I have bad news. Men and women are different. Oh, I don’t mean that – vive la difference, right? – I mean men and women are different in the way they relate to others, the way they relate to society, the way they present.
Is some of that culturally set? Well, no sh*t Sherlock. The “revolutionaries” and “daring innovators” of the sixties kept coming up with ridiculous things like you know, in some cultures wearing pants would make you non-womanly, and in Scottland men wore kilts. Well, again, no sh*t Sherlock. A lot of the external signaling of gender and the way people er… for lack of a better phrase, strut their stuff for the opposite gender (or the same) is different depending where you are. (I had the d*mndest time convincing my parents that no, Dan wasn’t gay, because he doesn’t drink alcohol, or not a lot of it.)
Do these differences in the way gender is expressed invalidate the concept of gender and make us all tabula rasa? Can we raise boys to behave as women and women as boys and nothing at all will be different?
I’d ask how stupid you have to be to believe that except that I know most psychologists and sociologists practicing today were TAUGHT that – whether they believe it or not depends, I guess on how much exposure they’ve had to the real world. And I know places like Sweden and Holland and Germany and other “enlightened” locations have swallowed this hook line and sinker, which is why we have “gender neutral” toys and the idea that kids get to choose their gender as adults, kind of like some “enlightened” parents let kids choose their own names “when they’re old enough”. As though it were just some accoutrement, and not an essential part of who you are, formed and molded into muscle and thought and hormonal load from the time you were in the womb, and formed before that over millennia of evolution.
Yes, men and women had different evolutionary pressures. There is a pattern to humanity.
Yes, yes, I know. If you look hard enough you’ll find a tribe in Africa where, if you squint kind of sideways, the women hunt and the men look after the children. Humans are very plastic and in unusual circumstances or do to some external reason, that pattern can emerge. Yes, yes, there have always been women warriors, and I’m sure there have always been men who spun and sewed and looked after the kids, too, though those aren’t nearly as celebrated as the “warrior women.” Because in these enlightened feminist times, women who act like men are celebrated, but never men who act like women. There is no worst chauvinist than a “feminist” for devaluing traditional female roles and valuing male ones.
HOWEVER those are outliers, whether tribes or individuals. Throughout most of human history and pre-history, men did the outdoor/dangerous/difficult work and women the boring/annoying/indoor work.
It all comes down to men hunted and women gathered. Neither work was – before I get jumped – easy or what we’d call safe, but they presented different kinds of danger and different kinds of overcoming it, which in turn led to very different group mechanics.
Men needed to trust each other absolutely; needed to know their place in the hierarchy; and allowed for innovation in the service of group success. Women, on the other hand needed to have a cohesive group, meaning you had to behave like the rest of the group. Sticking out was bad because it didn’t materially help the group – you didn’t have to corner berries together, or … And striking out on your own was bad because, if we see the patterns in the rainforest today, for instance, the berry-gathering group is also the child watching group. Mothers like me, who rather preferred not to be submerged in a ‘mommy group’ would either have to be beyond very good, or they’d lose the vast majority of their kids, and thereby not pass on their genes.
More than that, when it comes to the relationship between men and women, it is marked by the fact that they outweigh us, out-lift us and out-run us. We can outlast them both in effort and in longevity, for what consolation that’s worth. BUT physically they’re stronger than us, even at the same size. (I had a moment of shock when my then 11 year old son, who was still shorter and slimmer than I, could easily lift 100 pounds in a dead lift which I couldn’t do.)
This means in interactions between men and women – as adults and partners – men must modulate their strength and women must find non-physical ways of projecting theirs. We see women doing this as far back as pre-history. The wise counselor. The advisor. It’s in all our legends and quite a few of our histories. The man goes home and consults with his wife.
I’d say our “civilization” – our road to being human – started when hominid males decided to court women rather than simply overpowering them.
Is it evolutionarily favored? It would seem to be. Women are more likely to raise to adulthood children willingly conceived.
Not to say that rape isn’t good reproductive strategy – if it weren’t, the Vikings wouldn’t have left swathes of blue eyed people all across the shores of Europe. I’m just saying it’s not EFFICIENT. Unless you’re going to make rape a way of life, and have a way to spread the damage across the world, then I wouldn’t recommend it, because I’d guess a lot fewer children conceived of rape reach healthy reproductive maturity.
So overall the men who courted won out over the men who raped. Regardless of the whole culture of rape thing, very few men want to pursue rape as a reproductive choice.
But… women don’t understand this.
Heinlein had something in Stranger about men and women each being locked in his own way of being in the world and unable to understand the other gender. This is not true at least for some of us who grew up with mostly members of the opposite sex, and who still have members of the opposite sex as close and trusted friends.
A while back there was a book about a woman who dressed up and passed as a man – I think it’s called Self Made Man – and the revelations she got this way. The things that “wives can’t know about husbands” type of revelations. By and large, she got me to blink and go “you didn’t know that?” or “You mean most women don’t know that?” Because I already did. But I might be a different case. As I said I grew up around my brother and his friends, and they tended to think it didn’t matter what they said in front of me. And my husband and I talk about just about everything.
BUT that said, there is a group of women, we’ll call them “the sob sisters” who are really really dumb about this. They either view men as a sort of hairier woman with a penis, or they wish he were so. These are the women who fight you tooth and nail on things like “Men are truly different” and “No, gender is not all ‘social construction’.
I never understood their psychology, though I’ve been interacting with them since Kindergarten. They were the little girls who wanted to boys to admire their pretty frocks, but didn’t want to play rough lest they tore the frills, and therefore demanded that boys not be “rough” around them. (Which largely amounted to their not being boys.)
They don’t understand that the decision to court rather than rape is built in very deeply in a man’s psyche, layered by thousands of years of evolution and – yes – sexual conditioning. It is a gentleness born of strength. Men who know themselves to be stronger than any woman they want, discipline themselves to go slowly, to court her.
Even in the most primitive tribes, rituals are instituted to bend men into this civilized mold. Because when the mold is broken, the result is that men abuse women, women abuse children, and the world goes to hell.
The sob sisters don’t get this. They are gentle because they’re weak and this forces them into being gentle. Hell hath no fury and ability to oppress as one of these weak, die-away sisters given some power, but every woman here will know what I’m talking about, because sooner or later you find yourself fin a group where one of these has got the bit between their teeth. Their power is mostly gossip and back stabbing and unbelievable psychological abuse, but they use it to the hilt.
Which is why they think that if men aren’t using their superior strength, it must be because they’re weak, and the “solution” to society (they nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones. It’s nuttiness) is to raise men to be weak and not to know their own strength. Hence the entire “rise of the sensitive male.”
The problem is this – you don’t reverse evolution in two generations. Even if you could, it would be stupid, mind, since there are muscular and hormonal reasons for men’s strength, but the point is you can’t do it, anyway.
So when you educate children to believe it’s all a social construction and there’s no difference, you run up against the fact that there’s differences.
Yes, girls can sleep around as much as men, but since our endocrine system predisposes us to attachment after sex, this means the majority of women CAN’T do that and be happy… Even when they tell themselves they are.
And yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters. The problem is they aren’t. Not even when they’re raised to act that way.
The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.
Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag.
Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible. Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.
I often think that the people now controlling education were women who went through this, and therefore want to stop boys from being… well boys. But what they’re doing in fact is creating more sociopathic males who will act as you want them to, but will take as much advantage as possible.
If they’re going to be considered criminals for being males; if none of their good qualities (their superior strength, their loyalty, their protectiveness) are appreciated; if they’re told they can only be this sort of inferior ersatz female… what is there for them to control themselves for? Why not present the face the world wants and take advantage of women behind it?
Chivalry and the code thereof was the laying down of those good reproductive (and civilizational) rules that make for a functioning society that passes on its values to its young: men who put their strength at the service of the weaker; women who praised them and admired them for it; and children who were raised to do the same.
Tearing it down might seem like freedom, but you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.
This has nothing to do with women working (women always worked, at least in the lower classes. And in the upper classes they often helped administer domains) though working outside the house is a new thing for both men and women, frankly. What it has to do with is the relationship between men and women.
Men and women are not the same. They are different at the sinew level, at the hormonal level, and yes, at the brain level. Different signals of dominance and submission are baked into each of them by thousands of years of evolution.
You can’t upend it quickly or efficiently and the attempt is likely to reduce to rubble everything built since the first proto-human gave a girl a flower instead of throwing her to the ground and having his way with her. You’ve been warned. Disregard it at your own risk.
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers and thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link.
According To Hoyt 
By not understanding what it is that is different about us, women wind up with the wrong men, by making their selections in the dark, and influenced by their past. With a greater awareness of the reality that there are differences, and that good men are better to have than a naughty boy, or a domineering male, a woman has a far better chance of finding a true mate and partner.
My second thought, on reading this, is the only place that responsibility for putting down the pirates can land… and how much of a Barbary hell Los Angeles and Miami are going to end up before that happens…
Mew
yes
This sounds like another example of “enlightened” policies really ending with rule by the strong.
Or rule by capriciousness and physical strength, I guess, which is not quite the same thing.
“Rule by the Strong” happens anyways. It always has happened, and it always will happen.
What Sarah and others are arguing is that it is better to allow the Strong to use their strength and teach them how to control it in a constructive way rather than lie to them by teaching them they are weak and not allowing them to learn any control at all. They will gain their strength regardless of what you tech them.
Yes, that’s why I added the caveat. The shorter phrase is usually shorthand for the longer one, but I realized it might not be so here.
There’s evidence that the “courtship” genetic route is older than humans–hominid level, at least. I forget if it was gorillas or chimpanzees, but once the naturalists stopped seeing what they expected to see (dear Victorians!) and just *watched*, they saw the beta males were mating quite frequently– but they needed the active cooperation of the females to do it (otherwise the females would just yell for the alpha and he’d beat up the beta). Hence the flowers-and-chocolates technique (or whatever chimpanzee ladies prefer…nuts and berries?) 😉
Mental image of a box of honey ants wrapped in various types of leaves…
I like the big red ones wrapped in the dark leaves…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/04/08/us-chimps-dinner-idUSTRE53700420090408
Raw meat seems to work
I had the d*mndest time convincing my parents that no, Dan wasn’t gay…
I recently found out that some of my wife’s family are still not convinced I’m not in the closet. I finally decided that it may be because I gravitate towards helping out in the kitchen when we visit.
Dan is smart enough to only do that at home…
Heh. Kudos to Dan, then.
I tend to get in the kitchen, not because I know I can do a better job (which I can, but why be annoying?) but because the relatives have a fuzzy at best understanding of food allergies.
Mew
I do it because I am lousy at small talk, and can find better conversation topics there. I have few relations on either side who are interested in the same things I am, and quickly get tired of talking about family, sports, and/or farming. One of my former co-workers invited us to her engagement party, where I spent the most awesome time talking with her future father-in-law, who was probably the first person I ever met who was over the age of 60 and had a STEM-related degree.
Fortunately for me, I grew up in a family where Food Is Important, so helping in the kitchen is an entirely reasonable thing for both sexes to do.
Help with the cleanup. I was raised in a Southern family, and all the children helped set & clear the table. My brothers & I continue to do it unless there are children around to do it for us! It makes all the women happy – the feminists obviously, but also the non-political women – I overheard one aunt of mine tell someone that the Feep boys “treat their women right”. Not exactly a feminist expression, but true. My dad used to call it KP, from his army days. (Kitchen Police, for you unmilitarized types…)
As for the cooking, my wife & I have had a deal for years – whoever doesn’t cook does the cleanup. And since I can get a meal on the table about twice as fast as she can, and can make a meal out of whatever is on hand, I do the lion’s share of the cooking, at least during the week. Plus I’m a bit more tolerant about at what point something is “clean” so she prefers the cleanup as a matter of self-defense.
You see, it’s not what you do, but the manner in which you do it.
My wife leans feminist, albeit in a conservative sort of way, so every now & then I have to remind her that I’m a guy, not a girl, so I don’t exactly see things as she does. Fortunately she’s rational about it most of the time – she still doesn’t see that boys, particularly white boys, are now at the bottom of the heap in terms of their economic prospects, nor does she grasp that, more & more young men are reading the tea leaves, and will either not marry, or marry immigrant girls.
The main problem, I think, is that a lot of women, in effect, marry the government, or their jobs. The ones who marry their jobs are more likely to wake up & look for a man, though perhaps too late.
“boys, particularly white boys, are now at the bottom of the heap in terms of their economic prospects”
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2011/07/25/9992/the-black-and-white-labor-gap-in-america/
http://www.techyville.com/2012/11/news/unemployed-black-woman-pretends-to-be-white-job-offers-suddenly-skyrocket/
The men who marry immigrant girls, or don’t get married at all, are the types that real American women do not want. So everyone should be happy!
Both of those articles could/would have begs. Also, btw, not the man who married this immigrant girl.
Also pfui.
“Bianca White” sounds like someone whose mother was ethnic, probably south of the border and married someone with an English last name– also, changing to a single number means any issues with the home phone are avoided.
Frankly, someone trying to pass as white by naming themselves “White White” sounds like a parody……
I find it interesting that Ms. Spivey is in New Jersey, a bastion of Liberalism, and therefore supposedly above all that racist nonsense.
Particularly since most people called White are black. No? Tally your acquaintance.
Incidentally, there were four folks that I served with who had the last name of “White.”
Three were very, very black, and one was adopted…..
YES.
Not sure how you’re linked articles support your conclusion. Care to elaborate, or was this a hit-n-run?
Also: pfui.
Apropos of the differences between men and women, there’s an incredible cookbook if you can find it, called For the Barefoot Gourmet: Life, Loves, and Meatloaf. Subtitled, “A cookbook for the bachelor-minded male”. It’s basically a philosophy for fifties beach living, but running throughout the book is his thoughts on the differences between men and women in the kitchen.
For example, “Cooking is infinite. Only women cooks are finite.”
I like to compare it to Saucepans and the Single Girl. “It’s easy enough to delude a male Saturday dinner guest into believing that he has discovered a real jewel of a gourmet.”
Of course in reality, men are the best most innovative chefs, composers, song writers, architects, software designers, entrepreneurs, inventers, etc . . . any endeavor where logic, imagination and risk taking are prerequisites for exceptional achievement. It’s just in the brain makeup; no amount of training or experience can alter this genetic certainty.
I finally decided that it may be because I gravitate towards helping out in the kitchen when we visit.
There’s food, the folks that are there are almost assured to be do-ers instead of all talk, there’s food, you can always find something to do and talk about, and did I mention food?
Will there be food? I mean, I’ll still be there to help, sure, no matter if there is or isn’t but, well, you know . . . 😉
I help out in the kitchen because it was beaten into me that a good guest is a helpful guest, and cleans up after himself. Besides, as Foxfier hinted at — that’s where the food ends up. 8^)
As the Admiral said on the radio to the Naval Aviator making his last pass to land on the carrier, because he was just about out of gas, “You have to land here, son, this is where the food is.”
And when you’re a young man, that’s where the women are.
An archetypical “son of Martha”
Why am I in the kitchen? Because I know how to cook. Why do I know how to cook? Because I like to eat good food.
What part of enjoying good food equates with being gay?
Eh, this is a group of hilljacks who are barely out of the, “Women should spend their time in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant” stage.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping them “barefoot and pregnant”, but you’ll find it’s much easier to keep ’em pregnant if you help out, especially in the kitchen!
NOT in the kitchen. That’s unsanitary. And besides, our boys would never eat at the kitchen table again if… oh… wait… that’s not what you meant? Never mind.
Heh. Heard a call someone made to Dr. Laura one time. The caller was complaining that his girlfriend’s parents wouldn’t talk to him any more. The reason? The parents had gone out for the evening, but had come home early and found the two of them going at it on the kitchen table.
As far as your boys are concerned, you’re not supposed to TELL them.
