There is a war between the men and the women — a blast from the past post Dec. 7 2006

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Yes, I know, that political closet had see through doors, shelves…  As a friend pointed out, it wasn’t so much a coming out of the closet, until about a year before I did, but a slow conversion.  Though it wasn’t exactly a conversion either.  I was always an anti-communist.  It just took me time for the softer stuff to start bothering me.  I got through school by parroting it, and I didn’t see its intrinsic evil until it started dawning on me much later.  This is one of those “dawning on me.”  Interestingly, of all the political posts I made before throwing the closet door open, this got me the most attacks, to the point I had to password protect the post to stop the attacks.*

There is a war between the men and the women — a blast from the past post Dec. 7 2006

And the women are winning.  And this is a bad thing.  Seriously.  Indulge me.

(Pardon the misspellings.  I’m ranting.  There’s something unholy to an orderly, spellchecked rant.  I won’t inflict it on you.  Besides, I have REAL writing to do.)

I know this goes completely against everything you’ve ever heard and learned.  History — and SF — is full of dreamers who are convinced that if women ruled the world it would all be beauty flowers and non aggression.  (To these dreamers I say spend a week as a girl in an all-girl school.  It will be a rude awakening.)

Dreamers of the Dan Brown stripe posit a peaceful female worship, with yet more beauty and flowers and non-aggression.  They ignore the fact that 99% of the goddess-worshiping religions were scary.  And don’t tell me that’s patriarchal slander — it’s not.  The baby-killing of Astoreth worship has been documented extensively.  (Of course, the Phoenicians were equal-opportunity baby killers.)  The castrations of Cybele worship were also well documented.  Now, I can hardly imagine a female divinity without imagining hormonal episodes requiring appeasement — but that’s because I’m a woman of a certain age, and that’s fodder for another altogether different discussion.  Suffice it to say that the maiden and mother usually also had a crone persona who was … er… “not a nice person.”

Anyway — all this to say since I joined the MOB (Mothers Of Boys) the scales about such things as the inherent equality of men and women as far as their brain structure and basic behavior have fallen from my eyes.  (Well, the scales that remained.  My experience in school notwithstanding, I’d been TAUGHT that females were getting the short end of the stick and that’s a hard thing to overcome.  Learned wisdom is so much more coherent than lived wisdom, after all.)

Again — indulge me — I’m going to make a lot of statements I can too back up, but which would take very, very, very long to document — so it will seem like I’m ranting mid air.  Stay with it.  If I feel up to it later, I’ll post some references.

Yes, women have been horribly oppressed throughout history including the rather disgusting Victorian period that most Americans seem to believe is how ALL of history went.  I contend, though, that women were not oppressed by some international conspiracy of males — yes, I know what Women’s Studies professors say.  I would however remind you we’re talking of a group of people — men — who a) have issues finding their own socks in the dresser they’ve used for ten years.  b) Are so good at communicating as a group that they couldn’t coordinate their way out of a wet paper bag, or to quote my friend Kate, couldn’t organize a bonk in a brothel.  (In most large organizations the “social/coordinating” function is performed by females at various levels.) c) That women being oppressed by a patriarchy so thorough it altered history and changed all records of peaceful female religion would require a conspiracy lasting thousands of years and involving almost every male on Earth.  If you believe that, I have this bridge in NY that I would like to sell you. — Women were oppressed by their own bodies.

Throughout most of history women had no safe and effective means of stopping pregnancy. — please, spare me the “herbal” remedies.  I grew up in a village that had little access to medicine.  If there had been an effective means of preventing pregnancy we’d have known it.  TRUST me.  There are abortificients, but they endanger the mother as well.  However, until the pill there was no safe contraceptive.  The herbal contraceptive is a plot device dreamed up by fantasy writers.  Also, btw, the People’s Republic of China TESTED all these methods (including swallowing live tadpoles at the full moon.)  NONE of them worked.  SERIOUSLY.

What this meant in practical fact is that most women were pregnant from menarche to menopause, if they were lucky to live that long.  I’ve been pregnant.  If you haven’t, take it from me it’s not a condition conducive to brilliant discourse or reasoned logic.  On top of that, of course, women would suffer the evils of repeated child bearing with no rest.  In effect this DID make women frail and not the intellectual equals of men.  And it encouraged any male around to “oppress” them.  I.e., when the majority of females around you need a minder, you’re going to assume ALL females need a minder.  It’s human nature.  Note that beyond suffrage, the greatest advance in women’s equality came from the pill.  Not a coincidence, that.

