Reich lasted 40 years?
Men & women of my generation are the product of a prolonged, ideologically driven societal brainwashing, & we're going to be policing ourselves & beating ourselves up over terms like sexism, racism & homophobia until the day we die, whether we want to or not. Concepts that had never even been thought of in all human history before 50, 60 years ago seem as real as concrete to us. We think instinctively in those terms now, & will do, to some degree, until the day we die. And even when future generations rise up & evolve past them into a new paradigm, we will, in all likelihood, at best witness it from the sidelines.
We can dream of a better world & work towards a future where the values of this age go the way of Nazism, McCarthyism, medieval witch-hunts & Victorian prudery. But it's a promised land we most likely will never get to walk in ourselves.

In The Ambulance

2011-12-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

Not only are we waking up

from 40 years of feminism,

we're coming to

in the ambulance

& all we can remember is

some crazy bitch

called Solanas

was driving.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

2011-12-21T04:11:00.000-08:00

My book of the year.

Two bold young neuroscientists have initiated a revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction. Before Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the only researcher to systematically investigate sexual desires was Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed 18,000 middle-class Caucasians in the 1950s. But Ogas and Gaddam have studied the secret sexual behavior of more than a hundred million men and women around the world. Their method? They observed what people do within the anonymity of the Internet.

There is so much in this book I want to say to the world that it makes it impossible to give a decent synopsis: you really do have to read it all. It speaks to both sexes equally, is extremely funny, & there are no dull bits - every chapter is a highpoint. I only wish I had a crate of them so I could hand them out to everyone i met. I may post more about this in the future but for now just a tiny (& woefully inadequate) sample:

Domestic Violence Hoaxes

2011-12-20T07:46:00.000-08:00

The living, breathing miracle that is Christina Hoff Sommers on Lies That Will Not Die:

A Girl Writes What?

2011-12-18T16:57:00.000-08:00

Two amazing videos by a new youtuber by the name of girlwriteswhat. The first an introduction to her & her reasons for writing, the second a remarkable critique of our society's attitude of male disposability. They are both excellent, but the second one in particular is absolute gold. Her blog is worth checking out, too.

The Term "Feminazi" No Longer Seems Like Hyperbole

2011-12-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

An amazing story just broke today over at AVfM: An activist identified only as 'Agent Orange' went undercover for several months in the 'Private Forum' of the radical feminist blog "RadFem Hub" & discovered gendercidal ravings are the norm for such folk when they think no-one is watching. In the time he was there he amassed a great deal of evidence of hatemongering & serious discussion on a 'final solution' for the exterminating of a whole one half of the human race, which is expected to be released in its entirety over the coming weeks.

But that's not all: With the aid of an investigator, he tracked down & put names to many of those posting & the scariest & most revelatory thing is the positions of influence & authority many of these women hold in society: a childcare worker who despises the small boys she looks after & refers to them as 'future rapists' ; a member of the City of Kingston Arts Council in Ontario who recommends mothers kill their male infants by starving them of physical touch & affection; a communications assistant for the French-Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry who wants "violent social, political and military revolution"; an established writer, publisher & lawyer curious about ways "to exterminate the male entirely"...the list goes on.

"For a long time men’s advocates and others have tried to point out to politicians and the public that feminism was, at its heart, a movement rooted in hate. Those contesting this point of view claim that radical feminism isn’t recognized as legitimate by most feminists and that radical feminists aren’t taken seriously. This new information demonstrates those assumptions are false.

This data, and the mountains of it to soon follow, reveal that radical feminists with bigoted, violent leanings are thoroughly entrenched in the media, governmental and education systems worldwide, and that they are exerting their influence to further legislation and policy that reflects not only their hatred of men and boys, but a desire to put themselves in a position to inflict as much harm on them as possible."

The most disturbing entry for me (so far) is the following, written by Lucy Nicholas (screen name “Luckynkl”), a professor and lecturer at both the University of Edinburgh and University of Portsmouth. The writers at AVfM point out that in this post, Nicholas clearly demonstrates the understanding that the ideas she is furthering are illegal:

I dearly hope this news story breaks big & reaches the mainstream media. It will be interesting to see if the public at large's groggy-headed impression of feminism being "about equality" changes in the face of such blatant evidence to the contrary. We can't know. We'll have to just wait & see.

Full article at:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/radfem-hub-the-underbelly-of-a-hate-movement/

The Education Gap in the UK

2011-12-13T16:09:00.000-08:00

I have already written about how the education gap in America has widened every year since 1980 until now the number of college degrees being given out are 60/40 female to male (the exact reverse of the figures from 1970, which led to massive overhauls of the education system throughout that decade). Recently I got to wondering how the situation is closer to home. This turned out to be very easy to find out, thanks to an annual report published on the Universities UK website: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/Publications/Documents/Patterns9.pdf

So at last count, there were approx. 800,000 full-time female enrollments to 650,000 male, & the gap between part-time enrollees is even greater, with more than half as many more females than males. Even 10 years has shown a marked increase in this gap, as the report itself points out. Not quite American levels yet but not far off & the trend is clear as to where this is heading.

Again I call out plaintively into the wilderness: if feminism really is about equality, why are they so silent over an issue they made such deafening noise about 40 years ago?

I mean, you know, if it isn't just a hate movement working exclusively towards female supremacy?

Bigamy

2011-12-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

Let's be big for a change.

The Biological Imperative Of Female Self-Preservation In Action Movies

2011-12-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

Something I’ve been musing on lately is how all the ‘girls kick-ass!’ movies so common today are almost entirely created by men – Buffy, Dollhouse, Kick-Ass, Kill Bill, Salt, Sucker Punch (most misandric film of the year), all the superheroey ones... All are repeatedly sold to us as ‘empowering role models’ etc for girls & yet the strange thing is it’s not women that are writing & directing them, it’s men. These films are predominantly watched by males, too - women may like the propaganda that they can 'do everything as well as men' but for the most part would much rather be home watching Sex And The City & Twilight.

So I've been puzzling over why this should be & the conclusion I have come to is that, under the system we have had the past 30 years or so, which denigrates masculinity to such a horrific degree, male creators have resorted to using female protagonists to play out their heroic ideals, ideals which, in the real world women would not think to carry out - think of the differing expectations of women in the police, the army, the fire service, for instance.

In the classic Alien films, Ripley – the first real female action hero – sacrifices herself to save the human race in a very chivalric, Christ-like (greatest hero of western society) way. I find it hard to imagine a female author coming up with that, a woman laying down her life for strangers. It just wouldn’t occur to them. And in the past it would never have occurred to a male writer either. Women’s bodies are a precious rare resource to be protected at all costs by the men, even at the cost of the mens own lives. That sacrificial role is a male burden, & a male fantasy, but one is now rather strangely being projected onto a female canvas.

Feminism has really messed with our heads.

Although some women might be consumers of heroic violent action movies with female protagonists, they don’t choose to create them themselves. It’s not like Jane Campion or Miranda July (two directors I hold in high esteem, by the way) are working on writing & directing a female Die Hard.

I mentioned the military, fire service & police earlier not to say that no women serve in such capacity, only that they are not serving under the same expectation to sacrifice themselves in the way their male counterparts are. Around 20% of the US armed forces are female, yet 97% of the troops that died in Iraq were male, & of the 3% of the troops that died that were female, more than a third of them died from other causes than combat. It has been said (with only a little exaggeration) that serving in Iraq is one of the safest places for an American woman to work.

Same happens in the police force. Female police officers overwhelmingly take the safer day shifts & on the beat, particularly in less safe areas, are almost always accompanied by a male officer, who’s unspoken role is to protect her. This has been looked at with concern in the past as it doubles the danger for the male officer, who has no one along for the ride to protect him. Of the 4000 deaths of police officers in the UK, 3956 of them are male, while only 44 are female, even though women now make up 25% of police officers on the beat & 62% of staff.

In the fire service, again, there are female firefighters, but hardly any. In the U.S. it’s about 2%. Women are not attracted to dangerous work generally, jobs in which they daily run the risk of death. Which is why, even though women now hold the majority of all jobs in the USA today, over 95% of all deaths at work, across the board, are male.

To restate my point perhaps more clearly, I am not addressing ‘strong female characters’ but rather female characters carrying out the traditional male heroic role of willingly sacrificing themselves for the tribe, for the greater good, for everyone else.

These figures, to pretty much all intents & purposes, don’t exist (as I say, the only one I could think of was Alien's Ripley), but when they do they are written exclusively by men, who are, it seems to me, projecting their own innate set of heroic values & behavioursomewhere where they do not occur in real life. Women in the real world do not, as a very strictly observed rule, sacrifice themselves for a bunch of strangers.

There’s a case to be made about how this is because of the females greater biological imperative for self-preservation {"MustSaveMyself&MyChild"}. If there are any instances of a woman writer portraying her female protagonist sacrificing herself it will almost certainly be for an immediate family member, a younger sibling or child most likely, rarely for her husband or lover & never for the greater good of all, for wider society. This is not a condemnation, it’s just the way things are: Neither men or women see women as being expendable in that way.

The only exception to that rule I can think of is a Thelma & Louise type story where (spoiler!) two women would rather drive off a cliff than live in a world with men in it. This, however, is obviously ideologically driven & shows only how ideology can make us perform strange, unhinged, fanatical acts. Thelma & Louise’s actions are essentially self-serving – the best you could say is that they are a personal protest about how they feel about their situation in the world – they are not done to save anyone else, the people of their tribe or the world. Even their staunchest defenders would have to admit that Thelma & Louise are not sacrificing themselves to save the men of their community.

This seems to me a fundamental natural difference between the sexes, but one which, due most likely to present day PC teachings of the interchangeability of the sexes, is increasingly obscured, giving us wildly unrealistic expectations of each of the sexes roles, motives & capabilities that aren’t based upon anything in nature or our daily reality.

Two Utopias

2011-12-07T06:24:00.001-08:00

An extract from an excellent essay by F. Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia In Power. I recommend reading it in full, the text of which can be found here.

Let us consider what a sexual utopia is, and let us begin with men, who are in every respect simpler.

Nature has played a trick on men: production of spermatozoa occurs at a rate several orders of magnitude greater than female ovulation (about 12 million per hour vs. 400 per lifetime). This is a natural, not a moral, fact. Among the lower animals also, the male is grossly oversupplied with something for which the female has only a limited demand. This means that the female has far greater control over mating. The universal law of nature is that males display and females choose. Male peacocks spread their tales, females choose. Male rams butt horns, females choose. Among humans, boys try to impress girls-and the girls choose. Nature dictates that in the mating dance, the male must wait to be chosen.

A man's sexual utopia is, accordingly, a world in which no such limit to female demand for him exists. It is not necessary to resort to pornography for examples. Consider only popular movies aimed at a male audience, such as the James Bond series. Women simply cannot resist James Bond. He does not have to propose marriage, or even request dates. He simply walks into the room and they swoon. The entertainment industry turns out endless unrealistic images such as this. Why, the male viewer eventually may ask, cannot life actually be so? To some, it is tempting to put the blame on the institution of marriage.

Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there would be twice as much of it as formerly. They imagined there existed a large, untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between "consenting adults." Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter. Traditionalists who disagreed were said to want to "put a policeman in every bedroom." This was the age of the Kinsey Report and the first appearance of Playboy magazine. Idle male daydreams had become a social movement.

This characteristically male sexual utopianism was a forerunner of the sexual revolution but not the revolution itself. Men are incapable of bringing about fundamental changes in heterosexual relations without the cooperation-the famed "consent"-of women. But the original male would-be revolutionaries did not understand the nature of the female sex instinct. That is why things have not gone according to their plan.

What is the special character of feminine sexual desire that distinguishes it from that of men?

It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. Such a belief is often implicit in the writings of male conservatives: Women only want good husbands, but heartless men use and abandon them. Some evidence does appear, prima facie, to support such a view. One 1994 survey found that "while men projected they would ideally like six sex partners over the next year, and eight over the next two years, women responded that their ideal would be to have only one partner over the next year. And over two years? The answer, for women, was still one." Is this not evidence that women are naturally monogamous?

No it is not. Women know their own sexual urges are unruly, but traditionally have had enough sense to keep quiet about it. A husband's belief that his wife is naturally monogamous makes for his own peace of mind. It is not to a wife's advantage, either, that her husband understand her too well: Knowledge is power. In short, we have here a kind of Platonic "noble lie"-a belief which is salutary, although false.

It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female "sexual orientations" are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.

Women, in fact, have a distinctive sexual utopia corresponding to their hypergamous instincts. In its purely utopian form, it has two parts: First, she mates with her incubus, the imaginary perfect man; and second, he "commits," or ceases mating with all other women. This is the formula of much pulp romance fiction. The fantasy is strictly utopian, partly because no perfect man exists, but partly also because even if he did, it is logically impossible for him to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him.

It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d'état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power. Aristophanes had a better understanding of the female mind than the average husband.

Hypergamy is not monogamy in the human sense. Although there may be only one "alpha male" at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime. In bygone days, it was permitted to point out natural female inconstancy. Consult, for example, Ring Lardner's humorous story "I Can't Breathe"- the private journal of an eighteen year old girl who wants to marry a different young man every week. If surveyed on her preferred number of "sex partners," she would presumably respond one; this does not mean she has any idea who it is.

An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males. Women are not so much naturally modest as naturally vain. They are inclined to believe that only the "best" (most sexually attractive) man is worthy of them. This is another common theme of popular romance (the beautiful princess, surrounded by panting suitors, pined away hopelessly for a "real" man-until, one day.etc.).

This cannot be objectively true, of course. An average man would seem to be good enough for the average woman by definition. If women were to mate with all the men "worthy" of them they would have little time for anything else. To repeat, hypergamy is distinct from monogamy. It is an irrational instinct, and the female sexual utopia is a consequence of that instinct.

Hogamus Higamus: Polyamorous Addendum

2011-12-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

A part I realize I didn't fully address in the last post was polyamory, which I mentioned but didn't expand upon. Polyamory is another brave & respectable attempt to find a workable model for men & women to be together. If anything, I feel much closer in my personal life to that as an ideal than either polygamy or monogamy, as it is more thoughtful & open-ended, & actively looking for a better solution than just the accepted norm, but in its present form it is fundamentally flawed in that it refuses to acknowledge the differences between the sexes. The party line is still that both sexes are essentially the same, & whatever works for one will work for the other: if you don't agree you just need to work on yourself some more.

This leads to some obvious imbalances straight-off: men generally have greater need for sexual variety but also experience greater possessiveness & revulsion at their partners having sexual contact with other men. Women, on the other hand, feel more uncomfortable with their partners building emotional ties with someone else. In addition to that, encouraging women to be as promiscuous as men want to be is asking women to do something that will in the long run lower their SMV (sexual market value) & so their chances of getting what they more often want, a long-term committed relationship in which to raise a child. I don't see a way of making it work on a wider scale until these ideological positions are overhauled.

Still, as I say, I feel closer to that than what we have at present, & any system in which private morality is not driven by religious or political manipulation to be what you aren't seems to me a good thing.

Hogamus Higamus: Conclusion

2011-12-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

Okay, let's wrap this up.

The story so far: Monogamy is not natural. It is something our particular society evolved in order to best keep the peace between men & women & society as a whole. It doesn't work for everyone, & men, being naturally polygamous, struggle under it particularly. Women, too, lose out materially by the attractive minority of wealthy, high-status men being limited to supporting only one wife each. But institutionalized polygamy doesn't work well either, it stirs up jealousy in women & leaves the majority of men without partners.

So it's a compromise, an attempt to appease men's polygamy & women's hypergamy & still keep people from raping, pillaging & rioting in the streets. Monogamy increasingly appears to me like the kind of solution a communist state would dream up to keep the greatest number of workers docile - 'one partner per person'. Like the socialist dream itself, it deserves admiration for its generosity of spirit. But, also like socialism, it breaks down because it fails to address very real human needs that are not acknowledged under its particular ideology.

Having peered recently across the great smörgåsbord of human relationships, I find I've come away feeling a certain kind of admiration for all of them: monogamy, polygamy, polyamory... Like most of the major political movements of the past, they are all attempts by individuals & societies to work out the best way of dealing with how to be in this world together, how to balance our own personal needs with the needs & demands of those around us. All have good things about them, all of them address some part of the puzzle, though clearly not the whole.

The central, fundamental reality underlying all of them is that men & women have to come together, one way or another, every generation, or else the human race dies off. How we do that is really just obsessing over details. What is bigger than any of those choices is that we will find each other, fuck each other silly & make some smaller versions of ourselves. Regardless of whatever pretty lies we fill our heads with, our bodies will still do what they need to do, chauffeuring our conscious minds along like passengers.

Bellita, who wrote the second post here, asked me after the last one what my solution was, & in truth, I have been trying to figure that one out myself. I'm not advocating a move to polygamy, at least not on a societal scale. And the situation we have at the moment, where men (& some women) profess to monogamy but engage secretly in promiscuity seems morally problematic & in the bigger picture just a waste of our time & energy, keeping our true wants & desires perpetually under wraps. As Gandhi famously said, "happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony" & clearly this is not possible if we are having to sneak around practicing something we are led to believe is shameful.

I think an answer of sorts begins to emerge the more we simply accept the previously stated models of basic natural 'hardwired' male & female behaviour. This requires us leaving behind the 'double standard' complaint often levelled at men by women, & particularly by feminists. But then that was based upon a fallacy, the notion that men & women are identical, entirely the same. Obviously, we're not. If we recognize that male & female behaviours are endlessly recurring & universal, then moral judgement upon those natural behaviours becomes unnecessary & foolish: We are what we are. Deal with it.

Perhaps what I've been writing here in these posts is more of an overview of our options than an advert for any one of them. I imagine that the final Answer, the final Truth, will necessarily appear paradoxical to our present way of thinking, as that is the nature of the universe. God, The Universe, The Everything - whatever you want to call it - contains everything; black & white, life & death, sunlight & shadow. Living vegetation grows out of death & waste. Good people can do terrible things. A person you hate can carry out acts of extraordinary kindness. A saint can be born from the belly of a murderer.

Rather than just putting forth another fixed position, another ideological stance, the answer, it seems to me, is much more to do with a paradigm shift in our perception of reality & our place within it.

There is REALITY - whatever this ever-unfolding phenomenon, ultimately beyond our comprehension but of which we are an intrinsic, inseparable part is - & then there are all our many little ways of interpreting & dealing with that reality. Beliefs are temporal, & they change. But the greater reality continues above & beyond whatever laws we pass, bibles we write & stories we make up about it. I guess if I'm putting any suggestion forth at all it is that we try move that underlying reality to the centre stage, make that the focus of our daily attention rather than the barely acknowledged wall we hang our (let's face it, largely delusory) beliefs upon.

This applies in every aspect of life. For example, music is a human constant: all human societies we know of have it, the form it takes is really of much less interest or importance than the fact that it exists at all, is unique to humanity & is universal. Whether it is nose-flutes or sitars, wah-wah guitars or flugelhorns, jungle drums or drum & bass, the bottom line is all the peoples of the world make music, & always have. That is the greater reality: the music is the constant, not the form the music takes. And we can understand & judge the meaning & worth of any music better from that higher vantage point than from any fixed position within it.

Religion too, is a human constant, & like music, is as old as humanity itself - older, in fact (neanderthal graves from 100,000 years ago show evidence of ritual burial & a belief in some sort of survival of the soul into an afterlife). In the widest sense it doesn't matter which one you choose, you are still following a unique & essentially human path by choosing it. Your resistance to that as an idea will be directly in proportion to how much you are invested in a particular brand of that religious experience. If you are deeply Christian, you will find that a hard pill to swallow, as will a Muslim, a Jew, or an Atheist.

Let's try apply this to a subject closer to the matter in hand, like the age of consent, an issue relating to men & women which often provokes heated debate &, more often than not, shaming language directed at men.

At 16, 17, years of age, girls bodies are, biologically speaking, at the height of their fertility, & in the best physical shape they will ever be in to give birth. Their bodies are still supple & elastic enough to spring back quickly after childbirth with the fewest health risks. As we know, men want youth & fertility. Nature wants them to want youth & fertility: most of what we universally regard as sign of female attractiveness are simply indicators of that. All the signals of health, youth, strength & vitality are nature's way of attracting males attention to indicate they are now ripe for childbearing.

So, that's the reality. And if we look at all the thousands of human societies we know of, both now in in the past, we see that it is entirely universal: There is no society in which fortysomething women with a long & varied sexual history are the most highly sought after sexual partners. If we can calmly & dispassionately look at the situation we must accept that this is nature, this is simply how it is.

But, to have a society where all men are only involving themselves with 16-year old girls would be a nightmare, & terribly destructive to the infrastructure of society, of family, of the bonds that hold us all together. For a start, most girls at 16 really don't know poo from clay, & are in no position to make such enormous decisions about the future of themselves, their child or the boy or man they are with. In addition to that, it would leave the rest of the women - & even those same women - in a much worse position than they are now. It would also mean that all the men would be fighting over a tiny proportion of the available women. So we can look at that situation for what it is, & openly accept that reality, yet choose to work towards maintaining the infrastructure of a society where women are cared for & valued for more than just breeding.

But doing that doesn't change the reality. And it doesn't obscure that reality for ideological reasons. It doesn't require us to lie to ourselves or each other, only to act responsibly in the face of it.

In Spain the age of consent is 13. Does this mean the Spanish people are a race of evil paedophiles? In Albania & Austria the age is 14, Germany too. And Hungary. And Italy. And Portugal. In Greece it's 15. In some parts of America it's as high as 18, though a hundred years or so ago it was as low as 12. In Mexico it's still 12. In Britain it used to be 12, way back in the day but was lowered to 10 in the 16th century...

Which of these is correct? Lined up like that, doesn't it become obvious that none of them are? And that, in fact, none of them could be?

The legality of sex is fluid, malleable. But in our search for truth, our personal morality has to be above the laws of the day. Just because something's against The Law doesn't mean, in the greater scheme of things, that it's wrong. And just because something's legal doesn't make it good & beneficial. Wouldn't it be better to simply accept that different people mature sexually at different speeds? Would it not be the most sensible & humane thing to try have that acknowledged to some degree in the eyes of the law?

A shared morality is essential for human society to continue, but the details of morality are also changeable, depending on where (& when) you are living. It's hard for people with strong political or religious beliefs to understand this but it needs to be accepted if one is going to progress to any sort of wider understanding of the world & larger truths. After all, a polygamous society is no more or less moral than a monogamous one. And in the larger scheme of things they are barely different at all.

So thought must be given to how we can arrive at a shared view of beneficial acts. We could attempt to work towards the development of a morality which acknowledges universally recurring constants as reality but seeks to choose the best, highest, noblest way of dealing with that reality for the greatest number of people, openly & above board. Then, if some of us fall short of that ideal - when some of us fall short of that ideal - we can hope to be treated with compassion rather than judgement & condemnation, because we know as a society that our 'flaws' are a simply a part of the way we are, & we are not enshrining fantasy into our moral beliefs.