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah….all that education and you still…..
I learned to cook in Boy Scouts. You learn, go hungry, or eat out of cans. No one in my patrol wanted Spam and chili all weekend.
yes indeed!
One of the best definitions of honor that I’ve heard is “there are things that I will not do”. Too many of these women sneer at “honor” while not realizing that men’s honor may be the only thing preventing men from using their superior strength against women.
Nailed it, Paul.
Bingo. For guys, a punch in the nose is perhaps on the table as an appropriate response to jerkish behavior. (Maybe a stronger word than jerkish belongs there, but…)
However, for females, a punch in the nose is never on the table as an appropriate response if the man understands chivalry, honor, and traditional roles.
Take that away and bad things happen to everybody.
Liberals trip over Chesterton’s fence once again, unfortunately, they have far too much power and when they trip, we all hit the sidewalk.
For an example of what happens when people ignore physical reality and gender roles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nck5hVKZsUY
Kinda violent, be warned.
Disturbing and uncomfortable video. The more telling parts for me are twofold. One, the woman felt emboldened by the still surviving culture of male restraint to resort to physical violence, repeatedly, despite a demonstrated inability to hold her own in the match. And two, that the other occupants of the bus, and the woman herself*, fell back to culturally berating the man because “that’s a female.” (for the record, I agree with those calling for the man to restrain himself, it is essential that he do so.) Yet, they made no move to berate the woman for her ignorant recklessness. And she completely fails to understand her part in fracturing his restraint.
*She begins to heckle him with the notion that other men (including the police) are going to deal him a blow in her defense, refusing to acknowledge any culpability for the events.
Disturbing and uncomfortable video doesn’t begin to describe. Ugly, ugly behaviour.
The woman reminds me of people at the zoo, yelling at and tossing things at the caged animals, secure in their expectations that the cages will protect, even though the bars have been so weakened and undermined as to exist only symbolically. This is a profoundly unhappy woman; if the man exercises restraint she is incapable of respecting it and when he responds to her attacks in kind she is incapable of comprehending it.
Alas, the harms done by squandering of inherited cultural wealth.
…squandering of inherited cultural wealth.
This is a perfect phrase. How do we go about re-instilling a belief in the value of that cultural wealth?
Same way we did it last time, Eamon – one bloody nose (or worse) at a time.
Mew
I’d prefer a path short of civil war, if possible.
So would I.
I just don’t *see* one, other than another World War.
Mew
On the contrary. It is essential that he NOT restrain himself.
As mentioned upthread the InstaPundit says “Chivalry was a system, one that imposed obligations of behavior on women and girls as well as on men.”
This is much like the “Laws of War”, or various treaties on weapons of mass destruction.
You are only obligated to follow the rules against fellow rule followers. This is deliberate, to create an incentive to follow the rules.
Chick got *exactly* what she deserved, and will probably go to jail.
The popo *might* think slightly less of him, but enough of them have been spit on and slapped by women that they will probably buy him a coffee and some doughnuts.
While I understand the sentiment, and might even be inclined to agree within the limited circumstance, I disagree with the larger thought.
I firmly believe it is only our restraint that is holding civilization together. Having some familiarity with responsible members of a group casting aside restraint in the face of the unrestrained I have no hope that meeting this threat within our own society blow for blow is a survivable experience for our civilization.
The laws of war and treaties regarding the same are dependent upon other partners, arguably ‘outside’ agencies enforcing the agreed upon standards. If all of the signatories abandon any pretense of holding to the treaty who, precisely, can be expected to step back into line and restore civilized conduct?
Your system opens things up to abuse by free-riders. If there is no cost to being unrestrained, and there is a cost – restraining oneself takes effort – to restraint, then you will see restraint erode away.
If you value a restrained civilization you must punish the unrestrained.
The same applies to international systems. That’s why the US had chemical and biological weapons stocks. We needed the ability to respond to those who violated the relevant treaties. Once we announced the policy that all WMD attacks would be considered to be nuclear attacks we didn’t need chemical and biological weapons, so we disposed of them.
International (or interpersonal) agreements aren’t handed to us out of the void. They’re developed because they’re preferable to the alternative. As the system loses stability the rational actors will work together to eliminate the destabilizing influence. If there aren’t enough rational actors the system will fall apart until the resulting chaos drives the creation of a new system. Look at the peace movement between the Wars.
Oh, I’m in no way advocating that the unrestrained should not be punished. I absolutely think they should pay a heavy price for their lack of restraint. I’m fully aware of the ‘externally’ applied nature of civilization, and I think the failure to enforce the external application erodes the whole experiment.
I think we’ve stretched the analogy of international actors a bit and it occludes the core idea. Nations are not individuals and their actions and deterrents do not map neatly onto individual interaction.
But I’m speaking in a very specific sense about the behavior of individuals in the midst of a confrontation. Within our system, with a burden of restraint placed on the most powerful, losing that restraint and responding in kind to an unrestrained attack will not be seen as punishing the unrestrained, it will be seen as abusing power. I’ll not comment on the value of that judgement, but it’s visible within contemporary events.
When I say ‘our restraint’ I mean specifically individuals (and even more specifically men) not social institutions. That the man in the video could effectively beat the aggressor into submission is evident to all but the aggressor. Actually setting about doing so did not serve as a deterrent to her further action and earned the enmity of his peers. The value of the lesson is lost across the cultural interface between man and woman, and because the social conditioning broke down and the more powerful attacked the less.
As the system loses stability the rational actors will work together to eliminate the destabilizing influence. If there aren’t enough rational actors the system will fall apart until the resulting chaos drives the creation of a new system.
^This. I am advocating that the rational actors work together to eliminate the destabilizing influence, not give in to the destabilizing to mete out individual punishment at individual whim. Primarily because I have some firm idea of what fall apart until the resulting chaos actual entails in terms of blood and pain and life.
In the subject video the rational actors are the bystanders who intervened not the aggressive passenger nor the driver.
Hopefully I’m driving toward clarity here, sometimes I’m obscure.
Then how does the unrestrained in this example learn that they are acting incorrectly? If the restrained does not respond in kind, what will prevent it in the future? And beyond that, what happens when the restrained cannot take it any more, and goes berserk on a whole group of people and sends them to the hospital?
It has to be enforced by a third party, kind of like how a coach can’t be the ump. (And if they are, they have to call against their team if there’s a tiny hint of question…. it sucks.)
Much tidier than mine. ^What she said!
Within a civil society we have mechanisms to resolve interpersonal dispute without beating on each other. (Note: I am not speaking about self-defense scenarios or suchlike) When the unrestrained individual presents no threat of great bodily harm or imminent death it’s more proper to disengage and rely on those mechanisms for resolution.
To the particulars, if someone thinks it is better for the individuals involved and society in general that this man not only felled the woman with an uppercut, physically threw her off the bus and tossed her belongings after her but wrapped his hands around her neck and then jerked her head about once she had been restrained then I don’t know what arguments to use to sway them.
Participation in civilized society, especially on a scale like modern America, requires that we defer some of our natural rights to the enforcement of 3rd party agencies. In the absence of that deferment there is no purpose to restraint on anyone.
As to cannot take it any more, and goes berzerk, how does going berserk in this instance moderate against going berserk in the future? Besides, I reject the ‘cannot take it anymore’ argument, at least for my own part. I’ve been putting up with the unrestrained idiocy of the population for a long time without any tendency toward berserkerism, I intend to continue the trend.
Just for clarity, I do not advocate that the unrestrained be allowed to continue on about their merry, oblivious and destructive way. We must engage the mechanisms of society to curtail this sort of behavior. I just don’t think letting ourselves descend into barbarity as a demonstration of the consequences is best route to pursue at this time.
The essential problem is with the verbs, not the pronouns:
This man not only felled the man with an uppercut, physically threw him off the bus and tossed his belongings after him but wrapped his hands around his neck and then jerked his head about once he had been restrained.
Excessive force initiated by the driver is, as Jesse Jackson Jr., observed in a comparable instance, unfortunate. Or maybe he said it was unacceptable. Whatever – my brain is too small to fill it with the wit & wisdom of Hymie Jackson.
Moreover, the driver is an employee of the state and therefore has a higher duty to restrain his impulse to smack the arrogant ignorant b-aitch down no matter how much she deserves it. Fundamental rule of man rules is violated: he lost control of himself. Had she struck him or a passenger, force sufficient to restrain or dissuade her would not have been out of line, nor would a little extra to impress upon her the dangers she was taunting.
If my memory of it being the bus driver is wrong then make appropriate changes to above screed. Ain’t gonna watch that trash twice.
Caveat: I had to rely on third-person descriptions here, as I am unable to watch videos willy-nilly without taking my internet connection down to a crawl for 24 hours, so I did not know the extent of the response. In that case, I agree that it was over the top.
My response was predicated on the notion that he decided he had had enough, and did something like backhand her and knock her down, not the extended version you described. Had it been as I thought, I would endorse it, because nothing would happen to her otherwise. If she actually were arrested, which is highly doubtful, the very same arguments you are giving here would be used in her defense, and the man would be castigated as a wimp for even allowing the prosecution to go forward (even if he didn’t have a choice in the matter), and she would be exonerated because, “she was weaker than him – she was no threat”.
Re: Losing it – I applaud your restraint, but not everyone is capable of that, and we should not define the standard by those who are multiple deviations outside of the norm. A defense for assault used to be, “fighting words (or actions)”, for a reason.
Fair enough. The video does give the discussion a somewhat different character. If his response had been so *ahem* restrained (sorry, couldn’t help it…) as a backhand I’d probably have left out my concerns above.
Sucks about the internet twitchiness. Occasionally my machine decides to be choppy and irritating about videos all on its ownself, but nothing quite that inconveniencing. Commiserations.
As to fighting words and the like, I think we could benefit from recognizing “he needed a good ass kicking” as a legitimate defense. But men usually have rules between them in an ass kicking.
Oh, my Internet’s not twitchy. I have a daily download limit that is frustratingly easy to exceed, and then they throttle it down to dial-up speeds for 24 hours.
Ah, well, then I feel much sorrier for myself and my occasional inexplicable video shenanigans… 😉
I failed to see the bus driver wrap his hands around her neck and shake her after she was restrained. Not disputing that he did, just that the video sucked and I missed that part. That was over the top, but, after being cussed at, chewed out, and punched by the woman because he wouldn’t allow her to break company policy (drinking tequila on the bus) all while be taunted because he was a man and couldn’t touch her, I had no problem with him ‘caressing’ her jaw with and upper cut and physically throwing her and her belongings off the bus.
This is one of the side effects of our modern love affair with wymyn’s feminism. If the cops had been called on her everybody present was perfectly well aware that nothing would have been done to her, while if she was a male who acted identically she would have been hauled off to jail. When justice is partial people learn to take justice into their own hands. As the bus driver said, “you want to act like a man, I’ll treat you like a man.”
Well, the wrapping about the neck and the shaking were two separate occasions within the fight. I believe the wrapping about the neck was the primary impetus for the crowd to get involved.
I don’t blame him for his response to the provocation. The extreme provocation. I’m not even disinclined to the notion that she had it coming. I just know myself and others and value restraint ridiculously.
. If the cops had been called on her everybody present was perfectly well aware that nothing would have been done to her, while if she was a male who acted identically she would have been hauled off to jail.
Probably not; if she were a male she’d probably be worried about outstanding warrants, but if she was sure she didn’t have ’em… the cops wouldn’t care.
As I”ve told before, my car was broken into by a ring that was stealing radios, valuables and identities. They were caught red handed in all three because one partner thought he was being cheated on his cut of their weed business, and called the cops to complain.
Quite a bit later, I got a letter that told me that they’d been given something like six months community service…suspended.
Yeah, these things represent a failure of those societal mechanisms and make the restraint argument a difficult sell. As a discussion for a different day, I think much of that is done with the misguided belief that it ‘helps’ the poor thugs, instead of putting them on the path to an unfortunate confrontation.
Quite a bit later, I got a letter that told me that they’d been given something like six months community service…suspended.
That was probably a result of jail overcrowding combined with a decent lawyer, and possibly they gave evidence of a higher-up. The woman would not have even been arrested, in all likelihood, simply because she was not a man.
The only reason charges were pressed on a teen who had stolen his 60th car (mine) is because we had an Amateur radio in it and he threw it away. The teen had broken the driver’s side window. He not only went to jail for a few years (stealing a radio that is used for emergency communications is a federal crime) he ended up sending us reparations for a year.
I think we agree more than we disagree.
I would agree that a powerful person shouldn’t become completely unrestrained in response to an unrestrained attack by a weaker person. I do think that they should use whatever means are necessary to defeat the attack. In the case of a violent attack the response should be sufficient violence to eliminate the threat, but no more. Thus, my response to an attack by my 6-year old cousin would be different than to my 29-year old brother, which would be different from my response to a knife-wielding stranger. But in all cases the response would be restrained. The only time I would go full spider-monkey would be if I were faced by a threat stronger than me.
Yep, I think we’re in alignment.
Since I am a woman, 😉 I go with every strategy I have including talking the person down. If I can’t do that I go full out, and throw everything at ’em including the kitchen sink otherwise known as the nuclear option. I am of the opinion that once you get the reputation of this type, most people want to leave you alone. Of course I can’t go toe-to-toe which was a valuable lesson I learned in karate. I can do the surprise attack– or as I have been told by companions “I may have lost a fight-fight, but I have never lost an ambush.”
Oh yeas. If you’re smaller and weaker — and unfortunately age is starting to tell — you go nuts.
The Tale of The Bully and the Crazy Boy (Girl)
I wasn’t always smaller and weaker… but age and illness has taken a toll. Plus it seems like age is not respected anymore–
I am tempted to make a sarcastic comment here, but I fear that 1500 miles is not enough distance to get away with it… 🙂
*snort– you are afraid of my rapier wit? 😉
No, I’m afraid that if I say it wrong and make you angry, you’ll come find me and throw me out the window of the building where I work (on the 20th floor). 🙂
What I was thinking was to respond to your comment about age not being respected any more with, “Oh, shush and go sit down, grey-haired old lady”. 😛
Wayne– you make me laugh– I just don’t have the strength to throw you out of the window… maybe push? Plus I have more wrinkles than grey hair. My hair is blonde with silver glints. lol
Louis L’amour used to claim, “I have won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights in the ring as a professional boxer, I have never lost one out of the ring.”
It is a good sentiment, when the rules go out the window, throw the one who threw the rules out, after them.
This is why the argument that captured al Qaeda fighters, guerrillas hiding under protective cover of non-combatant civilians, must be granted — at a minimum — full protection of signatories to the Geneva protocols (if not given the privileges of American civil court protections is not just stupid, not just astoundingly stupid but astoundingly dangerously stupid.
I think it has its origins in Israeli attacks by “Palestinians” who not only are the very definition of unlawful combatants (a Keffiyeh is not a uniform) and whose placement of combat positions in civilian areas (including hospitals and school buildings) endangers (ostensible) non-combatants, rendering them unwilling human shields but whose war crimes are given the #^%!@ blessing of our self-defined “enlightened” intellectual class, who blame Israelis for the harm done by their efforts to curtail such attacks.
And then our “leaders” complain about Israeli arrogance for not playing the “Heads Palestinians win, Tails Israelis lose” game they’ve been cast into.
… a Keffiyeh is not a uniform …
It’s been a couple of years since I read the Geneva protocols, but I recall there being a provision for guerilla fighters being counted as being “in uniform”, with the benefits thereof, if they can produce some identifiable symbol that they all wear. The example given was an armband, I believe. One could make the case for the black-and-white keffiyeh being a uniform. Of course, the natural consequences of this would mean that anyone wearing the keffiyeh would be considered “in uniform” and, among other things, a legitimate military target. Yes, including those useful idiots who put one on to participate in protest marches in America.