However, the people who think that women were oppressed by an international historical cabal rule the establishment.  Including the educational establishment.  I find it hilarious that in their minds men/boys are so powerful that they must be kept back and are suspected of being criminals just because they have a penis.  This is attributing to them god-like powers to rival what any Victorian housewife would believe.

Anyway — these people have decided all efforts must be made to equal male and female performance in school.  Since, in practical fact, this is impossible because males and females develop at different paces and favor different areas, they’ve settled for hobbling the all-powerful males.

You see this everywhere from Saturday morning cartoons to kindergarten to all the grades beyond.  In cartoons these days, the girls ALWAYS rescue the boys.  (They do it while keeping impeccably groomed hair, too.  Impressive, that.)  And in school all the girls are assumed to be right and all the boys are assumed to be wrong.

Because it’s been determined girls learn better in groups — not all girls.  I HATED group work.  But most girls — group work rules the class.  Because girls do better in homework, particularly of the “decorating and coloring” kind, this homework persists well into highschool — even with no pedagogical excuse.  Because single-sex education is good for BOTH genders, but BETTER for boys, single-sex education is anathema.

As a matter of fact I don’t  know ANY parents of boys who haven’t been told their sons are ADHD at some point and told the boy needs ritalin.  Even my older son, who is almost as verbally inclined as a girl, and who has always been interested in learning had this pushed at him in first grade.  Middle school is insane for boys, as their verbal skills at that age lag well behind the girls.  They are not only behind academically, they also tend to have issues working in groups.  Boys are accused of sexual harassment on a regular basis at this age.  No girl ever is.

I remember going to the parent teacher conference for my older son, in sixth grade, and sitting in the hallway listening to the other parents.  All the parents whose children had perfect grades were parents of girls.  All the parents whose children were inexplicably not doing well, despite high IQs, were parents of boys.

You’re not outraged?  Reverse those.  Perhaps it will help.  Imagine that our method for teaching teens was leaving all the girls out in the cold and favoring boys.  Wouldn’t it shock you?  It should.

On top of all, we’re fostering a victim mentality in these girls.  We’re giving them the advantages AND telling them boys are oppressing them — these boys are all powerful creatures from which there is no escape.

You’re not worried?  You should be.

If an alien species had devised a way to stop the human race from reproducing they wouldn’t have come up with a better way to drive both girls and boys crazy.

Look — this is striking at the core of our society.  by which I don’t mean American or even western society.  I mean SOCIETY.  Human.  Association.

Insofar as that goes — and without in anyway defending it — there is a reason that, given the chance (mostly by nature and that pesky pregnancy thing) societies became ridiculously anti-woman.  There is a reason Islamic countries are terrified of the female half of their population — no, don’t want to hear anything about higher observances.  Female circumcision.  Veiling (anyone who thinks those who put women in slip covers respect women needs his or her head examined.)  Women’s testimony being worth half of the man’s.  Women punished for being raped.  If that’s respect and kindness, give me insult and intolerance any day — there is a reason Imperial China circumscribed females to non-human status.

The reason is that we ARE more powerful than they are.

No, seriously.  And I’m not talking about the ability to bear life within us, or some such chestnut dreamed up by an anthropologist.  I’m talking about — creating social links.

Women, perhaps because they were the child caretakers and therefore had to be able to communicate child care lore as well as teach the children, seem to have learned to organize and create cooperative links.  Men’s brains seem to run to hierarchies — the order giving necessary to cooperative hunting — while women’s brains run to networks — the communication lines necessary to pass on recipes and child care tips.

The farther we go back, the more we’re sure the greatest innovations leading to civilization were the work of women: agriculture.  Animal domestication.

I’m going to take a wild leap and assume we also invented language.  Stands to reason “Gog go around mammoth from front” is far less complex than “Iga make sure child doesn’t eat poisonous berries.”

In that sense we MADE society.  We fit into society naturally.  Our aggression is verbal, social.  It’s an aggression that consists in freezing out and/or going around people.  Male aggression consists of hitting someone over the head.  Our society — any advanced society — condones the first, but not the last.