*

Okay, another one:

Whenever I hear of women complaining 'why doesn't he want to commit? Why doesn't he want to settle down?' I always think the answer is actually blatantly obvious: it's because he's not a woman. A woman is driven to settle down & feather the nest. A man isn't. Again, this can be explained by simple biology, it doesn't require belief in any political ideology or holy book to make it make sense, we can verify it with our own eyes. We don't demonize women for this biological imperative. In fact we make it the basis of our society's sexual morality.

Likewise, a man is driven to briefly be with as many women as he can be. That is his role. It's been estimated that a man in his lifetime could father up to around 50,000 children, without necessarily ever meeting any of them. A woman, on the other hand, could have at the every most, what? Twenty? Thirty? (Ouch). And generally speaking women do know they've given birth.... This huge difference in the amount of investment makes women put far more consideration into their choice of sexual partner. Again, there is no good or bad here, this is simply nature - God, the universe, whatever - working through us.

You can't apply female biological imperatives to men. Because men don't have them. Men have different ones. A problem we have had in our society for a long time (even before feminism) is that men fulfilling their half of the equation & following their natural impulses are judged to be exhibiting not male behaviour, but bad behaviour. However, it must be said that there are more immediately obvious ill-effects accompanying unchecked male promiscuity than the female drive to settle down. Men created civilization, women created society. Women are the glue that holds the tribe together. Men are the architects, the builders of all the concrete things we see. Without either of these contributions we'd have nothing. The men would never have stopped fighting long enough to accomplish anything great, & the women would still be living in mud huts with leaky roofs & no plumbing.

*

As I said before, the difference between monogamy & polygamy, from a higher vantage point, is actually quite small. Monogamy & polygamy both entail marriage, after all - under both regimes the men do not just fuck & run, but stay around to support the woman through childbirth & beyond, even though there is far less immediate benefit for them than for women. For that, the countless men of the past deserve our respect & gratitude too, along with all the fathers out there still, doing what needs to be done with ever-decreasing reward in a world which punishes & demeans them at every turn.

The choice is not between polygamy & monogamy but between widespread societally responsible behaviour & serving only ones own interests. Women need to practice this just as much as men - 'personal empowerment' & entitled princess behaviours are just as much of a threat to society as men's unchecked promiscuity. And goddamn it, it would be nice to live in a world which points that out just once in awhile.

We're one big tribe, one big family. The banks & the governments & the high-street stores might not want you to remember that, but we are. And we need to look out for one another a little better than we often do.

I hope this has been an interesting journey of sorts. I guess if I had to restate the main point again it would be this: It is better to accept reality & build our moralities - sexual or otherwise - around acting responsibly in the face of it, rather than project ideologically-based fantasies onto the much bigger, messier, ever-changing living world of green vegetation & flesh & blood that we have always lived in & always will.

Here endeth the lesson.

.

Higamus Hogamus (Part 3)

2011-11-04T02:59:00.000-07:00

In the first of these anthropological lectures on 21st century homo sapiens mating behaviour I spent a lot of time speaking about male sexuality, so this one I'll try focus more on the female side of the mountain, the innate female characteristics we need to factor in when speaking of male/female relationships & our present morality.

Human females are biologically structured for monogamous pairings, at least for the short term - what has been called 'serial monogamy': perhaps in reality four or five years. This is most likely due to the unusually slow development of human young; Monogamy, after all, is extremely rare in the rest of the animal kingdom, with the exception of a number of species of birds. And there it exists for a similar reason: there are eggs needing sitting on & waiting to be done until they hatch. The male must go forth & find food while the female sits at home & feathers her nest. In the human world, infants are helpless for years, rather than a few days or weeks, as it is with most other animals. But by around the fourth year the child can fend for itself a little more & the woman has more freedom of movement, she can work again & go about her life without nursing her child constantly. Then that urge can safely leave, once her & her child's survival is no longer threatened.

But women are also hypergamous, meaning they are usually looking for a mate of equal or higher status, be that socially, financially, physically (strength or attractiveness) or intellectually. One way or another, most women will not 'marry down'.

Biologically, this makes a lot of sense. For all of human history, at least up until the advent of the pill in the 1960's, sex for women would inevitably mean pregnancy, sooner or later. And pregnancy meant, at best, a new life you had to support for the next 16 years or so; at worst, death. That is a serious price attatched to pleasure, & under such harsh realities, it makes sense for women to vet their partners far more thoroughly than men, to find one who's going to stick around & provide for them in some way.

And so it is that when women find another lover it is more often the case that they are testing the water for a new relationship, for a better model, for someone they like better than the one they are with.

The males of the species are very different in this regard. Once they find someone they like very much & want to settle down with, they still want to go out & sow their seed far & wide, with almost anyone they can, even if they're not hoping to plant anything. Rarely are they looking for 'someone better' in doing this. They're simply doing what their bodies & nature are instructing them to do. To a man, love & sex are quite clearly two distinct entities. Women seem to have a harder time seeing a sexual relationship as being just that, & are much more likely to project a narrative on top, an expectation of something more, a longer story of greater commitment.

One of the authors of that fascinating analysis of male/female internet usage, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, had this to say about the differing requirements of men & women:

"All across the planet, what most women seek out, in growing numbers, are not explicit scenes of sexual activity but character-driven stories of romantic relationships.

Men who are attracted to a particular actress may go online looking for racy photos of her. Women who are attracted to an actor are more likely to seek out personal details about his life or erotic stories featuring one of the characters he portrays.

All romance novels, whether written by the likes of Jane Austen, Nora Roberts or Stephenie Meyer, employ a narrative formula that follows the gradual elucidation of the hero's inner character, leading to an emotional epiphany between hero and heroine. On this journey, the heroine—and the reader—investigates the character of the hero. The goal of a romance novel's heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less impersonal sex with strangers. All romance novels end with a "happily ever after": a marriage or committed long-term partnership".

Women's romantic & sexual fantasies are not interchangeable with men's: if we reverse the genders of the Cinderella/Pretty Woman fantasy - the formula of perhaps most romantic fiction - we see it quickly falls apart & becomes nonsensical: A poor boy sits & waits for a rich woman to come along to save him from his poverty? A grey-haired businesswoman picks up a syphillitic rent-boy & promises to provide for all his needs, keeping him in pampered luxury until the day he dies? Who would go see that film? There's nothing in it for most women, & men would find it repulsive & emasculating. Such events may well have taken place in real life at some point, for all I know, but that's not the point: No-one, male or female, dreams of that story as their greatest fantasy. No-one thinks that being in that film is the best their life can turn out.

When I started looking into all this - men, women, monogamy, hypergamy.. I checked out, for the first time, the prevalance of polygamy in the modern world. I had expected to find, going in, that polygamy (or 'polygyny') had pretty much died out on the world stage, due to Christianity & the imposition of western culture upon the rest of the globe. But according to Wikipedia, & the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook it quotes from,

"of 1,231 societies noted, 186 were monogamous. 453 had occasional polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 had polyandry.^"

All of which is considerably more than I would have imagined. Polygamy as an institution is extremely foreign to our culture, yet objectively it is important to accept that people living polygamously are no more or less moral than people in monogamous relationships. People born into polygamous cultures are no more inherently 'bad' than people born into Christian cultures are 'bad' because they're not born Muslim. It seems a common weakness in the human mind to not be able to think outside whatever cultural goldfish bowl we are born into for more than a few minutes at a time.

Monogamy is not natural, & men, being naturally polygamous, struggle under it particularly. But I find it odd how polygamy is often presented as some kind of male oppression of women, when in actual fact it is 'men' (as a group) who lose out the most in a polygamous society. For those for whom this is not immediately obvious, let's break it down:

Say there are a hundred people, 50 men & 50 women - the population of the world in miniature - Now say 5 of the men at the top of the social hierarchy are wealthy & powerful or popular enough to attract & comfortably support multiple partners, so each of them takes 5 wives apiece. For the women this works out well, as, after all, these are the attractive men, & in a monogamous society they would otherwise have to compete with each other to get to them & only one of them could succeed.

But now here's the situation: now there are 45 men left but only 25 women: half the women are gone. The 25 left may marry 25 of the remaining men, leaving all the women comfortably settled, but still that leaves 20 of the men with no-one at all.

In addition to this, if men are to have multiple partners, where are they going to find them, except from the pool of already attatched women, women with lovers & husbands already? It is here the private spills over into the public &creates societal problems - disharmony & anger between men, & also between women, families, & society as a whole. As a man it means you can't trust your friends. As a woman it weakens what security & hold you feel you have in your relationship. As a society, it means you are no longer pulling together but instead looking out only for your own interests. Without a shared sexual morality practiced by a majority, no society can hold together long.

This is the crux of the problem: there has to be a certain amount of societal disapproval to promiscuity so that civilization doesn't break down altogether. But, at the same time, nature must find its way.

The answer, such as it is, that our present society + human nature seem to have thrashed out between them is that the men who can - i.e. the wealthy, powerful or unusually attractive men - do stray, but keep it hidden. As wikipedia puts it:

While few present-day states permit polygamous marriages, polygynous male behavior may be observed in the establishment of mistresses, who are openly or secretly supported. In this way, men may be technically monogamous but de facto polygynous.

This is problematic, because clearly not all men can do this, & ends up creating a situation of imbalance, of haves & have nots. It is also morally troubling, as it invariably involves lying ('cheating'), at least under the present order. But plainly many men accept this as a necessity. Most women, after all, react badly to the idea of their man being with other women, even if they may benefit from it by it keeping their relationship together. But another way of looking at the situation would be that men are forced into 'adultery' by the peculiar morality of their times, which ignores or condemns the natural biological reality of their sex.

The prudery of the Christian era - in particularly the Victorian period - never really ended but carried over into the presentfeminist age. The only real difference being, where the Christian Church demonized all sexuality, feminism demonizes & condemns only male sexuality, depicting it almost exclusively as some sort of ugly, violent threat.

But here's the thing:

Sex is life. Without male desire for womankind, none of us would be here. In a healthy society male desire would be something honoured & praised. But instead of being raised up & admired, male virility is shamed & frowned upon unless it is played out within a narrow band of acceptable behaviour: "we want you to be a wild, free, sexual stallion, preselected, admired & desired by other women, driven to be successful but only with us (monogamously, of course)".

Now, those two things don't go together: a highly sexual, driven, virile man will rarely be truly monogamous, & if he tries to be - or is forced to be - he will become less virile & so less attractive to the woman he is trying to be faithful to. An alpha male is seldom monogamous. Perhaps a few beta males are, but women don't want beta males. Women don't have posters of beta males on their bedroom walls.

Einstein, Roosevelt, JFK, MLK, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Gandhi, Picasso, Nietzsche, William Blake, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence... the list is only limited by how much we know of great men's intimate lives. All these were either believers in polygamy or adulterers. If our best minds, our highest achievers the past hundred years or so are all just a bunch of dirty lowdown pussyhounds, what hope do the rest of us have?

Would a more sensible approach not be to simply accept that as part of male nature? Would it not be more sensible for us to expect that behaviour from most men, & accept it as part & parcel of the whole package?

There's still a little more to say on this: One more post & that''ll be it.

Hogamus Higamus Part 2 - Sex & The Free Gift

2011-10-20T02:19:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to the last piece, here is a guest post from Bellita:

"Men are biologically driven to be with as many sexual partners as they can be: Quantity Matters. Women are instructed by their own bodies to find the best male they can find and be with them at least long enough to raise a child out of infancy. Quality Matters. This isn’t rocket science. We all know this . . . The change I see that needs to come is for the different male experience of sex to be accepted [it is], without judgement [it isn't]. "

I will never forget the Muslim man who tried to pick me up (so to speak) for Islam. (If I ever share the whole of that story on this blog, I’ll play up the Game elements.) Perhaps the most memorable part of his practiced sales pitch were his parting words . . .

“You know, I’m really glad I got to talk with you about this, because my reward will be great in heaven. Many beautiful women!“

Yes, he actually said that. But it was not all . . .

“You will have a great reward, too, if you become a Muslim. Many handsome men!”

*****Silent Scream of Terror*****

Every woman I have told this story to has cringed in sheer horror at the idea of being a sexual partner to countless men for all eternity. (That’s not Heaven; it’s hell.) Byron acknowledges this in his post, but says that if you reverse the sexes, you have a man’s idea of an “all-areas pass to the Hall of the Gods.”

Then he asks: If men and women are completely different when it comes to sexual hard wiring, then why is it women’s sexuality that has become the standard by which both sexes are judged? When that point sunk in, I started wondering how we got to this modern state of affairs.

The old Catholic view was pretty much the reverse–very down on female sexuality, warning that all women could be agents of the devil, including one’s own wife. It is the early Church that gives us the very first Marriage Strike in history, with men retreating to the deserts in record numbers or barricading themselves against the opposite sex in monasteries. The great theologian Origen of Alexandria even thought it reasonable to castrate himself. Say what you like about the “misogyny” of it all: these religious actions took for granted that male sexuality is after quantity rather than quality.

On the other hand, the post-Reformation (but not necessarily propter-Reformation) idea that everyone can achieve sexual virtue through marriage seems to be in desperate denial of the same fact. And its implication that a man can be “fixed” by being faithful to a single woman (a benign sort of social castration?) is a complete break with the ancient Christian tradition that there is just no fixing human nature until death.

Yet anyone who thinks the Christian view begins and ends with the bleakness of sin and death has never seen the way the light of ages looks, refracted through the stained glass of medieval thought. At no other time in history did both natural law and divine law get to sit side by side at the table of philosophy.

St. Thomas Aquinas himself, Patron of Philosophers, was very clear that there is actually no natural law against a man taking several wives . . . whereas there is a natural law against a woman having several husbands. The latter is wrong in a way the former is not because it creates a situation in which a child may never know who his real father is. But the child of a man with many wives can be certain of both his father and his mother. Natural law and biology hum along together very harmoniously.

But why do people assume that divine law is the discordant note? I don’t know what happened to philosophy after the Reformation for many to take that for granted today, but the sanity of the Middle Ages was better than that. It’s the reason we have an answer to the question of why in the world a man would keep to only one woman when he doesn’t actually have to–and I submit that this answer that only a Catholic could have come up with is absolutely universal in application.

Simply stated, the only reason for a man to have only one wife and to stay true to her all their lives would be his desire to give her his fidelity as a gift.

And it would be a gift because she could never repay it, even with the same. A woman’s faithfulness is an obligation for the reason stated above, but a man’s faithfulness isn’t. Marriage is just not a relationship between equals. But when it comes with that free gift from a husband, properly valued by a wife, it is also–to quote St. Thomas Aquinas–”the greatest of all friendships.”

Nature can explain a lot of things about sex, but only Christianity understands the free gift.

*

Hogamus Higamus

2011-10-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Hogamus higamus

Men are polygamous
Higamus hogamus

Women monogamous

-Ogden Nash

A little while back, over at my favourite site, Hooking Up Smart, there was some debate over advice being offered to a college girl when the 19 year old boy she was kind-of-seeing-but-not-sleeping-with got caught out kind-of-seeing-but-possibly-sleeping-with someone else. Well, it happens. The boy was branded a 'player' (!) right from the get-go, a ghastly predator practising his 'toxic' dark arts on this sweet virginal child [of the same age], & some of the female commenters ( I may be exaggerating a little here) seemed just about ready to organize a lynching there & then. On the other side of the fence, most of the men tended towards a groan & a sigh & a shake of the head & a 'been-there-done-that-God-doesn't-the-desire-for-pretty-women-make-us-do-some-stupid-things-sometimes'stance. They weren't as ready to judge & demonize the boy for urges & actions they knew they could just as easily have had & carried out themselves.

The point is that it split into two camps quite quickly, with the women growing increasingly hostile & in some cases openly insulting of the men, who kept on trying to make their points in different ways but weren't being heard. Now, if you've ever been to HUS, you'll know that this is a rare occurence - the commenters there are smart, thoughtful, original, generally open-minded & constructive, & I've never found a group of women more empathetic towards the problems men face in modern society anywhere. So this was a little odd. It got kind of ugly & I've not been back since. I'm sure I will eventually, I think I just need a break to absorb it all. But since then I've been trying to figure out what happened & why it happened & if there is a way to not make it happen in the future. How do you talk between the sexes about the differing experiences of sex?

For the most part, the wonderful women of HUS are highly-advanced in their thinking about the workings of male/female relationships (the marvellous men too, of course). Regular topics of discussion there include evolutionary psychology & Game Theory, so the ability to step out of ones own personal narrative & emotions & attempt to observe the human situation objectively & dispassionately is present. Feminism is looked at very critically & it's largely understood there that men & women are necessarily different in matters relating to reproduction & therefore sex. But once this sore point was touched on, practically all the women rounded up their wagons & all that theoretical thinking went out the window. And in my life, pretty much every woman I've ever spoken to has reacted in the same way, with the exception of a few polyamorous types (but they generally haven't cleared the feminism hurdle yet, & apply all discussion about sexuality equally over both sexes, so they're not much help either).

It seems to me the women got hostile because to acknowledge the essentially polygamous drive of men, to recognize that it is necessarily different to womens, that that is their nature, cannot help but threaten the (also necessary) female biological need for stability, i.e. that the man, who is needed to provide for the female while she carries her child & later nurses it, will be there to stick around.

It's become common, the past 40 years or so, to hear women talking quite openly about their experiences & requirements of sex, & as a result we as a society know quite a lot about the preferences & desires of women, which we see largely without judgement. Men's desires, on the other hand, although so overwhelmingly strong (men on average have between 20 to100 times more testosterone, the hormone which governs sexual desire, than women), are still shrouded in shame. Female fantasies (which we call 'erotica') are considered benign. Male fantasies (which we call 'pornography') are still considered harmful & wrong. This moral judgement & imbalance makes men & women's experience of sex even harder to explain to each other. As Bill Maher said, "There are no such things as mutual fantasies: yours bore us, ours offend you."

Pornography simply doesn't interest most women, & so is off their radar, it doesn't really exist for them. Conversely, 'romantic' tales of rich doctors/sheiks/oil barons/princes whisking barmaids/florists/typists up & off into the sunset on their yacht/mercedes/pony bore almost all men silly too, so the entire 'Romantic' literary genre is something they don't ever really think of either.

But our sexual fantasies tell us an awful lot about how different we are from each other. Men & women may well be as much as 99% the same, but then again, we're told that the DNA of the human race & chimpanzees are about 99% the same, too. It's that 1% that makes all the difference. And the places the sexes differ the most are the areas closest to reproduction, & so sex.

Gay culture is a very interesting barometer of this, I find. Men are men, after all, & Gay men are very much the same as straight men sexually, as Sai Gaddam & Ogi Ogass' recent A Billion Wicked Thoughts has shown - it is simply the direction in which male desire is pointed that differs. What we see when we look at gay culture is men without women - more precisely, men living outside of the societal compromises they otherwise would have struck with women.

And what do we see when we look at gay culture? By a rather huge margin, the people self-reporting having the most sex in the world are single gay men. The people self-reporting the lowest amount of sex in the world are lesbians in long-term relationships. On a grossly simplified level, we have there the male/female polarity. Promiscuity is not a gay trait, it's a male trait. But it's treated with far more understanding in the gay world than in the straight world, because there everyone is male, so they all know how it is to be male, what that reality feels like, inside.

"Considering our true wishes & longings, our daily lives are pretty ridiculous"

- Dieter Duhm

It must be great to be gay, in this day & age. So simple. Can you even imagine it? If I could go to a bathhouse, pick up a different woman every night for the rest of my life & then perhaps never see her again, I would. Gladly. Wouldn't you? It doesn't have anything to do with falling in love - which I also love to do but experience as a largely seperate thing - as Lenny Bruce told us earlier, 'men detatch - not consciously but they do detatch.' There's the day-to-day need to be met - food/water/sex - & then there is romance on top of that, an additional sweet taste on top. That is the male reality stripped down the best I can. Women are different in this, or at least healthy women. A woman compulsively engaging in anonymous sex would be seen by others & herself as unhappy & damaged in some way. Yet every male is like this, to a greater or lesser degree, healthy & happy or not. Most men would feel biologically fulfilled by this: they would be doing what life has told them to do. Whereas women would be going against their own best interests in doing this, mating with whoever crosses their path.

When you bring this subject up, some women always have to tell you about that one girlfriend of theirs with a sex-drive as big as any man, who goes out every weekend picking up one-night stands. Every girl, it seems, knows at least one girl like that. And it's true, there are girls like that out there. But she's not telling you how all her male friends would like to be doing that too, if they only had the chance. It's likely that she doesn't even know that, because that's something the men & boys she knows most likely don't tell her, for fear of being shamed or judged. And if you asked that friend of hers if she see herself doing what she's doing now at 55, 60 years old, it's highly unlikely that she will tell you yes. No woman dreams of a future which consists of them simply fucking a different man - or several men - every single day for the rest of their lives until they die. No riding off into the sunset, no marriage, no children, no settling down... Just new, different, sweaty faces, day in & day out for the rest of your life.

To almost any woman that's a nightmarish vision of white-slavery-crackwhore hell. But to most men, that's veritably an all-areas pass to the Hall of the Gods.

Men are biologically driven to be with as many sexual partners as they can be: Quantity Matters. Women are instructed by their own bodies to find the best male they can find & be with them at least long enough to raise a child out of infancy. Quality matters.

This isn't rocket science - We all know this. Stand-up comedians make their living from talking about the differences between the sexes on stage every night. They can do this only because their audience already recognizes those differences & knows them to be true. Women know that men are born different, that they "think with their dicks", that they are "only after one thing". All their jokes & advice & wisdom rely upon that ancient knowledge. But there is no understanding or kindness accompanying it.

The change I see that needs to come is for the different male experience of sex to be accepted [it is], without judgement [it isn't].

19 year-old boys do not start out 'toxic players'. They start out being the male of their species whose bodies are instructing them - in the prime of their youth - to go spread their seed with as many females as possible in order to enable the survival of the human race. They make many mistakes & blunders along the way, chiefly because no-one, least of all their mothers - who are now primarily raising them - is instructing them in the best way to strike the balance between what their society expects of them & what their body demands of them. They receive no instruction on how to be male in the present society as being male runs contrary to female goals & expectations.

In the society we live now, men's needs & concerns have for some time been overlooked & downplayed, as any truly objective observer would have to agree. Mainstream society is always a compromise between male & female concerns. If we believe in equality - or at least fairness - then we have to make sure that one sex is not promoted at the expense of the other. We cannot apply identical expectations to both men & women, as men & women are, by definition, different. If you have a law or a morality that is very easy for 50% of the people to live under & very hard for the other 50%, it isn't a fair law, & it isn't a healthy morality.

Instead of shaming male sexuality, we could instruct teenage boys about some of the realities that accompany sex out there - we could tell them that if they make a girl pregnant, they will be in legal servitude to that girl for many years, & have to work to provide for a child they weren't ready for.We could tell them that unprotected sex with a promiscuous partner can result in STDs. This, after all, is basically the message we give to girls. But we could do it without judging & shaming the boys naturally polygamous urges. We could tell them if a truly exceptional woman comes along, he may want to commit to her, to build a life together & start a family, but in the meantime not to confuse the sex he will have with love.