The rest of the Palestinian Geneva violations, however, put them outside of Geneva’s protections anyway, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Good point. If the Israelis were to target any body in the war zone wearing a Keffiyeh it would be a … actually, it would be a pretty good thing, except for the wailing of the idiots who think they can play with matches without getting burnt.
If the Israelis targeted anybody wearing a keffiyeh it would be… effective.
That reminds me, I need to order that star-of-David keffiyeh I’ve been looking at. *evil grin*
That is one?
As far as I know, the US is not a signatory to any of the abominations that grant terrorists GC protections.
Actually, I think the Geneva conventions allow partisans and insurgents to be categorized as legal combatants, provided they display some kind of identifying mark and abide by all the rules of war. The Keffiyeh could meet the first requirement, but since Hamas and the PLO violate the crap out of the second one the point is academic.
I would love to see the Knesset declare the existence of Palestine and then immediately declare a state of war exists between Israel and Palestine with shelling beginning in 12 hours and no terms but unconditional surrender.
Heh. We posted essentially the exact same thing. 🙂
That’s what I get for using the notifications instead of reading the thread.
At least I added some original content in my second paragraph. 🙂
Feminism, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s dictum about democracy, is the belief that females are to be treated as men and deserve to get it good and hard.
Strange, isn’t it, how nobody questions the whupping a smaller, weaker, skinnier man gets after taunting and assaulting the bigger, stronger, heavier man. Rather, most people will say “he got what was coming to him” or “he asked for it”. Yet when a female taunts, torments, and assaults a man, few have the strength of character to judge correctly when the man treats her as she deserves and say “she got what was coming to her, she asked for it.”
Just look around you. If it weren’t for their sexist double standards feminists would have no standards at all.
This is known as desiring to have your cake and eat it, too. Societies which encourage such silliness should end. Societies which indulge it are in the process of ending.
It seems a bit insoluble. You hold your temper, you’re potentially seen as less of a man (by those who don’t know any better).
You engage physically, you’re a great big bullying man trying to oppress women.
You engage verbally, and heaven help you, the person you’re trying to engage with probably won’t play fair and has built up a good head of steam at this point.
You ignore her, she yells louder or moves to physical provocation.
I’m trying to game this out in my head, and I don’t know how a civilized man gets out of this with his civility intact. Maybe he doesn’t.
The civilized man gets out of a situation that doesn’t present a threat to his safety or life by disengaging and/or walking away. Those who don’t know any better and see him as less of a man don’t matter. If you can’t disengage or walk away you take the minimal action necessary to contain the situation and then you disengage and walk away.
Having the strength and power is essentially tied to restraining it. All else leads to barbarity via a short road or long.
Sometimes the only reasonable response is to laugh in the person’s face. It denies them seriousness.
I’m amenable to that.
Works for me!
Perhaps I misread, but I’m not sure how much strength of character it takes to applaud when the strong beat down the weak.
Though I do agree regarding the disreputable nature of many feminist standards.
Full text here:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_oh_to_be.html
And not only does she suffer the physical, psychological, spiritual harm, but the guy goes to jail (and should) because he hasn’t been properly socialized. Wh
dagnabit early clicking…
… Who is at fault, though? The guy, certainly, for actively inflicting the harm…
But the wider society that tore down the values and principles that could have channeled the guy’s behavior? The teachers and parents who bought in to it? They may have responsibility, but they have no culpability.
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Clive Staples. Cheers, Clive. *empties glass*
I think you mean “Jack”. 😉
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 9:23 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > @kilteDave commented: “Clive Staples. Cheers, Clive. *empties glass*” >
We were never that close, to my shame. Still, I enjoy his writing, even when it convicts me.
C. S. Frackin’ Lewis. Now all we need is an obligatory Kipl… nope. nope, Someone already quoted from “Female of the Species.” I think I might have ATH Bingo!
Nope, look here, yes right here. Nothing on your Monty Python square. You shouted “bingo!” too soon.
Ah no. It’s never on the table if she acts like a lady. If not, well then one does what one must. Chivalry, as Reynolds like to point out, is a system.
Honor indeed is a neglected virtue. It’s destruction is paramount to those who want to destroy (fundamentally transform) our society. Thus those last bastions of male society–the military, the boy scouts–must be destroyed. And here I mean honor as still understood by our society, not the poorly translated “honor” that only means reputation.
Chivalric honor, not primal honor, in other words. Lancelot instead of the bad version of machismo.
Machismo, or pride, or face isn’t honor, it’s status. It’s a way of ranking yourself among peers, not defining yourself in relationship to the universe.
Indeed. Machismo is analogous to the concept of “face” in Asian societies. Externally, it looks a lot like honor, and can even substitute, but in the negative ends up a destructive force. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and you’ve lost face. You’ve brought shame upon yourself and your family. Allow someone to demonstrate themselves better than you (at anything) and you have lost status, through no fault of your own. Pah! Nonsense. If anyone else’s gain means your loss, you’re doing it wrong.
Nobody else can dishonor you. Only you can do that.
You know that, and I know that. But those whose whole life has been lived in an honor/shame society where what others think of you is more important than what you think of yourself… they’re going to have a harder time accepting the truth of that statement.
See Dr. Danity’s post on shame and the excellent diagram of guilt cultures (most Western cultures) vs. shame cultures (most Eastern cultures, including Middle Eastern).
Typo. That should, of course, be Dr. Sanity.
I agree, which is why I’m of the opinion that machismo is a pernicious lie, used by small people to promote small agenda. It ruins lives by forcing unnatural conformation.
Gonna hazard a guess that this is, in part, because Western culture developed in a less resource-constrained environment than Eastern culture.
There was always a horizon for someone in the West to travel over .. but Japan, China, the Koreas et al were quite literally always beset from the outside… usually by one another.
Further, the West is much more individualistic – especially when one gets to the U.S.; reinventing yourself is seen as .. well, I was going to say “normal”, but … Not “shocking”, anyway.
Otherwise, agree. The idea of “face”, of “preserving the honor of the family” is not the same as western *individual* “honor”
Mew
Um, didn’t Lancelot cuckold the king? Not exactly chivalrous nor honorable.
Er… I’m not really big on Arthurian legend, but TX Red is an historian.
However, chivalry HERE means “don’t hit her over the head with a rock.” You okay with that?
The Arthurian legends are unclear as to whether Lancelot cuckolded Arthur or merely compromised her honor*. Two reasons for this: legends are generally low resolution on such blow-by-blow issues and their retelling are frequently targeted at an “all ages” audience for whom such details are typically deemed inappropriate.
*The difference between the two terms is left as an exercise for readers of regencies.
Well Lancelot is also a late addition to the Arthur tale. IIRC there was no “queen’s lover” in the earliest Arthur stories. Lancelot was added to the Arthur legends by French minstrels during a time when “courtly lovers” were in fashion.
In talking about men, you give us only two possibilities for sex: courting a woman or raping her. There’s another alternative: being courted by her. But don’t feel bad, because every feminist ignores this possibility as well, even though they think of themselves as experts on gender roles. In fact, feminists go so far as to think that rape is part of patriarchy, after which they conclude that since rape is still around, patriarchy is still around, too. I point out to them that if rape is part of patriarchy, why are there lesbians who have engaged in sexual assaults? Lesbians should be the least likely people to do this, if rape were truly part of patriarchy.
Anyway, I’ve written a book about this topic, available on Amazon.
Speaking of evolution — in any animal species, the sex that invests more in the offspring is wooed by the one that invests less. Statistically, at least
There’s always paying for it.
In a very loose sense of the term, this could be considered a form of courting, just the basest possible form.
Nah. The object of courting is to convince the woman to stick around. The object of hiring a prostitute is that she goes away.
Or never not.
I think it’s less that she gave only two possibilities, than expecting that those are the VAST majority of cases, with women courting men falling in a distant third. It is mostly reserved for the rare case when a man is unable to perceive himself as worthy, but a woman does.
This does not mean that women do not do things to attract men, but they almost never actively pursue them.
I’d also say that a good portion of the women who are courting men manage to make it look like the men are the ones doing the courting.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 11:59 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > Wayne Blackburn commented: “I think it’s less that she gave only two > possibilities, than expecting that those are the VAST majority of cases, > with women courting men falling in a distant third. It is mostly reserved > for the rare case when a man is unable to perceive himself as worth” >
Well, that’s a well-documented technique. in the words of Heinlein, she “Chases him until he catches her.” But it’s not the same thing, since it’s done more in the nature of putting herself in his way until he realizes she’s a good prospect.
The old line of “she ran from him so fast that *she* caught him”. [Wink]
And:
“I chased her for years before she caught me…”
It is rarer. Most women simply don’t LIKE doing the pursuing. Sorry, it’s like talking about that tribe in papua new guinea where men do the weaving and women do the hunting. It is not, nor will it ever be how things are done, because it goes against “mammal pattern.” In mammal cultures that mate for life, females play hard to get because the difficulty of courtship increases the attachment.
Now, there is a difference when “seducing for a tryst”, and all primate females do that. But for mating, males court females usually. That is the pattern for mammals, let alone primates or humans.
Yeah, some of us women like pursuing, but it will never be the general pattern. Lesbians are a whole other ball of wax, and I want you to understand I’m not saying women are not capable of violence — just they’ll never be the pursuer as a matter of course and en masse. people’s individual arrangements are THEIR business.
“Most women simply don’t LIKE doing the pursuing.” Exactly. What I’m saying is that feminists said they wanted to eliminate all gender roles, but a more accurate description of what they are doing is that they want to eliminate the gender roles they hate and keep the ones they like.
By the way, thanks for the hint about Bill Ayers. That’s priceless. It fits in with all the other examples I have of leftist hypocrisy.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are two monstrously-evil individuals. Between them they completely corrupted and destroyed at least dozens of people, and exerted a profoundly malign influence on many thousands more — millions if you count their role as mentors to Barack Obama. They would deliberately break up any couples that formed amongst their followers, mostly through encouraging joyless group sex. Ayers would partake in the orgies, the better to cement his dominance (“I nailed your woman”). Dohrn (who knew how to best exert female power) would generally stay clear, though she would strategically have sex with key influential individuals (especially Bill, which is how they wound up getting married in the end).
I would call them Ayn Randian villains, save that Ayn Rand never made villains quite that Obviously Evil. Seriously, they’re more over the top than Ellsworth Toohey. And they’re real. And alive. And still Villains With Good Publicity. After they engaged in an utterly-pointless attempt at revolution, which directly got about a dozen dead and indirectly destroyed hundreds of lives on both sides, they burrowed into the Establishment they hated and have been participating in the continued corruption of Chicago — basically joining the Machine that the Days of Rage of 1968 had opposed, because it gave them wealth and power.
The best description of these two masses of sewage in humanoid form comes from David Horowitz, Destructive Generation.
They didn’t have to “join” the machine — they were already part of it. Ayers comes from an extremely rich family, after all.
The family was also powerful as his father’s wikipedia page shows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_G._Ayers
(not a critique, a reinforcement)
If you ever want to find an inexhaustible source of villainous characterization, check out the 60s radicals. Such boundless egotism and self-absorption, their “lack of materialism” blatantly being the narcissistic assumption that whatever they wanted would be provided so they can feign contempt.
It’s quite understandable that they mostly came from middle-class to rich backgrounds, for two reasons: first, their own snobbery never permitted them to be led by members of the lower classes or racial minorities (though the latter in particular were often kept around and worshipped as sacred curiosities); and second, most poor people or energetic members of racial minorities were more interested in becoming successful and wealthy than in playing at revolution. The really dark thing about the Counterculture was its Pied Piper nature: it consisted mostly of rich to upper middle class adults sucking in gullible lower middle class to lower class kids, to the destruction of those kids. And, when the Countercultural leaders got tired of playing-at revolution, they went back to their lives of ease through their family’s wealth and social connections, and left their less-fortunate playmates to sink under the weight of the poor physical and psychological health, and lack of meaningful work and life experience, which had been bequeathed to said playmates by the revolution game.
One should also note that it needs to be different than a guy chasing a girl. As G. K. Chesterton objected to a play by Shaw not that the woman chased the man but that in the process, she convinced us that the man would never consent to marry her.
” It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is not there by accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that the mousetrap runs after the mouse.”
It derives in part from the dynamics of the commercial relationship being conducted. Each party has something to trade and seeks to get the highest possible price for it. Traditionally, the worst possible way to get a high price for your wares is to let the trading partner know you have no other buyers.
I leave it to the varying degrees of cynical to debate just what each partner in a relationship is selling or buying; in my experience every such transaction is unique.
I hate doing the pursuing, but in my husband’s case, he was so utterly clueless I had to at least initiate the chase. After that, it was much more traditional.
Clears throat. I chased him until he caught me. Took me four friggen years. That’s how clueless my darlin’ was. BUT all the while HE thought HE was doing the chasing, and running hard too. Eh. 😉 I hope there are equally manipulative females out there for my boys, because they’ve inherited the clueless from dad.
Because we are both Odd, and non-traditional in ways that society raises an eyebrow at even now, I had to chase. Fortunately not for long before he caught me.
Well, our plight was worsened by my giving up and getting engaged to someone else.
Look, I spent my entire prom talking him down to my date — how he could have failed to get the hint… 😛
I was similarly chased, and caught.
Then abandoned.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Often comes in large part from the dissolution of clear mechanisms of social interaction. And quite possibly from getting burned for misapprehending the cues.
I think we’re better off seeing each other as slightly alien species and establishing and working through an interface that clarifies disparate signals.
“Are men and women the same species? Yes, I know what science says, but scientists have been wrong in the past. Perhaps we’re just highly specialized symbionts.” Robert A. Heinlein.
🙂
For reasons unknown, we have been sequestered by a superior race. (Divide and rule?) Elsewhere in the universe there is a complementary population of males and females making the best of their imperfect compatibility.
Our experience is the same. Teresa asked me for our first date, and demanded a recount by e-mail after I told her at the end of the date that I don’t feel a spark. The reason was, to a large extent, that I didn’t feel myself worthy.
If we are going to go with hunting analogies men prefer to spot and stalk hunt, while women prefer to sit over bait and wait for their prey to come to them.
Oh ho do I disagree! Females live for the pursuit but insist on reserving for themselves plausible deniability that they’re on the hunt. Check again the cover teasers on the female-interests magazines that crowd the supermarket checkout aisles in the U.S.A. Similar magazines in German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese are big sellers in the lands where those are the mother tongues and they’re not being bought by the men there. If one finds females who aren’t chasing after men’s interest then one has stumbled across that near-mythical tribe in Africa or Papua New Guinea.
I am unabashedly male, though I am so in an odd way. Feetsbull? Basicball? nope. I actually fear for American women. I got a good one who knows she is a woman and that I am a man. A number of us odds have done that. What the “normal women may find out in a few more years of this path is that they will have one of two statuses, property or prostitute. I don’t think our society can continue in this direction much longer and it won’t be a pendulum swing. It will be a wire broken by tension. The reason i think it will be wire whip instead of pendulum is “a perfect storm” of factors. Our socity is becoming untenable for men on many fronts. When men snap it won’t be pretty. And gentle will go out the window
I know, that is my fear too. Most young women seem to be dopped to the hilt on anti-psychotics — a silent epidemic — and it is a measure of how broken we are.
Substitute people for women and SSRIs for anti-psychotics.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when folks can no longer afford their pill colored glasses and have to learn 20 years of coping mechanisms in a few months.
doped, not dopped.
Won’t happen, a lot of these pills are generics, and not much more expensive than ramen noodles.
Soma.
I’d really rather not be property, thank you very much.
Your preferences might not matter. If things go as I fear women will become envious of the freedoms of Muslim women. At that point women will be like dogs. I love my dog but decide what is best for her. I could dump her on the side of the road if I chose, drop her at the pound, or put her down. On the other hand there are stray dogs, anyone can pet them, or kick them without anyone paying much attention. And no man who pets a stray plans on taking it home.