We are — so to put it — house broken.  Males aren’t.  Young males MUST be trained to fit into society.  Young females instinctively know how to go around and manipulate the system. (Yes, I’m talking generally.  I had no social clue and was very much male in my approach.)

THIS, ladies, is our turf.  They had a handle on us while continuous pregnancy weakened us.  They could even get the upper hand and push us to a corner.

NOW they can’t.  Science has equalized the odds.  And therefore, our superior organizational skills — ever more needed in an increasingly complex society — already give us an advantage.

On top of that our schools are treating our boys as guilty until proven innocent.  This is alienating them and making them crazy.  It’s also giving them a distaste for learning, which is why most college graduates are women.

We’ve won.  They’re on the run.

It’s now time to remember that they are our fathers/husbands/children.  It’s now time to remember that if we demand that men behave like women and become women in all but equipment only a small percentage will be able to accommodate.  The rest will become embittered, disillusioned and, ultimately, aggressive.  Because that’s how men behave when they’re not happy.

It’s time to stop driving the young warriors from the tribe to live in the wilderness.  They only become dangerous and come back in attack mode.

We’ve won.  Fly the standard.  Sound the trumpet.  And then extend your hand to the enemy — bring those boys back in.  They are no more guilty for the crimes of their ancestors who were terrified of women than the little girls today are guilty of the crimes of women who in the last four decades have been terrified of men.

It’s time to stop this nonsense.  We’re two halves of a whole.  Regardless of how your preference runs, or whether you have both genders in the home — it takes both to make a society.  Or at least a functional society.  And — until science overcomes that — it takes both to make a physical human being.

Go out there and hug a man today.

222 thoughts on “There is a war between the men and the women — a blast from the past post Dec. 7 2006”

          1. It won’t. There’s enough of us who think that third-wave feminists and MRAs are two sides of the same coin–i.e., some legitimate beefs combined with raging entitlement complexes–that we can at least preserve some enclaves.
            Errr.
            Most of those will be in Catholic/Evangelical areas. Will that be a problem?

            1. Nor for me. I’m Jewish but my husband is Methodist. I grew up with Catholics–Brooklyn, NY.

        3. Wayne:: That’s what I’m afraid of. As a woman who likes men better… ack. That’s all I can say.

  2. Darlin’ sometimes you truly do amaze me.
    Here you were exploding the heads of the SJW long before anyone ever even heard the term.
    Just imagine the effect if you hadn’t been so restrained and politically correct.

  3. School is just the start of things. Women outnumber men in the workforce. Women get promoted faster. Women are catered to with family court rulings. Men who complain about things are told that they are SEXXXXIIIISSSSSSS…

    My favorite is the argument about women getting lesser compensation for the same job. There are generally two reasons for this:

    1.) Women frequently work less hours than a man does. They deal more with child-rearing, etc. In a position that is paid by the hour, working less hours means making less money. At the end of the day though, this is not the fault of the employer, it is a result of choices made by the employee.

    2.) Women get promoted faster. Seriously. Sorry, but this is the real world and compensation sometimes depends on length of employment. This is especially true in the military where there is a chart. Pay is based on rank and time in service. A woman who gets promoted faster (often to prove that the officer promoting her is not promoting based on [male] gender) just doesn’t get paid as much as a man who took longer to get there.

    It really is time for men to start fighting back. We’d have to take the courts back first though, and that’s going to be hard to do. Things are now slanted so far toward women at the moment and people are so fired up to protect the rights of women that no one seems interested in maintain a real equality.

    1. Men take more dangerous jobs. Men don’t outnumber women 11 to 1 in on-the-job deaths because men are clumsy. When someone needs to go up on a powerline in a storm or fly offshore and install a new framistan it is usually a Dad whose kids need braces or tuition money that steps up to take the travel bonus / hazard pay / double overtime / plant shutdown shift / etc.

      1. That is true. Men are the natural risk-takers. There are some men who do it for the pay. There are also others who do it for the rush. There are more than just a few who do it for the rush – and justify it because of the pay.

        1. And some of us do it because it’s a job, and all jobs have some risk. When you’re raised on a farm, you’re used to the idea that if you mess up you could get maimed or die. A quick check of the ten most dangerous jobs in the US shows I’ve worked in five of them, and never really thought about it. No thrill or “rush.” It’s a job, and you either enjoy it or you don’t, and if you don’t you probably won’t go into it, or stay there long before you find other work.

