A Hopeful Sign?

I also sometimes write for Ricochet, a members-only discussion site.  Politically, it includes a broad cross-section of the right:  everybody from hardcore anti-Republican survivalists to squishy moderates, social conservatives, libertarians, members of the dreaded “establishment” and Tea Party activists, traditional Christians and seculars.  Some of its members are Red Pill and familiar with the manosphere, others aren’t just Blue Pill, they’re Baby Blue Pill.

When a member decides to do a post, it automatically goes into the Member Feed, meaning only members can access it.  Editors select certain posts from the Member Feed and elevate them to the Main Feed which can be seen by anybody.

My posts have been elevated to the Main Feed before, and I was hoping this one would have been as well.  Alas, it hasn’t been.  I’ll keep my theories concerning why to myself for now.

Nevertheless, I think I did a decent job of promoting potentially threatening concepts to a wider audience.  I therefore post it here for my more “extremist” readers:

[Names have been changed to protect the identities of the Ricochet members in question.]

Near the end of a great discussion inspired by Front Seat Cat’s post, Kermit left a response to a controversial comment by Mickey.  Mickey’s comment:

Mickey: At the risk of being provocative, let me say that it was a better world when women stayed home and raised children.

And Kermit’s response in full:

Kermit:  What can I say about Manny’s “provocative” opinion? Yaba-daba-doo? I’m sure he’s not primitive enough to be against women making their own choices, career-wise at least. But was it really a better world when men ruled the workplace, and housewives lit fondue pots in suburban Stepford?

Fact is, my life and all our lives have been greatly enriched by the boomer generation’s female workplace pioneers. Women always worked of course, but only since the late 1960’s have upwardly mobile career paths opened to entire generations. Overall, it’s been a huge success for them, and for their families. Women today are passing men in education, and combined incomes have created more options for their families.

Women have intuitive managerial skills which complement roles which suit men. Consensus building and giving positive encouragement come as naturally to female middle managers as barking orders and berating slackers suit male athletic coaches. Women are better listeners, which makes them better doctors, and better team players. Not all, of course. I can think of one presently awaiting indictment who’s an absolute scoundrel. But most.

I remember the transition period between WWII and the entrance of the boomer generation to the workplace twenty years later. 1950’s moms weren’t completely insular, but often their conversational range was limited. Many were “Cinderella Syndrome” dependent in financial matters. The singular focus on child-raising left too many ill-prepared for when the kids left the nest, or for when tragedy struck. Their daughters had so many more choices to lead richer, fuller lives, and many have.

For those of you not old enough to remember the “better world” of the girdle-bound gals of yesteryear, try this exercise in time travel. Get aDVD set of the genteel CBS Sunday night panel show What’s My Line? Watch the shows from 1953 onward into the mid-1960’s — 50 half-hours per year — and see cultural history jump forward one week at a time. Watch the male panelists size up the female contestants. See how the jobs being guessed change over time for the female contestants. Watch the fashions change. You’ll find illuminating, I think.

My response is too detailed for the comment section, yet despite the furor my response may well inspire, I feel obligated to respond.

Kermit:

What can I say about Mickey’s “provocative” opinion? Yaba-daba-doo?

Hardy-har-har.  Kermit begins by accusing his opponent of being primitive, albeit lightheartedly and not necessarily that primitive.  Fortunately, as conservatives we’re used to this, for everybody knows that how we do things today is invariably better than how we did things in prior eras.  Never mind the mess you see around you as described in Front Seat Cat’s post and elsewhere:  “Don’t be on the wrong side of history!”

I’m sure he’s not primitive enough to be against women making their own choices, career-wise at least.

I can’t speak for Mickey, but as for me, I’ve no problem with “women making their own choices” were that what’s actually happening, but there’s far more to it than that.

In prior eras, both men and women were in fact restricted.  Married men essentially had to have a job to support his family, women were relegated to the kitchen.  Women may now have the option to either work or stay at home, but men still have to work.

Yes, I know that there are househusbands.  But although a modern collegiate woman may encounter difficulties if she tells anyone her Art History degree is essentially an MRS degree, a man doing the same will be outright ridiculed.  “I’m in college just to find a rich, ambitious, wife” said no man trying to woo a woman, ever.

For the fact remains that women are attracted to ambitious and successful men, including ambitious and successful women.  In theory, women have no issues with men who’ve no interest in a career and would love to stay at home with the kids.  In practice, they’re unlikely to spend time with such a man as soon as she finds out his intentions.  If the relationship eventually develops into that of sole female breadwinner, it’s likely to turn out like this (sexual content warning).

Thus, while men are still as bound to bring home the bacon as they were before feminism, women have much greater freedom to either adopt modern or traditional roles.

At least upper-middle and upper class women do.  For lower and lower-middle class women, working isn’t some empowering option, it’s a requirement.  Whereas prior to the two-income household norm a janitor could support a family on a single income, today it’s damn near impossible.  If a working-class woman wants any sort of financial stability for her children, she has to work.

Furthermore, although the women’s empowerment crowd often crows about “women’s choices,” behind that lies the terrifying prospect that left to their own devices, a lot of women would in fact just stay home with the kids.  If it turned out that most women actually liked traditional roles, that would mean that the entire Feminine Mystique is a pile of fecal matter.

So we continually find ourselves faced with crises like the lack of women in STEM fields.  We’re not to consider the possibility that women don’t actually want that sort of job (including the writers at Jezebel with liberal arts degrees).  Instead, we’ve got to use government funds to encourage them to go into such fields (site at link funded by UK taxpayers) and accuse STEM employers and managers of sexism if they don’t have enough successful female employees.

Nevertheless, I’d stack a capable woman’s chances of being a successful microbiologist up against a man’s hope to be a happy househusband any day.

Kermit:

Fact is, my life and all our lives have been greatly enriched by the boomer generation’s female workplace pioneers.

I can’t speak for Kermit’s life, but I’d rather he not speak for the rest of us.  He’s apparently blithely unaware of all the depressed women, suicidal men, and stressed-out supermoms out there.  If he is aware, I’m sure he doubts that any of this could have any relation whatsoever with people not leading lives they’re naturally inclined to lead.

Overall, it’s been a huge success for them, and for their families.

Could high divorce rates have anything to do with both halves of a couple being perpetually stressed out as they both share every financial and logistical responsibility for their entire household?  Never.

Women today are passing men in education, and combined incomes have created more options for their families.

Running schools as if boys are defective girls might have something to do with the former.  As to the latter, whereas before only the man had to chain himself to a desk for forty-five hours a week, now both the man and woman do!  That’s some “more options.”

Women have intuitive managerial skills which complement roles which suit men. Consensus building and giving positive encouragement come as naturally to female middle managers as barking orders and berating slackers suit male athletic coaches. Women are better listeners, which makes them better doctors, and better team players.