Two more generations, if this ship isn’t righted.
I’m not sure it won’t be just one more.
I don’t believe enough of us will have died out for one more generation to be sufficient.
But I reset to ‘optimism’ each day.
Depends. How much blood and sweat and risk do you *personally* plan to put on the line to turn it?
See the problem?
Mew
While I have personally put some small measure on the line in favor of civilization in the past, and my willingness in the future…well, strategy dictates tactics remain unstated, I do understand your larger point.
And I understood the necessity of individual involvement when I made my original statement. Where I’d have to acknowledge my optimism may be getting the best of me is regional assumptions. Not everywhere is here, and not everybody is us, and that may undo us faster than I hope.
And I’ll reset to optimism, again.
“There’s a lot of ruin in a nation”. Of course how close we are to the end of that “lot” remains to be seen. I’d prefer to see it from elsewhere. Saturn maybe.
Already occurring. I forget which enlightened idiot feminist it is — Naomi Wolf comes to mind, but I try to delete these idiots from memory rather than allocating them data storage I could use for more useful things (like the batting order of the 1969 Baltimore Orioles) — has already stepped forward to write in praise of the freedom of the burkha. Thus far it is primarily the thrill of transgression, of taking on the challenge of debating in support of a contrary position, but soon enough such twits convince themselves ad all too many others.
Naomi Wolf was the first, but several others have followed suit.
Susan Sontag:
I was about to write that she set a standard that will never be equalled, but I realized how rieckless such a claim would be.
Good heavens. half of my female/of color colleagues tweet stuff double that bad.
Isn’t it amazing how many assumptions (mostly false, in my opinion) can be packed into such a short statement. It would take two kilowords to properly unpack that extremely dense phrase.
OTOH, I will also smile at a different Sontag statement:
It is telling that Sontag refers to her American ideological opposition as enemies. It is clear, as well, that she gave only the briefest of pauses to imagining that.
Tellling but hardly surprising.
…Not entirely sure what she was saying, since Reader’s Digest of the 80s on is as far back as I go.
I’d have to guess she’s insulting TN and TNS, since they seem to presume a basic level of knowledge and agreement, while Reader’s Digest is more general in aim and offers a lot of the “assumed” stuff in each article.
Reader’s Digest used to be a determinedly conservative, middle-brow magazine, an extremely successful business enterprise. A good overview of its collapse can be found:
InDigestible
The decline of a great magazine.
By John J. Miller, NR National Political Reporter
From the February 11, 2002, issue of National Review
There’s probably no agreeing on precisely when Reader’s Digest took a turn for the worse. There was the move last year to stick a celebrity photograph on the cover of every issue, rather than the picture of an ordinary American whose story of heroism would inspire readers. Two years earlier, there was the magazine’s redesign, which elevated graphics and visuals to a place of importance that previously had been reserved for the power of the written word. Around the same time, the magazine dropped its familiar slogan promising “Thirty-one articles each month . . . Each article of enduring value and interest.” There aren’t 31 articles each month anymore — the February 2002 issue has only 15 — and most of those that remain sure aren’t of enduring value and interest, either.
It’s a saddening transformation, and one that must especially upset conservatives, who seem able to do little more than sit by the bed of a good friend in the throes of a terminal illness. Reader’s Digest was not only the greatest and most popular magazine of the 20th century, it was also a steady ally. Monthly celebrations of traditional American values, staunch anti-Communism during the Cold War, and an optimistic philosophy of moral and personal aspiration made it stand out in the lowest-common-denominator world of magazine publishing. In an unwitting tribute to the Digest‘s success and influence, the Left loathed it. Conservatives of all stripes — and perhaps most importantly, the unpoliticized, small-c conservatives of the heartland — cherished it. The Digest was the quintessential magazine of “red-state” America — those broad swaths of the country colored red for George W. Bush on 2000 Election Night maps, as opposed to blue for Al Gore.
Reader’s Digest remained an outstanding magazine well into the 1990s, but much has changed in just the last three or four years. Editorial quality was sacrificed to a mix of poor personnel decisions and cost-cutting maneuvers. The Digest simply isn’t what it used to be. There are still occasional flashes of the old excellence, but now these increasingly rare moments double as disturbing reminders of how much has been lost.
A Magazine for Mose Everybody
Founded in 1922 by DeWitt and Lila Wallace, Reader’s Digest became what the Wall Street Journal was to call “the greatest publishing success since the Bible.” The Wallaces printed only 5,000 copies of their first issue, but their circulation soon skyrocketed. By the 1930s, they owned the most popular magazine in the United States and were beginning to reach around the globe. Today the Digest claims 12.5 million subscribers in this country — down from an all-time high of 18 million in the 1970s, but still an industry leader — and a grand total of 95 million readers who see one of its 48 editions published in 19 different languages.
The Digest was special for a number of reasons. Just as today’s Internet users rely on search engines to mine the best sources of information on the web, subscribers to Reader’s Digest could count on the Wal laces and their team to locate the best articles in a sea of periodicals and reproduce them in condensed form. Even tually, about half the magazine consisted of original material. The Digest displayed great variety and range; each issue had something in it for everybody, from a mother seeking health tips to a father interested in tax cuts to a teenager thrilled by real-life ad venture stories. Behind the whole enterprise was a typically American belief in self-improvement that managed to find an audience not just in the U.S., but everywhere. Reader’s Digest honored individuals and their achievements — usually ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
[MORE: http://old.nationalreview.com/11feb02/miller021102.shtml ]
Emphasis added. The highlighted portion should explain why intellectuals held it in such utter disdain that they wouldn’t allow it in their bathrooms even as toilet paper.
I stopped reading it mid eighties, when they had a profile of Samora Machel “president” of Mozambique and said he was only a nurse’s assistant because “the portuguese wouldn’t allow a black man to be a doctor.” Among the refugees desperately escaping Mozambique when it was given to Cuba and Russia, more or less as a free prize, was a young woman who had to travel as luggage, because a black woman wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country (just like white women were told to go, no matter how many generations their ancestors had been there.) That young woman was my SIL’s best friend and a senior in medical school. She was also a native and at least as black as Mr. Machel.
I’ve not bought Reader’s Digest since.
Ah.
I would’ve guessed the decline happened when the funky faddy medical stuff outnumbered the “WOW!” heartwarming tales of overcoming adversity.
They lost sight of their audience, took them for granted and held them in unconcealed contempt. Wow! What would happen if other publishers treated their readership that way?
Dona Sara sayeth: I’ve not bought Reader’s Digest since.
That will teach you to read any non-fiction popular press coverage of anything of which you have direct knowledge, either in the instance or in any technical field.
Highly educated professional journalists so consistently make basic errors of fact in stories touching on any topic I know anything at all about that I have come to assume everything in any journalistic presentation is pretty much fictive.
In the 1970’s and early ’80’s, Reader’s Digest had excellent political and historical coverage of terrorism, domestic and foreign, and its funding by the KGB. A lot of the articles were written specifically for Reader’s Digest, too.
The White race is the svior of civilization. To hell with that Sontag woman.
“The White Race” is a slander; there ain’t no sech thing, and all who claim there is are scoundrels and fools.
Prior to the ascension of Woodrow Wilson and his racist fellow travellers there was no “White Race” — there were Slavs, Germans, Italians, Russians, Poles, Finns, Dutch, French, Britons, Spaniards, Portuguese, Walloon, Serbs, Croats, Greeks and thousands of sub-cultures. Even in Britain you had the Welsh, Scots, Picts, Iceni, Irish, Angles, Saxons, Normans and more — so intermixed, especially the Anglo-Saxons whose women probably bore more babes with Danish fathers than Anglo-Saxon ones on the 9th & 10th Centuries — as to make any genetic distinctions moot.
Hear, hear. And the same applies to “the black race”, “the Asian race”, and whatever other broad categories racists of various stripes talk about. They lump so many different ethnicities and cultures into one category that any claims they’re trying to make are rendered utterly moot by the lousy grouping. Narrow it down to one or two ethnicities and you can make good claims (e.g., “The Hutus and Tutsis have a lot more in common than they think; linguistic analysis shows that …”), but any claims made about “the black race” (or Caucasian, or Asian, or Hispanic, or whatever the flavor of the month is) are so ridiculously over-broad that they become almost* meaningless.
* The only meaningful distinction that I’ve found is that most people do, as a general rule, have a preference for marrying “someone who looks kind of like me,” which is why intermarriage within the various “white” or “black” or “Asian” ethnicities is far more common than intermarriage between two people with widely varying skin tone, even among people without a racist bone in their bodies. (That is, a Thai woman is more likely to marry a Chinese man than a Nigerian man, and a Frenchman is more likely to marry an Italian woman than a Mexican woman. Much of this is, of course, due to geographical proximity, but in a racially-mixed country like the United States, the rate of visibly-interracial marriages is still lower than would happen if people had no racial preference in mate selection. And the results cannot be explained by the “Americans are still racist” theory: many of those who have no racism in their selection of friends will still have racial preference in their mate selection.) And thus, the categories “white” and “black” and “Asian” still continue to appear to mean something (if you’re only looking at skin tone, facial features, etc.), but really mean almost nothing when you start looking at genetics.
He keeps changing his IPs. BAH. I’m tired of racist garbage.
Ever hear of the concept of “hybrid vigor”? I’m proud to be a mutt.
Me too.
When my brothers were looking for wives, I tried to convince them to look for someone different with more varied heritage.
woof!!!
Mutt here too. Portugal, where all of the invaders to Europe wiped their genetic material before moving on…
Justthisguy– I have several lines who have intermarried so much that they are closely related (sometimes on the same). Even then, I am fair and I have sisters who have olive skin– What intermarrying has got us is autoimmune diseases, schizophrenia, paranoia, and many of the royal diseases. A little hybrid vigor would help us a lot (a hint we have hemophilia in our lines). You might get stronger mental abilities, but in-breeding causes a lot of weaknesses that are paused to several generations.
It only gets stronger mental abilities, if you cull the morons.
Yep–
You banned him, so I will spare everybody the eye glazing lecture on scientific breeding. Suffice it to say that inbreeding only improves the species if you cull judiciously. And that you know what you are looking to produce before you make a cross, and make each cross with an end goal in line. Neither of those aspects work well with the human race.
Ugh, someone forgot to wipe their shoes (or paws), and tracked a pile of excrement into the blog. Shame on you vertebrates!
I had to find a way to ban him that did not attach to the IP, since that’s changeable (He actually sent me a private message saying that’s because he’s on dialup. Bull feathers. It took him a whole day to do that after I banned the IP) Done now.
Yay! The Oyster’s back!
I’d have a choice. I am married to an honorable, faithful gentleman who will not do that to me.
He might treat you as well as he does now, in my dog analogy I never mentioned how spoiled she is. She is still property
I disagree that there will be an epidemic of rape and murder directed at women. Half of all babies born are children, and when a man has a daughter (and most men do), he suddenly becomes concerned about their welfare. I could be wrong, but I just don’t see it.
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment.
It’s probably inappropriate levity and not at all to your point, but,
Half of all babies born are children…
I just enjoy that (presumed) typo immensely. 🙂
The other half are monsters, of course. Monstrous little terrors, utterly without cognizance of how protected they are and full of nothing but want and… the stuff that fills dirty diapers. *grin*
Raise them to value character, curiosity, courage, and common sense, and they’ll probably turn out alright anyway. *grin* As a former little monster, I think I turned out okay.
Well, oddness and such aside, that is.
Definitely for the good raising of little monsters. And I think I have a new refrain:
For the monsters! Delivered with as much hollow emotional wrenching as I can manage.
I was another former little monster and a tomboy to boot. My little monster could probably beat up your little monster. 😛
Umm… my little monster was in a cage– but when it broke out, heaven help the person in direct opposition.
Probably. *grin* My inner monster is fat an happy most of the time. As long as I stay away from politics and keep a steady supply of shiny things to distract with, trouble tends to stay quiescent.
This is also why I’ve sworn off children. I was cursed, you see, as a child. I have godchildren that I am quite proud of, but my genes stop here. Because I always heard, “When you grow up you’re gonna have young ‘uns *just like you!* ”
*shudder* Anything but that! I *remember* the stuff I used to get up to, and wonder how in the hell I ever survived. I really shouldn’t have. Or how my folks survived *me.*
*chuckle*
I went ahead and had the kids, in the face of the same curse, and, oh, my friend, the curse spake right. I.e. younger spawn, oh, younger spawn, my friend. He’s either my dad to the life or, since my dad says I was his curse-response, me to the life. In either case, I’ve paid for my sins. At one time we knew all the emergency room technicians by name 😉
I think I’m going to have to start a second family, so that I can get “cursed” with a child like me. If only.
And before anyone says I don’t know what I’m talking about, the rest of my family says the same thing.
Heh. I’m still on a first name basis with quite a few of the staff at three different hospitals in two states. *grin*
It’s rather funny when the one’s I’ve not seen in twenty years say “Is that your son?” Referring to myself and his mother- both dark haired, dusky skinned, brown eyed people, carrying in a pale skinned blue eyed blond haired ball of rambunctiousness.
Unfortunately for me, he has somewhere gotten a streak of the smart-ass in him. I can’t for the life of me think where. It’s not like I *coached* him in the phrase “Lies and fallacies!” so he could say it when accused of something his cousin (practically his sister, they live together) did. Really!
The daughters will be locked up tighter than a drum and married off to the fathers choice of a “good” husband. Who will then have a piece of property.
Strikes me that casual rape suffered a well deserved mortal blow with the invention of small concealable firearms. And is seeing a resurgence in those countries that espouse strict gun control. As I recall the UK and Australia have incidents of rape two to three times that of the US, with the statistics tracking reliably with the increasing limits on self defense imposed upon their citizens.
Rape as an ongoing strategy is very time and energy intensive. Men who rape and leave avoid the problem of a wronged woman having access to his food while his back is turned or access to his throat while he sleeps.
Yes. I grow quietly frustrated and furious as I see so many, male and female, presume upon the restraint of men and declare it their virtue and the restrained man’s weakness. We’ve raised so many who don’t understand the underlying reasons for the system. And I guess living obliviously in the U.S. keeps them from any understanding of the potential for human barbarity. This came up before with the author who was offended that a man had defended his companion from inappropriate grabbing. Her contention being that women don’t need men to defend them! My response being, it was less about defense and more about enforcing civil behavior on his peers.
Regarding that presuming on the restraint thing: There used to be a functioning system of challenge and response in Western male society, a system for resolving dominance conflicts. That, too, has been destroyed and the results may be frighteningly catastrophic.
Referencing Glenn Reynolds: Chivalry was a system, and it had obligations for women as well as men.
Even from a gender-neutral point of view, I would want my companions to stick up for me if someone committed sexual assault and battery against me. Male or female.
My wife and I have a pact: if either of us is attacked, one of us will engage the attacker while the other will take said attacker from behind. Regardless of who is actually attacked.
A “companion” who won’t stick up for you in a pinch is no true friend at all, whether male or female. That transcends gender roles.
I think that arrangement is the rational extension of the agreement. Us against all comers. And is the only sensible response to an assault on one’s partner.
Others, apparently, see mutual defense as a lessening of one partner. pfui.
“Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible. Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.”
Well, part of that was that they are Activists and therefore getting their RDA of Doing Good Things, and so they didn’t need to worry about being good in the quotidian business of life. (You can produce it in the lab; giving subjects merely the chance to buy “green” products made them more likely to lie and cheat in a subsequent game for money.)
Intellectuals by Paul Johnson goes ruthlessly into their lives.
Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior by E. Michael Jones goes even more deeply, and with more explication on how one leads to the next, on a smaller group.
Modern indulgence buying.
Nonsense! An indulgence can only have effect if you have repented and been forgiven for your sin, which requires that you intend to stop sinning. These, they think they can buy in advance.