          1. In college in the ’80s I drove a Taxi… in Philadelphia… night shift. I never got robbed, per se (although on average one guy a week did), but I did have my fair share of fare jumpers. Corner me at a Con sometime and I’ll tell you about the time I chased one. It’s funny.

            I spent some time doing a job assembling office furniture in people’s homes. That doesn’t seem TOO risky, I mean, you might cut yourself with a utility knife or get a splinter, or get a hernia and bad back lifting stuff, or ruin your knees crawling around on the floor (I didn’t get the hernia), but there are unseen risks, like how I got a Staph/Cellulitis infection that laid me out for 10 days – and probably led to the Cutaneous Vasculitis I got hit with a year later that I still bear scars from. People’s floors are DIRTY!

            These days, it’s all kinds of physical injuries I’m at risk for, plus chemicals that can cause organ failure, and high falls onto concrete.

            In the end though, I’ll probably just get hit by a car.

            1. Beer truck. Because the Universe has a warped sense of humor. Organic, micro-brew in an electric or LP “no emissions” vehicle.

            2. Nah. Sometime when you’re a dirty old man walking down the sidewalk, someone will be trying to move a piece of furniture that you built in their home many, many years ago, will trip and fall over a cat, and knock a table lamp out the window, which will hit you in the head. You will survive that, be on the way to the hospital in an ambulance, when a piece of a 787 will somehow fall off and crash into the ambulance, killing you.

              1. Well, today (frigging mandatory Saturday overtime) I got sprayed in the face with high pressure air/oil mix. Thank goodness for safety glasses.

                1. The warehouse I worked in one time, I didn’t think I needed safety glasses, until I sprayed glue in my eye.

                  I still didn’t wear them, after that, but I was MUCH more careful when trying to rotate the nozzle face to change the direction of the oval spray pattern.

                  1. Well, I needed new glasses anyway, and we have a pretty good vision plan, so the glasses I’ve got now are also certified as safety glasses (they have these clip-on side shields on the arms.)

      2. This is mostly due to strength, particularly upper body strength. Yes, there are women in these jobs, and yes, they are physically able to do the work. But they aren’t the norm, whether SJW like it or not,

        BTW, I’ve never gotten hazard pay or a travel bonus. OTOH, I have worked my share of time and a half and double time.

        1. Bull hockey. Pizza delivery driver, a surprisingly dangerous job. 70-80% men. Truck driver 94%. Cab driver – 85%.

          There are plenty of dangerous occupations that don’t require a lot of upper body strength, and women are conspicuously absent. Airline pilots and engineers? Less than 6%.

          1. “don’t require a lot of upper body strength, and women are conspicuously absent. Airline pilots and engineers? Less than 6%.”

            Excuse me? Have you ever tried to move airplane controls without hydraulic boost? It isn’t for day to day, it’s when the feces meets the impeller.

            2. Well, there’s boost and there’s boost – in an Airbus you can play with the joystick all day long with no power and nothing is going to move. I haven’t read up on what’s hooked to what on a 787, but without hydraulics/electrics/electrohydraulics you are not going to be accomplishing much.

              Case in point: United 232, the DC-10 that almost made an amazing landing with not a damn thing working flight-control-wise back in 1989 – the Captain and FO were pulling and straining at the controls in hope that they were doing anything after the rear engine catastrophically failed, severing all the hydraulic lines and draining all the hydraulic fluid from all the systems, but the only control they actually had was in the hands of the off-duty pilot who was manually adjusting thrust between the surviving jet engines on each wing to try and get down. The Captain and First Officer could have gone and sat in the back for all the physical good they did (although they did a great job of crew coordination and working the systems to try and get anything back working – they just never moved any control surface one jot).

              1. 787 is fly by wire, but with many redundant systems, including split hydraulic lines. Plus, unlike an Airbus, the pilot’s and co-pilot’s controls are physically connected to one another, and DO have force feedback. So a scenario like the Air France flight that went down in the Atlantic because the co-pilot held the joystick back all the way to the water can’t happen.

                (It’s the most basic design philosophy difference between Boeing and Airbus. Boeing believes the pilot is always the ultimate authority over what the airplane does. Airbus lets the flight computer over-ride the pilot.)