If “[c]onsensus building and giving positive encouragement come…naturally to female middle managers,” so do office gossip, emphasizing “cultural fit” over competence in hiring decisions, forming office cliques, and taking sick days. (If positive feminine stereotypes are fair game, so are the negative.)

And just try to tell anyone who’s ever served in an all-male military unit about how much better women are at teamwork.  As a matter of fact, some of that “barking orders and berating slackers” of male athletic coaches results in some pretty damn good teams.

For every ostensible improvement resulting from women becoming more prevalent in the workplace, there’s a corresponding increase in sexual harassment complaints (sometimes even false ones), problems from workplace romance and subsequent tensions among romantic rivals (not to mention if there’s a breakup), and need for the employer to account for fertility decisions.  There’s far more chance that an employer will groom a woman for four years only to have her quit so she can spend time with the kids than there is for a man.  Men are substantially less likely to burst into tears during meetings.  Of course, we’re not supposed to notice any of this.

1950’s moms weren’t completely insular, but often their conversational range was limited.

And this has somehow changed?  Indeed, there are some damn intelligent and insightful women here on Ricochet and elsewhere, but the vast majority of conversation among younger women I encounter is restricted to relationship or workplace gossip and reality television.

The War on Women meme actually worked, yet somebody’s trying to tell me that all this education and careerism is broadening female minds.

Instead, we find time and time again that the more traditional women tend to be the more conservative ones.

Many were “Cinderella Syndrome” dependent in financial matters. The singular focus on child-raising left too many ill-prepared for when the kids left the nest, or for when tragedy struck.

I’ll grant this point because I don’t have access to the requisite stats.  However, in retrospect we’re far more likely to know about the women who weren’t prepared for tragedy than those that were (What modern-day academic is going to write an in-depth investigative article about a 1930’s widow who did just fine?). Yet I suspect that before young women postponed child-rearing until their thirties so as to not interfere with their careers, older women with strong maternal instincts had a much easier time diverting those instincts to grandchildren.

Their daughters had so many more choices to lead richer, fuller lives, and many have.

And many haven’t, for they’re far more likely to be single mothers, forced to remain in jobs they may well not find particularly “empowering,” and growing old without familial support from either a husband, children, grandchildren, or extended family.

I can’t say for certain because I wasn’t there, but I find it hard to believe that before we had so many working women that there were quite so many women in their later thirties and forties trolling bars, getting drunk out of their minds, and decrying the lack of good men out there.  We’re largely unaware of the women who deeply regret postponing marriage and family for the sake of their careers.  A high-powered career requires sacrifices for both men and women, but such sacrifices usually cost women far more.

A man can spend his energy on his career throughout his twenties and thirties, decide when he’s forty-two he wants to get married, and actually pull it off.  Any decreases in his fertility are negligible, and in many ways his appeal to women actually increases with time.

Fair or not, for a woman this isn’t true.  But even if we could re-program men to find forty-five year-old women as appealing as twenty-five year-olds (good luck with that), a woman’s fertility window is much shorter; if she waits too long, she may miss her chance to have kids altogether.  Time spent in the lab is time she can’t spend with her kids, thus either depriving the kids of needed attention, missing out on work experience, or forcing her employer to pretend that her time off spent with the kids is as valuable to him as time her co-workers spend doing actual work for him.

Yet in our quest to give women “more options,” we’re positioning them to have to do it all.  She’s got to “lean in” in the office but be soft and tender with her three year-old.  She’s supposed to spend her twenties building her resume, but biologically that’s the best time for her to have children.  If she has a husband, it’s stressful as the both of them try to manage every aspect of managing the household.  If she doesn’t have a husband, it’s even worse.

Yes, there are some women who are naturally more driven and inclined to focus on career.  Let those women do what they wish.

However, let’s not push women who aren’t so inclined into a lifestyle they may not want in schools and pop culture.  Let’s not mandate that employers bend over backwards to accommodate biological realities that should instead be the responsibility of the women in question; it’s up to her to balance her career goals and her biological imperatives, not her employer.  Let the women who choose to enter male-dominated fields learn how to adapt to male culture instead of insist that her twenty-five colleagues change their behavior to suit her.

I recognize that more traditional eras fell far short of paradise.  Indeed, man is fallen.  Every era is somewhat broken, individuals always fall through the cracks.  Were the 1950’s perfect, there wouldn’t have been so many revolutions in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

However, it’s also naive to believe that everything we label an “improvement” is actually an improvement, that revolutionary societal changes don’t have consequences, that it’s impossible to “solve” a problem to such an extent that we can’t create a host of new ones.

Yet I see even ostensible conservatives accuse people who deign to so much as address such issues as “primitive.”  I see others insist there’s no correlation whatsoever between the immense cultural shift of women entering the workplace and the innumerable problems we’ve developed since then.  They see the empowered happy female executive and smile and assume that that’s the entire story.  Any problems we’ve developed either don’t exist, have nothing to do with the unprecedented shifts that preceded it, or still exist because we still haven’t gone far enough.

If a women don’t want to be engineers, we’ve socialized them improperly.  If they want to be engineers but aren’t happy as engineers, it has nothing to do with the women in question and everything to do with their sexist co-workers.  If she can’t find a suitable spouse at thirty-eight, it’s because men are too immature or threatened to see her true worth.  If she has a tough time balancing her career and kids, it’s up to the government to provide more programs for her.

Yet I’m somehow “primitive” for noticing this.  I have a hard time reconciling “everybody needs to change to suit me” with “independence,” so I’m on “the wrong side of history.”  I can’t help but notice that traditional women both older and younger strike me as happier than their eternally aggrieved power-woman sisters, so I’m a misogynist.

Call me whatever ugly names you want.  Enough is enough.

As to the “Hopeful Sign” I cite in my title, as of the time I post this here, there have been thirty-eight comments.  Some are by me, and one I would describe as neutral.

But all of the other comments are supportive, and not a single one is negative or disagrees with what I say.

And Kermit has said absolutely nothing.

Soldiering On

Reader Anon called attention to the fact that I’ve not yet discussed my experience in the military in much detail.  Being as my experience has broader implications and that it’s Veteran’s Day, I’ve decided to indulge him.

My two tours in the Army were from mid 2003-2005 and in 2009.  I was active duty for the first tour, but got out when that was done.  However, when you sign up it’s for a minimum commitment of eight years, thus I had six years remaining on my contract after I got out as an inactive reserve.  Just before Christmas of 2008 I got a letter in the mail telling me I was getting pulled back in and sent to Iraq (I went to Afghanistan instead).