So anyway. The fundamental point I have been trying to make in this somewhat meandering monologue is this:

Until there is a widespread recognition of male sexuality being innately different, without judgement, there can never be a truly fair, honest dialogue between the sexes.

And I guess it's in service of that that I am writing this.

_-*-_-*-_-*-_-*-_

There's more to be said on this, but it's starting to get on a little. I'll pick it up again next post.

An Introduction To Hypergamy

2011-10-05T02:58:00.001-07:00

There's a piece I've been writing, about some of the differences between women & men which is taking me awhile to finish. Luckily a portion of what it is I'm attempting to say was covered quite excellently by last night's AVFM radio, an extract of which I'm posting here as a stop gap before my next one:Full show available at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avoiceformen

I Want More

2011-10-03T04:16:00.000-07:00

Everybody plays the game

We don't have to say the name

If we take a summary

Boys & Girls just ain't the same

I don't have to say no more

You know what I'm aiming for

Don't care if I break your law

I want more & more & more..

*

The Unknown History Of Misandry

2011-09-26T03:46:00.000-07:00

Another website I've just discovered - an amazing treasure trove of historical newspaper cuttings, photos, documents all relating to The Unknown History Of Misandry .

It's very mysterious, just seems to have appeared on the net from nowhere about 3 months ago, yet already has so much up there. I have no knowledge of who it is has put it together but I can tell I'm going to be wading through it for quite some time.

www.unknownmisandry.blogspot.com

Sexism Busters

2011-09-21T05:51:00.000-07:00

Just a quick one to plug a new site www.sexismbusters.org/, which you may have heard about on AVFM last night. Its creator, Tom Martin, is currently suing the London School Of Economics Gender Studies department for sex discrimination, which will be quite a landmark case, should he win. There's more background information at his site, which I recommend you check out. And donate if you are able, it's for a very good cause.

20th Century Notions Of Gender

2011-09-15T01:55:00.000-07:00

Reading the latest, as always, superbly concise & thought-provoking post by The Damned Olde Man I was struck by how good an overview of the 20th century's conceptions of gender it is, how the pendulum swinging back & forth through the 1950's & 60's - the rabid anticommunism of the McCarthy era leading to rebellious youths embracing of Marxist theory a generation later - ended up with the widespread normalization of first Marxist then Feminist thought. By the mid-1980's feminism's bizarre conspiracy theory of history became that of society at large.

But the other thought that strikes me about this is that the pendulum has kept swinging & that seems to now have changed: The kind of discussion we are now having about these matters in the manosphere & increasingly in mainstream media simply couldn't have been had anywhere 25 years ago. I hadn't really noted it as that before - the turn of the century being the actual cut-off point of the hold of that ideology - but it seems to me right now that that is the case. Feminism is so 20th century.

That feels quite revelatory to me. I hope TDOM doesn't mind me reproducing so much of his piece here, out of context - I was going to just use a paragraph or two but it works much better as a whole. The full article can be found here.

I’ve often viewed feminism as neither left nor right by nature. Instead it is, as many feminists freely admit, a gender issue and there are members of both genders on either side of the political spectrum.

I think early feminists adopted the leftist view as a matter of strategy and for recruitment purposes. The Marxist approach to economics was easily adaptable to cultural practices. All it took to draw in membership was to convince people that women are disadvantaged. With societal structures predominantly populated with men, this was easy enough to do. The term “patriarchy” was redefined and used for this purpose. first wave feminists laid the groundwork and second wave feminists became the foot soldiers.

Aligning themselves with cultural Marxist idealism served another purpose as well. The communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era resulted in a popularization of Marxism during which time, it became chic to be openly Marxist and difficult, if not destructive, for opponents of Marxism to speak out against them; the fear of being identified as a “hatemonger” keeping opponents in line.

At first, feminism was only a part of the liberal movement of the 60s but by the mid-80s it had eclipsed the movement itself and liberalism had become more or less synonymous with feminism to the point that one could not be leftist and not be feminist.

On the right, the movement was more subtle. Women were already being pedestalized by white knight chivalry as standard practice. The leftist acceptance of the women as victim model was simply transferred to the right. One did not have to adopt the value system to accept the model. In fact, on the right women were already seen as helpless. All that was needed was to turn “helpless” into “victim.” The second wave feminist could fight the battles and the conservative feminist would move out of the way and then reap the rewards.

The chivalrist ideal was prevalent on the left as well. For more liberal chivalrists it was easy to accept feminists because of their Marxist position. They simply incorporated feminism into their own leftist idealism and became collaborationists (manginas as they are sometimes called). The right wing chivalrist (the white knight) picked up on the woman as victim mantra and rushed to her rescue.

Feminism transcends left and right. It is neither and it is both. It favors wealth and cultural redistribution from male to female while seeking to establish a totalitarian police state to control the “oppressor class.” To that end it has abandoned the liberal ideal of personal freedom and liberty for all, in favor of personal freedom and liberty for the new feminist oppressor class while restricting liberty and freedom for the new oppressed class (male). It seeks to replace what it calls patriarchy with matriarchy (which can now be equated with female supremacism). Thus while claiming to hold the liberal ideal of “equality” feminism has in reality adopted the conservative ideal of a ruling class superior to that of the working class and with more rights and privilege and the full force of the state to enforce that privilege.

Men Are From Mars. Women Are From Venus. Sun-Ra Was From Saturn.

2011-09-12T05:38:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to the last post, a recent article in New Scientist by Laura Spinney caught my eye. Called Mars and Venus Collide it took a look at the current state of play in regards to biological differences between men & women. In my opinion it tried to play it too safe in regard to the Nature/Nurture debate to really have much of a position at all but here's a couple of extracts I found of interest:

Why do girls prefer dolls and boys cars? Some put it down to cultural influences that prepare children to take on stereotypical gender roles as adults. Now consider this: male vervet monkeys prefer cars even though they have never been primed to do so (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 23, p467), and girls who have a hormonal disorder that means they produce too much testosterone prefer them, too. This suggests an innate component to toy choice, which may be amplified by socialisation processes after birth.

Intriguing new research by Margaret McCarthy at the University of Maryland in College Park points - to the neurobiology underlying sex-specific play preferences - in rats, at least. Her group found that the amygdalae, twin brain structures that are important for processing emotional and social cues, contain between 30 and 5O per cent more of a type of brain cell called glial cells in female rats than in males. Male brains, meanwhile, had higher levels of endocannabinoids - naturally occurring molecules that stimulate the same neural circuits as the active ingredient in cannabis. However, when the researchers injected day-old female rats with a dose of a cannabis-like substance, they found that after three days the proportion of glial cells in their amygdalae was the same level as in males. These females now played like male pups too - they played 30 to 40 per cent more than regular females, and indulged in much more rough-and-tumble play (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 20535). The main structural differences between male and female rat brains all have parallels in humans, and researchers believe that all mammals have the same neural mechanisms underlying key survival behaviours.

For years, the accepted view was that all embryos start out the same - the default sex being female. Then during the first trimester, in individuals that have inherited a Y chromosone, a gene called sry, for sex-determining region Y, switches on the development of the testes. These start pumping out testosterone and by the time a baby boy is born, the "default" female brain has become masculine.

We now know that's not quite how it works. As it turns out there are "pro-female" as well as "pro-male" genes, and that sexual differentiation is governed by a delicate balance between the two. In 2006, for example, Pietro Parma at the University of Pavia in Italy, and colleagues, reported that a gene called r-spondin1 promotes the development of the ovaries, and that without it individuals who are genetically female grow up physically and psychologically male, although they have ambiguous external genitalia and are sterile (Nature Genetics, Vol 38, p 1304).

There are clear differences in the types of mental illness and learning difficulties that males and females experience. Boys are much more vulnerable to developmental difficulties than girls. For example, boys are between six and 10 times more likely to be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, four times as likely to be affected by language disorders such as dyslexia, and a conservative estimate suggests that boys are twice as likely to suffer from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The picture is more chequered for adults, but the differences are still dramatic. Major depression is twice as common in women, while men are more susceptible to alchohol dependence and antisocial personality disorder. Even in conditions for which the prevalence is the same in both sexes, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, there are differences in age of onset and symptoms.

Melissa Hines, who studies gender development at the University of Cambridge, reckons sex differences in such conditions are the result of different vulnerabilities due to the distinct ways in which those brains are wired. We know, for example, that the amygdalae, a pair of brain structures important for processing emotions such as fear and aggression, are bigger in men, while the hippocampi, critical for memory, are bigger in women. Such brain differences are shaped by a combination of genes, hormones and the environment. "It's all of these things together that make the final outcome." says Hines.

-------------------------------------

As for Sun Ra , he doesn't have very much to do with this post at all. But the Mars/Venus thing always makes me think of him. And he did come from Saturn. Here's my favourite tune by him, anyway:

Sex Differences In The Brain

2011-09-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

Recently I got into a debate with someone in cyberspace about the biological differences between the brains of men & women, during which I made what I thought was a pretty safe statement by saying studies show there are innate differences in place in the structure of male & female brains even while still in the womb. I was asked, with some annoyance, what studies?

So, in response, I put together a list of studies & scientific papers relating to differences most specifically between the brain structure & function of males & females, but also a few that are related to the wider question of innate sex differences. There were obviously many more I could have included but kept with the ones that most clearly referred to this specific issue & whose titles made plain their position.

I reproduce it here as it may be found useful to others in similar situations.

-------------

Arnold, A. P. (2004). "Sex chromosomes and brain gender." Nat Rev Neurosci 5 (9): 701-8.
Arnold, A. P., J. Xu, et al. (2004). "Minireview: Sex chromosomes and brain sexual differentiation." Endocrinology 145 (3): 1057-62.
Bachevalier, J., C. Hagger, et al. (1989). "Gender differences in visual habit formation in 3-month-old rhesus monkeys." Dev Psychobiol 22 (6): 585-99.
Baron-Cohen, S., R. C. Knickmeyer, et al. (2005). "Sex differences in the brain: Implications for explaining autism." Science 310 (5749): 819-23.
Bayliss, A. P., G. di Pellegrino, et al. (2005). "Sex differences in eye gaze and symbolic cueing of attention." Q J Exp Psychol A 58 (4): 631-50.
Berkley, K. (2002). "Pain: Sex/Gender differences." In Hormones, Brain and Behavior, ed. D. W. Pfaff, vol. 5, 409-42. San Diego: Academic Press.
Brody, L. R. (1985). "Gender differences in emotional development: A review of theories and research." J Pers 53:102-49.
Buss, D. M. (1995). "Psychological sex differences. Origins through sexual selection." Am Psychol 50 (3): 164-68; discussion 169-71.
Canli, T., J. E. Desmond, et al. (2002). "Sex differences in the neural basis of emotional memories." Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99 (16): 10789-94.
Carter, C. S. (1992). "Oxytocin and sexual behavior." Neurosci Biobehav Rev 16 (2): 131-44.
Collaer, M. L., and M. Hines (1995). "Human behavioral sex differences: A role for gonadal hormones during early development?" Psychol Bull 118 (1): 55-107.
Derbyshire, S. W., T. E. Nichols, et al. (2002). "Gender differences in patterns of cerebral activation during equal experience of painful laser stimulation." J Pain 3 (5): 401-11.
DeVries, G. J. (1999). "Brain sexual dimorphism and sex differences in parental and other social behaviors." In C. S. Carter, I. I. Lederhendler, and B. Kirkpatrick,
eds., The Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation, 155-68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dluzen, D. E. (2005). "Estrogen, testosterone, and gender differences." Endocrine 27 (3): 259-68.
Fernandez-Guasti, A., F. P. Kruijver, et al. (2000). "Sex differences in the distribution of androgen receptors in the human hypothalamus." J Comp Neurol 425 (3): 422-35.
Giedd, J. N., F. X. Castellanos, et al. (1997). "Sexual dimorphism of the developing human brain." Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry 21 (8):1185-201.
Gizewski, E. R., E. Krause, et al. (2006). "Gender-specific cerebral activation during cognitive tasks using functional MRI: Comparison of women in midluteal phase and men." Neuroradiology 48 (1): 14-20.
Goldstein, J. M., M. Jerram, et al. (2005). "Sex differences in prefrontal cortical brain activity during FMRI of auditory verbal working memory." Neuropsychology 19 (4): 509-19.
Goldstein, J. M., L. J. Seidman, et al. (2001). "Normal sexual dimorphism of the adult human brain assessed by in vivo magnetic resonance imaging." Cereb Cortex 11 (6): 490-97.
Gur, R. C., F. Gunning-Dixon, et al. (2002). "Sex differences in temporo-limbic and frontal brain volumes of healthy adults." Cereb Cortex 12 (9): 998-1003.
Gur, R. C., F. M. Gunning-Dixon, et al. (2002). "Brain region and sex differences in age association with brain volume: A quantitative MRI study of healthy young adults." Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 10 (1): 72-80.
Gur, R. C., L. H. Mozley, et al. (1995). "Sex differences in regional cerebral glucose metabolism during a resting state." Science 267 (5197): 528-31.
Halari, R., M. Hines, et al. (2005). "Sex differences and individual differences in cognitive performance and their relationship to endogenous gonadal hormones and gonadotropins." Behav Neurosci 119 (1): 104-17.
Halari, R., and V. Kumari (2005). "Comparable cortical activation with inferior performance in women during a novel cognitive inhibition task." Behav Brain Res 158 (1): 167-73.
Halari, R., T. Sharma, et al. (2006). "Comparable fMRI activity with differential behavioural performance on mental rotation and overt verbal fluency tasks in healthy men and women." Exp Brain Res 169 (1): 1-14.
Hines, M. (2002). "Sexual differentiation of human brain and behavior." In Hormones, Brain and Behavior, ed. D. W. Pfaff, vol. 4, 425-62. San Diego: Academic Press.
Hines, M., S. F. Ahmed, et al. (2003). "Psychological outcomes and genderrelated development in complete androgen insensitivity syndrome." Arch Sex Behav 32 (2): 93-101.
Hines, M., C. Brook, et al. (2004). "Androgen and psychosexual development: Core gender identity, sexual orientation and recalled childhood gender role behavior in women and men with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)." J Sex Res 41 (1): 75-81.
Hines, M., and F. R. Kaufman (1994). "Androgen and the development of human sex-typical behavior: Rough-and-tumble play and sex of preferred playmates in children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)." Child Dev 65 (4): 1042-53.
Hittelman, J. H. (1979). "Sex differences in neonatal eye contact time." Merrill-Palmer Q 25:171-84.
Jausovec, N., and K. Jausovec (2005). "Sex differences in brain activity related to general and emotional intelligence." Brain Cogn 59 (3): 277-86.
Jordan, K., T. Wustenberg, et al. (2002). "Women and men exhibit different cortical activation patterns during mental rotation tasks." Neuropsychologia 40 (13): 2397-408.
Knaus, T. A., A. M. Bollich, et al. (2004). "Sex-linked differences in the anatomy of the perisylvian language cortex: A volumetric MRI study of gray matter volumes." Neuropsychology 18 (4): 738-47.
Kruijver, F. P., A. Fernandez-Guasti, et al. (2001). "Sex differences in androgen receptors of the human mamillary bodies are related to endocrine status rather than to sexual orientation or transsexuality." J Clin Endocrinol Metab 86 (2): 818-27.
Lee, T. M., H. L. Liu, et al. (2002). "Gender differences in neural correlates of recognition of happy and sad faces in humans assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging." Neurosci Lett 333 (1): 131-36.
Lee, T. M., H. L. Liu, et al. (2005). "Neural activities associated with emotion recognition observed in men and women." Mol Psychiatry 10 (5): 450-55.
Li, C. S., T. R. Kosten, et al. (2005). "Sex differences in brain activation during stress imagery in abstinent cocaine users: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study." Biol Psychiatry 57 (5): 487-94.
Li, H., S. Pin, et al. (2005). "Sex differences in cell death." Ann Neurol 58 (2): 317-21.
Li, Z. J., H. Matsuda, et al. (2004). "Gender difference in brain perfusion 99mTc- ECD SPECT in aged healthy volunteers after correction for partial volume effects." Nucl Med Commun 25 (10): 999-1005.
McClure, E. B. (2000). "A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents." Psychol Bull 126 (3): 424-53.
McClure, E. B., C. S. Monk, et al. (2004). "A developmental examination of gender differences in brain engagement during evaluation of threat." Biol Psychiatry 55 (11): 1047-55.
Maccoby, E. E., and C. N. Jacklin (1973). "Stress, activity, and proximity seeking: Sex differences in the year-old child." Child Dev 44 (1): 34-42.
Madden, T. E., L. F. Barrett, et al. (2000). "Sex differences in anxiety and depression: Empirical evidence and methodological questions." In Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, ed. A. H. Fischer, 2nd series, 277-98. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Mogi, K., T. Funabashi, et al. (2005). "Sex difference in the response of melaninconcentrating hormone neurons in the lateral hypothalamic area to glucose, as revealed by the expression of phosphorylated cyclic adenosine 3', 5'- monophosphate response element-binding protein." Endocrinology 146 (8):
3325-33.
Muscarella, F., V. A. Elias, et al. (2004). "Brain differentiation and preferred partner characteristics in heterosexual and homosexual men and women." Neuro Endocrinol Lett 25 (4): 297-301.
Naliboff, B. D., S. Berman, et al. (2003). "Sex-related differences in IBS patients: Central processing of visceral stimuli." Gastroenterology 124 (7): 1738-47.
Nawata, H., T. Yanase, et al. (2004). "Adrenopause." Horm Res 62 (Suppl. 3): 110-14.
Nishida, Y., M. Yoshioka, et al. (2005). "Sexually dimorphic gene expression in the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and cortex." Genomics 85 (6): 679-87.
Oatridge, A., A. Holdcroft, et al. (2002). "Change in brain size during and after pregnancy: Study in healthy women and women with preeclampsia." AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 23 (1): 19-26.
Overman, W. H., J. Bachevalier, et al. (1996). "Cognitive gender differences in very young children parallel biologically based cognitive gender differences in monkeys." Behav Neurosci 110 (4): 673-84.
Plante, E., V. J. Schmithorst, et al. (2006). "Sex differences in the activation of language cortex during childhood." Neuropsychologia 44 (7): 1210-21.
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Esther Vilar

2011-09-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

"Someday it will dawn on man that woman does not read the wonderful books with which he has filled his libraries, and though she may well admire his marvelous works of art in museums, she herself will rarely create, only copy."

- Esther Vilar, author of The Manipulated Man.

Reminds me of that other favourite quote of mine, by Camille Paglia. I like it so much let's hear it again:

“Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross George Washington bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

We haven't lived in a world where mens unique & astonishing achievements have been acknowledged & praised in quite awhile. I hope some day we will again.

Interview With Barbara Kay

2011-09-08T10:17:00.000-07:00

This is great. An interview with the writer Barbara Kay from Canadian TV a few years back. Wonderfully clear-headed overview of the extent of feminisms influence on the courts, education, government policies, & society in general.

A Man Is A Rape Supporter If He Even Draws Breath, Says Psychotic Feminazi Hellbeast

2011-08-28T15:15:00.000-07:00

Oh my shitting God.

I know I'm a little late to the dinner table over this particular feast but I saw this list - that originates at the none-more-feminist blog 'Eve Bit First' - entitled 'A Man Is A Rape Supporter If...' . Which then of course goes on to list just about every position a man could have on, well, just about anything. It's a long, exhaustive list, but includes all the following.

A man is a rape supporter, you'll be moist to know, if:

He defends the current legal definition of rape and/or opposes making consent a defense.
He has accused a rape 'victim' of having “buyer’s remorse” or wanting to get money from the man.
He has ever revealed he conceives of sex as fundamentally transactional.
He has gone to a strip club.
He frames discussions of pornography in terms of “freedom of speech.”
He characterizes prostitution as a “legitimate” “job” “choice” or defends men who purchase prostitutes.
He watches pornography in which women are depicted.
He watches any pornography in which sexual acts are depicted as a struggle for power or domination, regardless of whether women are present.
He characterizes the self-sexualizing behavior of some women, such as wearing make-up or high heels, as evidence of women’s desire to “get” a man.
He describes female anatomy in terms of penetration, or uses terms referencing the supposed “emptiness” of female anatomy when describing women.
He promotes the idea that women as a class are happier or more fulfilled if they have children, or that they “should” have children.
He argues that people (or just “men”) have sexual “needs.”
He defends these actions by saying that some women also engage in them.

She ends the list by asking, "how many women reading this know at least one male over the age of 18 who does not fit this list. Anybody?"

And that's the point, of course: All Men Are Rapists. Or at least - in this instance - rape 'supporters', whatever that means (have you ever met anyone who said to you "Yes! I wholeheartedly support the implementation of rape on a societal level, that's exactly what this country needs. Rape is The Solution! Absolutely! Sign me up for that!"?)

What is the aim of these psychotic nazi hellbeasts? Don't they realize by calling upon such a horrific term & applying it in such hysterical & inappropriate ways, so often, all that will happen is that we, as a society, will become inured to it? It will cease to shock us. And we will all cease to care.

If the definition of rape is widened to include so many natural male/female interactions that it becomes meaningless, real rape accusations will cease to be taken seriously or believed. Societal abhorrence of rape will lessen & incidents of real rape will rise. All because some beserk & overwrought middle class white girls who know nothing about life & are troubled by their bodies got brainwashed at university by a hate cult.

There is no better example than this article of why feminism is not now, & never has been, about equality. The fact that the other NAWALT* feminists are not up in arms against this madness & denouncing it from the highest rooftops for the genocidal madness it is shows you why the egalitarian claims of feminism mean nothing. It's a hate movement. Simple as that. Always has been. Always will be.

I don't usually like the shouty Angry Atheist youtube man but on this occasion - his analysis of said list - he's spot on, & says pretty much everything that needs to be said about it. This is a Bill Hicks level righteous indignation joy, so savour:

(* "Not All Women Are Like That")

How I Know That Something Like 90% Of The Homeless Are Men

2011-08-26T16:51:00.000-07:00

Arguing with Feminists can more often than not get you to feeling like you're on a doorstep debating with a born-again Christian whose entire argument is 'But surely you must believe Jesus died for your sins?'

You've been there, I've been there. Let's not dwell.

The good thing about arguing with feminists is that it can occasionally force you to go away & do the research for yourself. Not that it will alter their opinion even one little bit, of course, but it's good to know of what you are speaking - the evidence, the stats, the facts & the figures behind the position that you hold - rather than simply singing along with the words like everyone else.

As an example: recently I was responding to a feminist online & used the well-known (to regular readers) figure of 90% of the homeless being men. She questioned it, & I realized that, although I'd used that particular figure a bunch of times I'd never tracked it to its source before. So I took a look & thought I would list my findings here as a resource for those interested.