                2. My dad predicted that the Airbus philosophy was going to start killing a noticeable number of people. He had a nicely reasoned out argument as to why. Most of them involved looking at specific and surprisingly common trouble situations that pilots face, and how the design of that autopilot is poorly designed for that situation. Further, he explained that no one solution is good for any of these situations– nor is computer logic (which has a limited operation range, and can only make judgement based on what can be measured) the appropriate means to make those decisions. Situations are too unpredictable. Then again, complex systems was his intellectual specialty.

                  He also used to say, “If I am always going to take the blame for a crash, I should be able to make the decisions I need to save lives.”

                  Naturally, all the folks he would work for would never buy an airbus– plus one who has installed an override that the pilot can trip to reassert control of the plane. I think Connie Kalitta does that.

                  1. There’s a famous video on YouTube of an Airbus that was making a low pass over a runway, and the autopilot decided they were going to land, and wouldn’t spool up the engines the way the pilot wanted, and plowed into the trees past the end of the runway. All ten aboard were killed.

                    1. Such usage constitutes Operator Error: Failure To Recognize Undocumented Features Of The Equipment/Device

                      Alternatively, it constitutes Operator Error: Mistaking A Bus For A Plane

                      Options for extending this abound.

          2. Indeed? I know of women on utility crews, and despite what people think, that work isn’t all mechanized.

            BTW, you might be surprised at husband and wife trucker teams.

            1. I drove OTR. No surprise. The stats above are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, except for pizza drivers, which I’m basing on my observations and experience working at Dominos.

          3. Got any info on truck driver ethnicity? I know the post was about men vs women, but an unscientific, observational study of passing trucks on the road seems to show an unusually high proportion of white men, though some of them may be latin-descended, and I just can’t tell from the car.

            Oh, and based on another unscientific observation, a significant proportion of female drivers appear to be in male/female teams.

            1. Seen a couple of Sikhs. Lot of black men drive trucks. (live 3 miles from a truck stop. Unscientific anecdotal report only)

              1. really depends on where one is. Here I see a ton of hispanics … but then I am in Texas, For over the road, long haul I see more whites, though black guys are getting more common. Most of the black truck drivers I know are dedicated route guys who mostly are local or near local (parent’s old neighbor ran a city to city route) most of the hispanics I see are intrastate only or, shocker, the border jumpers who are SUPPOSED to speak english (Ha!). The Sikhs I’ve seen are split between long haul (one from Canada) and intrastate (mostly hauling sea containers).
                I see less trucker than I did before (they changed how they ship at work since the buyout) but we still deal with a lot of forwarding so we still get a bit of variety. The women I have talked to who drive for the most part, were either in a team, once were in a team (Mom’s cousin started in a team with her Ex … after the divorce … and split off because he was too slow and liked to take too much time off). I have only chatted with one who started out as a lone driver (and she was easily confused for being a male as one of my coworkers asked “was that guy the NADS Tanker??”) but we get so few even in teams though twice we have had hot shots teams that were two females.
                I had a customer when I did auto parts who had hot shot trucks (diesel Fords and Dodges and a pair of Ford Ranger small p/u trucks) and he preferred women drivers for those. He said they were easier on the trucks and could prove it with maintenance work receipts and stuff. Especially his two Dodge diesels. The brakes were too small on them from the factory so they ate pads and rotors and his best lady got almost twice the miles for a set than any of the guys.

                  1. I drove past you just once then. I usually run up through K.C. but once, just to take the route, I drove (usually I ride instead) 44 from Joplin to St. Lou.

            2. I know one black truck driver, and have met others. No demographic breakdown. I assume that previously there were more white independents than black due to the investment costs of a rig. Nor do I know if short haul vs long haul makes a difference. I seem to recall black pulpwood truck drivers several decades ago, when pulpwood trucks were still smaller than big rigs.

              To tell the truth, I don’t pay it any attention. If I think about it, I’ll try to get an idea the next time I’m at a truck stop.

              1. I was actually a little incorrect about my observation location. I ride the bus to work a lot, and guess what? That’s boring, so I look around. So far, in a couple of years’ time, I think I’ve seen two black truck drivers. Maybe three. And one woman. Now, that is on I-71/75 going into Cincinnati, which is a major thoroughfare, and may skew the results in favor of longer-haul drivers.

                1. Lots of black and Mexican drivers on I55 and I80 up here in the Sheepul’s Republik of Illinoisy. It seems like a LOT of the white drivers are either Polacks or Russians.