I signed up just after the invasion of Iraq.  My personal beliefs regarding the invasion both then and now aside, I kept seeing reports of individual soldiers who were actually accomplishing important things, even if it was only for the sake of their buddies and not necessarily Peace and Freedom.  At the time my life was going nowhere; I lacked the requisite internal executive required to accomplish much of anything, so I figured that if I couldn’t get anywhere controlling my own life, I’d let somebody else take charge of it for a while.

Still, I was a bit hesitant to sign away too much of my life, for I knew that military life was no paradise and might very well not be for me.  Either going in as an officer or linguist would have required a longer commitment than I was ready to give, so I took a really crappy job in the Quartermaster Corps instead that only required two years.  Being told that I could re-enlist with another MOS (Military Occupational Specialty, or “job” to normal people) after a year, I figured that I could give the Army a shot, then either change jobs or get out.

Thus, although there are experiences common to all soldiers, I won’t claim that my experiences mirror that of the infantry or special ops.  In most respects their lives are infinitely more challenging, but mine was probably mired in a bit more useless crap.

The seeds of my eventual disillusionment began at Reception, doing all the processing stuff before Basic Training begins in earnest.  We got yelled at a lot (which was expected and fine by me), but we also spent hour after hour waiting in line, waiting in line some more, then waiting in line a bit more than that.  Stand at parade rest, snap to attention, walk forward a step, snap back to parade rest, repeat hundreds of times.  We filled out countless forms, ate ridiculously fattening food (virtually everybody gained at least five pounds), and had to just sit or stand in silence for an entire week.  Apparently it takes the Marines just a day or so to do all the same stuff.

When I finally got to Basic, our platoon was lead by three Drill Sergeants.  The first who noticed me was Staff Sergeant Baker.  She asked us to fill out some form, and I was forced to admit to her I had no pen.  It wasn’t my fault I had no pen, for during reception when our unit was sent to the PX to buy supplies they were out of pens and I had no chance to go back.  No matter, she reamed me to hell.

Next came Staff Sergeant Torres, a brash Puerto Rican from New York who looked like he was three quarters man and one quarter bull.  After that, Sergeant First Class Mauran, a rural black North Carolinian who actually seemed to notice we were people.

Torres and Mauran had the perfect good cop-bad cop routine and obviously intense respect for each other.  You were terrified to ask Torres anything for fear he’d rip your head off, but Mauran would take as much time as necessary to explain what needed explaining.  If Mauran got mad at you, you know you messed up.  The one time Torres gave us a compliment, it was one of the most touching experiences any of us had ever felt.

On the other hand, Baker was an utter jackass.  She had no idea what she was doing (we noticed the other Drills correcting her more than once), and whether or not she was lax and indulgent with us or “smoked” us (made us do push-ups or other exercises as punishment) for an hour had nothing to do with what we did and everything to do with her mood.  Whereas Torres and Mauran simply oozed competence in their respective ways, being led by Baker felt like have a dictatorial toddler ruling your every thought and action.

Yet Baker’s idiocy provided me with my proudest moment during Basic training.  All the push-ups were tough, but sitting on the floor for classes for hours on end was tougher.  Once while sitting on the floor during one of Baker’s “classes,” While switching from one position to another for an instant (sincerely) I was lying on my side with my head rested on my hand.  That’s when Baker caught my eye and thus put me in the front-leaning rest position (the starting position for a push-up).

When put in the front-leaning rest, usually eventually the Drill noticed you and would tell you to recover.  Baker seemed to have forgotten I was there.  Under such circumstances normally the recruit calls out “permission to recover?” and the Drill would either grant or deny permission.  You then waited another couple of minutes and repeated the little ritual.  Eventually permission was granted.

But I knew Baker noticed me and was relishing the fact that I had been in that position for an exceptionally long time.  The recruits next to me kept whispering to me to request permission to recover, but I refused under any circumstances to request mercy from that twat.  I was shaking.  I went numb.  I could hardly breathe.  I kept having to switch the position of my hands and feet because there was so much slippery sweat underneath me, but stayed in position and did NOT ask for permission to recover.  When she finished the class, she told me to relax.  I won, and I could see a flash of disappointment in her eyes, too.

Despite Baker’s inadequacy, the competence of Torres and Mauran would have been enough to have given me the genuine test of manhood I was seeking.  Of course, three weeks into training they were sent to another platoon and I got a team of another jackass female, a burned-out male just passing time to get his pension, and a competent but detached reservist who although relatively competent blew up at random.

Basic Training hardly turned out to be the transformative experience you see in Full Metal Jacket or in documentaries about the Marines.  The greatest skill I developed was the ability to just sit and wait, the only discipline I developed was the ability to not say “that’s stupid” to somebody who outranked me.

Moreover, the Army’s equivalent of grade deflation belittled any sense of “earning” your graduation from Basic.  Every platoon had at least one idiot who everybody knew should not become a soldier, but about ninety percent of the time that idiot graduated just like everybody else.  The Drills told such idiots, “They’ll whip you into shape at AIT!” (Advanced Individual Training, where you learn the basics of your job).  At AIT they told them “They’ll whip you into shape at your first duty station!”  At their first duty station they put them on extra duty a lot and maybe demoted them but just passed them on as soon as they could to the next station.

There was one such moron who was in my Company at Basic who objectively sucked, but he wound up in my platoon at AIT and demonstrated even more incompetence.  He wound up in my platoon in Korea and acted even more stupid, but although he got demoted from PFC to PV2, he was sent back with me to Fort Lee.  In Fort Lee upon hearing he was going to be deployed to Iraq, he wigged out every Wednesday night.  One Wednesday night while drunk he broke into a storage locker for deployed soldiers and passed out in the locker on top of somebody’s clothes.  Another Wednesday while drunk he stole somebody’s car keys and was busted off post for DUI and driving without a license.  Thus, even though any idiot private could knew this guy would never be a real soldier four weeks into Basic, after the Army spent God only know how many hours training and disciplining him and tons of money feeding, housing, clothing, training, and paying him, two years later (and the moment before he would have been ostensibly useful) the Army finally let him go.

I knew soldiers who graduated from Fort Benning (instead of Jackson like me) who had a genuinely challenging experience during Basic and afterwards never had to put up with such idiocy.  Moreover, I’ve seen some genuinely competent units that put up with no crap whatever.  Unfortunately, I suspect with the feminization of combat arms that future military hardasses will be far more likely to have experiences that reflect mine.  Pass them to make them feel good may have started with female soldiers and leaders, but the attitude spreads to males.

I was never called on to storm buildings or rescue a fallen comrade under fire, but I was a good soldier in that I always did what I was called upon to do and did it well.  I can’t claim with certainty that I would have responded well under fire, but I responded well to everything I underwent to prepare me for that eventuality.