In the UK both the Scottish Government's Homelessness Monitoring Group's 2004 First Report To Scottish Ministers & the official homelessness statistics from CRISIS 2006 (source: p.29) give the figure as 80-90%. In North America two sources from the year 2000, Homelessness: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis by Jack Layton & Barbara Murphy's On The Street: How We Created Homelessness give the figure as 70-90%. There seems to be a little more variation in the U.S figures generally, I would imagine stemming from that country's much larger size, & studies being done in different states rather than nationally.

A 1985 study by the university of California said that 96% of adult homeless in San Francisco were men, but less in some other cities, working out as an average of 85% nationwide (Richard H. Ropers, “The Rise of the New Urban Homeless,” Public Affairs Report (Berkeley: University of California/Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985), October-December, 1985, Vol. 26, Nos. 5 & 6, p. 4, Table 1 “Comparisons of Homeless Samples from Select Cities.”)

Another source: “Data collected for the 2004 U.S. Conference of Mayors survey showed that in almost all cities surveyed, single males greatly outnumbered single females among the homeless. Single males were most overrepresented in Nashville, Tennessee (79% of the homeless), followed closely by Santa Monica, California (72%), Miami, Florida (70%), and San Francisco, California (69%)” (source: Libraryindex.com). This is a very high percentage but lower than 90%. However, this study refers only to single males: if males in other groups (married men & children) also outnumber women then the total figure of male homelessness would be noticably higher.

A commonly stated figure which pops up repeatedly when googling about this is 68%. Still, obviously, a great inequality, but that number originates with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development & refers to the number of homeless ‘clients’ - i.e the percentage currently being worked with & sheltered by that organization.

There are other factors which make it hard to get a definitive answer: a father with children, or even wife & children, often comes under the heading of ‘families’ - which tends to be classed seperately - so it muddies the water even further. Wikipedia says there are 41% single males to 14% single females. It also says “In 2008 in one sample, women represented 26% of the respondents surveyed” [my italics], which obviously only relates to whoever filled the survey in but still, would presumably mean that 74% of those were male.

My point in listing these differing reports is simply to say we can't know for sure what exact percentage of the world's homeless population is male. There is no single statistic: there will be considerable variation between different countries & even areas within those countries. And it's a big world. But I haven't been able to find any figure anywhere that says men are less than two-thirds of the homeless, & the generally accepted government & charity organization estimates, as I stated at the beginning, do seem to be generally in the region of 80 - 90%.

In my own personal experience (& most likely yours too) living in different cities in England the last 20 years or more, easily 9 out of 10 people I see out on the streets are men. In fact I can’t remember the last time I saw a female beggar, though I always see at least five or six men panhandling every time I cycle into town.

So there we go: doesn't that feel better? To actually know what you're talking about? Well, it does to me, anyway. Go now & do likewise.

The Troubling Misandry of Buffy The Vampire Slayer

2011-08-20T00:57:00.000-07:00

So here's the thing: Buffy The Vampire Slayer is possibly my favourite TV show ever, equalled only perhaps by The Sopranos for its grand scope & depth, its balance of humour & pathos. Always surprising, always inspiring, always human & humane - "talking about monsters to talk about people" is how its creator, Joss Whedon once described it.

Joss Whedon is the Charlie Kaufman of television - the most brilliant single mind of that particular medium. And he does what he does there better than anyone else has ever done, I would say.

So what's the problem? Well, the problem is that Buffy is a show that even its creator describes as having an overtly feminist agenda, & in fact that is true, it does. And feminism is a hate movement. Which inevitably leads to misandry - a contemptuous disregard for men's suffering & humanity. So you see my problem.

Paul Nathanson & Katherine K. Young define a misandric film or TV show as one in which the men are all depicted as being either evil (Spike, Angelus, Oz-when-werewolf, Warren, The Master, all the bad guys) or inadequate (Xander, Riley, Oz-when-human, Giles - how many times does Giles get knocked over the head, by the way?).

There are no 'empowered' men in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The only male characters that are strong & self-possessed are monsters & demons, & so, by definition, evil. Angel, the wettest & most self-flagellating beta-male in all sci-fi & fantasy, only comes alive once his soul is returned to him & he becomes the murderous Angelus. But of course then he is, again, Evil. The message being, to be a strong man makes you the bad guy. Oz & Angel & later Spike have to struggle constantly to remain 'good', to behave themselves for fear that their innate, true 'evil' [male] self will escape. A man is defined as good only to the extent that he helps & facilitates the needs of a woman, in this case Buffy, the entitled centre of this world, that all of the other characters flutter around like butterflies.

There is also a third category, of 'honorary women', granted to a very small number of men, usually black, or gay, who are given a little more leeway because they're seen to be from another 'victim' class, & so similarly oppressed by The Patriarchy. True to form & by the book, the only human male in the entire seven year run of the show who is shown to be physically strong, confident, self-possessed yet good is the black principal Robin Wood, who appears in the final season.

The women, on the other hand, are all basically good-to-go: they start from a position of presumed innocence, & are not required to work on themselves or accomplish anything to earn our (the audiences) concern & empathy. If in the unlikely event that they do do something 'bad' (Faith murdering people, Willow trying to end the world) there's always an understandable reason why, & we want them to be given a second chance, we want them to be looked after, & helped. Even the 'bad gurls' like Drusilla & Darla are given terrible backstories of victimhood (at the hands of men, of course) that led to their evilosity. No woman, it seems, is simply born bad. That's something that can only befall a man.

Warren, a human male we are told is a hater of women, is presented to us as an irredeemable monster. Anya, a female demon who has tortured & murdered men for a thousand years, is shown as light relief. As always in the feminist narrative, male violence against women = Horror. Female violence against men = comedy.

Buffy & Faith & all the other slayers have their superpowers, Willow (the most powerful witch in the world, let us not forget) & Tara have their magic. What do the men have? Even such lightweight characters such as Cordelia or Dawn are shown to be as good at fighting as the male 'scoobies', though this bears no resemblance to the reality of any known human society.

So, for instance, the 7-stone stick insect that is Sarah Michelle Gellar routinely beats to a pulp burly men literally twice the size & weight of her, laws of physics be damned. And without ever picking up even a scratch on that perfect face.Yes I know that it's a metaphor for grrrl power & taking back the night & blah diddy blah blah, but what kind of message is that sending to young girls? That if you pick a fight with someone twice your size you're not going to get hurt? That you should pick a fight with someone twice your size?

One of the scariest things about telling girls it's okay - 'empowering', even - to hit boys is that in our society, girls greatest defence against boys is that Boys Don't Hit Girls. And that's a good thing, because boys can hit a lot harder than girls. But the more that girls get told it's ok for them to hit boys, the more that girls are taught to behave like boys, the less likely that golden rule is to hold. If boys get punched in the face by increasingly aggressive females enough times, eventually those boys will hit back. And that's not good, a genie that would be hard to get back in the bottle.

Whedon has carried these ideas of The Überwoman over into his other shows, such as Firefly (Zoe), & Dollhouse (Echo) - human women who can kickbox all comers in high heels & leap a tall man in a single bound. Mortal women as physically strong as any man.

These women don't exist, nor will they ever - not as long as they are women, not without a ton of steroids or genetic modification. It's wishful thinking, & a very strange kind of wishful thinking: the idea that you can or should want to change the laws of nature to fit in with the perceived reality of a presently fashionable ideological movement.

Men the world over are bigger, stronger & faster than women, more heroic & self-sacrificing in an emergency. Every society encourages the sacrifice of the men on behalf of the women, & always has.

If you were to examine all Olympic times for men & women since records were first kept, you would see there is a reason why men & women are not made to compete against each other: if they did, no woman would ever win anything. The times of the guys who come in fourth or fifth will still trump whoever gets the gold in the women's events. Men can jump higher, run faster, throw further.

These are innate & immutable physical realities. Men are stronger than women. That's simply how we're built, & any healthy society would see that as a good thing. A strong man should be a good thing to find. If you were trapped in a burning building with a broken leg would you rather have Sarah Michelle Gellar (who plays Buffy) or Nicholas Brendon (who plays Xander) try carry you down a three storey ladder?

In addition to this insistence on the physical supremacy of women, the smartest, most technically minded characters in the Whedon-universe are female too (Willow in Buffy, 'Fred in Angel, Kaylee in Firefly, Claire Saunders & Bennett Halverson in Dollhouse). Again, this bears no relation to the world as it is: women as a group have very little interest in higher mathematics or engineering, as reflected in the percentage of course enrollments at universities.

At Harvard University, there is a class widely held to be the hardest undergraduate maths class in the country: 'Math 55'. Every year around 50 students enrol & more than half of those drop out within the first 5 days, it's that hard. After a couple more weeks the class settles down for what it will be for the rest of the semester: 45% Jewish, 18% Asian, & 100% male.

Now, there is nothing stopping any woman from signing up for that class, & with the present education gap, more women are leaving higher education with degrees than men by a large margin, so either women are choosing not to do higher mathematics, or are trying & can't. Either way, the portrayal across the board of the greatest mathematical or engineering minds being female is (again) a case of wishful thinking on the part of an ideological position that bears no resemblance to the real world young women have to go out & make their way in. As with the depictions of female violence, I don't see how this helps anyone.

The times we live in are the water we swim through: we can't see them, & even the best minds bend to them & obey, at least some of the time. The nineties was a feminist age - Whedon probably believed when he made Buffy that rape was a major epidemic; that 1 in 4 women were being dragged into bushes & raped daily; that domestic violence was a crime that only men inflicted & only women were the victims of; that women were getting paid 70¢ for every dollar a man made working the same job & so on & so on. He was wrong but he meant well, & was just trying to do the best he could with the information he was provided with, so it's hard to think bad of him. And for all I've said here he made a great show.

Aww, maybe I just think too much. Breaking Bad is nice, too.

Shaven Pussies Make Me Sad

2011-08-17T08:18:00.000-07:00

'Jesus Hates Bald Pussy'
- Hunter S. Thompson

I started writing this as a response to a recent Hooking-Up Smart post where the talk turned to the current preference amongst college-age boys for the shaven punani.

It's kind of interesting looking at the 100 or so years of nude photography & also the developments in pornography & seeing how sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s the female body, which had been worshipped in its natural state as the wonder that it is for a hundred thousand years or more was for the very first time suddenly judged as wanting. Plastic, artificial bodies - silicone & botox & genitals scraped free of hair became seemingly commonplace pretty much overnight. Compare any Playboy pic from before 1984 to 1994, & then again to 2004 & you can see the whole sorry downward slide played out in pictures. The sad thing is that a whole generation has grown up with that being the norm, & of course it's hard for any of us to see outside our societal conditioning (cf. Feminism, for example, just to try keep this site on topic).

Shaving forwomen did not become popular until 1915 when the May edition ofHarper's Bazaar was published with an ad showing a model in asleeveless summer dress and bare armpits. This was supplemented by theWilkinson Sword Company, who ran an ad campaign in 1920, whose purposewas to convince the public that feminine body hair was both unladylikeand unhygienic. This ad campaign was successful and in two years thesales of razors doubled. Now, this way of thinking has become soengrained in our society, through generations of daughters followingtheir mothers, that most women never question the fact that they shavethemselves. - A History Of Shaving

A shaven pussy always seems a little sad, to me, like a laboratory animal, all interfered with & wrong, somehow. It's like when you see a beautiful wild moor ripped up & turned into a golf course for visiting Japanese businessmen. These are symptoms that have accompanied the growth of capitalism, consumerism & the advertising industry. Fear is the best way to make people buy stuff they don't need, so making people question & distrust their own bodies is a great way to make people spend money on waxing strips & deodorant, ladyshaves & aftershave, pancake makeup & anal bleach. The message being: Your Body Is Wrong Unless You Fix It (With Our Product).

The natural world is being made to seem unacceptable & natural processes are increasingly obscured by the artificial things we create. We are divorced from what our food is, how it is grown & where it comes from, we don't see what happens to the plastic shit we throw away, don't see it being buried in the ground in landfill sites, the battery acid seeping into the rivers. Our human relationships are carried out through glowing rectangular screens, & even our own bodies are becoming foreign to us. It's batshit crazy & thankfully a blip in human history which cannot last, but try telling that to a 19 year old. Does it even matter to them it never used to be this way?

We've had a little excitement at the Bal Nègre and Joe's mind has slipped back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt. It's at this hour, when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness mounts to a fever pitch. He thinks of the women he passed up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might have had for the asking, if it weren't that he was fed up with them. He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt.. What gripes him most about her is that she doesn't put on any flesh. "It's like taking a skeleton to bed with you", he says. "The other night I took her on--out of pity--and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean ... not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It's repulsive ain't it? And it's funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn't look like a twat anymore: it's like a dead clam or something." He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. "I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me ... it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You'd imagine I'd never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there's nothing to it after all, especially when it's shaved. It's the hair that makes it mysterious. That's why a statue leaves you cold."

- Henry Miller, Tropic Of Cancer 1934

Origins Of The Term "Politically Correct"

2011-08-08T03:13:00.001-07:00

Yesterday over at Hooking-Up Smart I heard a feminist commentee refer to someone as "forward thinking & politically correct", which startled me a little & made me think that a few words about how this term originated & came into modern usage might not be a bad thing.

The words 'politically' & 'correct' had, of course, been used together before the last century - the earliest example given in Wikipedia is 1793 - but always in their literal sense, to highlight a logical fallacy about a political statement, not as a criticism of thinking outside of the state's current position on a given matter, or of use of language that others may find upsetting: "The term previously used 'correctness' in its literal sense and without any particular reference to language that might be considered offensive or discriminatory."

Ruth Perry, in her "A Short History of the term 'Politically Correct'" (1992) traces the now accepted use of the term back to the 1960's & Chairman Mao's Little Red Book: "It probably came into the New Left vocabulary through translations of Mao Tse-tung's writing". Others agree with when & through which channels it entered western culture but place the origin of the phrase with Trotsky. I found a good synopsis of its use since then at the website The Karl Hess Club which I will reproduce here in full:

"PC" has gone through four stages of meaning. "Politically correct" was initially coined by Leon Trotsky to refer favorably to those whose views remained in sync with the ever-shifting Bolshevik Party line. This was important, as "not PC" people risked prison or death.
"Politically correct" was revived (and again, used favorably) by 1960s New Left radicals who fancied themselves revolutionaries in the mold of Che, Castro, and Mao. "Politically correct" was first used negatively by 1980s conservatives, following the publication of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Conservatives embraced the term "politically incorrect" as a badge of honor to contrast their championing of free speech against campus leftists who used speech codes to suppress debate on sensitive topics. This was also when the term first became widely known by its acronym, "PC." In these three previous stages, everyone agreed that PC meant Left, and "not PC" meant Right. But because liberals don't like a reputation of being anti-free speech, within a few years they did a turnabout, and called their opponents "PC" and themselves "not PC." Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect is representative of this fourth stage, creating the odd result of a self-proclaimed "not PC" show winning a very PC environmental media award.
However, despite liberals' turnabout, conservatives continued to refer to themselves too as "not PC." Thus "PC" has lost any specific meaning in this fourth stage, since everyone defines their position as the now chic "not PC," and their opponents as "PC." (A far cry from the days when Russians dreaded the Chekists who executed "not PC" people.)

What Political Correctness really means - wherever & in whatever form it appears - is this: that The State or similar authority (the Church, society, any dominant ideology, it doesn't matter which) has decided what you can or cannot think or say. It has decided this for you. Its definition is the one you must accept. Your opinion is wrong. Your opinion should not be heard. Your opinion is Incorrect.

Two Great Quotes From Hooking-Up Smart

2011-08-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of gems that leapt out at me recently over at my current favourite blog, Hooking Up Smart, that seem to me to bear repeating in this setting. First from new kid on the block Jesus Mahoney:

The feminist view of male sexuality reminds me of Nietzsche’s view of Christianity. Nietzsche said, “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.” I would say that the feminist resolution to find male sexuality ugly and bad has helped to make male sexuality ugly and bad.

Isn't that great? I could muse on that for hours. Then a second, longer one from a commenter named Esau:

[A] young man grows up under the feminist indoctrination which tells him that Making a woman feel uncomfortable or unsafe in a sexual way is a VERY VERY VERY bad thing to do; you should never do it, and you should feel very, very, very bad and ashamed if you ever find that you have done it. Do you have the picture? Good.

Now our young man passes puberty and (let’s say he’s straight) wants the intimate society of women, and he also wants to do the right thing as he’s been taught. He understands that, practically, he must take the initiative and starts with the very simplest first step: he makes eye contact, maybe with a smile, for at least three seconds, with a variety of women he finds attractive.

What happens? You know what happens. If he’s not especially handsome and not especially skilled at choosing the right time and place — i.e if he’s like most young men — then a substantial fraction of the time, maybe even a majority of the time, the woman will not be interested and she’ll fend off his fledgling advance. She’ll scowl, frown, look away, pointedly ignore him, maybe even get up and leave his vicinity. These are not rare occurrences; by number count, they probably describes the large majority of sexual approaches in the world.

Now, how should he carry on in the future? Under a previous regime or in an alternate universe, he might think “Ah well, didn’t click; maybe the next one will be better.” Under Feminist Indoctrination, however, if he’s a decent, well-meaning boy then he’ll think “Holy cow! This eye-contact thing is making some women feel uncomfortable or unsafe in a sexual way! I feel really ashamed, and had better cut it out. (Guys, don’t do that.)” Now tell me, what kind of a sexual future do you think he has, if he’s been shamed out of even making eye contact? But, that’s exactly what the feminist protocol must lead to when taken seriously.

Let me take a moment to emphasize that I’m not claiming that the woman in any of these interactions is necessarily a bad actor, or that she should behave any differently. In all of these “Please stop and go away” reactions I’m imagining, she’s not going to call the cops or spray him with mace; it’s just that she really does feel uncomfortable or unsafe in a sexual way, and she’s just being honest about it. The fuck-up in the system is not her being honest about her feelings; the fuck-up in the system is the moral code that says he should be mortally ashamed after having tripped her feelings with the mildest possible action.

Now, back to the future: what is our young man to do? If he’s decent and holds to the moral code he’s been taught, then he won’t take a chance on making a woman feel uncomfortable or unsafe in a sexual way again; no, that would be a sin (“Guys, don’t do that.”). His only alternative is to wait in an eternal holding pattern, hanging out near women but never crossing the line to doing anything that might possibly make them uncomfortable; and waiting waiting waiting for that giant, un-mis-interpretable, sky-writing gauge IOI from some woman so he can be 100.0+% sure he won’t inadvertently make her feel uncomfortable or unsafe in a sexual way. Or, he can just give it up entirely and go back to porn and XBox. Hello! Does any of this sound familiar yet?
Of course, Randall Munroe nailed it first: http://xkcd.com/642/

Read the comic, and then ask yourself: where did the young man get his ideas? Cereal box tops, you think?

And this is how we got to where we are today. By elevating women’s subjective comfort to the Absolute Highest Good, to which all other needs must be subordinated — read some Amanda Marcotte, if you think this is an exaggeration — feminism has made happy, normal sex lives impossible for large numbers of men and women both. And, with decent men being taught to self-censor, who is left with a free field of action? Assholes, of course; men who don’t care about making women uncomfortable or unsafe or anything else. Do you grasp the irony? Feminism enhances misogyny. To use an analogy, here feminism is like the poorly chosen antibiotic, that suppresses the beneficial microbes and in so doing lets the harmful ones run wild, eventually harming and weakening the body. It really is a gift that keeps on giving.

More On Catherine Kieu Becker & 'The Talk'

2011-07-30T12:32:00.001-07:00

As a follow-up on the piece on Catherine Kieu Becker, & because we've not heard from Hugh & Mary for awhile, here's a new video from the always trouser-ruiningly funny 6oodfella:

Live From The Witch Trials

2011-07-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

There's a meme that's been present in our culture for a good 40 years or more, & it's this: the idea that the 'witchburning' craze of the 15th-18th centuries was in some way simply a war upon women. That it was in fact a "genocide" (or "gendercide") carried out upon women, a "woman's holocaust", with some of the more fanciful claims of the death toll being as high as 9 million. Dan Brown, in his extraordinarily popular blockbuster novel The DaVinci Code makes the claim that "the church burned at the stake an astonishing five million women."

That figure really is astonishing. It's also almost certainly false.

A couple of days ago I was engaged in one of the many fantastically in-depth discussions about ideas & philosophy & the general human tragedy with my wondrous lover F, & I don't know how but somehow we got onto the witchburnings, & I realized that I really ought to know a little more about the claims being made & what is actually known historically about those times.

So then, first stop, as always, was Wikipedia, whose entry on 'witch-hunt' gave these basic figures for the years 1450-1750:

Region	Number of trials	Number of executions
British Isles and North America	~5,000	~1,500–2,000
Empire (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Lorraine, Austria and Czech)	~50000	~25000–30000
France	~3,000	~1,000
Scandinavia	~5,000	~1,700–2,000
Eastern Europe (Poland and Lithuania, Hungary and Russia)	~7,000	~2,000
Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy)	~10,000	fewer than 1,000
Total:	~80,000	~35,000

The frst thing that strikes me immediately about this is that, in the whole of the British Isles & North America combined, over a period of three hundred years, there were in total less than two thousand deaths. That works out around 6 or 7 people a year, & a quarter of those, as you probably already know, were men. An unpleasant business, yes, but hardly a holocaust. To put that in some perspective, more people died in road accidents last year in Britain alone than in all 300 years of witch-burnings.

A note to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry tells us:

The most common estimates [worldwide] are between 40,000 and 60,000 deaths. Brian Levack (The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe) multiplied the number of known European witch trials by the average rate of conviction and execution, to arrive at a figure of around 60,000 deaths. Anne Lewelyn Barstow (Witchcraze) adjusted Levack's estimate to account for lost records, estimating 100,000 deaths. Ronald Hutton (Triumph of the Moon) argues that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted for these, and revises the figure to approximately 40,000.

While looking for occurences of the '9 million' figure, [which seems to have entered the public at large's conciousness via a documentary film from 1990 called The Burning Times] I came across an interesting site called 'Gendercide.org' which at first glance I took to be simply more feminist propaganda (the words 'gender' & 'patriarchy', which I usually take as flashing neon warning signs, crop up frequently) but on further reading appeared to hold a much more balanced position, & included these further reports on how many people died:

"The most dramatic [recent] changes in our vision of the Great Hunt [have] centered on the death toll," notes Jenny Gibbons. She points out that estimates made prior to the mid-1970s, when detailed research into trial records began, "were almost 100% pure speculation." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.) "On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements," writes Robin Briggs, "a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. [See, e.g., the witch-hunt documentary "The Burning Times".] This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men." Briggs adds that "these figures are chilling enough, but they have to be set in the context of what was probably the harshest period of capital punishments in European history." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, p. 8.)