There have been a few studies on males who were reassigned to female in infancy after butchers, I mean surgeons, screwed up. Physically outward female, the mental hardware is still male, with male drives and passions. This dissonance is enough that, like a transgender person who is not allowed to transition, self-destruction to the point of suicide is likely.
Acceptance of people as who they are, as what they are, providing an equal opportunity to screw up or succeed, that’s the way it should be.
the irony is that people will use that to argue for people who are deluded they are members of the opposite sex.
Johns Hopkins pioneered the surgery, and stopped it because it doesn’t help: they are no happier with it than without it. (Those who escape the little thing that all surgery has its risks.)
OK, I had to step back a while because I may have read what you wrote wrong. Is the implication that there are people out there who think that transgender people just need their head ‘fixed,’ or are you advocating that stance directly?
This is a bit of a hot button fraught with rage for me, and I don’t care to come unglued over a misunderstanding.
She is NOT talking about transgender people… she is talking about the children who are born with both sexes in their bodies… the technical term is hermaphrodites… At one time they were given surgery as babies to the gender the parents wanted… it mostly didn’t work out well for the child.
I read the comment as a reference to this: http://www.narth.com/docs/johnhopkins.html
I could be mis-reading of course.
Of course I could be mis-reading too–
I thought the comment was talking about the case where a biologically male infant had an accident during circumcision that resulted in an amputation. A Johns Hopkins Psych convinced the parents to raise the little boy as a girl Basically, he grew up feeling like a man trapped in a woman’s body…. because he was……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
I think the case is that there are some people who are transgendered, and some people who think they are.
Each need a different sort of help.
Additionally there at least some who are transgendered who see reassignment surgery as a panacea for many of their problems, when in fact it’s only a fix for some of them.
The problem is–like a genetic basis for homosexuality–that the question is so politicized that we’re not allowed to do reasonable science on it, and any study that gets published is not trusted.
The thing that makes me froth at the mouth is sex change for children under puberty. Sorry, no. Just no. And don’t tell me “it’s easier for them to adapt.” Maybe — but do these people take in account how MUCH influence parents have on children that young? And that the child CANNOT have any conception what he or she is doing, regardless of what psychiatrists say. (For one, right now sex-change means sterilization. No children-of-the-body, ever. This is something you don’t care about until you are of age to have children.) And when it comes to a six year old and his parents saying “he’s told us he was a girl since he was two” you don’t need an emetic to make me throw up. Particularly when the boy has FOUR older sisters, so, duh.
This follows from other things discussed here recently. Normalization of the outliers, and thus possession or association with those outlier identities becomes a mark of status and sought after. So the proliferation of ADD/ADHD/Autism Spectrum/OCD/etc. diagnoses. Victimhood is nobility, oppression sanctifies, marginalization is a mark of superiority.
And the status seekers seek participation, wicked variations of Munchausen’s and Munchausen’s by proxy.
The problem–seriously–is determining at which point we should stop telling outliers to “shut up and deal with it”.
Being an outlier myself I’d not advocate for “shut up and deal with it.” But I’m perfectly okay with “yours is not the normal experience, and you can only expect the bulk of society to bend so far to accommodate your abnormal experience.”
A lot of it can be dealt with by other people keeping their pointy noses out of people’s private lives. And I’m sorry, but hetero marriage is getting more like gay marriage everyday, so no, there isn’t much distinction and there are legitimate civil rights issues — if Dan and I had both been guys I couldn’t have come to the States legally and he might not have been able to immigrate legally either. At the very least it would have made him an exile. That part is not right. BUT please, yes, heteronormative is “normative” because it’s the majority. As an odd, I’m used to dealing the idea most people aren’t like me. I can’t force them to be, so you let it go. Yes, I’m in the odd position of being pro-gay-marriage and outraged by gay organizations taking down a private wedding cake-baking business. Again, I’m okay with equalizing of opportunity, (and duty) between outliers and others, but then step back and stop trying to force everyone to approve of the outliers. And the majority of the ‘normal’ people should do what they do to us odds and leave us alone. (By and large.)
^^This, indeed. Like you I’m pro-gay-marriage (and pro many other outlier personal choices), but I’m most assuredly not pro-make-them-like-and-accept-me. Sorry, if we say you are free to behave in a fashion they find inherently wrong, they are then free to disapprove. That is the substance of freedom it is at least as much a matter of burdens as liberty, of obligations as opportunities.
The sublime opportunity to be ignored…
EXACTLY. My in laws threatened to take our kids away because we raised them without TV to age 8. (To establish reading habits. Mind you, they had computers from age two on. With edutainment games.) They couldn’t do that (good) but they could bitch moan and call us unnatural (also good.) And most people were shocked at our choice — their prerogative. I wouldn’t want a law to make them approve of us. Just leave us alone. Most of my gay friends want nothing more, either. Mind you, they are almost all republican or libertarian, so… odd. (I know that shocks you.)
Yep, this is my shocked face: 😐
I’ve known several folks who have no real desire for “acceptance” and are quite happy with ignored. And like the peripheral ‘members’ of so many groups seeking acceptance they’re treated as traitors. Fortunately the shrill accusatory folks don’t realize that being willing to be ignored includes ignoring ignorant maligning. 😉
I don’t have a problem with people choosing to have a sex change when they are an adult. I think it is gross, weird, and wrong, but it is their life and they should be able to choose what they do with it, it certainly doesn’t affect me (unless they happened to be my wife, in which case I would guess I had bigger problems 😉 ). You leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone. Just don’t ask me to approve of your choices, you have the right to make the choice that you think is right, I have the right to think it is morally wrong and disapprove, but not the right to stop you.
I do have a problem with sex change operations for kids, and with changing birth certificates of adults to match their current sex. The birth certificate should state the sex of the child at birth.
I am always as nice and accommodating as possible to people who have unrestricted access to the preparation of my food. The idea of forcing someone by judicial writ and the destruction of thebusiness by civil rights lawsuits where the entire proceeding would be only about the degree of how horrible the owner is would make me nervous to actually eat the cake. I think the gay-activism crowd had a certain lack of imagination, and completely depends on the people they are attempting to subjugate to be much nicer and tolerant people than they themselves admit to being.
Re: letting people do what they want with a sex change, voluntary amputation, etc. — The problem is that, first of all, you’re dragging a surgeon into it. A surgeon whose ethical standards permit him to do elective sex changes and amputations is a surgeon who’s enabling psychological problems with a knife. This is a threat to the entire medical community’s ethics, and to the community’s safety, as well as to the safety of the crazy individual.
Second, it’s the maladaption of the person’s head that’s usually the problem, not their equipment. Treat the sick head, and you don’t have to cut up the poor innocent body. Refusing to treat an illness is ethically wrong.
Someone who’s really male or really female who’s suffering from physical deformities of their male or female equipment is a different case. They’ve got a physical problem with a physical solution.
Surgeons should fix what’s broken. They shouldn’t fix what’s not broken.
I actually agree with you Suburban that it is primarily a mental problem, the problem with mental problems though is who is defining them. Those currently in power believe those of us who are clinging bitterly to our bibles and our guns have a mental problem. I might think you are as crazy as a pet coon, but as long as you aren’t doing anything to harm me (or anyone else) I’m not going to stop you from harming yourself, because I don’t want you to be able to stop me from doing whatever it is I want to do.
Hadn’t really gave any thought to the surgeon’s and their hypocratic oath, that is a good point.
One of the things I think we’re also losing is the idea that people can be strong and womanly. Maybe it’s just because of working a lot with historical frontiers/borderlands, but every Western culture I’ve looked at that dealt with frontiers (Spain, Brandenburg and Prussia, the Hapsburg Lands, the Hispanos in the American Southwest), women had to be both domestic and defensive. By defensive, I mean able to fight or flee as appropriate, able to manage resources in the face of hostile physical and cultural environments, while still acting womanly. It’s a lot more impressive set of accomplishments than what the modern wymynists praise modern females/”sensitive males” for doing, IMHO.
Yes, that too.
Women have traditionally been the defenders of children and others too weak to defend themselves, while men have been the defenders of women. It takes a heck of a lot of strength on multiple levels to be an effective secondary line of defense, whether that means fighting off bad guys who get through or taking the children and fleeing while the men stand and die while holding the line.
That’s pretty much the way I’ve always thought of it.
Men and women are different, yeah, but for the right people (and this is an awful lot of the time), we are complimentary. Someone you trust at your back, with your children, while you sleep, with your food, and with your thoughts- heck, that’s a lot to ask of *anyone.*
Heck yes there is feminine strength and it is different from masculine strength. Those who want to lose that complimentary nature (or flip it around) are wasting what benefit there is to be had there.
Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!
But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
I had a moment of shock when my then 11 year old son, who was still shorter and slimmer than I, could easily lift 100 pounds in a dead lift which I couldn’t do.
I worked with a woman who was fairly far Left, though not a radical, who asked if I could bring her some flat stones for her flower garden. When I was giving them to her, I told her I had used MY then-11 year old son to test them for being too heavy. She was a little upset with that, so I casually reached one to her one-handed, by the edge. She put her hands out and grabbed it, and I let go all at once, which made the stone dip significantly, and she grunted. She didn’t say anything more about strength comparisons ever again.
Oh, I should also mention that this woman was a rock climber, so she wasn’t exactly a weakling.
Incidentally, I had tried to explain that it was largely because, being twice her size, I had to be stronger just to be able to get up and walk.
It’s got nothing to do with your size. Even if she outweighed you, w/out the use of steroids 99.5% of the time you’d still be twice her strength.
yeah…& some of us females still have a chip on our shoulder from the “weaker=inferior” brainwashing combined with the feminist equality brainwashing. it’s one thing to accept & acknowledge biology, it’s another to have our noses rubbed in it.
**side note: am currently flat on my back because my 14 year old son can’t quite lift as much weight as I can; therefore was not the partner I needed for lifting the heavy piece of firewood into the truck.
Ouch. Strained back muscles (I’m assuming that’s what has you laid out flat) truly suck. Hope you feel better soon.
I believe the difference in the way men and women communicate is the possibility of violence. When men argue they know it can quickly devolve into a fight and even death. This has led to a certain politeness between males.
Women on the other hand rarely have to fear the other woman they’re arguing with is going to kill them in the heat of the moment. This means that they can afford to be catty or otherwise insulting to a degree that would result in murder in an all male conflict.
Thus when women enter a room with other women they might look at clothes, judging them, establishing in their minds a pecking order. Men entering the same room do a threat assessment, who’s a danger, who’s not.
That’s part of the reason I’m opposed to stopping fights among children. Kids, with their weak muscles, soft bones, and extra fat, are pretty much built to fight one another without causing serious damage. But they will hurt each other, teaching the lesson that nobody wins a fist-fight and that other means of resolving conflict are preferred.
Amen. Boys especially.
I classify feminism as 3 types:
Type 1: Men and women are of equal value and should be treated with equal respect.
Type 2: Men and women are the same and should be treated the same.
Type 3: Men are scum who should yield to the inherent superiority of women.
Type 2, while less hostile than 3, is working from badly mistaken premises that lead to dangerously wrong conclusions. I honestly think that’s where gay “marriage” comes from. If a man and a woman are the same, then 2 men are the same as a man and a woman, and you must be a horrible bigot if you think differently.
If a man and a woman are the same, then 2 men are the same as a man and a woman, and you must be a horrible bigot if you think differently.
Flatly stated in several places.
Type 1 is the important part.
I’d disagree with your conflating type 2 with gay marriage. Gay marriage is – or should be – nothing more than acknowledging something that’s been happening informally for damn near as long as there’s been civilization of any flavor: how many places had the “confirmed bachelors” who are best of friends and not interested in anything the ladies have to offer? Quite a few. Some might well have actually been confirmed bachelors, others were likely an informal gay marriage. And everyone in town knew you didn’t invite one to anything without inviting the other, and you didn’t ask questions. Same with the “confirmed spinsters” or the woman and her “companion” who was also best friend and more.
If an adult genuinely loves another adult of the same gender, I don’t see any reason to keep them apart. The key words here are “adult”, and “love”. Not “gender” – or “sex”.
Yup. What responsible adults do with other responsible adults without hurting anybody ain’t none of my or anyone else’s business. This is why I’ve never really seen the harm in gay marriage. Treat them the same as other responsible adults and the real bigots will show themselves for who and what they are.
The main harm I see is political. The incident Sarah mentioned in a comment upthread — “gay organizations taking down a private wedding cake-baking business” — will, I believe, be repeated over and over, because most of the ones pushing hard for gay marriage are hardcore statists. (There are some libertarians pushing too, but they’re few in number compared to the statists.) So I foresee lots of churches who have religious objections to marrying a gay couple being forced to either ignore their religious objections or else close their doors and have their right to marry anyone revoked.
If the gay organizations were more inclined to leave others alone, I’d be more inclined to shrug my own shoulders.
Yes, we have had this argument/discussion here before, so I won’t reiterate it all. But I believe marriage to be a religious institution (and that civil unions between couples whether gay or hetero should be separate) if your religion of choice accepts gay marriage (or any other form of marriage you care to choose, polygamous, cross-specious, etc.) fine, go ahead and get married in it, since mine doesn’t though, you can’t force my minister to perform your marriage.
Yes indeed. The French inspired concept in much of Europe that you have a civil wedding and then a religious blessing afterwards if you feel like it makes a lot of sense.
IMO it wouldn’t matter if the US had that system. The assholes among the gays would still attempt to make churches marry them. [Frown]
Again the problem is lawfare and oh, yeah, schools teaching “activism” is good.
You wouldn’t have to be gay to be that particular brand of jerk. There would be plenty of people who would want to do this to make their church more progressive or inclusive or fair or loving or some other kind of self-congratulatory BS.
No argument there. Just that IIRC non-gay jerks wouldn’t have the “standing” to sue a church in order to force the church to marry gays.
I doubt there is a church so small that it doesn’t have a few members who feel the church fails to live up to their standards of enlightenment and would not hesitate to use same sex weddings as a petard with which to heist power. The courts have demonstrated a remarkably flexible definition of standing when it comes to advancing certain “civil rights” issues, and most localities are possessed of a plethora of regulatory bodies eager to make their presence felt.
(to RES):
When your church is down on “celebrating” halloween it’s very unlikely anyone left is a big fan of gay marriage.
By some strange coincidence I hear of almost no gays attempting to force mosques to marry them.
Yes and no. As implemented in America civil union would be separate but equal and the kids would go “It’s not a real marriage, just legal shaking up” and then THAT would destroy straight marriage.
I just think lawfare needs to be stopped. Now.
Can’t be stopped, short of people remembering (or re-learning) why “nation of laws” was a good idea in the first place…
Which .. is part and parcel to the pirate problem you presented.
Mew
One of the questions I never see asked in this discussion (not just on this forum, but anywhere) is “what is the purpose of marriage?”. Another way to put it would be “why has every society in human history tried to encourage and reward male/female pair-bonding?” (yes, there have been variations, but the theme has been pretty consistent). Given the results of the collapse of marriage, as seen in the black ghettos of the U.S. and the white, dolist ghettos of the UK, I think this is a rather important question.
The entire “gay marriage” debate seems to center around government-granted privileges for married couples, without any reference to *why* those privileges exist for married couples but not for, say, roommates-with-benefits. My own opinion is that the benefits are there to reward and encourage the production and socialization of children, and that extending those benefits to un-married people, or non-fertile couples, is not a productive use of society’s resources. Yes, that’s harsh on infertile couples, but if marriage is a social survival mechanism (you can produce lots of neurotic, feral children by paying single women to give birth…but you won’t produce a society worth living in) then you want to allocate the incentives where they’ll do the most good.