Yet I got out, and a lot of other quality soldiers did likewise for the same reasons as me.  The Army let too many dirtbags through Basic, thus saddling competent soldiers with them in other units.  I got horribly sick of being lectured because other people couldn’t show up on time, listening to lectures with the rest of my Battalion about the dangers of drunk driving because somebody I never met in another company got a DWI, and having a new rule pop up to govern my life every time somebody else broke a rule that was already there.  When I was in Korea, four female soldiers got pregnant within a month, resulting in lecture after lecture on the importance and accessibility of birth control.  Far too much of my life was prey to a system that had been set up to control the irresponsible actions of others who never should have gotten out of Basic Training in the first place.

I understand that the military is a collective endeavor, that “the chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” but it wasn’t my fault the chain had so many weak links–it was the Army’s.  Yet I still had to suffer for it.  The competent soldiers and NCO’s did what they could to strengthen some of the weak links and sometimes even succeeded, but usually they were hamstrung in what they could do.  Can’t hurt anyone’s morale too much.

I’m aware that most combat arms positions are far more stringent and disciplined, but I’m also aware that the brass is doing everything in its power to change that.  What began as watered-down standards for non-combat females morphed into a culture of “tolerance” for weak males.  Thus, I see no reason to believe that the combat units that were exempt from some of this crap until now will soon become inundated by it.

That’s not to say I never encountered some great leaders and men.  I did, and most of the most strong and competent men I’ve ever met were in the Army, but I could tell that they were getting disillusioned.  Still, I saw some great examples, some of whom have affected my outlook on life to this day.

(And not to sound sexist or anything, but the number of competent female officers and NCO’s I worked with during my total of three years comes to a grand total of one.)

Yet my attempt at developing my masculine strength through the military largely failed.  Yes, I probably should have selected a better MOS, but it’s the Army for crying out loud. The military is supposed to be the most masculine of our institutions, one in which even cooks are supposed to have some mettle to them, yet it’s no longer masculine and no longer mettle.  The culture of the support troops is spreading to the combat troops when it should be the other way around.

I did develop some internal strength and I’m much better and working with authority.  Before the Army, I had huge problems with bad bosses; since then I don’t.

Yet I wanted to find men to push me to achieve more than I ever thought I could, not just endure more idiocy and incompetence without telling somebody off.  I put up with a lot of crap without blowing up, and I suppose that’s an accomplishment of sorts.  However, growth entails not just enduring bad but also achieving something good.  At the former the Army helped a great deal, at the latter not so much.

I suppose I also learned a bit about leadership.  By the time I left Afghanistan, I was myself an NCO and had soldiers under me.  Still, the focus of my job was less getting the most out of my soldiers and more shielding them from crap sent down from the top.  Nevertheless, I was still respected in a way I hadn’t been before, and that counts for something.

However, knowing full well that there were plenty of idiots in the military even prior to its feminization, it used to be a largely male space, somewhere that a guy who didn’t have the best father could go to learn a bit of what he should have learned earlier.  It may still be that way for Navy SEAL’s, but probably not for much longer.

Yet as more women join the “best of the best,” we’ll soon discover that not enough of the truly best want to be there.  Men will abandon military responsibilities like they’ve abandoned so many others.  One day we’ll wake up and realize we actually need tough men to defend us, inspiring yet more cries of “Where have all the good men gone?”

 

 

 

 

Failing Faster

Among the difficulties men face after a feminized upbringing is that of finding a proper balance regarding to risk-taking.  The caution the women who raised him can become internalized, thus making him overly hesitant to make the bold decisions required to develop into a healthy man.

However, many of these men find such hesitancy unsatisfying, observing that other men embarking on “risky” behavior do just fine.  In an effort to not be so hesitant, he might instead over-compensate and become almost reckless.  The internal voice that tells him not to quit his job prematurely is the same voice that tells him not to put himself forward socially or risk pissing someone off who deserves it.  He therefore disregards this voice, not recognizing that sometimes prudence is actually warranted.

Hence my current predicament.  Some time back, I returned from my Army stint in Afghanistan with a fairly decent amount of extra money, therefore having innumerable opportunities to embark on the sort of life I would have found fulfilling had I not either repressed my own healthy desires or viewed them as immature.  Instead, I listened to the Feminine and decided to invest the bulk of my money into getting a nice apartment with pretty furniture.

It was only a couple of weeks after settling in that I discovered that “a nice place” wasn’t making me happy in the slightest, but I dismissed that as immaturity and a refusal to grow up.  Nevertheless, the stuff I had and space required to house it substantially restricted me. After a couple of years, I transferred from an intensely stressful job to an insupportably boring one in a different city with the same company, but moving all my stuff made such moves cumbersome and expensive.  Shortly after this move I discovered the manosphere and realized that I was actually right to resent all this crap I was carting around with me.  Establishing yourself somewhere (maybe even tying yourself down) makes sense if it’s your objectively best option, i.e. you’re starting a family or you’ve found a place in which you actually want to put down ties.  Neither was the case with me:  I had little emotional attachment to my geographical location, nor was anything even closely resembling a prospect for a family on, or likely to be on, the horizon.

Instead of being able to save money for trips or socializing (or even the nebulous “future”), I had to sink it into rent for a place big enough to house all the crap I had.  Yet my stuff was “assets,” and getting rid of it would have caused a substantial financial loss.  So I muddled through, cognizant of the mistake I had recently made but also aware that anything I could do to counter it also seemed like a mistake.

At the same time, I was reading Captain Capitalism, Roosh, and others who were living lives of adventure, not tied down by stupid mistakes like the one I had made.  Through a stroke of massive good fortune, I got a financial windfall that enabled me to consider other opportunities.

Of course, I had signed a lease that couldn’t be broken and got this windfall immediately after renewing it.  I thus decided to muddle through for another year; perhaps something would change, or I would change, or something.  Despite my newfound masculine boldness in social situations, something inside me still held back.

Finally, I decided to move on when the lease expired.  I got rid of the furniture, moved out, and took steps to move to Europe.  I secured (or at least certainly seemed to have secured) “location independent employment,” enabling me to work from wherever I happened to be.  I made it to Europe about six weeks ago.

Unfortunately, I came here too soon.  My “employer” kept telling me I was about to start, only to have me not yet start, then tell me I was about to start again, and again.

Obviously I should have waited, but I was so damn sick of waiting, and waiting had objectively caused me innumerable problems before.  “Fortune favors the bold,” so I decided to be bold.  Had my “employer” acted even remotely like he spoke, despite the other mistakes and strokes of bad luck that came my way (backpack with computer and other valuables stolen while visiting my father before I came here), everything would have worked out, but he didn’t and I did make some mistakes, so it didn’t work out.