            3. Anecdotal info only. I’m primary shipper on afternoon shift at our chemical factory. I’d say about 1/4 black, simply because the railyards that send us our overseas containers are based in Detroit. We also get about 10% Hispanic because we ship a lot to Mexico. Gender is about 3/4 male. Most of the white ESL drivers that I see came from Eastern Europe originally. They are interesting folks to listen to.

      3. True. Historically speaking, women tended to do the work that was easier to do with a passel of small children around. This work would be easily interruptible in order to feed and care for those small children, and would involve relatively fewer hazards for the children to fall into. So, gardening, cooking, spinning/weaving (clothing was often the most time-consuming job, more so than food), and so on. Men took on the work that was more mobile, hazardous, non-child-friendly, or un-interruptible. And we’re still at it.

        I did pizza delivery for a while. It was fine and I got really nice tips, but looking back, I’m amazed that my parents were OK with it. There were one or two iffy situations and if anybody had wanted to get mean, I would have been in deep trouble. I don’t know that I’d let my daughters do it.

        1. I did pizza delivery for a while. It was fine and I got really nice tips, but looking back, I’m amazed that my parents were OK with it. There were one or two iffy situations and if anybody had wanted to get mean, I would have been in deep trouble.

          That Papa John’s delivery girl that carried her CCL against policy, and is alive because of it.

          As a friend pointed out– whoever made the decision on how to deal with that was brilliant. She was moved off of being a delivery agent for at least a while. (And they’re paying for her therapy.) She was “punished”…with exactly what you’d want to do if it was policy that all drivers carry a gun, but with the option of firing the random idiot who thinks guns are toys.

                1. No problem, I’m just delighted at how clever the solution is.

                  A little annoyed at how folks totally miss the clever, but oh well– read a news article the other day that mentioned a ‘men’s rights’ group as specifically misogynistic, and a ‘feminist geek’ group with no modifier, setting them as being explicitly equivalent… and people were attacking him for slandering the ‘men’s rights’ movement.

        2. Pizza delivery, like convenience store clerk, really depends on location. I’ve worked both and never had any real problems with either. But I’ve spent time in other areas where those jobs wouldn’t be high on my list of acceptable risks without MAJOR monetary incentive.

  4. L.E. Modesitt had an offhand comment in one of his SF books, referencing the “Sosh Wars” (I’m assuming “sosh” is a shortened version of “sociological”) and mentions that societal rules are an alternate form of force. It’s also mentioned that those applying such rules did not recognize them as a form of force and were surprised when it backfired in such a big way.

      1. That’s a leftist thing in general. They don’t expect people to stand up to them anymore. They still haven’t realized that we haven’t all surrendered and when it hits them in the fact they don’t know how to act.

        1. It’s that male thing of reacting aggressively–which is why GamerGate became as big as it did as fast as it did. They pushed the men too far, and the response was, to their mind, out of proportion to the offense. I think a lot of the GamerGaters thought it was too restrained.

          1. eh, it was no more aggressive than theirs have been. It’s part of parcel of the whole “punching up.”

            And how they want men to act chivalrously anyway. There is no way to say women get harassed more than men online except by defining the sort of harassment women get as worse than what men get because they are women, but they get up in arms about it.

          2. There’s a percentage of people who would rather not waste time fighting — until the stakes are too large (often, cumulatively) to ignore; at which point they may go “all in” to make that problem go away permanently.

            Quite a lot of SJW and other activist types, by contrast, see low-level fighting as a “normal”, and are quite surprised when the reaction occurs.

            The chivalry that remains in society means that when the first type is male and the second is female, they survive the experience.

            1. There’s a percentage of people who would rather not waste time fighting — until the stakes are too large (often, cumulatively) to ignore; at which point they may go “all in” to make that problem go away permanently.

              Depending on where they draw the line for requiring response, this is either fighting “like a girl” or using Christian restraint. Neither of which are bad; remember Pratchett’s line about “never threaten a small man, he’ll kill you”? Same with a sensible girl. Christian restraint– not responding to insults as if they are actual violence– is a major foundation of our culture’s basic manners.

              “Rules for Radicals” and related tactics are explicitly based off of exploiting manners to advance a cause– and they’re upset that after three or so generations, they’ve managed to wear down part of it. (Yes, the book was published in the 70s; it just organized what was already going on, and formalized for easier teaching.)