Brian Levack's book The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe arrives at roughly similar conclusions. Levack "surveyed regional studies and found that there were approximately 110,000 witch trials. Levack focused on recorded trials, not executions, because in many cases we have evidence that a trial occurred but no indication of its outcomes. On average, 48% of trials ended in an execution, [and] therefore he estimated 60,000 witches died. This is slightly higher than 48% to reflect the fact that Germany, the center of the persecution, killed more than 48% of its witches." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)

Strangely, even though Gendercide admits that 'over 99.9-plus percent of all women who lived during the three centuries of the witch craze were not harmed', & also that in a number of places (such as France, Iceland & Finland) as many or more men than women were accused & sentenced (in France more than half, Finland almost half, in Iceland it was 90% male) it still feels justified in labelling the witch-hunts 'gendercide', which seems to run contrary to the evidence it lists. An interesting site, though - hard to pigeonhole (it covers the enforced military conscription of males alongside female infanticide, for instance). I recommend giving it a look.

A couple more fascinating tidbits from it: the first debunking the widely held notion that the attack on 'witches' was an attack on midwives, thought to be the torch-bearers for the old, 'pre-patriarchal' ways:

One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that "being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's chances of being charged" and "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.)

And second, that it was an entirely male hatred & distrust of the female that the innocent accused women struggled under:

"women did testify in large numbers against other women, making up 43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30 per cent of them. ... A more sophisticated count for the English Home Circuit by Clive Holmes shows that the proportion of women witnesses rose from around 38 per cent in the last years of Queen Elizabeth to 53 per cent after the Restoration." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, pp. 264-65, 270, 273, 282.)

Deborah Willis's study of "Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England" similarly finds it "clear ... that women were actively involved in making witchcraft accusations against their female neighbours"

[Alan] Macfarlane finds that as many women as men informed against witches in the 291 Essex cases he studied; about 55 percent of those who believed they had been bewitched were female. The number of witchcraft quarrels that began between women may actually have been higher; in some cases, it appears that the husband as "head of household" came forward to make statements on behalf of his wife, although the central quarrel had taken place between her and another woman. ... It may, then, be misleading to equate "informants" with "accusers": the person who gave a statement to authorities was not necessarily the person directly quarreling with the witch. Other studies support a figure in the range of 60 percent. In Peter Rushton's examination of slander cases in the Durham church courts, women took action against other women who had labeled them witches in 61 percent of the cases. ... J.A. Sharpe also notes the prevalence of women as accusers in seventeenth-century Yorkshire cases, concluding that "on a village level witchcraft seems to have been something peculiarly enmeshed in women's quarrels." To a considerable extent, then, village-level witch-hunting was women's work. (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, pp. 35-36.)

So where did that "9 million" figure come from, & why? Why is that estimate so far out? It's no coincidence that both that number & also the term "holocaust" have come to be used: when we hear that word & think of millions dead we think specifically of the Jewish holocaust of the second world war, in which somewhere in the region of 6 million died.

"What should trouble everyone," write Nathanson & Young, about the aforementioned Burning Times documentary,"is the fact that this film tries to upstage the Jewish tragedy for political purposes, to exploit the suffering of Jews in order to score political points for the suffering of women. Burning claims not merely that women have suffered just as Jews have suffered, but that women have suffered more than Jews and even that female suffering is the paradigm of all suffering."

The very real horrors of the witch-trials have been inflated & exploited by feminism for political ends, to score higher victim points, to claim greater victim status, which in feminism thinking tends to mean you have won the argument: Who Suffers Loudest Wins.

A final word on this from Sanctifying Misandry, by Paul Nathanson & Katherine K. Young:

'Even if we could study history exclusively in terms of gender, even if we could reduce history effectively to the story of relations between men and women, misogyny would still be an inadequate explanation. The Burning Times acknowledges several possible causes of the witch hunts, to be sure, but it takes only misogyny seriously. Literary evidence notwithstanding, it is by no means self-evident that all or even most men have ever hated women. What does seem self-evident is that most or even all men have been ambivalent about women. The fact is that, at one time or another - paradoxically, often at the same time - men feel both anger and love for women, both fear and respect, both envy and admiration. Moreover, the same is true in reverse. Most or all women have been ambivalent about men. The same is true of the way all people feel about their parents, children, relatives, friends, and communities. Ambivalence is a universal feature of the human condition, largely because ambiguity is a universal feature of reality itself (or, at least, of the ways in which finite beings perceive the world). The witch hunts surely do represent a period when misogyny took hold. At issue for historians of the witch craze, however, is not why misogyny exists but why it swept away all other attitudes toward women - who included wives, sisters, daughters, even mothers - at a particular time and place. That is a task for historians, not for political activists masquerading as scholars.'

Catherine Kieu Becker

2011-07-21T04:07:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've posted one of ManWomanMyth's videos, but the case of Catherine Kieu Becker, a woman who a week ago drugged her husband then cut off his penis & threw it in the garbage disposal because he wanted a divorce, & then our society's reaction to that story, is dealt with very well here:

JtO over at A Voice For Men also has some typically stirring words, so let's bring him to the table too:

Hooking Up Smart

2011-07-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

There's a blog I've been following the past year or so that I've been meaning to give a shout out to for awhile. Hooking Up Smart is both the best discussion about men & women & also between men & women I think I've ever found. I don't know at what point the changeover took place but what started out being quite possibly just another advice column for young women living in the modern age of hookup culture quickly became something much bigger, better, & harder to define.

The posts, by it's creator, Susan Walsh, are always intelligent & involving, regularly taking in such topics as Game Theory & Evolutionary Psychology. Walsh shows a refreshingly rational level-headedness in her advice to women & an unusual generosity, curiosity, & open-mindedness in regard to male realities too. The balance she maintains between the male & female concerns is practically unique, & is almost certainly the key to the site's success. But the comments upon those posts - which regularly run for over 500 entries - are where the nitty gritty really begins.

An unusual community of minds has sprung up there, from a wide variety of backgrounds - U.S marines & polyamorous riot grrrls, pick-up artists & concerned mothers.. A healthy number are critical of feminism, though there are feminist voices represented there, too. Which makes for some lively discussions, that would no doubt descend into ugly shanking-in-the-showers violence in waking life but somehow Susan manages to keeps it all on an even keel & everyone gets their say, & people for the most part remain level-headed & respectful, & it works, somehow. It really shouldn't, but it does.

At this moment in time I am popping over there to check out the new developments every few days if I'm by a computer. I am, as it were, hooked. Here are a few posts of interest to start you off:

http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2011/06/08/politics-and-feminism/have-we-had-enough-feminism-yet/
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2011/03/29/relationshipstrategies/its-a-small-hypergamous-world/
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2011/03/21/relationshipstrategies/why-we-shit-test/
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2011/04/18/whatguyswant/is-feminism-desires-kryptonite/

Thoughts on Lady Chatterley

2011-07-02T02:45:00.000-07:00

I recently read, for the first time, all of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover . A marvellous book: rich, deep, & long-resonating, containing great truths & insights into maleness & masculinity, & yet reads like a woman's romance novel. To bridge that gap, to write so well for both sexes is rare indeed, & I can't help but think that, even with all the advantages & developments that writers have had at their disposal since then, still no-one has written better about men & women than this. And perhaps, in this present age, no-one would be allowed to.

The book was was written in 1928, while Lawrence was ill with tuberculosis, & was his last full-length novel. Two years later he would be dead. After finishing it he wrote an afterword - 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' - discussing his thoughts behind its creation, & upon the state of man & woman generally. I am shaken by how prophetic his vision of the future - our future - has been. In particular, the replacing of the family, the tribe, the trade union, & the bond between the man & the woman - which all others emanate from - with the State.

The point he makes is that all states - capitalist or communist - have pushed for the weakening of the family unit, & of the power of the individual. Such is their nature. And Feminism has been state policy all over the western world for at least 40 years - most likely more - & an argument could be made that in fact it has been state policy since the beginnings of the 20th century, with the rise of industrialized labour, & the wartime work of women in WWII being a test run for what was to come: the forcible full-time employment of the one half of humanity which had always previously been exempt from wage-slavery, all under the banner of liberation. That Lawrence saw this, so clearly, within 10 years of the Russian revolution, takes my breath away.

As I said before, I can't help but think that, for all the 'freedoms' we now apparently enjoy, the sexual liberation & freedom of expression we are told we possess (in no small part due to censorship battles like 'the Lady Chatterley trial' of the 1960s), still no-one has written better of, or more deeply about, the eternal mystery of man & woman since then. Lawrence speaks of sex with awe & reverence, & when he does he is speaking of the whole, instead of the parts, of the terrible magnetic compulsion of our unity, instead of the petty grievances & greedy recriminations of our separation. We simply don't see ourselves in that way anymore. But perhaps one day we will again.

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Extracts from A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

Everybody, pretty well, takes it for granted that as soon as we can find a possible way out of it, marriage will be abolished. The Soviet abolishes marriage: or did. If new “modern” states spring up, they will almost certainly follow suit. They will try to find some social substitute for marriage, and abolish the hated yoke of conjugality. State support of motherhood, State support of children, and independence of women. It is on the programme of every great scheme of reform. And it means, of course, the abolition of marriage.

Do we, then, want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State. Do we want to fall under the direct sway of the State? Any State? For my part, I don’t.

The sense of isolation, followed by the sense of menace and of fear, is bound to arise as the feeling of oneness and community with our fellow men declines, and the feeling of individualism and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases. The so-called “cultured” classes are the first to develop “personality” and individualism, and the first to fall into this state of unconscious menace and fear. The working classes retain the old blood-warmth of oneness and togetherness some decades longer. Then they lose it too. And then class-consciousness becomes rampant, and class-hate. Class-hate and class-consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood warmth has collapsed, and every man is really aware of himself in apartness. Then we have these hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition, strife. Civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-assertion.

The blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled. Even scientifically we know it. But therefore they are the two rivers that encircle the whole of life, and in marriage the circle is complete, and in sex the two rivers touch and renew one another, without ever commingling or confusing. We know it. The phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depths the great river of female blood—yet neither breaks its bounds.

Two rivers of blood, are man and wife, two distinct eternal streams, that have the power of touching and communing and so renewing, making new one another, without any breaking of the subtle confines, any confusing or commingling. And the phallus is the connecting link between the two rivers, that establishes the two streams in a oneness, and gives out of their duality a single circuit, forever. And this, this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity. And all we know of the will of God is that He wishes this, this oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime, this oneness within the great dual blood-stream of humanity.

Man dies, and woman dies, and perhaps separate the souls go back to the creator. Who knows? But we know that the oneness of the blood-stream of man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars.

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Father's Day

2011-06-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

There's a meme going round on Facebook at the moment of posting your father or grandfather's picture as your profile photo until after Father's Day. Actually, 'any patriarchal figure will do' is what my friend said when she told me. It strikes me as a beautiful thing to honor, & maybe there's still time to spread the same meme over the blogosphere.

So here's my contribution, my Grandad on my mother's side. My mother wouldn't be here without him. I wouldn't be here without him. And I have his eyes:

"Women Don't Lie"

2011-06-08T07:31:00.000-07:00

Extract from Daphne Patai's excellent study of the rise of the Sexual Harrassment culture of America, Heterophobia. The following account is typical of the many cases she documents:

There is a suspicious circularity to the shape of some sexual harassment cases. They begin and end with the worldview promoted by the Sexual Harrassment Industry. Once one is caught in this vicious circle, escape is difficult. Professor Ramdas Lamb's experience of escalating charges of sexual harassment is a frightening example of this pattern.

Born in 1945 to an Italian-German family living in California, Lamb spent eight years in India (1969-77), becoming a Hindu monk and adopting the first name "Ramdas." Upon returning to this country, he married and attended graduate school, receiving his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. In the fall of 1991, he took a position as an assistant professor of religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. One of his tasks there was to serve as undergraduate adviser for religion majors. In this job he was remarkably successful, doubling the number of majors in just two years. His students (many of whom later testified for him) described him as an immensely popular, enthusiastic, and unusually accessible teacher, one who kept his office door open and allowed his students to come and go virtually as they pleased. He had a following — a group of students who often hung out at his office, discussing issues raised in class, and generally drawing on his wide experience and genial personality.

Trouble began in his second year of full-time teaching when he offered a new course, one he realized would, by its very subject, be controversial. Entitled "Religion, Politics, and Society," it focused on contemporary social issues such as homelessness, gay marriage, animal rights, abortion, and AIDS. In February 1993, Lamb asked his class to lead several articles on rape and sexual harassment from the textbook he had chosen for the course. One of these articles sparked a discussion among the students (two-thirds of whom were women) about false allegations of rape. One student said she could see both sides of the issue. She had herself been raped but had also seen her brother falsely accused when he broke off his engagement. Another young woman in the class, Tania Mortensen, who worked as a peer educator for a group called CORE (Creating Options for a Rape-Free Environment), vehemently denied that women ever lie about rape. Women must be believed, she insisted. She stated that data showed that a mere 3 percent of rape charges are false. Two other students, Michelle Gretzinger and Bonita Rai, supported this view. Gretzinger, who the previous semester had told various friends and professors that she had herself been raped in 1989, was evidently upset by challenges offered by other students to Mortensen's views and spent much of the class close to tears.

Professor Lamb knew Gretzinger well. She was a straight-A student who had decided to major in religion after meeting him. He had urged her to become an honors student, had written letters of recommendation for her, had lent her books, and had allowed her, along with others, to use his computer. As tension rose in his class, Lamb tried to mediate according to the ground rules that — so several of his students later testified — he had laid down at the beginning of the semester: Everyone was to be allowed to have his or her say; everyone's views were to be treated with respect; if a discussion was one-sided, Lamb would play the devil's advocate and introduce contrary points of view. As Wanda Dicks later testified, Lamb tried to get his students to understand the other person's point of view; he did not try to convert them. Another student who, as a Christian Fundamentalist, did not share Professor Lamb's beliefs, also testified to Lamb's open-mindedness.

However, for the first time in his teaching experience, Ramdas Lamb found the class getting out of his control that day. Tania Mortensen dominated the class, did most of the talking, adamantly denied that more than one view of women's truthfulness about rape was possible, and generally seemed to intimidate the other students.
Out of that day's conflict issued an extraordinary drama. First, Ramdas Lamb found himself accused of sexual harassment by the three distraught students (Mortensen, Gretzinger, and Rai) who had argued that "women don't lie." They claimed that Lamb had created a "hostile environment" by challenging their position and characterizing them as "man haters."

It is fascinating to see intellectual controversy about a social problem itself become grounds for sexual harassment charges. As famous a figure as Alan M. Dershowitz came close to facing charges over precisely the same issue. Dershowitz considers the notion of hostile-environment sexual harassment a threat to both freedom of speech and equal protection (since it sets offenses to women apart from all other offenses). He recounts how a group of feminists in his criminal-law class at Harvard, objecting to his discussion of false allegations of rape, threatened to file hostile-environment charges against him. "Despite the fact that the vast majority of students wanted to hear all sides of the important issues surrounding the law of rape," Dershowitz states, "a small minority tried to use the law of sexual harassment as a tool of censorship." The significance of this does not escape him: "The fact that it is even thinkable at a major university that controversial teaching techniques might constitute hostile-environment sexual harassment demonstrates the dangers of this expandable concept." Still, in Dershowitz's case the feminist students eventually decided against bringing charges.

Ramdas Lamb wasn't so lucky. When the original accusations began to crumble, Michelle Gretzinger, who by all accounts had until then shown a special, and apparently personal, interest in Professor Lamb, escalated her charges—initially merely hinting at some sexual relation-ship between herself and Lamb; later, when pressed, accusing him of repeated rape. The offense was "serial rape" and "mentor rape," as her lawyer was to call it in court.

Reading through the two thousand or so pages of legal transcripts generated by this case, I noticed a distinct pattern emerging of how Gretzinger proceeded in her accusations against Lamb. First she tried to keep the charges vague, so that initially it was not even clear what precisely was being alleged—perhaps merely some suspicion of sexual misconduct to complement the hostile-environment charges she and her two classmates were pursuing. She repeatedly testified that there had been no specific mention of any rapes in the first few months of the investigation because, she said, she had assumed that the charges the three students had already filed would be "enough."

When the initial charges proved flimsy, Gretzinger began to allege that Lamb had sexually assaulted her during the preceding semester, identifying to different acquaintances different locations for the as-saults, of which she had given no sign at the time. She variously claimed they had occurred in Lamb's office, in his home, and in her apartment. When forced to come up with specifics (months after her initial charges, even though university regulations expressly required that complaints when first filed were to be accompanied by precise details), Gretzinger asserted that Lamb had raped her between ten and sixteen times in her own apartment after driving her home from his once-a-week class. These rapes, she claimed, had taken place between early September and early October 1992.

Unfortunately for Gretzinger's case, when pushed to come up with concrete dates, she named some that proved to be impossible. In the time frame she mentioned, there were not enough class days, Lamb's lawyer demonstrated in court, to accommodate her charges.

Professor Lamb, for his part, categorically denied having had sexual relations of any sort with her and testified that he had never set foot in her apartment. Furthermore, Gretzinger's own actions throughout the period in which the rapes were supposed to have occurred made the story of rape unconvincing. She had failed to indicate to her husband or to anyone else that repeated assaults were taking place; she had continued to demonstrate enthusiasm for Lamb, his courses, and the extra-curricular activities in which he was involved; she had signed up for an elective course with Lamb the following semester — all of which was attested to by many other students. This pattern of behavior was part of the challenge faced by the sexual harassment specialists when they came to Gretzinger's aid.

Confronted by irrefutable testimony of Lamb's innocence — testimony that left the plaintiff's case a shambles — Gretzinger's attorney fell back upon the very claims with which the entire drama had gotten underway: What motive could the plaintiff possibly have for making up such a tale? Why would she expose herself to the humiliation and pain of admitting to being the victim of rape? In short: Women do not lie. The lawyer's closing examination of Gretzinger before the jury in no way addressed the many problems with Gretzinger's testimony. Instead, he merely had Gretzinger confirm one last time (without citing specifics) that she had indeed been raped. Stressing the "painful, humiliating experience" Gretzinger was willing to relive by going to court, and the damage this indignity inflicted on her reputation, he claimed that his client's motivation was nothing more than to prevent other women from coming to the same harm to which she had been subjected." Winding up, he asserted, "There is no motive to lie."

However, this effort failed to persuade the jury to overlook the abundant evidence that Gretzinger had fabricated the charges. Plausible as it is to hold that in some past periods or in other countries the very charge of rape has been so self-vilifying that few women would willingly make it unless it was in fact true, hardly the situation in America in the 1990s, Gretzinger's lawyer's invocation of a prefeminist image of women's disadvantage in legal battles over rape thus proved unconvincing.

The Ramdas Lamb case is a particularly interesting one because of what it reveals about the inner workings of the Sexual Harassment Industry. Here is a professor of religion so profeminist that in class he referred to God as "she," a teacher whom many students described as always treating women with respect and encouraging their work in every way. None of these traits, however, carried any weight once the SHI involved itself in the case. What should have been dismissed at once as an instance of a few angry and vindictive students whose feminist beliefs had been challenged by a professor exercising his right of free speech quickly spun out of control. As Lamb points out, Gretzinger, while constantly alleging her powerlessness, managed, on the basis of mere accusations with no evidence at all, to turn his life upside down very easily — a good illustration of the increasing lag between rhetoric and reality: Victimhood is claimed while the very opposite is demonstrated.
Gretzinger's depositions reveal how thoroughly she knew the typical sexual harassment script. She stressed her vulnerability and "indebted-ness" to Lamb, and for this latter case to be made she had to interpret his typical professorial gestures of kindness and helpfulness as instances of "grooming" (or, as some texts call it, "priming") her." Fortunately for Lamb, many of his other students had witnessed Gretzinger's behavior — that she had phoned him, had sought him out, was always hanging around his office, and so on, all of which she denied under oath. Instead, she turned it all around, sounding well versed in the "how to make a case" literature, whose script she followed in every particular, above all in her psychological portrait of herself as a victim of an unscrupulous professor, whose path toward sexual assault she outlined with care.

All the charges made about Ramdas Lamb's behavior in class were refuted by other students, but to Susan Hippensteele, the university's "student advocate," and to Mie Watanabe, its EEO/affirmative action officer, whose handling of the matter also violated university procedures, they were self-evidently true. Hippensteele suggested reading materials to teach the plaintiffs about sexual harassment injuries and how to be on the lookout for them. In that duplication of functions that often characterizes the SHI's involvement with local cases, she also served as adviser to a student group called SHarP (Sexual Harassment Prevention), in which Michelle Gretzinger participated after making her allegations. Testifying on behalf of the "victim" was Michele Paludi, the same sexual harassment expert whose Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus was one of the books suggested to the complainant by Hippensteely. What did Paludi know about the case? She had read only the supposed victim's account, not the masses of other testimony produced. But she could affirm that the charges were entirely plausible, her judgment being based on her general familiarity with student victims and predatory professors.

Professor Ramdas Lamb's three-and-a-half-year battle to prove his innocence — which is precisely what he had to do — is thus a scary example of the kind of reality the Sexual Harassment Industry has brought upon us. That his case was an administrative outrage was plain as early as 1994 — before claims and counterclaims were filed in federal court — when a labor arbitrator brought in by the faculty union examined the evidence and, in deciding in Lamb's favor, meticulously dissected the many abuses of due process that had characterized the university's handling of the case from the beginning. These abuses, the arbitrator made clear, resulted from the zealotry of the university's feminist sexual harassment officers. Nonetheless, the university settled with Gretzinger in 1995 for $175,000, citing inordinate delays in dealing with her case, but offered Lamb no recompense for suffering not only the same delays but also mistreatment by university officials. As we saw in chapter 3, Gretzinger lost her federal suit against Lamb.

But legal vindication is hardly enough to compensate the real victim in this case. In early 1998, this is what Lamb wrote about the repercussions of his experience:

I still avoid interacting with women I don't know and trust. I rarely feel good about going to school. I still avoid meeting female students in my office, unless I know someone else will be there. I definitely treat my female students differently now than I do my male students. The case has had clear ramifications within the university, too. A lot of professors are being very careful with what they say. Several have told me they now avoid becoming advisors for female grad students. There have been policy changes, but that really doesn't mean a thing. In my case, nearly every administrator who dealt with me simply ignored the policy, from Hippensteele to the dean of the law school.

In June 1998, Lamb was awarded tenure. But he failed in his attempt to save colleagues from an ordeal similar to his. In May 1998, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected his appeal of a district court's ruling that granted qualified immunity to the individual University of Hawaii officials who participated in the flawed sexual harassment investigation against him. These officials, the court declared, were entitled to qualified immunity; they were, in fact, obligated to investigate the sexual harassment charge. What the Court of Appeals declined to define were the "precise contours of the protection the First Amend-ment provides the classroom speech of college professors." The same Court of Appeals, however, upheld the federal jury's verdict against Gretzinger.

Finally, Lamb can put this entire episode behind him. But its effects linger: "I don't think I will ever feel the way I did prior to these accusations," he has said. "There are those at the university who still treat me as guilty even though every investigation has found me innocent."

More recently still, Lamb has written: "I used to love to teach. Not any more. I used to love to interact with students and stimulate them to think critically. Not any more. I used to believe that university campuses promoted free speech and the truth. Not any more. I used to believe students when they would tell me things. Not any more."