So, if neither one of two things happens by Sunday, I have to return.  I’m debt-free but without definite prospects for income (I’m still about to start my job “soon”).  Unfortunately, my car in the States is really old so I’ll probably have to take out a loan to get a new one (one of the advantages of Europe is no car needed).  Therefore, I will once again be starting anew, slowly positioning myself again to be able to once again take the steps I want to take some time down the road.  However I’m not without prospects and talents I didn’t have (or know about) before, so this time it might not take quite so long.

Still, it’s frustrating to know that I’m still working on trying to find a coherent balance between taking bold decisive steps and prudence.  I’m either too risk-averse and stagnate or too blind to risk and do dumb things.  The voices that tell me to hold back have kept me from doing innumerable things to improve my life, yet had I listened to those voices two months ago I would be in infinitely better shape.

I also wonder, has my feminine conditioning been so strong that I set myself up for failure?  Has “don’t be too bold” been so deeply ingrained into me that I almost intentionally do “bold” yet also “dumb” things so as to convince myself to just keep my head down and stay safe?

Yet I tried, and I’m aware that virtually every successful man out there has made some dumb choices.  I had some great times over here and also learned quite a lot about myself.

Still, I had a goal in coming here and it would have been nice to have reached it.  I failed, but at least I did something.

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Thanks to those of you who noticed my re-appearance and welcomed me back.  I’ll respond to emails shortly.

The Forgotten

No, I’m not referring to myself, even though it’s been forever since I’ve posted here.

I’m currently staying in an Airbnb flat in a quasi-European country.  For those of you not familiar with how Airbnb works, you rent out all kinds of properties:  entire flats, rooms in apartments and houses, etc.  Sometimes you have other guests as roommates, sometimes you live with the owner of the property, sometimes you’re alone.

My current host is a man in his late fifties (it seems) named Nick.  Nick speaks English as well as a Londoner and is also fluent in German and French.  He’s a retired chemistry teacher who seems to have done rather well for himself financially.  After all, he’s travelled throughout Europe and has four different properties for rent on Airbnb.

However, he’s unmarried and lives with his mother.  He spends time in his other properties (namely the one where I am) seemingly to get away from her.  My first night with Nick as host, I was at his primary residence where she and he live.  I heard them arguing almost perpetually whenever I was there–not break-the-furniture-smash-the-walls type arguing, but despite my utter inability to understand the language, I felt the tension through the walls.  I had tea with them the next day before coming here, and I could see she loved but didn’t respect him.  She complained to me about how he hasn’t started a family, with him present.

Thus, Nick spends a great deal of time over here.  Interacting with his guests seems to be his primary social life.  Yet I found it interesting to see how when I was talking with the Italian couple I shared the flat with last night how he seemed to become almost small when attempting to navigate a conversation among multiple parties.  Even though we were discussing topics about which he was more knowledgeable than I, he deferred to me excessively.

Nick is nice, too nice, “you don’t need to ask again if I’ll need a second towel, Nick, one is plenty” nice.  He’s baked bread and made (excellent) soup for me and the other guests, obviously hoping for our approval.  He has what might be the sweetest dog I’ve ever met to keep him company (poor girl only has three legs), but you can tell he’s lonely.  Some men in his situation are perfectly content; Nick isn’t one of them.

And he’s not alone.  I’ve met Nicks in small towns and large cities, in the US, Latin America, and Europe, rich, poor, and middle class.  Drug addicts, alcoholics, and sober, executives and military veterans, Christian and secular.  Some are unhappily married, others bachelors, quite a few have been divorced.  Lonely, empty, sad, not quite alive.

The New York Times seems to have noticed that something has gone wrong, but deaths from suicide, poor health, and addiction are only part of the story, and the problem isn’t limited to the poor.

We’ve had such men in prior eras, but something about today’s forgotten men strikes me as more insidious.  The lonely man a hundred years ago was raised with a clear idea as to what was expected of him as he became a man, and he probably somehow fell short.  Yes, deserving of sympathy, but at least he knew the Game he was playing before he lost it.

Today’s forgotten men were so often raised to believe that there was no such Game, that they’d no need to learn how to fight but just how to please people instead.  He’s been told his hunting and fishing trips are selfish unless his wife approves of them, his desire to want things for himself is just exercising unearned “male privilege,” his desire to serve the Lord should be expressed by letting his wife and neighbors exploit him, and if he remains unmarried, shame.  He has no right to object to paying child support.  If he’s single, it’s entirely his fault.  That women are single is his fault, too.

Yes, today’s women are lonely, and that’s also a tragedy.  However, how much better would we all be served if the men (and women) of today understood what was actually expected of them instead of the pretty lies?  How much more future loneliness are we fostering by raising our boys as defective girls and our girls as “strong” and “empowered”?

As for me, I’m lucky.  I think.  I’m still young enough that I might be able to live out a couple of my dreams, that I might wake up each day feeling important and that I’m filling a role I’m uniquely designed to fill.

Yet the jury’s still out.  I was not only exposed to the lies, I was immersed in them, believing wholeheartedly that being a good person would count for more than being good at being a man.  I’ve got Game down to the point that women throw themselves at me (more on that later), but I’ve not the desire to reform a broken woman–the only kind I seem to find.  I’m still at war with myself, using more strength than I have to change destructive thought patterns, struggling to understand how I came to be this way enough to understand the problem yet not so introspective as to dwell on it.

I think I’ll pull through.  However, I realize how close I came to becoming another Nick, a good yet unfulfilled man, nice but unimportant, doing what seems to be the right thing but isn’t.

But if I succeed, somehow, some way, may I be the sort of man whose strength uplifts others.  When I’ve the chance to influence a younger man, may I help him to avoid some of the pain I’ve undergone myself.  May I also appreciate the subtle goodness of the men I encounter like Nick.  Even though it’s probably too late for him to change, he’s done good things and does deserve some appreciation.

The World chews up and spits out men who fail in the Game.  I don’t want to be of the World, I want to be above it.

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I will shortly be filling y’all in as to my life’s situation, the future direction of this blog, and my writings that aren’t on this site.  For those of you who are just dying to read something I’ve written, you can go here, here, and here to read some stuff I’ve done on politics.

The Best Article on Campus ‘Rape Culture’ Yet

Not much commentary from me, but I really think that this article by Heather MacDonald deserves a lot of attention.

Some choice quotes [emphasis mine]:

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

 

None of this crisis response occurs, of course—because the crisis doesn’t exist. During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

 

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The chance that the victims would not consider this event “serious enough to report,” or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences—supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.

None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical. In a rape culture, which “condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm,” sexual assault will wind up underreported, argued the director of Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center in a March 2007 newsletter. You don’t need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the best proof there is.

 

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults—the law does not require their confirmation—usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for students and administrators alike.