I’ll avoid the slippery-slope arguments regarding the *further* re-definitions of marriage that are likely to result from allowing same-sex unions aside from linking to this story (http://preview.tinyurl.com/7f86l3w) and asking whether the couple involved should be allowed to marry as well, and if not, why not?
Yes, but these days most couples are fertile only with assist — because people marry so late. So, this would stop most straight marriage, too.
Also those heartwarming stories of old folks meeting at the nursing home, falling for each other, and getting married.
LOL. That too. But reproductively, 30 is old and 35 is VERY old, as I found out when I wanted more kids…
Well, yes. But it’s it’s just so much fun to argue around the extremes, and who wants to deny Grandpa a few more years of happiness?
I was told in high school that your (a woman’s) years of highest fertility are from 18 to 25.
I’m nearly forty and have a brother about to enter kindergarten. Grandpa is not lacking in fertility. I think Sarah is coming at this from the female perspective.
The purpose of marriage? My cynical side says that it only became what we see it as today in the last hundred, two hundred years or thereabouts.
Way back – and as described (rather than idealized) in Biblical times it was about control of the sole asset that could produce children. Not, I might add, the Evil Patriarchy, but the combination of a man’s natural desire to be reasonably sure that the children he was raising were actually his, and the inevitable result of women having less strength in a time and place where there wasn’t much in the way of technological assists.
That got codified in a lot of places to the point where women were legally the property of their fathers, brothers or husbands. Marriage was quite literally a contract regarding a transferal of assets. For those without assets, living together (“common law marriage”) was the norm.
It wasn’t until the sentimentality of the Victorians that marrying for love and family really got to be the ideal. The social benefits are actually more of a side effect.
Oh, and in general terms? Absent abuse, kids are usually going to be best off with their actual parents. They’ll still do well with any two-parent arrangement that’s stable and loving – whether the parents are heterosexual or homosexual. It’s the stability, love, and the flexibility of two parents that does it. Single parent is problematic not because of the parenting skill of that parent, but because the poor sod has to work to live, and doesn’t have the time to spend with the kids – with two parents, even when both work, there’s a little more leeway. The less well-off the single parent is, the more problematic things are because there’s less ability to adjust to problems. Institutionalization comes in dead last.
You obviously didn’t see my Facebook feed about a year ago. I asked the same question and came up with a three-tiered system that would satisfy what I saw as the major reasons for marriage.
first there was the religious marriage, performed in a church (or mosque or sacred grove) by a religious officiant under the rules and auspecies of whatever faith. It has no legal significance and can only be dissolved in accordance with the tenents of the faith.
Next we have a civil union. Basically a two-person corporation with the addition that each party names the other as their primary next of kin. It’s open to all couples. Since the state has an interest in promoting and stabilizing pair-bonds and so reducing the negative societal effects of sexual competition, there would be certain tax benefits to the arraingement. Breaking up the union would be similar to dissolving any corporation. No cause needed, just a determination – by a judge if necessary – of how to distribute the joint assets.
Finally there would be the parental union. Open to all couples that have children, including adopted (I’m deliberately ignoring the issue of gay adoption, if they can adopt they’re eligible). There are larger tax and social benefits from the government, but the flip side is that it is nearly impossible to dissolve absent abuse. This encourages raising children in a stable two-parent household.
Yes, I never saw your FB feed, unsurprisingly as I don’t know you:-).
Your three situations all pre-suppose the existence of marriage or a marriage-like institution. My question is more fundamental than that (I apologize if I didn’t clearly express it). To wit: why was a sexually-exclusive, male/female relationship ever adopted and institutionalized in the first place? Primates are not, AFAIK, naturally monogamous.
The best reason I’ve found is that the sexually exclusive nature of marriage (the spouses have sex *only* with one another [ideally]) gives the male equal parental status with the female. Motherhood is obvious, but if fatherhood is a matter of opinion, then men will have no particular reason to become emotionally invested in any particular woman or her children. Married men will work themselves to an early grave to protect and provide for their wives and children because they believe, thanks to the sexually exclusive nature of marriage, that the children are truly their own. They’ll fight, bleed, kill, die, and *work* for the betterment of those children. Why should they do all that for the children of other men? Absent marriage, men would do the minimum necessary to survive and get laid occasionally, and we’d all still be hunter/gatherers.
So marriage serves that vital function (if you don’t accept the above reason for marriage, consider those communities where it’s been largely abandoned: the U.S. inner-cities and the UK dolists), and society *needs* marriage to be a strong institution. Undermining marriage amounts to undermining the foundation of civilization itself. No-fault divorce, Roe v. Wade, welfare for unwed mothers, and now redefining the fundamental nature of the relationship, all serve to undermine it, and the hits are just going to keep on coming.
Anyway, this has gotten longer than I intended, so I’ll shut up now:-).
I think there are two possible reasons for marriage. How and why they developed is something I can’t begin to describe, but if we look at societies around the world and throughout time (one can consider religion to be a kind of fossilized social structure) we see that marriage is fairly common. So there must be some reason for it. I think that there are two possible reasons (and various societies could be responding to both in varying proportion). The first is, as you mentioned, to ensure that children are raised by two parents, preferably by the ones who contributed the genetic material. We are born horribly premature by mammal standards, we have a very long period of helplessness before we can even start learning how to survive.
The second, and I think the higher-order reason is to prevent sexual competition by encouraging pair bonding. Men tend to be attracted toward youth. Women tend to be attracted toward power. Power tends to increase with age. The net result is that older men would tend to make younger women unavailable to their peers. This results in a large population of sexually frustrated young men who spend all their time trying to accumulate power so they can win mates. This is seen in a lot of polygamous societies, and they’re generally some degree of disfunctional.
I have never had a more pointless conversation than the one I got into when I asserted that men and women are different in the presence of a feminist. It doesn’t matter what kind of science or common sense you cite- they won’t hear another point-of-view no matter what you say. Obvious physical differences? Pthhthththt! That means nothing.
I don’t even bother talking to people who lack the common sense to grasp such a simple truth.
It takes a great deal of education to get someone to ignore the obvious.
What too many feminists don’t understand – men and women are different. That doesn’t mean we put one sex or the other down or that we hold some folks back – it means we acknowledge the readily apparent differences that exist.
Different doesn’t mean one is superior. Different means different. What’s wrong with bringing together our differences to make the whole stronger?
If some women can compete with men on men’s terms, great. Let them. But no special dispensations.
I agree wholeheartedly. The problem comes, almost exclusively in the physical arena, with what happens when most can’t meet the same physical standard – that standard gets lowered. And then folks wonder why we gripe about all this “equal” stuff.
There are non-physical, or rather physical but not identified as such characteristics, too. The woman who can VISUALIZE as well as a man is very rare. It’s just the way it is. Ya’ll have a lock down on the visual/spacial relationships thing. We on the other hand are better verbally. (Possibly the only thing in which I’m extremely feminine, though until about 14 when I was using math, I tested higher in math.) Again, if a woman is a truly gifted engineer, by all means, let her become one. BUT do not push the vast mass of girls into “engineering” when they don’t have the same capacity as the average boy.
I will have to go track down the study that backs up my family’s anecdotal experience regarding “girls who play with building blocks at an early age have better grasp of spacial relations.”
My mother & I excel at packing things into places…luggage into cars, for instance.
yeah, but I played with building blocks and legos, and you truly don’t want to go there. The studies uniformly show female outliers are very good with spacial, but most females aren’t. Like my older son is a wizard with language, but most men are uh… ah… uh…. ah.
Afflicted with lesser facility? Infelicitous? Inept? Awkwardly at a loss? Endowed with tongue atwist? Torturously thwarted trying their thoughts to express?
I have no trouble with language (singular) and possess vocabulary vast, but yet I frequently find, with words divine, thoughts I cannot unwind.
Such as Sontag’s cancerous remark — I know the words, I ken the grammar, but the underlying meaning is incomprehensible zu mir.
I was a wizard with some languages … mostly “C” and “C++”. With Pascal, PL-M, Fortran … sorta journeyman sorceror … with Java as well.
Traditionally, Anglosphere society used to believe that women were horrible with language, men were the natural writers and polyglots, studying a foreign language might strain a woman’s brain to the point of madness, etc.
Of course, this was after Henry VIII and Elizabeth I turned the most highly educated female population in Europe into the one least likely to get any schooling (between getting rid of nuns and the rest of their crap)….
I was talking of modern day aptitude tests. BUT the idea that it strained the female body etc was actually Arab and came to Europe that way…
Yep this irritates enormously. I run long distances and I’m pretty good at it. I generally end up in the top 10%, sometimes top 5% of finishers. However I typically beat all but the top 1% or so of females – and that includes high school/university athletes who are young enough to be my children.
My wife who is also very good at running long distances is always slower than me (unless I deliberately run with her). She frequently wins a podium for her age group if not all women in smaller races. But she is typically beaten by at least 25% of the men even when she does get her podium finish.
Right! which is why I have a real problem right now with women being allowed on the front lines. Here’s the slippery slope: you start by saying, “women have to meet the same physical standards as men.” Well, a few outliers will be able to do it. MOST WOMEN WON’T. That means women who CAN do it become a premium sought after by military commanders, who are under great career pressure to have some sex balance to their commands.
There will not be enough women to go around – both because a lot of women won’t volunteer and because so many women are unable to meet standards. So there will be pressure on both barriers. Women who aren’t really mentally prepared for front line deployment will be pressured into volunteering for it in order to advance their careers, and military agencies that set standards will be under pressure to either set different standards for women or to downgrade ALL standards.
End result: less military readiness and more contempt for women as front-line female soldiers crack under the pressure of real battle and prove themselves less capable to carry their weight – literally. It’s bad for the military AND it’s bad for women – though at first glance it looks like “YAY WIMMIN!”
The ENTIRE “gender balance” (or race balance or left handed ballet dancers) by government enforcement thing makes me nauseous.
This particular pursuit of ‘balance’ will result in pain, blood and death eventually.
For those who might not have read them, John Ringo and Tom Kratman touch on the ideas a bit in their fiction. Col. Kratman is, oddly, not subtle.
It also assumes there are no significant costs (funny how often that assumption is made by those who imagine their lives, fortunes and sacred honor aren’t on the line) to losing.
In spite of recent battlefield successes, victory is not assured and the cost of losing a war is beyond the conceptual ability of most of the twits who see the military as a social theory playland. When shieldwalls meet it doesn’t matter which side has been more inclusive, more noble nor more fair — it only matters which is stronger, better able to hold formation and more willing to do what is necessary to survive.
What is more expensive than a first-rate military? A second-rate military.
Preface: Navy vet, here.
That said, I strongly oppose female ground forces, because I like to presume most of our guys are honorable, and most of the other guys aren’t. That means that if she gets in trouble, they will try to protect her, and that the other side will target her if they can tell she’s female.
On the side effect, enemies will target guys who happen to be small and/or lean.
We really, really don’t want the enemy to take a wedge to a wall.
I don’t really care about women on the front lines, as long as two conditions are met.
1) The physical standards remain the same. This is a bit of a problem because the current physical standards are generic fitness, not combat fitness. My basic rule is that if you have a lower standard for age you can have a lower standard for women.
2) All women are required to register with the Selective Service and are considered part of the unorganized militia. Fair is fair, and even if a woman decides that she isn’t up for front-line duty (and how is that not sexist? If I join the Army and they decide they need me to haul a machine gun around I don’t get a choice.) there are plenty of REMF positions available that would free up a man to fight. In fact, wasn’t that a major recruiting theme for the WAVES/WAC/WASP?
I would love this. It would be a reason for me to insist that my daughter learn firearms, which she avoids now because loud, which somehow does not apply to her bizarre screamo metal thing she calls music … sigh …
The unorganized militia is why I think basic weapons training should be taught in schools.
The fact that it would force most liberals out of the education field is just gravy.
I fully endorse deployment of women in combat in those situations in which their sex carries advantages. There is, for example, ample reason to believe that women make superior aerial combat pilots, able to sustain higher g-force turns and with greater endurance.
All of that having been said, individual abilities rule.
Also the Female Engagement Teams (don’t know if this is the correct name) the Marines used in in the Middle East.
Kywrite,
You do a very good job of explaining one problem with women in the front lines. The other problem that is often overlooked is the detrimental effect on the men fighting alongside of them. Every time women have been used in the front lines the casualty rates of their male comrades-in-arms has skyrocketed.
In the past I have said that IF the standards were not lowered to accommodate them, the rare woman who could meet them should be able to serve the same as any man who meets them. I will no longer say this because while the woman may make an excellent soldier herself, her presence will be more detrimental to the unit she is assigned to than she can compensate for, no matter how exceptional a soldier she is. The military should be designed to win battles as effectively as possible, with as little loss of life as possible, NOT to be fair and balanced.
If one were cynical (which, of course, none here are) one might think this aspect was, for its advocates, a feature not a bug.
Too many on one side of the discussion have expressed the opinion that America’s military might, our being a hyper-power, is the main thing wrong with the world today. After all, look at how much our non-intervention* these last five years has improved things in Iran, Egypt and Syria.
*Stipulated, given the brilliance demonstrated by our current crew of geniuses it is hard to make an argument that our involvement would improve such situations.
I don’t think there is anyplace where there are no special dispensations. I’ve heard a lot of supposed conservatives go all soft over the new Army. I’ve been deeply involved with training women for decades. There are always special dispensations.
Yes, but that’s always swept under the rug; no one’s supposed to notice it.
Sure there is. Incoming fire is completely and utterly dispassionate.
It doesn’t care about your melanin content.
Doesn’t care what you’ve got between your legs.
Could care less if you voted, who for, why, if you cared, or not.
Has no opinion on gender, sexualization, or if you got any lately.
Oblivious to which side you are on, even.
It has not ROE. No Geneva Convention.
The only laws it obeys are the laws of physics.
Should the day come when women are sent, unprepared, undertrained, and unaware of the consequences of this, it will be a cold comfort. Women will be mutilated, dismembered, killed in all the horrible ways that men already are in wartime, needlessly. Men will be, too, while rushing to their aid, because the drive to protect women is bone deep and hard, very hard to ignore for a great many of us.
“Women and children first.” It’s an old-fashioned, antiquated idea. Maybe it is rooted in some deep seated racial memory. Perhaps a time when humans were nearly wiped out, which would explain why there is so little variation in our DNA compared to out closest genetic cousins species-wise. We can reproduce from a relatively low population, sure, but it will take many more females than males at extremely low total numbers. When the fecal matter hits the rotary impeller, the guy who stayed behind so his wife and kids could live got his genes passed on, and for most guys, that ancient dude is in us. If we forget that, we don’t deserve to have those genes passed on. Best to let that selfish desire hit an evolutionary dead end.
Not that I expect to have any say in such a thing. *grin*
On the plus side, maybe it will finally make us enforce the Laws of War against our enemies …
The irony is that the armed forces are simultaneously training against sexual harrassment, and also to inure men to the sounds of women being raped, against the possibility that they will be held captive in a location where women prisoners of war also are held.
I was raised to treat women with respect. My mother would not tolerate my treating any women with disrespect, if she hadn’t earned it. Her teaching, was as follows. “Every Lady is a woman, but not every woman is a Lady.” (BTW, the same is true for gentlemen/men.)
If I did/do hold a door, it’s a gesture of respect. If I “stand up for you,” it’s not a sign of power, but protecting anyone. A true bully doesn’t pay attention to victim size, or sex. Neither do I. Bullies/attackers offend me, regardless of sex, race, gender, etc. I was taught a simple principle. “Silence/non-action equals consent.” I will defend even people I loathe, and there really are some. AS “old fashioned, and unpopular as it may be, I believe in the Chivalric Code of Honor.
I have whined about my relationship problems here before (never had one, that is, not a real one :D), and there have probably been several reasons why I never managed to get into one. Being odd, having had some mild experiences of sexual abuse as a child which left me more skittish than average, being one of the rare fat girls back in time when being a fat young person was very much a rarity here (and I wasn’t even all that fat, but when pretty much all the others girls were slim being even somewhat overweight was a problem, especially for somebody who was also sorta weird and a bit awkward socially, even if I would have been attractive enough without the excess weight).