"The Women's Movement" by Joan Didion

2011-05-08T07:20:00.000-07:00

I've recently been discovering the haunting & original writing of Joan Didion, in particular her book of nonfictions from the late 60's & 70's, 'The White Album' (1979), in which I was pleased & surprised to discover this essay from 1972 upon feminism. Didion seems to have been one of the first to recognize & point out that what we now tend to think of as 'modern' Feminism sprang directly out of Marxism, & that the principle difference was simply the replacement of the word 'Class' with 'Gender'. I am taken aback at just how clearly she saw the shortcomings of the 'second wave' so early, only a year or two into its beginnings, & how relevant & true her comments remain almost 40 years later. It's a remarkably insightful work that rewards a careful reading.

NOTE: This essay has appeared elsewhere on the net in a number of forms but with numerous - & frequently nonsensical - errors. I don't know how or why those errors were introduced but have corrected them in this version to be the text as presented in the original book.

To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone "oppressed" to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every women, which either does or does not make 51 per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary "class" was from the virtual beginning the "idea" of the women's movement, and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement still to center around day-care centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life.

"The new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality," the feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone announced flatly in 1970. "It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history." This was scarcely a statement of purpose anyone could find cryptic, and it was scarcely the only statement of its kind in the literature of the movement. Nonetheless, in 1972, in a "special issue" on women, Time was still musing genially that the movement might well succeed in bringing about "fewer diapers and more Dante."

That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo and murmuring lasciate ogni speranza, but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for "fulfillment" or "self-expression," a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most pro forma benevolent interest. In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women's movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.

Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood."

And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women's movement, and the invention of women as a "class." One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration. The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, "named" and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one's idea of where 19th-century transcendental instincts, crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx, might lead. To read the theorists of the women's movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high-minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights. If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, "the very organization of nature," the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, "that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself." I accept the universe, Margaret Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not.

It seemed very New England, this febrile and cerebral passion. The solemn a priori idealism in the guise of radical materialism somehow bespoke old-fashioned self-reliance and prudent sacrifice. The clumsy torrent of words became a principle, a renunciation of style as unserious. The rhetorical willingness to break eggs became, in practice, only a thrifty capacity for finding the sermon in every stone. Burn the literature, Ti-Grace Atkinson said in effect when it was suggested that, even come the revolution, there would still remain the whole body of "sexist" Western literature.

But of course no books would be burned: the women of this movement were perfectly capable of crafting didactic revisions of whatever apparently intractable material came to hand. "As a parent you should become an interpreter of myths," advised Letty Cottin Pogrebin in the preview issue of Ms. Magazine. "Portions of any fairy tale or children's story can be salvaged during a critique session with your child." Other literary analysts devised ways to salvage other books: Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady need no longer be the victim of her own idealism. She could be, instead, the victim of a sexist society, a woman who had "internalized the conventional definition of wife." The narrator of Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps could be seen as "enslaved because she persists in looking for her identity in a man." Similarly, Miss McCarthy's The Group could serve to illustrate "what happens to women who have been educated at first-rate women's colleges-taught philosophy and history-and then are consigned to breast-feeding and gourmet cooking."

That fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology. They had invented a class; now they had only to make that class conscious. They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a "rap session," then called "consciousness-raising," and in any case a therapeutically-oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as "speaking bitterness." They purged and regrouped and purged again, worried out one another's errors and deviations, the "elitism" here, the "careerism" there. It would have been merely sententious to call some of their thinking Stalinist: of course it was. It would have been pointless even to speak of whether one considered these women "right" or "wrong," meaningless to dwell upon the obvious, upon the coarsening of moral imagination to which such social idealism so often leads. To believe in "the greater good" is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism. Nonetheless it was serious, and for these high-strung idealists to find themselves out of the mimeo room and onto the Cavett Show must have been in certain ways more unsettling to them than it ever was to the viewers. They were being heard, and yet not really. Attention was finally being paid, and yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. (This grievance was not atypic in that discussion of it always seemed to take on unexplored Ms. Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being "spoken to," and therefore violated, by uppity proles.) They totted up the pans scoured, the towels picked off the bathroom floor, the loads of laundry done in a lifetime. Cooking a meal could only be "dogwork," and to claim any pleasure from it was evidence of craven acquiescence in one's own forced labor. Small children could only be odious mechanisms for the spilling and digesting of food, for robbing women of their "freedom." It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of woman's role as "the Other" to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman's marriage contract ("wife strips beds, husband remakes them") reproduced in Ms., but it was toward just such trivialization that the women's movement seemed to be heading.

Of course this litany of trivia was crucial to the movement in the beginning, a key technique in the politicizing of women who perhaps had been conditioned to obscure their resentments even from themselves. Mrs. Shulman's discovery that she had less time than her husband seemed to have was precisely the kind of chord the movement had hoped to strike in all women (the "click! of recognition," as Jane O'Reilly described it), but such discoveries could be of no use at all if one refused to perceive the larger point, failed to make that inductive leap from the personal to the political.

Spliting up the week into hours during which the children were directed to address their "personal questions" to either one parent or another might or might not have improved the quality of Mr. and Mrs. Shulman's marriage, but the improvement of marriages would not a revolution make. It could be very useful to call housework, as Lenin did, "the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do," but it could be useful only as the first step in a political process, only in the "awakening" of a class to its position, useful only as a metaphor: to believe, during the late 1960's and early 1970's in the United States of America, that the words had literal meaning was not only to stall the movement in the personal but to seriously delude oneself.

More and more, as the literature of the movement began to reflect the thinking of women who did not really understand the movement's ideological base, one had the sense of this stall, this delusion, the sense that the drilling of the theorists had struck only some psychic hardpan dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish-fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies. To read even desultorily in this literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman with whom the authors seemed to identify all too entirely. This ubiquitous construct was everyone's victim but her own. She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist's table. During the fashion for shoes with pointed toes, she, like "many women," had her toes amputated. She was so intimidated by cosmetic advertising that she would sleep "huge portions" of her day in order to forestall wrinkling, and when awake she was enslaved by detergent commercials on television. She sent her child to a nursery school where the little girls huddled in a "doll corner," and were forcibly restrained from playing with building blocks. Should she work, she was paid "three to ten times less" than an (always) unqualified man holding the same job, was prevented from attending business lunches because she would be "embarrassed" to appear in public with a man not her husband, and, when she traveled alone, faced a choice between humiliation in a restaurant and "eating a doughnut" in her hotel room.

The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves. The bitter fancies assumed their own logic. To ask the obvious - why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set, or why, the most eccentric detail, she stayed in hotels where only doughnuts could be obtained from room service - was to join this argument at its own spooky level, a level which had only the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman. That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.

But of course something other than an objection to being "discriminated against" was at work here, something other than an aversion to being "stereotyped" in one's sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children. One is constantly struck, in the accounts of lesbian relationships which appear from time to time in the movement literature, by the emphasis on the superior "tenderness" of the relationship, the "gentleness" of the sexual connection, as if the participants were wounded birds. The derogation of assertiveness as "machismo" has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal at any level with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the "terror and revulsion" experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too "tender" for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too "sensitive" for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality. The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened because a male-chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should. The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared, because what the sexual connection really amounts to, we learn in one liberated woman's account of a postmarital affair, is "wisecracking and laughing" and "lying together and then leaping up to play and sing the entire Sesame Street Songbook." All one's actual apprehension of what it is to be like a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it - that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death - could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

One was only told it, and now one is to be re-programmed, fixed up, rendered again as inviolate and unstained as the "modern" little girls in the Tampax advertisements. More and more we have been hearing the wishful voices of just such perpetual adolescents, the voices of women scarred not by their class position as women but at the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions. "Nobody ever so much as mentioned" to Susan Edmiston "that when you say 'I do,' what you are doing is not, as you thought, vowing your eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of rights, obligations and responsibilities that may well be anathema to your most cherished beliefs." To Ellen Peck "the birth of children too often means the dissolution of romance, the loss of freedom, the abandonment of ideals to economics." A young woman described on the cover of a recent issue of New York magazine as "the Suburban Housewife Who Bought the Promises of Women's Lib and Came to the City to Live Them" tells us what promises she bought: "The chance to respond to the bright lights and civilization of the Big Apple, yes. The chance to compete, yes. But most of all, the chance to have some fun. Fun is what's been missing."

Eternal love, romance, fun. The Big Apple. These are relatively rare expectations in the arrangements of consenting adults, although not in those of children, and it wrenches the heart to read about these women in their brave new lives. An ex-wife and mother of three speaks of her plan "to play out my college girl's dream. I am going to New York to become this famous writer. Or this working writer. Failing that, I will get a job in publishing." She mentions a friend, another young woman who "had never had any other life than as a daughter or wife or mother" but who is "just discovering herself to be a gifted potter." The childlike resourcefulness - to get a job in publishing, to be a gifted potter - bewilders the imagination. The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real ambiguities and the real generative or malignant possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words.

"It is the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression as they see and define it," the movement theorists insist doggedly in an effort to solve the question of these women, to convince themselves that what is going on is still a political process; but the handwriting is already on the wall. These are converts who want not a revolution but "romance," who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exactly the mold of their old life. In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them than the theorists ever did, and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom.

The Education Gap

2011-05-05T02:38:00.000-07:00

The above chart comes from Professor Mark J. Perry's Economics & Finance blog Carpe Diem, where he writes:

It's now official: Women dominate men at every level of higher education, in terms of degrees conferred. Here's the breakdown for graduates of the class of 2009:

Associate's Degrees: 167 women for every 100 men

Bachelor's Degrees: 142 women for every 100 men.

Master's Degrees: 159 women for every 100 men.

Professional Degrees: 104 women for every 100 men.

Doctoral Degrees: 107 women for every 100 men.

In fact, the last time men had more degrees than women at any level was the Class of 2006, which had slightly more men than women for both Professional and Doctoral degrees. For the other levels, it hasn't been even close for decades. The last year that men earned more Master's degrees than women was 1984-1985, for Bachelor's degrees it was the Class of 1981, and for Associates degrees it was 1976-1977 when men earned more degrees than women.

The full U.S Department of Education figures are available here, please take the time to give them a look:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp

There are two things that immediately leap out at me from this: First of all, it's somewhat surprising to find that even as far back as 1869, something like 1-in-6 Bachelor's degrees were being received by women in America - a relatively small number, admittedly, but higher than I would have expected from that time. The popular image we generally receive is that pretty much until the 1970s all women were forcibly kept away from any kind of higher education. But that seems not to be the case: even by the 1920's - i.e. even before American women "Got The Vote" - more than half as many women as men were leaving colleges with degrees, & that percentage rose every year up until the end of the 1970s, when it became equal.

And that's the other thing that surprised me: just how long the present-day inequality has been going on: Women began to outnumber men from the beginning of the 1980s onwards. And this gap has increased every year up until the present & beyond.

Men are now in a worse place educationally than women were before the 1970s. Clearly something is very wrong with either the teaching methods used or the environment they are used in. Or perhaps there is simply discrimination at work?

Why are boys failing at school? Why are young men dropping out of college? And why does no-one care?

This is yet another pretty damning refutation of the belief that feminism is, or ever has been, 'about equality'. If feminism were truly 'About Equality' then it would necessarily be the duty of every self-proclaimed feminist to speak out at every opportunity against this disparity, to drop whatever else they're doing & devote their time & energy to this injustice until those numbers are equal again.

And anyone who believed in 'equality' would surely have to agree.

I mean, that's obvious. To everyone. Isn't it?

Why Are Women Violent?

2011-05-04T04:26:00.000-07:00

Jesus, this is so heartbreaking: Someone hits you, so instinctively you hit them back, then EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM gathers round to beat you to the floor & kick you in the head.

What a twisted, ugly world.

Watching those men beating that poor guy, it puts me in mind of that experiment I'm sure you know of already:

Monkeys in a cage, a banana is hung from above. When a monkey goes to grab the banana, a hose is turned on all of them. The monkeys stop going for the bananas. After a few days of that, a new monkey is introduced. He, naturally, goes for the banana, & the others grab him & beat him up, for fear of getting the hose again. One by one, all the original monkeys are removed & new ones take their place. Eventually none of the original monkeys remain, & the hose isn't used any longer, yet no monkey tries to eat the banana. And any new ones that attempt to are pulled to the floor & kicked in the head.

If they could talk, they'd probably say they don't know why they do what they do. It's just the way it is, the way it's always been.

Why are women violent? This report, just in, from our correspondent Bill Burr:

The Monarchy Is A Grotesque Abomination That Must Be Abolished

2011-04-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

JTO LIVES!

2011-04-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

He's Back! And he's pissed off!!

Hypergamy: The Husband Store

2011-04-20T03:38:00.000-07:00

A store that sells husbands has just opened where a woman may go to choose a husband from among many men. There is, however, a catch. As you open the door to any floor you may choose a man from that floor, but if you go up a floor, you cannot go back down except to exit the building.

So a woman goes to the shopping center to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The woman reads the sign and says to herself, "Well, that's better than my last boyfriend, but I wonder what's further up?"

So up she goes.

The second floor sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The woman remarks to herself, "That's great, but I wonder what's further up?" And up she goes again.

The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids and are extremely good looking.
"Hmm, better" she says. "But I wonder what's upstairs?"

The fourth floor sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking and help with the housework.
"Wow!" exclaims the woman, "very tempting. BUT, there must be more further up!" And again she heads up
another flight.

The fifth floor sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking, help with the housework and have a strong romantic streak.
"Oh, mercy me! But just think... what must be awaiting me further on?" So up to
the sixth floor she goes.

The sixth floor sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 3,456,789,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at The Husband Store and have a nice day.

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap

2011-04-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Article from the Wall Street Journal (April 12th) by Carrie Lukas, executive director of The Independent Women's Forum.

A study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that women earned 8% more than men.

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.

JohnTheOther, Where Art Thou?

2011-04-11T02:36:00.000-07:00

Visitors to the library may have found a number of youtube links have stopped working the past few days. This is because the most excellent JohnTheOther, the best (& sweetest) men's rights campaigner of the youtube community has, as of a couple of days ago, closed his account, pulled his blog, & to all intents & purposes disappeared off the face of the internet.

His videos, always thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate & humane, inspired me greatly & did much to shape my present thinking about the misandric society we are living in.

Several months ago he wrote what seemed to me to be a very sensible piece about how the present climate of misandry & rape hysteria, encouraged & propagated by feminism, along with the prevalance of false rape accusations, has led to a society in which men have less reason to step in & risk injury intervening if witnessing an actual rape, the way he personally had done in the past. This, somewhat predictably, led to a hysterically overwrought reaction from youtube feminists, who showered him with personal insults, threatened physical violence &, of course, accused him of secretly being a rapist. (But of course!)

It all went on for quite some time, & word has it he was also threatened at his place of work. I can only speculate on why he has stopped posting, but that kind of hate-campaign would shut down most other free-speaking people too, including me, so I wouldn't be surprised if that were the cause.

The saddest thing about his removing all traces is that what is left on the internet is only the mirror image of what he said & did - the personal attacks, the slander & criticism of him. His videos refute all such drivel much better than I ever could, & I wish he could simply have left them where they were & just stopped posting, if that was what he had to do.

It's quite a loss to the internet, & the last few days have been pretty glum. But wherever he is & whatever he is doing, I wish him well.

The Movement to Disbar Mary N. Kellett

2011-03-31T03:02:00.001-07:00

by Paul Elam

There are often times that we shake our heads at injustices in the world. Sometimes it seems to be all we can do. And with so many problems in modern life, and their often systemic, intractable nature, it can be difficult to choose what battles to fight and when. Because of this we have increasingly become a nation of head shakers, concerned about an array of injustices but often not knowing where to turn or what to do to solve them.
With that in mind we have an opportunity, right here and now, to face down and fight against a terrible injustice, an absolute evil, going on in the state of Maine.
Vladek Filler is about to face trial for a second time on the charge of raping his wife, Ligia. He was brought to trial the first time by Bar Harbor prosecutor Mary N. Kellett, who has sought to imprison Mr. Filler despite the fact that she knows that there is no physical evidence that he ever committed a crime, and despite the fact that his accuser Ligia Filler, has proven to be a violent criminal, a liar who has been caught in false allegations against her husband, and a physical and emotional abuser of her husband and children with a history of severe psychiatric problems.
Ligia Filler has been referred to as “certifiable” by sheriff’s department personnel who she repeatedly threatened to kill.
Mary Kellett’s professional conduct in this case breeches virtually all canons of legal ethics where it concerns prosecutors, from intentionally misleading jurors to avoiding pretrial discovery to actually asking a law enforcement officer to refuse to comply with a valid subpoena in order to help her conceal exculpatory evidence.
All of this, and many other similar cases, have been conducted under the supervision of Bar Harbor, Maine, District Attorney Carletta Bassano, leading to the almost unavoidable conclusion that the problem is not just one rogue prosecutor, but one in which District Attorney Bassano is an enabling accomplice.
Additionally, all of these events have transpired without so much as raising an eyebrow in local news media.
Given the complicity of her supervisor and the lack of attention by local media, Kellet appears emboldened to continue this reign of terror on the life of Vladek Filler, his children, and other innocents who reside in the community Kellett is supposed to protect.
After having Filler’s first conviction overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct by the Maine Supreme Court, she is coming after him again, putting him through another trial on the same slipshod evidence.
Kellett is not pursuing justice; she is making a mockery of it in ways that border on criminality. She is out of control and no one with authority over her is doing anything about it.
And given the hubris demonstrated by her actions, it is clear she feels free to proceed with impunity.
We cannot, must not, allow this to happen.
This is a battle worth choosing to fight, and A Voice for Men is not the only place that is happening. Glenn Sacks at Father’s and Families, the nation’s leader in father’s rights advocacy is speaking out about this story. You can also read about it at The False Rape Society. This article will also be running at the-spearhead.com, with thanks to our good friend Mr. W.F. Price.
The organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments(S.A.V.E.) has taken the even more significant action, sending a Complaint for the Disbarment of Prosecutor Mary Kellett to the Maine Board of Overseers for the Bar.
They have also authored a letter to Paul LePage, the Governor of Maine, referencing the disbarment complaint and making an appeal for an intervention on Mary Kellett on behalf of Vladek Filler and the people of Maine.
And you can do your part.
Write Governor LePage here and respectfully insist on an investigation to the practices of Mary N. Kellett. The message can be as simple as. “For the sake of justice, please assure that Mary Kellett is relieved of her prosecutorial duties and disbarred from the practice of law.”
Write the Board of overseers for the Bar here, and insist that they respond to the allegations against Kellett with an investigation.
Lastly, try to get the media involved. Bill Trotter does crime reporting for the Bangor Daily News. You can write email him at btrotter@bangordailynews.com or phone him at 207-460-6318 and ask him to consider investigating this story.
What is happening in Maine is only a microcosm of what is happening across the western world. So regardless of where you live, your insistent message to one or all of these people can help force them to consider looking in to Kellett’s activities. And make no mistake about it, Kellett’s actions, if unchecked, are a forecast of own future. We know this is a witch hunt, but because most are ignoring it, it will spread. If we take this silently, we have lost in the most tragic and disgraceful of ways.
This is a fight worth fighting, people. If you are reading this, you could be another Vladek Filler, or someone who cares about him. Your children could be hurt the same way his children have And your freedom, even if seemingly secure today, cannot be assured for tomorrow. As long as the likes of Mary Kellett are allowed to practice predatory prosecutions against innocent human beings no one is safe.
And if she is allowed to build a career on doing this, there will be nothing to stop the same from happening where you live.
It is your future, and your move.

Even If Your Voice Shakes

2011-03-19T05:36:00.001-07:00

Feminists & Misandry

2011-03-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

This is an edited extract from the conclusion of Spreading Misandry by Katherine K. Young & Paul Nathanson

There have probably always been feminists who have recognized misandry and been troubled by it. It flies in the face of everything feminists have learned from the experience of women and everything that some feminists claim about the innate decency of women. But it is worth pointing out that this extraordinary phenomenon, the dehumanization of half the population, has gone almost unnoticed not only by the reviewers and journalists who work for the mass media but also by the critics and theorists who write for academic journals. Despite the vaunted capacity of women for empathy, only a few feminist publications, albeit ones of profound moral significance, have so far expressed sympathy for men in general, except as a way of encouraging men to believe that feminism is in their own interest.

Until very recently, moreover, the few feminists who dared to speak out against misandry were usually declared to be enemies of feminism, or even enemies of women, and thus effectively silenced. Most feminists deny misandry. When challenged, which happens occasionally, they use three strategies: excusing it, justifying it, or trivializing it.

Women who try to excuse misandry acknowledge it as a moral problem. They do not approve of it, but they are willing to tolerate it, at least for the time being. There are several characteristic excuses. One of them is based on psychology. It is a lamentable but inevitable fact, some observe, that most women see nothing wrong with attacks on men, masculinity, or even maleness itself. People always find it hard to feel sympathy for those they consider privileged (although that did not prevent many women from feeling sympathy for the unhappily married Princess of Wales, who had access to privilege and status beyond the wildest dreams of most women or men). It is even harder for people to feel sympathy for those they consider rivals or enemies.

Another excuse is based on expediency. It is a lamentable but inevitable fact, some say, that many women succumb to misandry. However, when feeling endangered, people tend to close ranks. In a more secure future, maybe women will address the problem of misandry. Maybe, or maybe not.

Underlying all excuses for misandry is the tenacious belief that men have "all the power." Resistance to men's studies, for instance, is often based on the belief that only victims are worthy of study. The response among female academics is often as follows: "Oh, please. Something like 90 per cent of the world's resources are owned and operated by 3 per cent of the population, all of whom are white males." Never mind that this 3 per cent is a tiny fraction of the male population, even of the white male population. The underlying assumption, in any case, is that men cannot be damaged by misandry. Anyone who complains should "take it like a man." These women seldom take seriously forms of power other than physical, political, or economic power. The fact that many men do not have godlike power in any of these realms, something anyone can observe merely by walking down tthe street or watching the nightly news, makes no difference. Neither does the fact that not even physical, political, or economic power can generate emotional invincibility (assuming that this would be a good thing). They see men as a "class," in any case, not as individuals or even as a class with a "diversity" of "voices." Rendering women either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, as people who can indeed be hurt both individually and collectively, might well be the single most serious flaw in feminism. If men are truly vulnerable in any way, after all, then they can surely be expected either to fight back or to withdraw sullenly when threatened at a fundamental level. And the level of identity is about as fundamental as you can get.

Women who trivialize misandry belong in a second category, probably the most popular one (although they could be included in the first category on the grounds that the easiest way to excuse misandry is to argue that it is a trivial phenomenon.) They sometimes acknowledge misandry as a moral problem but not a serious one. They are willing to tolerate it, therefore, though not necessarily to encourage it.