            2. “Quite a lot of SJW and other activist types, by contrast, see low-level fighting as a “normal” …”

              This is because they engage in constant micro-aggression, nagging, harassing, pushing and shoving in order to get their way and (more importantly) to condition others to concede minor points rather than engage in “needless” (i.e., low reward) combat. Thus such people are amazed when anybody pushes back, having come to believe in their divine right to shove without resistance.

        2. “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.” — William F. Buckley, Jr.

          It’s been tested in the lab. Haidt found that leftists are the most ignorant about their political opponents and the further left, the more ignorant.

          The good news is that they are violating the Art of War by not knowing their enemy. The better news is that Haidt was a liberal when he started his studies. As he came to realize the conservatives weren’t just being jerks, he moved rightward. So they may be caught in a cleft.

  5. I have never, NEVER met a avowed Feminist who was not either in open rebellion with the majority of her “sisters”( see the career of Christina Hoff Sommers), or profoundly deranged.

  6. As the mother of boys (and girls) I salute you. When I was working outside the home, I would much rather be around boys/men than women. I hated having female bosses, with one exception. The others were always so ‘conscious’ of being women and dominant and all that BS, that I hated having them as bosses. And mentoring? Forget it. The last one wasn’t even my boss, but a colleague. She cost me my job. My oldest daughter is about to receive her degree in a more male-oriented field–Ag. And she’s tough, but respects her husband as the head of their household and neither makes a major decision without consulting the other. Teamwork, a marriage…it works.

    1. Someone who (deep down) believes she was hired and promoted on the basis of her plumbing rather than the excellence of her performance is likely to feel constantly threatened by others who are also females AND who re, in addition, competent.

  7. The rest will become embittered, disillusioned and, ultimately, aggressive. Because that’s how men behave when they’re not happy.

    Amen to that. I’m seeing a lot of disturbing stuff in various odd corners of the Internet that reads like the writers thought the ending of Outlaw of Gor was a Good Idea. It’s making me worry that the backlash against gender feminism could wind up undoing even the gains of the original women’s rights movement of the 19th and early 20th century: the right to vote, the right to own property in one’s own name, the right to apply for credit in one’s own name and be considered on one’s own financial merits, even the right of self-ownership. These guys are that angry, that frustrated, and it’s dangerous.

    We need a system that simultaneously acknowledges that typical men and women are different and that, because we are biological organisms rather than manufactured goods, the populations of men and women will have some outliers who think and act more like the other not because they’re being willfully noncompliant, but because of peculiarities of genetics and development that push them to the edge of the population. But how to do that when not just our formal laws but also our unwritten social rules are built on the assumption that there are always neat, tidy bright lines rather than fuzzy edges bounding categories? I honestly don’t know — it may turn out that essentialism is hardwired into our brains at some level, and it’s almost impossible to keep outliers from being stigmatized and punished just for being outliers who can’t squeeze themselves into their assigned box.

    1. Perhaps if we approached the question by treating everybody — male or female — as an In-effing-dividual we would avoid the problems of trying to force outliers back into the main herd.

      Nyah — that’s crazy talk! Procrustes had the right idea, which is why our system strives so hard to emulate and adapt his methodology.

  8. “Young females instinctively know how to go around and manipulate the system.”
    My three year old daughter gets whatever she wants whenever she wants from Grandpa, Daddy, and four big brothers. ONLY the women in the family are capable of telling her “No.” It’s going to be really interesting when the baby, also a girl, becomes able to demand more than nursing and diaper changes. Won’t be long now: she’s trying to get my keyboard.
    I submit that given that women are smaller and weaker and slower than males, it’s probably a good thing that men aren’t naturally inclined to deny women what we want. At least in past eras.

  9. I like the ladies but I’m also getting tired of “Men Jokes” especially the one where the “intelligent woman” talks about “accusing the game warden of rape because he has the equipment to rape”.

    Accusing a man of rape in any shape or form isn’t funny.

    1. No. In fact, it strikes me as one of the least funny things out there. Because the consequences are so phenomenally devastating and last so long.

      2. ‘We encourage the humans to recite a particularly stupid lie, starting when they are very small, so that they will grow up believing it: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” If you, my dear fellow McStudges, ever find yourselves annoyed by a human who actually believes this, here is how to hurt him with a name. By fair means or foul, but preferably by foul, get his fellow vermin to call him by the affectionate nickname, “Registered Sex Offender”.