 

Campuses do everything they can to get their numbers of reported and adjudicated sexual assaults up—adding new categories of lesser offenses, lowering the burden of proof, and devising hearing procedures that will elicit more assault charges. At Yale, it is the accuser who decides whether the accused may confront her—a sacrifice of one of the great Anglo-Saxon truth-finding procedures. “You don’t want them to not come to the board and report, do you?” asks physics professor Peter Parker, convener of the university’s Sexual Harassment Grievance Board.

The scarcity of reported sexual assaults means that the women who do report them must be treated like rare treasures. New York University’s Wellness Exchange counsels people to “believe unconditionally” in sexual-assault charges because “only 2 percent of reported rapes are false reports” (a ubiquitous claim that dates from radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 tract Against Our Will). As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however, the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent. Just how powerful is the “believe unconditionally” credo? David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor who lectures constantly on the antirape college circuit, acknowledged to a hall of Rutgers students this November that the “Duke case,” in which a black stripper falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, “has raised the issue of false allegations.” But Lisak didn’t want to talk about the Duke case, he said. “I don’t know what happened at Duke. No one knows.” Actually, we do know what happened at Duke: the prosecutor ignored clearly exculpatory evidence and alibis that cleared the defendants, and was later disbarred for his misconduct. But to the campus rape industry, a lying plaintiff remains a victim of the patriarchy, and the accused remain forever under suspicion.

 

But the post-1960s university is nothing if not capacious. It has institutionalized every strand of adolescent-inspired rebellion familiar since student sit-in days. The campus rape industry may decry ubiquitous male predation, but a campus sex industry puts bureaucratic clout behind the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity.

 

In October 2005, at a Delta Delta Delta formal, drunken sorority girls careened through the host’s house, vomiting, falling, and breaking furnishings. One girl ran naked through a hallway; another was found half-naked with a male on the bed in the master suite. A third had intercourse with her escort in a different bedroom. On the bus back from the formal, she was seen kissing her escort; once she arrived home, she had sex with a different male. Later, she accused her escort of rape. The district attorney declined to prosecute the girl’s rape charges. William and Mary, however, had already forced the defendant to leave school and, even after the D.A.’s decision, wouldn’t let him return until his accuser graduated. The defendant sued his accuser for $5.5 million for defamation; the parties settled out of court.

The incident wasn’t as unusual as it sounds. A year earlier, a William and Mary student had charged rape after having provided a condom to her partner for intercourse. The boy had cofounded the national antirape organization One in Four; the school suspended him for a year, anyway. In an earlier incident, a drunken sorority girl was filmed giving oral sex to seven men. She cried rape when her boyfriend found out. William and Mary found one of the recipients, who had taped the event, guilty of assault and suspended him.

But in the fall semester of 2005, rape charges spread through William and Mary like witchcraft accusations in a medieval village. In short succession after the Delta Delta Delta bacchanal, three more students accused acquaintances of rape. Only one of these three additional victims pressed charges in court, however, and she quickly dropped the case.

A fifth rape incident around the same time followed a different pattern. In November 2005, a William and Mary student woke up in the middle of the night with a knife at her throat. A 23-year-old stranger with a prior conviction for peeping at her apartment complex had broken into her apartment; he raped her, threatened her roommate at knifepoint, and left with two stolen cell phones and cash. The rapist was caught, convicted, and sentenced to 57 years in prison.

Guess which incident got the most attention at William and Mary? The Delta Delta Delta formal “rape.” Like many stranger rapists on campus, the knifepoint assailant was black, and thus an unattractive target for politically correct protest. (The 2006 Duke stripper case, by contrast, seemingly provided the ideal and, for the industry, sadly rare configuration: white rapists and a black victim.)

 

Modern feminists defined the right to be promiscuous as a cornerstone of female equality. Understandably, they now hesitate to acknowledge that sex is a more complicated force than was foreseen. Rather than recognizing that no-consequences sex may be a contradiction in terms, however, the campus rape industry claims that what it calls campus rape is about not sex but rather politics—the male desire to subordinate women. The University of Virginia Women’s Center intones that “rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust—it’s about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist’s goal is domination.”

This characterization may or may not describe the psychopathic violence of stranger rape. But it is an absurd description of the barnyard rutting that undergraduate men, happily released from older constraints, seek. The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it’s not a reinstatement of the patriarchy. Each would be perfectly content if his partner for the evening becomes president of the United States one day, so long as she lets him take off her panties tonight.

 

“Promiscuity” is a word that you will never see in the pages of a campus rape center publication; it is equally repugnant to the sexual liberationist strand of feminism and to the Catherine Mac-Kinnonite “all-sex-is-rape” strand. But it’s an idea that won’t go away among the student Lumpenproletariat. Students refer to “sororistutes”—those wild and crazy Greek women so often featured in Girls Gone Wild videos. And they persist in seeing a connection between promiscuity and the alleged campus rape epidemic. A Rutgers University freshman says that he knows women who claim to have been sexually assaulted, but adds: “They don’t have the best reputation. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that kind of stuff.”

Rape consultant David Lisak faced a similar problem this November: an auditorium of Rutgers students who kept treating women as moral agents. He might have sensed the trouble ahead when in response to a photo array of what Lisak calls “undetected rapists,” a girl asked: “Why are there only white men? Am I blind?” It went downhill from there. Lisak did his best to send a tremor of fear through the audience with the news that “rape happens with terrifying frequency. I’m not talking of someone who comes onto campus but students, Rutgers students, who prowl for victims in bars, parties, wherever alcohol is being consumed.” He then played a dramatized interview with a student “rapist” at a fraternity that had deliberately set aside a room for raping girls during parties, according to Lisak. The students weren’t buying it. “I don’t understand why these parties don’t become infamous among girls,” wondered one. Another asked: “Are you saying that the frat brothers decided that this room would be used for committing sexual assault, or was it just: ‘Maybe I’ll get lucky, and if I do, I’ll go there’?” And then someone asked the most dangerous question of all: “Shouldn’t the victim have had a little bit of education beforehand? We all know the dangers of parties. The victim had miscalculations on her part; alcohol can lead to things.”

As long and numerous as these quotes are, there’s way much more in the article.  It’s long, but I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Is the mainstream finally starting to notice that something’s gone terribly wrong?

Anecdotal Evidence

The other night I encountered a Bulgarian-American woman just before closing time in a bar.  She was cute (albeit not gorgeous) and seemed to be in her late twenties.  She spoke English with a slight Bulgarian accent, and as I later learned she came here when she was fourteen.  I wasn’t hitting on her, I just wanted decent conversation.  Besides, her boyfriend was nearby, talking to other people.

After discussing Bulgaria for a bit (I’ve actually been there), the conversation migrated to the European Union as her boyfriend migrated away.  We both disliked the EU, and as long as that remained the topic of conversation the conversation was pleasant.