Both unsophisticated women and ideological feminists are likely to say, for different reasons, that pop cultural misandry is ephemeral and trivial; lapses in good taste, common sense, or even common decency may be excused. But they would never tolerate that argument in connection with pop cultural misogyny: feminists have argued very effectively that there can be no such thing as taking that too seriously. In fact, they have made popular culture one of the chief battlegrounds in their struggle for women.

The world presented in movies or on television, they continue, is merely a fantasy world. Well, yes, but it is also a self-contained and often convincing simulation of the real world. Indeed, movies fail at the box office and shows fail in the ratings when they do not convince viewers of a likeness between the fantasy world and the real one, when they do not encourage the willing suspension of disbelief. With both this and their own intellectual or political interests in mind, those who create these productions carefully select features of everyday life that they consider significant and reject others that they consider insignificant. Virtually nothing of the real world that appears onscreen, in theatres or at home, is there by accident. Similarly, virtually nothing of the real world that "disappears" onscreen is absent by accident. In other words, movies and shows are never direct transcriptions of reality; they are always interpretations of reality. What would otherwise be dry theories of interest only to academics become powerfully evocative experiences of interest, if made with skill, to all viewers. They are secular myths. Their moral value, therefore, depends more on what kind of secular myth than on their correlation with empirical information that can be verified by historians or social scientists. It could argued that misandric movies such as those discussed in this book are either immoral or unhealthy, for instance, because they encourage people to stereotype men as evil, psychotic, or, at best, inadequate. The same argument would apply to movies that stereotype other groups of people, including women. But moral consistency is not always a high priority among critics or, for that matter, the population at large.

When criticized for their silence in the face of misandry, at any rate,these women usually argue that only "radical" feminists on the "lunatic fringe" could ever be found guilty of hatred. Others argue that misandry might have been common in the past — in the 1980s, say — but is no longer. Maybe they actually believe that. We have been told for decades that women are innately "nurturant" beings and thus virtually immune to hating. Women who do hate must therefore be rare anomalies, either the crazed victims of a male-dominated society or the crazed victims of some psychological or physiological disorder. Theory not-withstanding, the evidence presented to everyone in everyday life indicates that women are no less capable of prejudice and hatred than men.

Women who try to justify misandry are in an entirely different category. They do not acknowledge it as a moral problem, but on the contrary see it as a moral and practical duty. Thus, they are willing not merely to tolerate it but also to encourage it.

Some women try to justify misandry as a legitimate "choice" for women, a "voice" for those who have been "silenced." Expressing anger is useful, they believe, as one feature of collective therapy for women. But they make the dubious assumption that misandry is about anger, not hatred. Even feminists who disapprove of Andrea Dworkin's misandric claim that any act of sexual intercourse with men amounts to rape, for example, often defend her as someone who "pushes the boundaries" and thus promotes the cause of women (albeit in a way that embarrasses some of them).

In its most sophisticated form, this attempt at justification is couched in terms of postmodernism. Once that became de rigueur among feminists, they could argue that man-hating was merely one example of the "diversity" or "pluralism" within feminism. According to one variant of this strategy, misandry is not aimed at all men but only at those with "privileged" status: rich men, white men, or any other group of elite men. Yet the distinction is often more theoretical and politically correct than practical, because they go on to argue that all men benefit from the behaviour of those few. Implicit, therefore, is the belief that all men are intentionally or unintentionally the enemies of Women and therefore legitimate targets of attack in popular culture.

Other women try to justify misandry on the purely practical grounds of political expediency. Even passive sympathy with men in connection with misandry would be tantamount to sympathy for the enemy or even, as one feminist put it in when her university was considering the establishment of a men's studies program, sympathy for Nazis. Whether in connection with movies and talk shows or greeting cards and comic strips, moreover, misandry is seen as a legitimate attack on those who foster misogyny. That is fighting fire with fire. They are not troubled by the moral non sequitur. The continued existence of misogyny has nothing whatever to do with the existence of misandry, after all — not unless two wrongs make a right. To those who point out that misogyny is being fought directly through legislation and indirectly through the manipulation of public opinion, some would reply that it persists in the form of a "glass ceiling" (even though the explanation of that problem does not necessarily involve misogyny) or that it persists in non-Western countries and in non-Western subcultures within the West. Once again, though, what has one thing got to do with the other? How does the existence of misogyny justify misandry, whether in our society or any other?

Still other women try to justify misandry with something far more sinister in mind: revenge. They argue that negative stereotypes of men are long overdue, because negative stereotypes of women have been around for so long. If that argument is to be taken seriously on moral grounds, those who use it would have to demonstrate that revenge is synonymous, or at least compatible, with justice. But if negative stereotyping is wrong when applied to women, how can it he right when applied to men? Is there nothing inherently wrong with promoting contempt or hatred for an entire group of people? If not, then things are right or wrong only when it is politically expedient to say so. In addition, advocates of this approach would have to demonstrate on purely pragmatic grounds that it is likely to bring about the desired results. The practical problem with revenge, of course, is that it quickly becomes a vicious circle. Once it is accepted as a legitimate political device, there is no way to prevent or terminate vendettas. And the current state of relations between men and women could well be described in precisely that way.

Underlying all of these attempts to justify misandry is a fundamental problem. Morality and practicality sometimes seem incompatible. Some women believe that feeling or expressing concern for men as the victims of misandry would mean indulging in a luxury that women cannot afford — this despite the vaunted capacity of women for compassion. But since when is compassion like money? Must it be carefully budgeted by reserving it for one's own people? Must we avoid squandering it on those judged "undeserving" for one reason or another? The fact is, nevertheless, that the more compassion is "spent," the more there is to go around.

Other women believe that taking any problem of men seriously would mean taking a non-feminist point of view. In fact, it would mean taking men as seriously as they see themselves, as people. The worldview of ideological feminism, like that of every other religion or movement, is all inclusive; nothing is beyond its purview. From that perspective, it would seem that men can be understood best through its lens.The trouble is that this form of feminism has no philosophical or moral framework for the notion that women, like men, can succumb to sexism or that men, like women, can be seriously damaged by hatred. To the extent that feminists refuse to focus much attention on their own gains (mainly because doing so would undermine their call for continuing political action), and to the extent that they refuse to acknowledge the problems of men (including misandry as the intentional or unintentional fallout from ideological feminism), they are morally implicated in the problem. That perspective leaves women largely unaccountable for their own behaviour.

What about the reactions of men to misandry? Ironically, many ordinary men have a vested interest in not seeing the pervasive misandry of everyday life. Misandry, no matter how trite it might seem on the surface, is an attack on men. Even worse, from a traditionally masculine point of view, it is an attack from the perspective of women (though not necessarily by women). To acknowledge being under attack is to acknowledge vulnerability. And to acknowledge vulnerability, for many men in our society, is to deny their own manhood, even if doing so would be in their own best interest. Being a man, they have been taught, means being in control, not necessarily of others but certainly of themselves and their own fate. These are often the men who find it easier to hide behind macho posturing than to admit being threatened by women (or by other men presumably acting on behalf of women).

Many men, therefore, find that acknowledging the problem of rampant misandry is too painful. Some ignore it. That usually happens at a subconscious level. Other men, though, deny it. That happens on a conscious level among those who are sincerely motivated by the need to ensure justice for women, not merely by the pressure of political correctness. (Some of these men, unfortunately, actually believe that men are morally responsible for most or all of women's problems.) This could mean internalizing a negative identity, which would be both neurotic and self-destructive. But "male feminists" have discovered a way of getting around that problem: they maintain their self-respect not as members of a group (men) but as individuals at its expense (as what could be called "honorary women"). They expect nothing from other men, but they do expect to be rewarded by women for being polically correct. Not many men are impressed by the self-righteousness inherent in that position. They are alienated not only from feminists in general, therefore, but from "male feminists" in particular (even though many of them believe that men are morally obliged to help create a more egalitarian society).

Most men, however, are probably too confused to take a position specifically on misandry. They are aware at some level of consciousness that something is wrong, but they are not equipped to identify or analyse it. Even the few men who really are equipped to do so often find it difficult to say anything in public. The taboo on male vulnerability is not only experienced internally, remember, but also enforced externally. Men who admit to feeling vulnerable are attacked as cowards, and by no group more effectively than women. The ability to shame men has always been among the most useful of women's weapons. In this case, men are shamed into silence, a form of abuse that few women today would tolerate.

What is happening to men as a result of this massive assault on their identity? How do men feel about being portrayed over and over again as psychotic or sinister thugs? What does it mean for a group of people to be identified as a class of victimizers? We will not know the full effect of all this misandry for many years. Given the predictable results of unleashing institutionalized anger against identifiable target groups (which is hatred) and the unpredictable results of manipulating collective guilt (which would be either destruction or self-destruction), this is a questionable method for pursuing social change, to say the least. In the meantime, one thing is certain: attacking the identity of any group of human beings per se is an extremely dangerous experiment. People are not like rats in a laboratory. They cannot be manipulated conveniently and safely with fairly predictable results. Misandry could convince some men to seek new sources of identity. To be effective, however, these would have to be chosen by men, not dictated by women. At issue here is identity, in short, not sociology. It should be obvious that most men consciously or unconsciously resent misandry. That is because all people resent having their identity undermined or attacked. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that misandry can backfire on women. What if men feel the need to reassert their identity as men? Ironically, misandry could encourage other men to reassert their identity as macho aggressors. Since our society tolerates a high level of hostility towards men as such, why be surprised when they resort to misogyny? That, after all, is a major feature of machismo. And it is surely no accident that the resurgence of machismo in the 1980s — consider movies such as Rambo and Top Gun, which suddenly ended two decades of glorifying the mentality of those men who had rejected both Vietnam and Wall Street — coincided with the flowering of ideological feminism. This particular response to misandry is clear. If men are told over and over again that they are not only brutal subhumans in general but also hostile to women in particular, they are likely to say, "So be it." Whatever their own inclinations, they realize that even a negative identity is better than no identity at all. Thus, when women think about misandry in popular culture, they should consider the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies. What goes around, according to the old saying, comes around. Or, for those who prefer biblical allusions, whoever sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind.

That possibility is often denied by those who view misandry as a political weapon to fight misogyny. They argue that the immediate result might be polarization but the eventual result will be reconciliation. In other words, the end justifies the means. But if polarization can bring about changes for the better, it can also bring about changes for the worse. How do we know that polarization will give rise to reconciliation? We do not. At the moment, things are moving in the opposite direction.

At any rate, the possibilities for mutual understanding between women and men did not increase in the 1990s. On the contrary, they diminished. Women such as Andrea Dworkin openly advocated that women become vigilantes and murder the men who afflict them. If any of this indicates the shape of things to come — and much of the material we have analysed might have been produced by Dworkin herself — those who hope for healing and reconciliation have every reason to look ahead with foreboding. The popular culture of misandry had a life of its own in 2000. Ideological feminists had to make only occasional appearances to ensure that it stayed that way.

Fostered by political correctness, misandry was the characteristic pattern of the 1990s. At first, it was actively promoted in academic and political circles as justifiable "anger" or a way of "pushing the boundaries." And this tendency, directly promoted on talk shows and either directly or indirectly in other genres of popular culture, quickly went mainstream. Popular culture both mediated and fostered the teaching of contempt for men. This was now the establishment. Androcentrism, often accompanied by misogyny, did not cease to exist but generally went underground (although it probably declined too, because many men really did take seriously the message that an androcentric world was unjust to women). It surfaced only in the music of very alienated subcultures, among individual men who "forgot" the new rules, and in some traditional or isolated communities. To the extent that gynocentrism and androcentrism can be described as worldviews, then the dominant worldview of this period, at least in public, was clearly gynocentrism. The fact that it has a dark underside has been ignored, excused, and trivialized. The revolution has been successful, as Marxists would say, because the new values are now so firmly embedded in everyday life that we can hardly see them, let alone challenge them. That is why we have written this book.

Now You See A Feminist, Now You Don't

2011-03-02T14:35:00.000-08:00

More from Hugh & Mary, & the most exalted 6oodfella. This stuff is gold.. And so funny it'll make you wee through your nose:

"..Dworkin is famous for having her photo used in most households to keep children away from the fire.."

AVFM

2011-03-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

I have just listened to history being made: the pilot broadcast of Paul Elam's A Voice For Men radio show, the world's first weekly radio show devoted to men's rights & men's issues in general. Obviously, it's very, very early days, so I don't know where it's going to go but it feels like something quite momentous. I realized, listening to the phone-ins, that this is the first time I'd ever heard two peoples voices talking about any of this stuff. Up until now it has been books & the internet, individuals posting blogs & youtube videos. This is the very first open, communal statement & dialogue addressing this culture of misandry. It's a big thing. Like I say, the sound of history being made.

A Voice For Men can be heard every tuesday at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avoiceformen

On Feminism

2011-03-01T17:06:00.001-08:00

An Evening with Dr. Louann Brizendine

2011-02-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

An entertaining introduction to, & synopsis of, some of the most interesting parts of Dr. Brizendine's books on the brain differences between men & women.

Truth Alone

2011-02-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to Truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.

-Mohandas K. Gandhi

Domestic Violence Myths Help No One

2011-02-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

by Christina Hoff Sommers

"The facts are clear," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45."
That's a horrifying statistic, and it would be a shocking reflection of the state of the black family, and American society generally, if it were true. But it isn't true.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice Department's own Bureau of Justice Statistics, the leading causes of death for African-American women between the ages 15-45 are cancer, heart disease, unintentional injuries such as car accidents, and HIV disease. Homicide comes in fifth--and includes murders by strangers. In 2006 (the latest year for which full statistics are available), several hundred African-American women died from intimate partner homicide--each one a tragedy and an outrage, but far fewer than the approximately 6,800 women who died of the other leading causes.
Yet Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department website for more than a year.
How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.
In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.
World Cup abuse?
Yet the story has proved too politically convenient to kill off altogether. Last summer, it came back to life on a different continent and with a new accent. During the 2010 World Cup, British newspapers carried stories with headlines such as "Women's World Cup Abuse Nightmare" and informed women that the games could uncover "for the first time, a darker side to their partner." Fortunately, a BBC program called Law in Action took the unusual route pioneered by Ringle: The news people actually checked the facts. Their conclusion: a stunt based on cherry-picked figures.
But when the BBC journalists presented the deputy chief constable, Carmel Napier, from the town of Gwent with evidence that the World Cup abuse campaign was based on twisted statistics, she replied: "If it has saved lives, then it is worth it."
It is not worth it. Misinformation leads to misdirected policies that fail to target the true causes of violence. Worse, those who promulgate false statistics about domestic violence, however well-meaning, promote prejudice. Most of the exaggerated claims implicate the average male in a social atrocity. Why do that? Anti-male misandry, like anti-female misogyny, is unjust and dangerous. Recall what happened at Duke University a few years ago when many seemingly fair-minded students and faculty stood by and said nothing while three innocent young men on the Duke Lacrosse team were subjected to the horrors of a modern-day witch hunt.
And then there's Iran
Worst of all, misinformation about violence against women suggests a false moral equivalence between societies where women are protected by law and those where they are not. American and British societies are not perfect, but we have long ago decided that violence against women is barbaric. By contrast, the Islamic Republic of Iran--where it is legal to bury an adulterous woman up to her neck and stone her--was last year granted a seat on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the decision by noting Iranian women are far better off than women in the West. "What is left of women's dignity in the West?" he asked. He then came up with a statistic to drive home his point: "In Europe almost 70% of housewives are beaten by their husbands."
That was a self-serving lie. Western women, with few exceptions, are safe and free. Iranian women are neither. Officials like Attorney General Holder, the deputy constable of Gwent, and the activists and journalists who promoted the Super Bowl and World Cup hoaxes, unwittingly contribute to such twisted deceptions.
Victims of intimate violence are best served by the truth. Eric Holder should correct his department's website immediately.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. This article originally appeared here.

CUT : Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision

2011-01-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

This is the first Trigger Alert post which actually needs a 'trigger' warning - there are scenes of the actual circumcisions that are bloody & hard to watch, & personally, I had to look away. However, this is a sensitive & thoughtful documentary by the Chicago filmmaker Eli Ungar-Sargon, mainly covering the issue from a Jewish perspective. The full-length DVD of the film can be found at www.CutTheFilm.com

Feminism, Misandry, and Romance Novels

2011-01-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

by Zoe Winters

I write romance, so automatically I’m an optimist when it comes to the love potential between the sexes. While I recognize the validity of homosexual and bisexual love, I write heterosexual love. And quite frankly, men and women have a lot to overcome these days.

The general hatred and fear of the opposite sex that I’ve witnessed in others makes me honestly question how anyone manages to overcome the hurdles around them and their psyche in order to engage in consensual heterosexual sex.

I am not a feminist. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate SOME of what feminism has done. I think it’s nifty that women have more career options for those with those particular drives/ambitions in life. I think it’s swell that women are regarded as intellectual and moral equals of men. And I do prize my right to vote.

However, in the long run, I believe feminism on the whole has done more harm than good. I say this because of the huge divisiveness caused between the sexes. Everything is “misogyny,” even honest opinion that actually ends up being correct such as: “for the most part women aren’t suited to being firefighters.” They aren’t. That might burn your biscuits or whatever, but frankly men are physically stronger for the most part. If I’m trapped in a burning building I want a big burly man coming up after me, not a woman who got the job through an affirmative action lawsuit and lowering of the physical requirements for her entrance into the fireman boy’s club.

What is often overlooked is the HUGE amount of misandry floating around our culture. Misandry isn’t talked about that much, so in the event that you don’t know, it’s the fear and hatred of men. Hearing some of the rude, shameful, disrespectful and emotionally abusive bullshit coming out of women’s mouths toward men, and society doesn’t even blink…I have to say there is a lot of misandry.

And women in our culture are trained to fear men. Despite the fact that the biological drive for all but a very small percentage of men is to protect and care for women, not abuse or kill or rape them.

One thing that highly irritates me, enough to rant about it, is the social indoctrination I was raised with as a result of feminism and how highly devalued and degraded traditional female roles have become. Like its somehow beneath a woman to be a wife and mother. Now personally I don’t aspire to motherhood, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a role worth pursuing. I recognize I’m in the minority as a woman who doesn’t want children of her own. And because of that I would never dream to belittle another woman’s desire for children.

Further, while this isn’t always true…in many cases most women do the majority of the cooking, cleaning and child rearing. Now most of them have full time jobs as well. How is this liberation? Someone please explain it to me. I’m not sure how other women are wired, but frankly I just don’t have the DRIVE to work for other human beings that I’m not in an intimate relationship with.

But here is something maybe not everybody fully grasps. Mammalian heterosexual relations work as follows: Aggressive dominant display by the male. Submissive response by the female. Coupling. Game. Set. Match. Humans are the only mammals (to my knowledge, if I’m wrong on this, correct me with some backup research please. I’m willing to be wrong, but I expect actual documentation.), where the female will accept a weaker male.

This is evolution. Male dominance, female submission. This does NOT mean “all men” as a society should dominate “all women.” Nor does it mean abusive behavior is okay. Nor does it mean that people who naturally don’t fit these generalities should follow them. If you’re female and need to be the dominant party because that’s your GENUINE natural drive, and not something you were socially conditioned to think, fine. More power to you. Ya Ya!

It’s just that somehow, after millions of years of evolution, the feminist movement comes along and decides that nature is both shameful and imaginary. So we have the bizarre circumstance of a woman who wants to stay home and raise a family, who doesn’t want an outside career and who frankly is operating on the evolutionary biological norm…who has to “come to terms with” her “shameful” submissive nature. What the hell?

Seriously?

Somehow though, despite all the indoctrination….despite all the shame, and women feeling like they have to be exactly like men…somehow romance continues to be the bestselling genre. And romance mostly features dominant alpha males.

So this ends up being a guilty fantasy instead of any type of workable reality. And it’s sad. For those curious about why so many women end up with abuser after abuser…it can be summed up in what I said about mammalian mating habits. They’re instinctively looking for the “dominant display.” And since most American males have been socially conditioned to be more passive, the ONLY display they have to go on for the most part, is that of an abusive male, who will turn that power against them.

Are we really coming to the place socially where the only way anyone’s desires can be acted upon is through fiction?

Men Slandered As Pedophiles

2011-01-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

The only good news about this is it's too serious even for Bernard's terrifying smile:

Germaine Greer on Male & Female Genital Mutilation

2011-01-13T04:43:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, I have a soft spot for Germaine Greer. It's true, of course, that much of her writing is openly contemptuous of men, & therefore surely the very opposite of everything this library should be housing. But beyond all that sorry misandry, she has a good mind, & her own opinions. Of all the major second-wave feminist writings I found The Female Eunuch to be the most interesting, intelligent & (comparitively speaking) fair. And she has, as Dennis Potter once said of her, the courage to change her mind in public, which is a quality I much admire in anyone, & one which should be treasured wherever found. So, I like to hear what she has to say, even if I disagree with the greater part of it.

In her book The Whole Woman (1999) she writes on the double-standard of male & female circumcision. She asks by what standard the West judges those parts of the world that still practice female circumcision when male genital mutilation is freely & openly carried out at home in America on going on two-thirds of all infant boys, & girls cut themselves, pierce themselves & surgically alter themselves in their millions. She was vilified by practically all organized Feminism for this stance, although it seems to me to be an extremely reasonable, moral, & thoughtful point of view, intelligently stated. The following is a condensed extract from it. It's not the right opinion, or the wrong opinion, it's just an opinion that deserves to be heard but isn't.

_______________________________________

Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been condemned as a violation of human rights by the International Conference on Population and Development, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, and the United Nations Family Planning Authority. Male genital mutilation is seldom condemned. Men mutilate the genitals of other men; usually women mutilate the genitals of other women, except where the procedure is carried out by a male professional. In England a doctor will be struck off the medical register if it is found that he has carried out a female circumcision of any kind. He will not be struck off for splitting a penis down the middle so that its owner can insert rings in it fore and aft for the gratification of himself and partners. He will not be struck off but rather encouraged to 'tidy up' the ambiguous genitalia of intersexual newborns, usually by removing the inadequate penis and creating an opening that will pass for vagina, so that the child becomes a girl, regardless of actual chromosomal make-up. And he may massively mutilate built men and women seeking gender reassignment. But he may not carry out any form of female circumcision at the request of a patient or her parents.

Human beings have always modified the external appearance of their bodies in one way or another; one man's beautification is another man's mutilation. Looked at in its full context the criminalization of FGM can be seen to be what African nationalists since Jomo Kenyatta have been calling it, an attack on cultural identity. Any suggestion that male genital mutilation should be outlawed would be understood to be a frontal attack on the cultural identity of Jews and Muslims.

Notwithstanding, the opinion that male circumcision might be bad for babies, bad for sex and bad for men is steadily gaining ground. In Denmark nearly 2 per cent of non-Jewish and non-Muslim men are circumcised on strictly medical grounds; in Britain the proportion rises to between 6 per cent and 7 per cent, but in the US between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of male babies will have their foreskins surgically removed. No UN agency has uttered a single protocol condemning the widespread practice of male genital mutilation, which will not be challenged until doctors start to be sued in large numbers by men they mutilated as infants. Silence on the question of male circumcision is evidence of the political power both of the communities where a circumcised penis is considered an essential identifying mark and of the practitioners who continue to do it for no good reason. Silence about male mutilation in our own countries combines nicely with noisiness on female mutilation in other countries to reinforce our notions of cultural superiority.