One factor was values dissonance.
I raised myself on old adventure stories, and my idea of what a man should be like, and how he should behave, was way old fashioned even when I was a teen. And the men who are my contemporaries are the ones who were raised during the 60’s and 70’s, when there already was a strong drive towards the new version of ‘equality’ where we are both supposed to be pretty much exactly the same. Boys were perhaps still expected to play with cars but the sexual revolution had started and it did mean that they didn’t learn to court, at least not the way the previous generations had learned to do it. Because that courting was now supposed to be demeaning towards women or something.
Yes, I gave up only after a few years because I just wasn’t comfortable, at all, with the whole thing, like seeing if you were compatible by testing the sex part first.
And yes, also because after a while the guys who asked got more rare, I did seem to develop the rep of being difficult. But I would probably have been pretty easy pickings for any man who would have cared to invest at least some time to both letting me know him a bit first, and to doing it by flattering me with his attention without demands (demands like seeming to think that I was obliged to pay for his attention by sex if I accepted that attention in the first place).
😀 Oh, what the hell, since I never did feel much of need for children it probably is better being alone than maybe having ended up with somebody I wouldn’t have much in common with – especially since because of those same values I got from the old books there is a good chance I would never have left somebody I would have gotten together with, officially married or not, especially if there were children involved (no, never wanted them much myself, but I would have carried and done my best to mother them for a husband), unless he asked for it first.
especially since because of those same values I got from the old books there is a good chance I would never have left somebody I would have gotten together with, officially married or not
Ah yes the “take your oaths seriously, when others don’t” problem. Absolutely the best bits of Lois M Bujold’s “A Civil Campaign” are about that.
“Because in these enlightened feminist times, women who act like men are celebrated, but never men who act like women. There is no worst chauvinist than a “feminist” for devaluing traditional female roles and valuing male ones.”
How sad but true.
… and do you notice that one trait of most modern feminists is an exaggerated fear of rape? And one usually directed at unlikely rapists? Often combined with a diminished fear of being raped by actual repeat violent criminals or members of cultures in which men are actually encouraged to rape?
The exaggerated fear is used as a bludgeon against those least likely to be guilty and who yet feel some guilt on behalf of their gender.
That they then ignore the very real threat from more obvious quarters reveals the lie. They think they have a handy tool to beat down opposition while believing confidently that their safety is secured by their own merit.
With one of the results being that those who are “least likely to be guilty and who yet feel some guilt on behalf of their gender” being less likely to feel guilt on behalf of their gender, and a net increase in cynicism.
Yep. Closing the circle, inevitably. And inevitably giving the lie to their merit securing their safety, and that will be an unpleasant reckoning.
Sad, but true. Responsibility doesn’t rhyme with “Republican,” but it’s a devilish “R” word, like “Rape.”
“Revolution” and “Redistribution” are their big favorites. Yet another of the fallacies of short-term thinking.
The exaggerated fear is used as a bludgeon against those least likely to be guilty and who yet feel some guilt on behalf of their gender.
Of course. Rules are not there to be obeyed, but to be enforced against those whom the persons in power do not like. This is the ABC of the present age.
They also use it as a weapon against working-class people they dislike yet can’t openly for being “lower-class” because they would offend against their Marxist ideals. The classic expression of this is the claim that domestic abuse increases by some absurd percentage come the Superbowl. What they’re basically-arguing, and without any real evidence, is that blue-collar men are so stupid and brutal that when they get excited (or disappointed) by football games, they are liable to beat up their wives and children.
There is no worst chauvinist than a “feminist” for devaluing traditional female roles and valuing male ones.
/agree
A Personal Favorite. The wolf’s expression at 7:16 is one of the classic “OH *FUCK*” moments in cinema (movies or TV).
And one I have generated more than once, for the same reasons. >:)
I hate the phrase “rape culture”. James Taranto compared it to “thought crime” in one of his columns and I thought it was very apt.
I find it interesting that the same folks who are so invested in their array of extreme beliefs – “rape culture”, men and women are identical, boys must be de-boyed – also are the ones fundamentally opposed to the public availability of concealable firearms and training for same, which as Uncle Lar noted above directly correlate to the incidence of rape.
If one were actually concerned with preventing rule by physical strength, the phrase “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal” should point to a solution. Now rule by the fast, or the wily, or the organized – those are still at issue, but the only reliable way a lone 110 lb. woman can enforce her demurral to proceed on a 200 lb. man with a differing opinion is with just such a handheld conveyor of high velocity masses.
Nothing says “NO” quite like a jacketed hollow point traveling at about 1,000 feet per second.
Even hearing the snick-snick of one being chambered.
what about a pump shotgun?
When you make your livelihood from screaming “rape culture”, the last thing you need is for rapes to become less frequent.
They are also utterly-unconcerned by the threat posed to our public safety by real “rape cultures,” most notably Islam and its assumption that any woman who is not utterly-swathed in absurdly-concealing clothing is “asking for it.”
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
–H.L. Mencken
“At times”?
THAT was my thought too. And I’m a woman.
Our personal honor *requires* restraint. Sometimes a truly staggering amount of restraint. I believe there are those on the left that somehow dimly realize this. It may be the only quasi-rational argument for gun control they have, and it is rooted in fear.
Because if even 1% of us were the monsters they loudly and daily proclaim us to be, progressives would quickly become an endangered species. *shakes head* That would destroy us, as well, because that restraint is one of the pillars that holds up our ideals.
There is a time and a place for making war. I would hope that we don’t have to see that time come in my country for a long, long time. Because if it comes, it will be truly terrible to behold.
Well said!
When browsing B&N’s Nook Library, I’ve noticed plenty of e-porn (even in SF/F). While I’m not a big buyers of such stuff, I have noticed a large amount of “domination/mind control” porn where women get “taken over by men”. While there may have always been such domination porn, I’m being to wonder if there’s more of it now days when we consider the topic of this blog. [Frown]
The traditional reason women read mind control porny fanfic is as a sort of analogy to uncontrollable passion – the woman (and often the man too, if both are mind controlled, held hostage for the survival of the starship, etc.) can’t help herself and therefore it’s okay not to hold back on the first date, or with the multiple sex partners the alien lab/vampire/telepath makes you take. And in some dreamlike Gothic fashion, it usually turns out okay anyway. Blah blah blah.
Some mind control fanfic stuff written for guys is similar, but a lot of the stuff I’ve come across is pretty clearly mind control rape as a turn-on, or the author reveling in the protagonist’s ability to make women unable to say no.
This is very different from the tone of traditional men’s adventures with sex scenes or romances, where either the guy wins his woman/women either by being awesome, or by being awesome at seduction (physical or mental). Remo Williams doesn’t have to rape anybody. Either the woman realizes he’s awesome already, or he deploys his awesome Sinanju seduction techniques to make his awesomeness physically obvious. Sometimes these events occur in a way unpleasing to feminism (it’s men’s pulpy adventure fic with sex scenes, so what do you think will happen?) but the awesome male adventure hero not only knows that rape is wrong, but is above that kind of thing anyway.
And yes, I’m a fast, voracious reader. Only now that I am older do I have the power to put down books and stories without finishing them. Even if I didn’t like the fanfic stories and knew I would have to get out the brain bleach, I used to read all fanfics that came under my nose that were related to my fandoms — or at least skim them. This is not the best way to maintain happiness and sanity in any fandom, or indeed in any bookstore.
Re: the “she can’t help herself and therefore it’s okay” thing, I recall reading somewhere the argument that this, bodice-rippers where the hero basically overpowers the heroine and forces her into sex (which magically ends up being good for both of them despite the scenario sounding way too much like rape), and other similar situations… all derive from the same thing. Which the author (wish I could remember who it was) summarized as “women want men to be the ‘bad boys’, because that gives them permission to be ‘bad girls’ without feeling guilty.”
That concept still feels a bit weird to me, but it makes WAY too much sense of things like the popularity of bodice-ripper romances, Fifty Shades of BDSM, and so on.
(A note: I’ve never read bodice-rippers, Fifty Shades, and the like; I’m relying on other people’s descriptions thereof. But the descriptions are quite consistent, so I’m pretty confident that they’re accurate.)
I tried to read 50 Shades. The writing was so bad that I gave up before I got to the naughty bits.
Naughty being a relative thing, of course.
For the record part of my issue — see post today — seems to be that you need amp things WAY up before I consider them interesting. I.e. I don’t just need the plumbing description. I WANT emotional involvement, too.
Possibly an interesting thing… I’ve recently seen a lot of bicyclists that insist that their behaving dangerously is fine, because if they actually get hit then they’re dead.
Multiple reiterations of “but you are causing a hazardous situation for other people who may not be trying to kill you, you selfish twerp” don’t sink in, no matter how politely rephrased….
I’m fine with that, provided they carry readily checked identification allowing police officers to put them down like rabid dogs if their accident doesn’t result in their desired terminus. No reason they should be permitted to burn valuable hospital resources for failing to take precautions against readily anticipatable exigencies.
And as long as the driver isn’t held responsible for hitting the bicyclist there was no way to avoid. (Sometimes drivers are held responsible for things that are entirely the bicyclists’ fault.) You wouldn’t believe (or maybe you would) the number of bicyclists I’ve seen riding at night, in dark clothes, no lights or reflectors (which are required by law here but funnily enough no bike rider is ever ticketed for their absence), driving the wrong way down the street or weaving across the road while texting, or just plain doing it to show off. Crossing in front of oncoming cars, where the car has a green light and the biker has a red light, etc.
To quote the philosopher Neal Stephenson in his opus Zodiac:
Me, I ride as if everyone was trying to kill me, but fail to succeed because they are too drunk and or stupid.
The other idiotic behavior, well, it ought to have consequences.
be warned if you’re doing 15 in a 35 zone, in the middle of the road, on a bike, yes, I WILL pace you with the SUV… mostly because I’m afraid of passing because bicyclists have swerved in front of me while I’m doing that. I will also hate your guts…. (Not yours. I assume you don’t do that.)
I resemble that remark.
I commute to work on my bicycle, and I stay as close to the center of the lane as I can, at least when there are parked cars on the side of the street. Why? Because last summer some jackass wasn’t looking and threw his car door open in right front of me. I took the door out, bounced off the moving car in the lane next to me, and went to the hospital.
So yeah, sorry if you have to slow down for a few seconds while I avoid the potentially deadly hazards sitting on the side of the road, but I am NOT getting doored again.
If you want to share the road then go the speed of traffic. Until you do you are nothing more than a hazard to navigation and you’re lucky I don’t run you into the ditch just to laugh at the bleeding wreckage of your body.
This is not with parked cars — it’s a broad street, with more than enough space by the berm. BUT they ride IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LANE. And it’s not a few seconds. This is a broad, open Colorado road, and I’ve been stuck at 15 for half an hour.
Ah. Well yeah, that I take exception to as well. If there are no parked cars, I’m way the hell over, out of your way. Hell, as soon as I’m past the parked cars, I’m there too. 🙂
These are “eco-fanatics” punishing me for being in an SUV. Sigh. I drive an SUV because I’m an amateur carpenter. It’s hard to transport wood in a compact car.
Plenty of guys transport wood in sporty little cars.
Or maybe it’s the car is compensation for their inability to transport wood. I always get confused about that, having never had a small car.
We are talking about the bicyclists who do NOT follow traffic laws. If you are following them (and yes, there are some car driving idiots too) then I don’t have a beef with you– it’s the idiots that do U-turns in front of oncoming traffic, who wear dark clothing at night, and who ride across crosswalks so they don’t have to wait at the stoplight (its against the law in NV to ride across a cross walk… a bicyclist has to get off the bike and walk it across– not that they do)…
Perhaps if you are unable to drive legally, not causing a traffic hazard, without fear of a possible hazard you should reconsider riding there.
Depending on the state, if you are causing a hazard due to low speed– such as going 15 in a 25 and up zone– you’re required to have hazard lights.
Do you have those?
I drive mostly during nights. Yep, same behavior here. No lights, nothing reflective, rarely even light colored clothes, and that’s most of them some nights (not that many bikers when I start work, but I quit just around the time when those people who start early are leaving for work). Same goes for walkers. They seem to think I should see them anyway. Sorry, I may claim some occasional hits with Tarot but I’m not quite that psychic.
I walk to work. My philosophy is that I’m more maneuverable than a car, I don’t have an integral means of emitting light, and they’re a heck of a lot more robust than I am. I’m far more likely and FAR more incentivized to spot them.
That’s pretty much the way I think when I’m on foot, to the point that if the road or street is very narrow I step completely off the whole thing, if possible, when a car comes. No crossing the street obliquely dressed in dark clothes when it’s raining, or keep walking in the middle of that small dark road when you hear or see a car coming – which have both happened, several times, and once the walker in the middle of the road was there when it was both dark and there was a heavy fog. Little bastard (guy looked young, late teens early twenties young) nearly gave me a heart attack. Hopefully I made him feel the same. Wasn’t even a weekend, when I drive a bit slower because at least one drunk is almost inevitable (once lying on the road, but at least he was on the side. Didn’t stop to check him because he got half up when I got near and didn’t try to flag me down. Was gone when I went back the same way some ten minutes later. There were houses near and it was warm too, still I always feel a bit guilty when I don’t stop, except once I nearly got punched when I did – fortunately that one really was pretty drunk and somewhat unbalanced – after which I have just called the emergency number if the weather is bad and the person is moving but also seems obviously drunk or otherwise messed up. Luckily no still ones so far, I’d feel obliged to go and check those).
What of those harmed by accidents caused by avoiding bicyclists doing things they shouldn’t?
As a car driver, I’m held responsible for creating a hazard. They should be, too.
Problem my mom was informed of when she complained about some bicyclists doing really dumb things: you can pull them over. You can give them a ticket. What do you think teh chance is that they’ll give you their ID, or that you can make it stick at all?
That’s why I favor two classes of bicyclists– “pedestrian” and “vehicle.”
No helmet laws, etc, for pedestrians– but they’re expected to behave like walkers or joggers.
Treat “vehicle” bicyclists exactly like any other vehicle. Including licensing, though I’d want it to be an “at any age” thing. I’d favor the “license plate” being tied to an individual rather than a vehicle, though, just to cut costs, but it would have to be displayed on the vehicle when they’re acting as a vehicle.
Preferably in large, brightly colored placards attached to their torso, so motorists know which bicyclists not to bother swerving to avoid.
Dude, do you know how hard it is to get those sorts of dents out of those crummy 5 MPH bumpers?
Since the legislators put another car law about bicyclists (stay 3 feet away from them) the bicyclists are starting to do even more dangerous stunts. *sigh I think if they want to be on the road and not in a private area that they have to pass the road test. You know the one that tells them how to show which way they are going to turn? etc?
In Washington State at least, it already applies to them.
There’s just no enforcement mechanism.
You can’t even treat it like jaywalking, because they’re on a bike.
See prior post about having “pedestrian” cyclists and “vehicle” cyclists. (which would also make it so kids aren’t stuck with all the “if you’re in a traffic accident” type laws)
Yep… they get away with more than pedestrians and are more dangerous.
When I was in high school, one of the kids I went to school with got a DUI while riding a bicycle. This was in Washington, of course he got heckled because he took his little brothers bike because he was too drunk to drive, then smacked a lightpole and the cops scraped him up off the sidewalk and hauled him to jail (he was 18).
I don’t know what the Idaho state law is, but as explained by the police in the local college town (every year on the radio, at the beginning of the schoolyear) bicycles on the roadway are treated like vehicles and must obey traffic laws, bicycles on the sidewalk and in crosswalks (illegal, even if not enforced, in Washington) are treated as pedestrians.