Soon the conversation somehow migrated to questions of maternity leave, and this soon prompted her to proclaim her strident support of feminism.  I made it equally clear that I’m by no means feminism’s friend.  Her face registered shock.

I normally try to soften my initial declarations of my political views, but sometimes it isn’t possible, and this was one of those cases (or maybe I just didn’t feel like it).  Parenthood/maternity leave/paternity issues were the frame through which her views on feminism were introduced.  She asked me if there could ever possibly be a case in which a man’s responsibility for a child could possibly differ from a woman’s.  The first thing that sprung to mind was if a women lied about using birth control.

Thus, a flurry of accusations and evasions.  “What if the condom breaks?”  That’s not fraud, lying about being on the pill is.  “What if the pill doesn’t work?”  Again, not fraud.  Nothing’s perfect, but the chances that the pill will fail if taken properly are considerably lower than if either taken improperly or not taken at all.  “What about rape?”  Who the hell lies about birth control before being raped?  Rape is a different issue entirely.

Her tendency to attack rather than so much as admit that lying to a sexual partner would be wrong if it were even conceivable that any woman would ever do such a thing tagged her in my mind that she was among the Anointed.  As I’ve stated before, the only reasons to discuss this stuff with the Anointed are to either convince an audience listening in or practice.  By now there was no audience, but after reading so many feminist articles recently I was most decidedly in the mood for some practice.

She’d evade, I’d bring it back to my initial point, even though I was well aware that lying about the pill is hardly the most pressing issue regarding modern gender relations.  One of my rhetorical rules is to allow for no evasions.  If I make a point, they have the option to either refute it, concede it, or effectively call into question its relevance, for if you allow an opponent to engage in a ridiculous evasion once, the discussion is thus framed as one of ping pong; you’ll follow her from point to point forever and never get anywhere.  She chose no valid option, so I held her to the fire:  lying about birth control is wrong and fraudulent behavior on the part of the female.  Admit I’m right and we can talk about something else.  Don’t, and this is where we stay.

We moved from the outside of the bar onto the street (about ten feet) and back came her boyfriend.  She told him I’m not a feminist.  He said, “Every man should be a feminist because it’s important we support the women in our lives.”  She gave him a high-five but didn’t seem to care if I stayed or not.  He left (evidently to somewhere else in the vicinity).

She ran her own business (I’ve no idea what) and threw out all sorts of stats about maternity leave.  I’d give a quick summation of my views on maternity leave, give her credit if she ever happened to say something that wasn’t nonsense, and bring it back to lying about birth control.  She’d somehow bring up rape, I’d again tell her that rape is awful but has nothing whatsoever to do with what we were discussing.  Back to sex and birth control.

We made our points referring to a hypothetical couple, referring to “he” and “she” and their hypothetical sexual relationship.  However, I soon noticed that “if she has sex with him” became “if you were fucking me,” and it wasn’t me who initiated the transition.  The hypothetical woman trying to steal the seed of her hypothetical man was now her hypothetically trying to trick me into getting her pregnant.  I was now the man who didn’t care if the condom broke and she was the potential victim of my evil masculine machinations.

Shortly thereafter she was moving in closer and yelling.  She threw out “that point is SUCH BULLSHIT” after I said something perfectly reasonable, to which I calmly but firmly replied “not at all” and explained why I was right.  She sighed audibly to catch her breath and said something about rape again.  I brought it back to my initial point, eventually deciding to repeat the refrain, “If I fuck up, it’s on me.  If you fuck up, it’s on me.”

“NOT AT ALL!  SUCH BULLSHIT!  SUCH BULLSHIT!”

“If I fuck up, it’s on me.  If you fuck up, it’s on me.” (I’ll readily concede that the Christian prohibition against swearing is one I frequently have difficulty upholding.)

At this point although there was nobody in our direct vicinity, I could tell we were attracting attention from drunken stragglers.  I could also see police in the distance.  Her eyes shot into me like daggers.  Her volume caused heads to turn our way.  I could tell she wasn’t going to change her mind, but she was about to grab me (whether in a “good” or “bad” way I couldn’t tell).  I figured it was time to go.  After all, if a woman decides to hit a man, who’s going to get the blame?  If she fucked up, it would be on me.

And as far as getting her number, she wasn’t my type.

So I looked straight into her eyes, repeated my refrain, and walked away.

“YOU FUCKING BASTARD!!!!!!  WRONG!!!!  SO WRONG!!!  YOU’RE A FUCKIING MONSTER!!!!!  MONSTER!!!!!!” gradually fading into the distance as I make my way up the street with a nice wide grin.

Takeaways

It would have taken some skill to transition, but I’ve seen that look in a woman’s eyes before, and it’s never been followed by the friend-zone.  Overtly opposing feminism may not be optimal Game, but it sure as hell beats being nice.  I find this to be evidence that although women may not want you to oppose them, they actually do.

No matter how hypothetical a discussion might be, to a woman it’s ultimately about her.  Moreover, she’s likely to project that mindset onto others, assuming that her conversation partner isn’t arguing about a hypothetical either and instead making a point that matters especially to him.  Therefore, I think by choosing that particular issue, I inadvertently framed myself as an Alpha, a man with similar concerns as professional athletes who have to worry about their flings stealing their semen out of their condoms.  After all, Betas need not be particularly worried about women trying to fraudulently maximize the use of their seed.  Even though I’ve only had one incident that might relate to what I described (a girl once tried to slip off a condom right before we had sex in a prior epoch of my life), she assumed that women trying to trick me into impregnating them was first and foremost in my mind.  Thus, I believe it’s of particular importance that if you want to support an issue particular to men that would strike women as being of concern to Betas (i.e. paternity fraud), be certain you’ve first framed yourself as Alpha, for an Alpha defending Betas will come across as far differently than a Beta whining about the possibility of somehow getting screwed over himself.  Indeed, the possibility of being destroyed by unfair divorce laws and being tricked into impregnating a woman are both valid concerns for men and both reflect what we don’t like about women, but discussing the latter will strike most women as somewhat authoritative, the former as butt-hurtedness.  Obviously, make your point, but be aware of the possibility that defending something that primarily affects Betas may well frame you as a Beta unless you sufficiently inoculate yourself.

I really wish there had been an audience, for I suspect that anybody witnessing her meltdown would have sided with me.

Although during prior political discussions I decided not to listen to that little voice inside that didn’t want to say anything that might cause me to be disliked, this time that voice wasn’t there.  At all.  Love me, hate me?  I didn’t care.  I was right, I knew it, and that’s what mattered.  Furthermore, I wanted to make my points enough to engage that part of my brain that made them but not enough to stress about it.  If for an instant or so it looked like there was a remote possibility she’d get the upper hand, I calmly neutralized it.  This shows me that I am in fact becoming more the man I want to be.