To be sure there are influential feminists who are fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries and their struggle must be supported but not to the point of refusing to consider the different priorities and cultural norms by which other women live. When I explained to Sudanese women that western women sometimes have their breasts cut and trimmed, they were every bit as mystified and horrified as we are by Pharaonic incision and infibulation. Stephanie Welsh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her photographs of the ceremonies surrounding female circumcision in rural Kenya, described it as 'a wonderful ritual that unifies the tribe. It's very beautiful - except for the circumcision itself.' Welsh's prize-winning photostory traces the lead-up to the climactic ritual: first the girl's mother builds the house where she will live as a woman; then the girl has her head shaved; circumcised women from surrounding villages gather to paint her with red ochre and assure her that she will have no pain; then they hold her down and stifle her cries as her own mother cuts her with a razor and plasters goat fat on the wound.

Male genital mutilation is considered trivial; female genital mutilation is considered devastating even if it involves nothing more than nicking the prepuce of the clitoris to provoke ritual bleeding. FGM takes so many forms that it is doubtful whether it represents a single phenomenon with a single cultural significance. The WHO recognizes degrees of severity of mutilation, one, in which the hood of the clitoris and surrounding tissue are removed, two, in which the clitoris and the labia minora are removed and three, infibulation, widespread in Somalia, Northern Sudan and Djibouti, in which the clitoris and labia minora are removed and raw surfaces created on the labia majora so that they can be stitched together to form a seal over the urethra and most of the introitus of the vagina. The accepted view of what these practices mean can he summed up as follows:

Beliefs and practices regarding Female Genital Mutilation seem to show a desire to control women's sexual experience and reinforce established gender roles. They support a priority of male over female sexual satisfaction (often at reproductive risk to women) and give evidence of profound ambivalence among men regarding the sexual needs and concerns of women.

This is indeed a curious explanation of something that women do to women, because it suggests that they are simply carrying out the desires of men, desires which in these cultures men would never have discussed with them. In Ethiopia circumcision is common but not universal among both Christian and Muslim women; when I asked Ethiopian men whether they preferred sex with circumcised or uncircumcised women they appeared not to know. They could not say for certain whether the women in their own families were circumcised or not. Circumcised women in Sudan told me that it was 'no problem for the sex' but 'a big problem with the childbirth'. They thought they might not have it done for their daughters, because it was going out of fashion, but when their mothers became agitated and said that their granddaughters would be considered ugly and unmarriageable, they said maybe they would do it anyway. These Sudanese women were very sensual and up front about their erotic interests; it is impossible to think of them as having no notion of their own sexual pleasure.

There is also a pronounced cosmetic element in the way women talk of their own circumcision. Many women who are circumcised or infibulated also remove absolutely all their body hair; the depilated, infibulated genitalia become virtually invisible — as they were in all western painting and sculpture very recently. Certainly FGM represents a significant health risk but it must also be a procedure with considerable cultural value because it has survived fifty years of criminalization and concerted propaganda campaigns. The fact that it is both painful and dangerous adds to its undeniable function as ideal in the rite of passage from child to woman. As UN workers in Eastern Uganda found, women would not abandon female circumcision until some similarly significant procedure could take its place.

Though I was among the feminists at Mexico City in 1985 who first raised the problem of FGM in an international forum, I am loath now to pronounce upon its significance as a cultural phenomenon given the occult attachment to self-mutilation that can be discerned in our own culture. This can perhaps be explained as partly an angered response to being defined as our bodies. The woman who cuts her body asserts undeniably and emphatically that there is a self that has power over that body. Time and again we are told by young women who cut themselves that they find release in watching their own blood flow. Self-harming of this kind is not a cry for help nor is it clamouring for attention, because it is secret. It is a genuine attack by the self upon the body, by which mental anguish swapped for bodily pain. Self-harming is older than Christendom, embedded in contrition, penance and expiation and rotten with guilt.

Piercing is no less mysterious to a non-piercer than cutting, but the underlying dynamic is similar. Perhaps we should be considering the possibility that FGM acts in a similar way to assert the individual woman's control over her genitals and to customize them to her specification, which may also be the hallmark of the group to which she wishes to signify her allegiance. If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?

We ought at least to entertain the notion that the African woman is having FGM done for herself and allow her the same access to professional assistance as jen angel can expect. Instead of prescribing improved operating techniques and antisepsis, westernized governments have criminalized FGM and driven it underground, so that the painfulness of the procedure and the attendant health hazards are much magnified. In our own culture girls too young to qualify for professional piercings have been known to do it themselves. I used to teach at a school where bad girls carved their own tattoos with steel pen-nibs and coloured them with school-issue ink.

Thirty years ago parents were not fighting with their sons and daughters over piercings and tattoos. No teeny-hopper heroine sported a stud through her tongue as Scary Spice does and sticks her tongue out ostentatiously to prove it. The tongue stud is supposed to have an erotic function in stimulating the underside of the penis during fellatio. What the Spice Girls' eight-year-old girl fans make of this is anybody's guess. Mothers know that their daughters' insistence on having a nose stud or a navel piercing or a bracelet of barbed wire tattooed around an arm is an act of hostility towards them. The child is asserting her right to alter irrevocably, even to damage and destroy, the body that her mother grew for her out of her own substance. The child thinks she is claiming her own body, wiling her autonomy; the mother sees it as mindless tribal behaviour, pretty much as the 'first' world sees FGM. The mother wants the tattoo parlours closed down, and piercing banned. The law capitulates only so far as to impose an age limit, thus presenting the mutilation even more effectively as a privilege, a goal to be fought for, a sign of adulthood, a rite of passage. Though we might suspect that the child who thinks she needs a nose-ring might be afraid that her face is a blank in need of illustration, that she becomes a piercer and tattooer because rings and tattoos make her visible to herself, we have got to see that this is no more than a continuation of the incessantly stimulated desire in the little girl to bedizen herself, to change her hair colour, to paint her face, and her nails. All these are ways of making herself visible. Or invisible, depending how she sees it.

Redefining Men

2010-12-12T03:23:00.000-08:00

Another one of JohnTheOther's great videos - Isn't it time someone give this man a daytime talk show? Or at the very least one of those huge tannoy speakers to strap to the back of his bicycle..

Christopher Hitchens on Male Genital Mutilation

2010-12-08T14:43:00.000-08:00

On the issue of religion i am usually on the other side of the fence* to Hitchens, but on this matter i find i am 100% wholeheartedly in agreement. Male circumcision is practised by most of the societies that practise female circumcision, & more, for the same reasons & with comparable effects. Female Genital Mutilation, however, is considered just about the worst crime imaginable pretty much everywhere in the world, while Male Genital Mutilation is legal in every country & a joke the world over.

There is something to be learned here about how ideology - religious or otherwise - has an uncanny power to blind human beings to the actual reality of what is staring them in the face. If you truly cannot see that taking a razor & cutting parts off of healthy male infant's genitals is the same as taking a razor & cutting parts off of healthy female infant's genitals, then whatever is happening inside you at this very second is that process. Take a moment to step back & look at how you have got here.

For more information on both Male & Female Genital Mutilation please check the 'Resources' sidebar.

*or rather, the other side of the debate altogether: it has always been clear to me the monotheistic religions [Judaism/Christianity/Islam] & Atheism are actually on the same side of the scales: the present day reductive materialist belief-system of the west - which includes Atheism - emerged out of Christian/monotheistic thought & would not - could not - have existed without it. It takes a breathtakingly limited worldview to define all religious experience as simply the modern west's experience of monotheism. The monotheistic religions go back 2 or 3 thousand years & have bred intolerance, war & fundamentalism. The religious experience of humanity, on the other hand, goes back at least a hundreds times that long, & is perhaps the defining characteristic of our species. There has never been, in all the thousands of tribes, nations, & civilizations ever discovered & recorded, been a culture found without it.

Religions may well be for sheep. That doesn't mean the concerns of religions are for sheep. They are the questions that all human beings eventually have to ask of themselves & the universe. But that's another matter, & for somewhere else than here.

Tyrannies

2010-12-07T06:39:00.000-08:00

by David Warren

One of the truest things said about Iran under the mullahs is "nothing in that country is quite as it appears." This is something journalists should know about Iran, or about any country where ideological misrepresentations of reality have been introduced, on a huge scale, for the very purpose of altering reality.

For the Shah was not the only thing overthrown during the Khomeinist takeover of 1979. In their attempt to reconstruct abiding Persia as a utopian, "revolutionary," quasi-Muslim quasi-state, the mullahs launched an attack on reality itself. Predictably, it has failed and, as we see today, a generation raised entirely on their doctrines and under their watchful thugs shows no gratitude.

Yet, as we saw before, during and after the fall of Communist regimes in Europe, tyranny does not evaporate like the morning dew. It is a spiritual poison, leaching into the soil. The effects of tyranny outlive the regime of tyranny, in the victims of tyranny. A typical side-effect is a kind of double-vision, in which reality and unreality remain simultaneously in view.

It becomes almost impossible to recover reality, because the tyrants so assiduously tampered with it. "The people" still half-believe the indoctrination; conversely, many of them openly embrace real evils, simply because they appear the opposite of the evils the regime embraced. Confusion reigns. Everything has been demonized; time is required, and the longer operations of nature, to sort what is good from what is bad.

Today's column is not about Iran, but I mention the country because we watch from a distance. That is what makes smugness possible. Nothing as horrible as what happens there has yet happened here. We feel secretly superior to people who've had to face circumstances we cannot imagine.

I remember the outrage of a Czech exile, a generation ago (before the Communists had fallen), receiving an uptight, self-righteous lecture from a shallow Canadian acquaintance. The latter said the enslaved Czechs should be blamed for co-operating with their Communist masters. Why didn't they just refuse to obey orders?

He was speaking to a man who had spent 12 years in labour camps for disobeying orders. Yet that was beside the point. The Canadian was speaking about things beyond his comprehension. My Czech friend, who had turned almost purple from his effort to contain himself, said only: "You are a fool." His Canadian interlocutor walked off, looking even more pleased with himself than usual. This Czech could have said more. I will say it for him.

In contemporary Canada we also face tyranny, but of a sort that we have brought upon ourselves in ways no Czechs, no Persians, ever did. There is no regime in Ottawa that seized power by violence, and imposed the "politically correct" ideology on us from a party manifesto. The advance of this tyranny -- of the Nanny State and all its trappings -- has been accomplished in plain view, by incremental advances, with our co-operation.

In two generations, we have witnessed a transformation, and nearly an inversion, of all the moral and ethical principles that guided us through countless generations before. The "revolution" has been accomplished by such means as George Orwell predicted: by changing the meanings of words.

Most overtly it has been done with "rights language" -- by the construction of new, artificial and quite abstract "group" rights that are anathematic to individual freedom. But beneath this, we have watched court and legislative interventions to redefine such basic ideas as manhood, fatherhood; womanhood, motherhood -- a purposeful destruction of the family in the cause of extending the powers of the state. We have likewise watched the religious order of society being systematically undermined, so that atheism or "irreligion" has become the default position from which the state now issues its ukases.

And we have allowed this and more, through the very laxity that shallow Canadian condemned in Czechs. We have accommodated the new powers, for fear of being isolated and ostracized.

I wrote last week about the evil of "feminism," and of the need to reverse its advance. It is typical of the present pseudo-reality that I am then attacked for being "anti-woman." It is further assumed, most obnoxiously, that I blame "women" for feminism -- thus playing the same game, of using one sex as a club to smash the other.

But no, I blame cowards -- most of them men.

Contemporary feminism did not prevail on such argumentative points as Betty Friedan included in her psychotic ravings. The movement had practical sponsors, who, for the most part, weren't female. They were men who wanted "free love" (read: copulation); who embraced contraception because it would free male pleasures from male responsibilities, and turn women very much into "objects" of their desire. That is how men conceded the high feminist ground.

Tyranny -- dehumanization -- advanced, because men failed to be men, women failed to be women, and both sexes pretended to become "persons" on an analogy more animal than divine. And today, nothing in our country is quite as it appears.

Run, Little Man, If You Can

2010-12-07T02:37:00.000-08:00

Oldie but goodie from Ilana Mercer :

In every boy there’s a girl waiting to break free. If boys were only encouraged to get in touch with their Inner Whiner, the problems plaguing them in schools and society at large would likely dissipate.

Distilled to its essence, this is the position some in the women’s movement are advancing. Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them.

The new friendlier feminism is oddly attractive to men, who’ve been snarled at for so long by these attack dogs. One such dog in disguise is Carol Gilligan. At the risk of engaging in what liberals call “lookism” (I note that the anti-ageism bigots have taken to deriding Ann Coulter for being in her 40s), here's a photo of her.

The tumbleweed hair and the ghoulish grimace ought to be enough to make all men head for the hills. But Gilligan gulls the gents because hers is a slightly more evolved feminism.

Most feminists have dedicated their careers to denying the facts of nature, namely that men and women are different. Not Gilligan. On discovering the genders have “differing moral and psychological tendencies,” she devoted herself to elevating the sillier sex’s proclivities.

You see, before they were so thoroughly feminized, “males and masculine persons” settled moral and ethical dilemmas differently to “females and feminine persons”—they were inclined to draw on individual rights and justice. Ladies, conversely, generally like collectivist considerations such as what is best for the group.

On observing this, Gilligan morphed psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development from a theory of absolute morality to a theory of relative morality: She decreed that reasoning rooted in collectivism was every bit as evolved and just as that based on individualism.

It recently dawned on Gilligan that boys had fallen far behind girls in almost all walks of life. Did this elicit introspection? Did she reflect on the crimes caused by codifying feminism into law? Did she finally confess to what privileging women and “women’s way of knowing” has wrought?

Affirmative action, the equal representation of women everywhere (including in sports), progressive teaching paradigms emphasizing group think; the banishing of competition (for which boys are hardwired) and moral instruction (which they generally crave); the demonization of the greatest writers, scientists, and explorers because they were men, the chemical castration of boys via Ritalin—was Gilligan driven to atone for these transgressions against boys and change direction? Did she even make the connection between men’s problems and the “Girls Gone Wild” gains of the women’s movement?

Not on your life.

In a recent column for Newsweek, Gilligan writes: “That boys are having trouble with school is not news. But images of rough-and-tumble boys not fit for the classroom now may blind us to a problem that has less to do with how boys seem and more with who they actually are—but are not allowed to show.”

That men have practically been made over in the image of woman is not enough for Gilligan. Their final “recovery,” as she sees it, lies in embracing the alleged woman within with complete abandon. Or in Gilligan speak, getting in touch with one’s "emotional intelligence," "relational self," and "feeling brain."

Gilligan’s credentials for “fixing” problems “scholars” like her have created include “having read ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye,’” and thus knowing “that boys and school don't mix.” Her scientific data are as compelling—they’re drawn from a one-case study of a badly abused little boy.

As Gilligan tells it, “Four-year-old Sam asked his mother one day, ‘Mommy, why are you sad?’ Wanting to shield him from her sadness, [mom] replied, ‘I'm not sad.’ Then, according to Gilligan, poor Sam sprung his Inner Girl. “Mommy, I know you. I was inside you,” he told his long-suffering mother.

No tyke will spontaneously refer to his mother’s uterus unless he has been taught to. This boy sounds as normal as Alexander Portnoy, the antihero of Philip Roth’s eponymous Portnoy's Complaint.

But for Gilligan, there’s nothing creepy about a toddler’s reference to his mother’s entrails. Au contraire. She casts the clearly contrived and inculcated womb talk as natural—as just the “kind of emotional openness, sensitivity and connectedness” men are forced to suppress for fear of appearing unmanly. “[B]oys often repudiate these human qualities,” she laments. If they “can be encouraged to embrace them, these qualities will develop, expanding their capacity for relationships and also their sense of themselves.”

Vagina monologues or uterus prattle—feminists believe that as long as their insides are being discussed, humanity’s progress is guaranteed.

Remember the cult, 1967 British television series The Prisoner ("I am not a number—I am a free man!")? Whenever “Number 6” (the individual) attempted to escape from “The Village” (the collective), a giant balloon called “Rover” gave chase and subdued him. Little Sam’s metaphoric “Rover,” you can be sure, is his mother’s suffocating monster womb.

Unless the men’s movement is more concerned with claiming victimhood than reclaiming manhood, its advocates ought not to go along with feminism’s new, kinder castration.

How Negative Depictions Of Men Make Women Look Bad

2010-12-03T06:35:00.000-08:00

At last! After a long hiatus the majestic 6oodfella is back, with another park bench sit-down between gender-defenders Hugh Jass & Mary Hinge. I love these, some of the most righteous & funny things I've ever seen. Why won't someone give this guy a TV show? Or at least a slot on Sesame Street..

By the way, if you are interested in some of the points raised here about the methods & agendas of advertising, i recommend doing some research into Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who began many of the modern techniques of advertising back in the 1920's & 30's, by applying his uncles theories of the subconscious to first commerce & eventually politics. There is an excellent documentary on this by Adam Curtis entitled 'The Century Of The Self' which I suggest you take a look at.

German Family Minister Speaks Out Against Feminism

2010-11-22T04:57:00.000-08:00

Kristina Schröder, the German Family Minister, spoke recently to SPIEGEL magazine of the shortcomings of feminism. The full interview can be found here, but it's long & the interviewers are rather annoying so here are some of the highlights:

Schröder: I don't agree with a core statement by most feminists, the statement by Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." Even as a schoolgirl I wasn't convinced by the claim that gender has nothing to do with biology and is only shaped by one's environment.

SPIEGEL: What do you think about [prominent German feminist] Alice Schwarzer?

Schröder: I found that many of her theories went too far. For example that heterosexual intercourse was barely possible without the submission of the woman. I can only say to that: Sorry, that's wrong... It is absurd if something that is fundamental for humanity and for its survival should in itself be defined as submission. That would mean that society can't carry on without the submission of women.

SPIEGEL: Did you think feminists fundamentally oppose relationships between men and women?

Schröder: There was indeed a radical movement that argued in this way and saw being lesbian as a solution. I didn't find it very convincing that homosexuality should be the solution to the problem of women being disadvantaged.

SPIEGEL: Has feminism made women happier?

Schröder: Good question. I think that early feminism at least overlooked the fact that partnership and children can provide happiness. It isn't the only way but for very many people it is the most important way.

SPIEGEL: Is there such a thing as conservative feminism?

Schröder: Such artificial terms don't mean much to me. For me conservatism means accepting reality. The Left wants to re-educate people. We acknowledge that there are differences, also between men and women.

I always thought we have badly neglected issues concerning boys and men. It's a fact that it used to be Catholic working class girls from rural areas who had the biggest problems in school. Now it's boys from low-education backgrounds. I want to make sure for example that there are more male staff in nurseries and elementary schools. Boys brought up by single mothers often don't get to see a man, either in the nursery or elementary school, until they're 12 years old. If one assumes that men and women are different then there's a lot to suggest that children benefit from being with both genders. For example a friend of mine who is a single mother keeps telling me that her little daughter wants to spend a lot of time with people she knows, uncles and brothers. She simply lacks a father figure in her everyday life.

It's a fact that boys are worse at school than girls, more of them go to secondary modern schools [the lowest tier of high school in Germany], and they have to repeat the school year more often. We must review what is taught in nurseries and schools to assess if it takes enough account of the needs of boys. To put it in an exaggerated way: do we give enough dictation with football stories? That interests boys. Or is always just about butterflies and ponies? I think it would be really rotten to tell boys that schools won't cater for them properly because men have unquestionably been dominant for thousands of years. A feminism that deliberately neglects boys is immoral in my opinion.

SPIEGEL: But you are the women's issues minister and not the men's minister, and you are responsible for promoting women in society. Why didn't you start demanding quotas for women in leadership positions long ago?

Schröder: Because a quota always amounts to a failure of politics. For me, economics is first and foremost the ability to act freely without state rules. That's why I believe quotas should only be used as a last resort. In fact, I am certain that we do not need quotas -- especially not in a time when we have a growing shortage of qualified workers.

You also have to ask yourself which women would profit from a quota -- probably those who have no family obligations whatsoever. But aren't women with families precisely the people we want to help? That's why we should, if at all, theoretically introduce a quota for mothers, which would be impossible in practice.

SPIEGEL: If you don't want any quotas, could you at least help women out by banning wage disparities for the same work -- the so-called gender pay gap?

Schröder: That has already long been forbidden by the General Equal Treatment Act. But the reality looks like this: Many women like to study German and humanities; men, on the other hand, electrical engineering -- and that has consequences when it comes to salaries. We cannot prohibit companies from paying electrical engineers more than people with German literature degrees.

SPIEGEL: So women themselves are responsible for the fact that they earn less?

Schröder: At the very least, they need to be conscious of the fact that certain earnings potential is attached to specific career choices.

SPIEGEL: So there is no real disadvantage for women when it comes to payment?

Schröder: Of course there is, and in multiple regards. First, women are often years behind if they take time out from their careers for the family. Second, women who work part-time earn an average of 6.5 percent less than men. On top of that, many women are simply bad at negotiating (their salaries). Many are happy if they succeed in returning to professional life. The main thing for them is that their job is at least somewhat compatible with their family life. But that's exactly where they are wrong. We, as women, often believe that we have to endear ourselves by acting modestly. But that leads personnel directors to think: Anyone who gives themselves away so cheaply cannot be very good. On that point, women need to get much, much more self-confident and tough.

SPIEGEL: As a minister, you have an advantage when it comes to your salary. It is stipulated.

Schröder: That's true. I am happy that I didn't have to negotiate that.

SPIEGEL: Studies have shown that women aren't particularly interested in placing their careers before their personal lives. You yourself became a government minister early on in your career. What's your feeling? Do careers make people happy?

Schröder: Not careers alone. A successful professional life and joy in work are certainly a part of it, but I couldn't be happy without a fulfilling private life.

Interview conducted by René Pfister and Markus Feldenkirchen

Men At Work

2010-11-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

We were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when Freya stopped & pointed to the sign, got me to step back & see what was behind it, what we were looking at, where we were. "Ah God, what an ugly city every city is", Kurt Vonnegut used to say. And he was right - for the most part cities are simply the places where Nature - & so Reality - have broken down the fastest. But I couldn't help but feel wonder at what humanity had dreamed up, the impossible things man has accomplished. Looking at the Empire State made me feel some of the same pride as man walking on the moon, & put me in mind of something Camille Paglia once wrote:

“Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross George Washington bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this! Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved..”

A world of New Yorks, a world of only skyscrapers & sidewalks; that would be a nightmare, & it's a nightmare that's coming, it's a nightmare we are making everyday. But one little island, one little theme park amusement ride art installation... if it's here anyway.... Well, I can like that, can't I? Well I do, anyway.