Some years back (like, in 1999 or 2000), a guy in Pierre, SD got picked up for public intoxication for riding his horse to Pierre, getting drunk, and riding home on multiple occasions. The horse was his designated driver. Apparently the Highway Patrol took a dim view of this practice.
This certainly explains the vast majority of men being USELESS- no brains, no balls and especially, no HONOR.
Well, acting honorably can get you laughed at. I mean, poor suckers, deceived by all those old ideals which The Man used to feed us in order to keep us under control, unlike the moderns who are way too smart to believe any of that sh*t (should we start talking about The Woman, now? Or maybe The Evil Stepmom – okay, moms can be horrible too, but I’d rather keep the idea of mothers separate from that image, anyway).
Some perhaps manage to be honorable, but they better stealth it – and always remember than being honorable can be a lonely thing now, no guarantees you’ll get rewarded in any way for it – and never, ever talk about such an old fashioned concept. Who’d want to get called a ‘boy scout’ now?
Come to think of, in some ways scrubbing down the image to a ‘boy scout’ was a precedent to a fall. You take out the ‘able to be dangerous when needed’ and leave the ‘nice, clean scrubbed and always polite’ and what is left does become easier to make fun of as somebody likely to be inefficient and probably rather naive. Then the ‘dangerous’ part becomes the prerogative of the ‘bad boys’ in the minds of people, and what you get next is that those men who refuse to become feminized are probably a bit more likely to become those ‘bad boys’. And behave badly.
I don’t know… there’s something to be said for a group of guys who are encouraged to play with knives, are rewarded for archery and marksmanship, and whose motto is “be prepared”.
It’s just that they’re so darn nice about it.
Too nice. The image forgets the knives, archery and markmanship parts, or if remembered thinks they’d never use any of those skills even in a clear and undoubted self defense situation because they are so nice, and because they have been taught to be so nice they’d be sitting ducks to any gang of street kids who happened to pass by. Because War Is Bad, and Killing Is ALWAYS Wrong, and Kids Should Never Have Any Exposure to Violence, even in order to learn to deal with it if they got in a situation where they could not avoid it, got around and it was forgotten – or deliberately forgotten in order to keep the whole thing going in an environment and with parents who might have tried to ban the whole organization, or at least keep their kids from it if reminded too often of its origins – that many of the skills taught are also those skills which a soldier might need.
I read a sort of a dystopia story once, where the Boy Scouts had taken over the job of going to the rescue of people who were besieged by outlaws. They went in response to a request for help and killed the bad guys. And they didn’t “nice” them to death.
Do you remember the title?
Sounds vaguely familiar.
Sorry, no. Long time ago, and I think it was a short story, which means I likely didn’t pay much attention to the title.
Sounds like “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Niven & Pournelle.
Nah, I’ve read that book several times, and nothing quite like that is in there. The scouts who were out in the mountains DID rescue some girls, but it wasn’t like that.
By the way, there seem to be two basic images of people with traditional values, doesn’t there? One is the naive goody two shoes who has lived a sheltered life and has no skills to deal with reality, the other is the rough and stupid racist redneck in love with his guns, demanding laws which resemble sharia in their attitudes towards women and gays, and likely to shoot the lost tourist knocking on his door, especially if said tourist happens to be not-white.
Oh, about that ‘lost tourist’, somebody once did shoot a (possibly Japanese) exchange student on his doorstep on Halloween somewhere, yes?
That is, anyway, one case which seems to be loved to death by our USA/gun haters. It sometimes seems that every single time there is a news story about a shooting in USA somebody in the comments brings that case up. Especially if some other commenter dares to defend your second amendment.
Halloween here can be very different, and it might have nothing to do with racial tensions. I.e. we have to be very careful not to get our house vandalized. Shooting is still… er… overkill…
Also, I vaguely remember hearing of this IN EUROPE but never in the US and considering our own anti-gun nuts, I wonder if it’s an urban legend, like the blades in apples and such.
Yep, I have tried to look for it a couple of times, never found anything definite.
I think blades in apples are now a legend, but I do remember their might have been one incident in the early 60s (one). You are more likely to get an idiot giving kids drugs on Halloween mixed in candy or baked goods *sigh
As for shootings, I think the Halloween shooting (whatever that was) is an urban legend. There have been a few shootings by police in LA and NY where a person was shot who didn’t have a gun. But they did do something suspicious like have a plastic gun, or were reaching for ID in an inside pocket (one person was smoking outside).–both are dangerous when you are dealing with adrenaline-rushed police swat teams (they all think they are on swat teams nowadays) *sigh
Nope. Urban legend. The ONLY time there was poison in Halloween candy was stepfather trying to off step son and disguising it that way.
ah– I guess the news got crazy, and then the police got crazy… Have you seen what they tell the parents about trick or treating? Amazing… although I miss trick-or-treating in small neighborhoods… I used to take my niece and nephew… It was over 15 years ago now.
About the drugs in brownies or muffins– has happened recently to a friend’s son. Some idiot CA adult served brownies to teenage boys who had no idea. Yep, at a school event. Three of them ended in the hospital.
I hope that idiot got some judicial or extra-judicial punishment for that idiocy.
Went to jail for at least 30 days and community service. It is in CA after all.
The legend, BTW, is where he got the notion, so it’s not the source.
I vaguely recall this news story. Yes, Japanese exchange student, shot & killed by homeowner. IIRC it was deep South — Louisiana comes to mind. There are several things wrong with the story from the standpoint of time and greater familiarity with Japanese culture (Japanese exchange students usually have a fair command of idiomatic American English from extensive exposure to American TV & Film, so when homeowner yelled ‘Freeze” it isn’t likely the student would have not understood.)
Ah – search engine reveals:
As we have recently had occasion to see, American news coverage gets certain types of stories particularly wrongly.
Note also this was a one off, a single instance of misapprehension. There were more instances of innocents mistakenly shot by police officers last weekend alone.
But what plays into stereotypes is etched into the public mind, nyet?
What’s more likely … being an innocent person shot in error by a Louisiana homeowner or shot by mistake by NYPD? I think Louisiana is safer.
Armed bystanders are indeed less likely to shoot the innocent than the police.
To be sure, armed bystanders do not generally arrive at the situation in the middle of it with only the information from a probably semi-coherent phone call.
For one thing, armed bystanders generally expect harsher penalties for wrongful shooting than tedious paperwork.
And since armed bystanders are not expected to get involved as a part of their job they probably won’t get involved unless or until the situation is very clear to them (because of those harsh penalties if they were wrong, and even if they were right it’s very likely they will face a long hassle and may end up on losing side anyway, one way or another, be demonized by the press, lose their gun, or all their guns, maybe their permits too, or even worse). So, the armed bystander is likely to shoot only after he just witnessed the bad guy shoot somebody or when he is directly threatened himself, or the situation is otherwise unmistakable.
And you can repeat that endlessly and the guns bad -crowd never gets it anyway. 😦 They either go for strawmen, or keep repeating those cases where an idiot had a gun and used it stupidly (preferred cases being of course the ones where the gun was owned legally). Of course it also says something of the scarcity of those cases that you tend to hear the same ones used again and again. 🙂
I remember that story.
I also remember the statistic pointed out at the time: the murder rate for Japanese Americans and Japanese living in America is lower than the Japanese murder rate.
Re. the waaaay upthread comment about the Star of David keffiyeh. Here’s one source, but there are a few others I’ve seen: http://semiticswag.com/store/ Some designs are more subtle than others.
Danke Sehr.
I WANT the American Keffiyeh. And Robert would kill for one of those ties. Sigh. bookmarked.
Yesterday I didn’t hear it, but today, whenever I look at this post’s title, I get Gilbert & Sullivan playing in my head.
I’m sorry.
Dear lady, one need never apologize for Gilbert and Sullivan music.
Indeed. My feelings, precisely. I merely wondered why it took me a day to hear it.
Correction:
I merely wondered that it took me a day to hear it.
I know why. Stoopid brain.
Somebody should write a post about Gilbert and Sullivan.
Set to something like the Pinafore tunes, i think:
When Men Hoist the Pirate Flag
Casting unjust bonds asunder
They do not boast or brag
Nor set they out for plunder
Their strength they take in hand
And feeling it constrain it
They disdain actions bland
Injustice they won’t permit
Cravenness they all eschew
Braveness is their choice
It’s honor that they value
When the pirate flag they hoist
Rough but a start.
Bravo!
Marvelous, my friend.
You bring to mind a friend who had lived in Moçambique during colonial times. The women still gathered, i.e. worked the fields. The men could no longer hunt, so they did all the housework. Washing clothes, ironing, everything.
They did not chop weeds or irrigate crops because that was traditionally women’s work. And all men know to stay out of women’s territory . . .
That’s it, Sarah. No Fed Chair***ship for you!
http://petticoatgovernment.blogspot.com/2013/09/gender-differences.html
If drafted I will tell show them my middle fingers, if forced I will not serve… anyway 😉
But you’re a woman. Apparently, that’s enough to be better by definition than Larry Summers. 🙂 (Actually, I don’t know anything about Yellen except her gender, but for women’s groups that seems to be enough.)
That does it, Sarah. No Fed Chair***ship for you ever! http://petticoatgovernment.blogspot.com/2013/09/gender-differences.html
Reminds of something Thomas Sowell wrote in his book “Visions of the Anointed”
“Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man(or woman), however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” — P. 112
And we do this every day in every thing! Why? Because we have become so arrogant as to think we know better than those in the past. We reap what we sow.
>>Men who have … been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral<<
Prime example: William Jefferson Clinton
At least “Slick Willey” is smarter than the current “sensitive moral-less man in the WH”.
I, too, believe that a masculine preference for courtship rather than rape, at least within one’s own society, is hardwired by evolution. Rape, within one’s own society is generally a risky option, due to the likelihood of retaliation by the victim’s mate or male relatives. But it may become the preferred option, by a process of elimination, despite the risk, for men who persistently fail in courtship.
What about that obvious pirate who just busted into the Washington Navy Yard and killed a bunch of people? I mean, one of the reasons we have Navies is to suppress piracy! No quarter for pirates. Hang ’em, if you catch ’em.
So, different IP. Interesting.
I’m on dial-up. Different IP address every time I log in.
I like that. It makes it maybe a little bit easier to hide from “those people”, as General Lee said. He never referred to them as “the Enemy.”
I’ll send you an email, Mrs. Hoyt. All will be made clear.
Sarah, I like your work and your commentariat. With regard to chivalry and the treatment of women, the rules are simple. If women show they appreciate polite, well-mannered men, they’ll get them. If not, then they won’t. End of story.
Regarding the post containing the word -graphically- by marycatelli which quotes http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_oh_to_be.html I find that to have some rather offensive things in it, though those parts were not posted here.
-I can now tell at a glance—with a fair degree of accuracy—that a man is violent toward his significant other.
-A closely shaven head with many scars on the scalp from collisions with broken bottles or glasses
-a broken nose
– blue tattoos on the hands, arms, and neck, relaying messages of love, hate, and challenge;
-above all, a facial expression of concentrated malignity, outraged egotism, and feral suspiciousness
What a load of misandric fucking garbage. Guess we better all grow a full head of hair gents or we`re fucking wife beatings.
Also don`t get punched in the nose or hit in the head by a beer bottle, because being injured by another person makes YOU a violent person.
Also don`t get any tattoos expressing love, because that means you will assault the ones you love, naturally.
Also, don`t ever be suspicious. People might read the suspicion on your face, and as we know, people who are suspicious of others attack women. Only be utterly trusting in everyone around you, especially trusting women, can you earn the privilege of possibly not being branded as a wife-beater.
Theodore Dalrymple is a fucking presumptuous piece of shit.
It is possible you are reading too much into the author’s descriptors. As I read it, he’s using the descriptors as referencing a pattern of behavior displayed by a sub-group of a population confined to a particular region serviced by his hospital. Those descriptors in and of themselves do not hold meaning, but in aggregate and applied to the appropriate population they serve as relatively reliable descriptors.
Grouping and the processes that facilitate it are a regular part of human social mechanisms, and while I tend to disagree with stereotyping as applied to individuals, it’s naive to deny its applicability to groups. We are a patterning species, the key is not to deny patterning but to utilize it where appropriate and ignore it where indicated.
He’s relaying observations that have proven accurate.
That you can pick a point or two out and take offense at them, seperate from the entire rest of the analysis, doesn’t mean much.
It’s like objecting to the “teenage males are more likely to commit crime” things by pointing to a teenage boy in a suit vs a thug-dressed woman and asking which you’d trust more.
Interesting read. I remember being in middle school sex ed class and discussing male/female roles and telling the girls in the class that I much preferred playing with my train set than Barbie and being made fun of for even admitting this out loud. But I grew up in a neighborhood of boys, my family of three girls, was until third grade, surrounded by no less than six households of mainly boys (one did have a girl but she was considerably older than us) and after the third grade one girl our age moved in. I tended to play with toys preferred by boys like trains, building blocks, and kickball.
That said, did I grow up a tomboy? Most definitely. Can I carry my own hauling tile for male customers? (I work in The Home Depot as a flooring sales associate, and I flip houses.) In some cases, even better than some of the me, but when it comes down to it, though I can relate/talk to men better than other women and as such find myself drawn to more conversations with the men in a group then the woman, I still can multitask (a trait of the gatherers who had to keep an eye on the kids and watch for predators all while finding the ripest berries) better than any man I know, I still cry when I’m frustrated and I can still rock a dress and heels and very much appreciate a man who respects a woman, one who will open my car door for me particularly one who can cook as good as me, and doesn’t insist I watch football with him on TV, because though I understand the rules, I don’t get the point of watching sports, though I did like participating in them (I was a lacrosse player in high school and college)
Will gender roles change over time, who knows? I have two friends who were/are stay at home dads because their wives made more money or because the work they did as consultants made it easier for them to do so. And another whose wife literally walked out on him and his three daughters and he can do a mean French braid. But, Susan pointed out, they will not be changed in a generation or two and I am quite happy with that. I raised my two sons and one daughter to respect the differences inherit between men and women but embrace they’re own being.
Res wrote:
“They lost sight of their audience, took them for granted and held them in unconcealed contempt. Wow! What would happen if other publishers treated their readership that way?”
They are, _especially_ in publications that are supposedly aimed at women. The underlying assumption in the business is that women want celebrity coverage, recipes, ‘human interest’ and lots of pictures. There’s a deep, deep contempt underlying much of the thinking, a contempt so deep I think it’s only half-conscious. Compare a modern issue of something like _Ladies Home Journal_ with one from 40 years ago.
But it shows up in other stuff too. _Newsweek_, for ex, sold for the sum of one dollar and debt transfer. _Time_ is shaky. The conventional wisdom is that ‘the Internet did it’. Nope, content (or its lack) did it.
Thank you for what you wrote, you made me think a lot..:)
To me, women possess more “real” strength than men. I’m a former Marine, a martial artist, a former bouncer/bodyguard and my sisters and wife are much stronger than me.
I learned a lot more about life from my mom, my sisters, my wife, than I ever did from any man (including my dad).
By the same token, whenever I’ve encountered a woman who tried to overpower me in martial arts, I’d warn them, and if they didn’t heed my warning, I’d show them the error of their ways. But it was never my first choice.
When I worked as a bouncer, conflicts with women were the most stressful because of unpredictability of the intensity of a woman, not to mention how they’d try to manipulate me (sexually, tears, or anger, etc). With all those experiences I learned to never underestimate a woman.
I dated an abusive woman for about 3 years (I’m a slow learner..:) ) and she hurt me alot worse than all the broken noses, bruised ribs, etc, I got from Boxing and Martial Arts, etc. But she did do me a favor, in that she taught me to set boundaries in a relationship so that I’d never get hurt like that again.
Like I said, women have taught me more about life than any man. And for that I am grateful and humble..:)