I found the blasé way in which she treated her boyfriend downright hilarious.  It was difficult stifling my laughter.

If I encounter her again, I’m curious about what will happen.  If she says she hates me, I’ll tell her to join the club.  “No, literally.  Do you want to join the club?  I’ll have the local chapter president get in touch with you.  I think ‘Martel’s Despisers’ (sounds better with my real name) meets every other Sunday or something.”  Moreover, would a random woman waking up to me and slapping me serve as some sort of “social proof”?  I’ve been holed up at home or Starbucks writing a lot lately, but this isn’t exactly a huge city so I may well find out.

I have no idea what her name is.

Anyhow, I’m plodding along with my book, having fun but wishing I had a lot more time to devote to it.  And I miss blogging.  That’s why I wrote this.

God bless you all.

 

Outlier Amplification Effect (Updated)

I believe that even most of us in the Manosphere who believe that men and women are fundamentally distinct allow for the existence of outliers:  men who love decorating and nurturing, high-T women with a killer competitive instincts.

Unfortunately (especially regarding women), the modern West has developed the tendency to assume that just because some women would never be content as housewives that no women would be happy as housewives.

This stems from the Outlier Amplification Effect (OAE).  The OAE is society’s tendency to view outliers as being more typical than they actually are.  Not very many guys play guitar, but when guitar players are called to our attention, it creates the subconscious impression that there are guitar players everywhere.

The first aspect of OAE applies not only to sex but also multiple other type of outlier:  gays, artists, etc.  Those of us who don’t fit the norms tend to stand out.  People who aren’t happy complain.  The squeaky wheel squeaks.

The second aspect is exclusive to masculine women is that the way in which they deviate from natural norms is inherently more likely to be noticed by others and to call attention to itself.

Who is more likely to sit at her computer for hours on end complaining about the pervasiveness of the patriarchy, the angry feminist or the fairly content housewife?  The female reporter exposing the sexism inherent in whatever industry has a more masculine disposition than the average woman.  Compared to the most women, she’s more ambitious, more inclined towards confrontation, and more visible.

Which leads to a selection bias of sorts, for a disproportionate number of women we see speaking about sex roles are women who inclined to oppose them.  This leaves the impression that most women would absolutely despise the idea of staying home to raise the kids, when in reality it’s merely most women we hear from.

The deferential feminine woman leaves less of a visible mark, making her seem less prevalent that she might actually be.  As masculine women gradually take over a higher proportion of the debate, it leaves an even stronger impression on young women and girls that this is what most women are like.  If you just want to find a husband and raise kids, you’re more inclined to feel like a weirdo.

Although truly ambitious masculine women might be outliers, virtually every women has a few such instincts.  The more women get the impression these instincts are the feminine norm, the more likely they are to follow these instincts instead of their more nurturing ones.

This effect is mirrored in the study of history.  In 1843, who was more likely to write a screed about gender relations, the happy housewife on the farm or the rich urban socialite who despised the constraints of society?  Was the novelist more inclined to write about the happy grandmother or the woman who’s bored to tears and thus driven to adultery?  Although the happy woman of the past left an indelible mark on the lives of those around her and society as a whole, there’s little record of her on paper.

Moreover, is the modern historian more likely to seek out the memoirs of the aggrieved women of the past, or will he focus on those few writing from the women of the time who actually liked how things were?  The venomous screed from the angry proto-feminist of 1843 will flash in neon throughout academia, the contented sketches of family life will rot away in some drawer.

(If a man of the era writes something describing how happy the women were, his self-serving observations can be dismissed out of hand.)

I’ve alluded to this effect on other sites but haven’t seen it elucidated in detail by anybody else, so I figured it was time to do so.  Indeed, there’s also an opposing Outlier Suppression Effect that occurs in more traditional societies, but we’re not seeing much of that today.

However, it’s important to keep in mind when we discuss our ideas with others that there’s a distinct selection bias inherent when we discuss these issues.  Feminine women don’t make as much noise as the masculine ones.  This leads us to think that they’re less common than they are.

Unfortunately girls get that same impression, leading fewer and fewer of them to embrace their natural femininity.  Although perception is not reality, this is one of those ways in which it most definitely changes it.

Update:

After finishing this, three other things occurred to me.

One, this effect also applies at social gatherings.  Everybody in the room is likely to notice the brash young woman captivating the room with her obnoxious wit.  The demure young woman in the corner may well be noticed by some of the men, but not so much by the women.

Two, this applies in organizational settings.  For example, in a church the more masculine women will speak up if they find something to be anti-woman, whereas the more feminine women will tend to either let their husbands object on their behalf or remain silent.  If her husband says something, whether or not his wife genuinely agrees with him will be forever suspect.

Third, this is part of the reason that political conservatism tends to still get swept away by greater societal forces.  The conservative women who get the most attention (Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, etc.) tend to have a more masculine temperament.  Thus the most prominent female voices in the conservative movement will tend to be less inclined to promote traditional sex roles.  Even if they do, it will strike people as weird.  Imagine Dana Loesch harping on about how much better would be for women to defer to men:  it doesn’t work.  This again leaves the men to do it, which comes across as self-serving.

A Nugget of Positivity (link updated)

Considering the depressing nature of my last video (that many of you weren’t even able to watch in its entirety), I figure this time I’ll post one that’s a bit more positive.

[Update:  My work computer hates YouTube, so here’s a link to another website with the video that’ll have to do until I switch computers.]

Enjoy your moment in the spotlight, sir.

You deserve it.

No Comment

[Update:  It looks like they took it down.  Here’s a link where it still seems to be in operation:  Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism by FCKH8.com]

The Rearing of the Childrens

Today instead of imparting you yet more of deti’s wisdom, I request a bit of help.

In my non-blog writing, I’m at a point where I need to explode the myth that men and women are different only because that’s how we’re socialized.  I’m refuting idiots like this.

However, one of my biggest challenges is that I’m largely ignorant of children’s movies, television programs, and books.  I’m aware of plenty of you-go-girlism in young adult stuff like The Hunger Games and Divergent, but for the under ten crowd I’m lost.

So I request your assistance.  I’m looking for stuff that either promotes the idea that girls=good/boys=bad, stuff that encourages girls to be aggressive action heroes, or that encourages boys to be soft and sensitive.

If you’re aware of a children’s movie, show, book, or game that does this, please leave it in the comments.  A quick summary of the way in which it’s socializing kids would be helpful but isn’t necessary.  Also, although my emphasis is on more recent stuff (from within the past 20 years), if you know of something older put it down.

I much appreciate any examples you can provide.  I know my overall point is right, but I’d much rather not have to waste my time watching stupid cartoons to prove it.

More enlightening posts to resume shortly.