        —H. Smiggy McStudge

      3. One of the forms of backlash I’m surprised we haven’t seen already is someone falsely accused of rape, or even one of their relatives / acquaintances, killing the accuser. Because the level of ruin to the accused person’s life wouldn’t be increased that much if they did.

        And speaking strictly for myself, I’d be hard pressed not to consider that a justifiable homicide.

            1. I vaguely recall a story about a guy being killed by the accuser’s boyfriend, attempting to defend her supposed honor (which she had forfeited by the false accusation.)

              I don’t know if the guy’s family tried to sue his accuser; surely there would have been justification for so doing.

        2. TBH I’m waiting for ‘false accusation of rape is treated as equally awful as actual rape.’ Because rape isn’t, as we keep being told, just a crime of sexuality, but also crime of exerting power over the victim – or something like that. A false accusation of rape is also a crime of power, and as damaging in my eyes to the victim as someone who has been raped.

          1. I dunno — someone who has been raped can keep the assault secret, suffering no public damage however much private harm is done. I doubt anybody ever gets over that, but you have control over the public component of the event. You can keep it a secret or you can tote a mattress around all semester.

    2. Example of joke drift– that joke was old when my mom was a kid, and it’s just not funny anymore.

      See also, parody news stories from a decade or two back that can be re-run as news stories now.

      1. I hate it when The Onion has more newsworthy stories than Main Stream Media outlets. It’s getting so I have to double check to see if it is something from The Onion or not.

  10. We’re two halves of a whole. Regardless of how your preference runs, or whether you have both genders in the home — it takes both to make a society.

    Which is precisely the reason the Cultural Marxists promote Radical Feminism along with all their other toxic doctrines. They want to wreck traditional society so they can pick up the pieces and super glue them into utopia. Once society has been atomized into perpetually warring factions, all the bad ol’ ideas and standards of the past will disappear. Then comes paradise on Earth. Oh, yeah.

    1. But there are always winners and losers in wars, not matter how fragmented they are. And ask the South how long the scars of a civil war last for the loser.

      1. And look at the history of places in Africa and Asia to see how bad it CAN get. Our civil war was brutal, nasty and vicious… and was probably one of the cleanest civil wars ever which is down right terrifying, especially if extrapolated to the war between the sexes.

        2. And when the Southern Confederate veterans regained the right to vote, the revenge they took on the vulnerable black people was terrible. Jim Crow, “race riots” and all the other atrocities inflicted by the Southern Democrats and their Democrat allies.

          1. Now, now, now — Jim Crow took a little longer to be established. Even after the Reconstruction, the feds would slap down Jim Crow laws.

            Not until the Progressive era gave us the great Progressive Woodrow Wilson was the antiquated notions from the Declaration of Independence put to rest, so that the government could boldly act on science and give us segregation.

          2. We are wandering astray from the point. (Since I recall that too much detail on this war tends to trip the ‘not to be discussed here’ line in the same way ‘discussing anarcho-capitalism’ does, if we’re not heading there, carry on.)

            My point was somewhat two fold… we, as a country, have a habit of getting through horrific things less horrifically than is ‘normal’ for the rest of the world. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that will continue, and even ‘less horrific’ is still horrific. The longer this war between the sexes goes the more likely we are to go from ‘uncomfortable correction’ to ‘horrific but not shattering’ to ‘yeah… we don’t have their side because they didn’t survive and no you don’t want to know the details not if you want to sleep again.’

            Fortunately, for once, enough of us are sleeping with the enemy that there is hope.

            1. And most of us that aren’t sleeping with the enemy…really, really wish we were. 🙂

              As to your point about us surviving…less horrifically than elsewhere, I think you’re on point and also emphasizing the point that Sarah has made in the past – the US is an Odd in the classroom of nations.

              1. Men in Women’s Studies programs apparently wish to be POW’s in the battle of the Sexes. I have never seen that actually work out for them though.

                I’ve seen a few, they’re like the wolf Kellogg raised on a Vegan diet. Very sad creatures indeed. They’ve sold their manhood for a mess of pottage.

            2. we, as a country, have a habit of getting through horrific things less horrifically than is ‘normal’ for the rest of the world.

              Yeah, but as Ann Coulter points out, due to massive immigration from third world countries, we are no longer the country we were. And this was done very deliberately by Democrats who hated what America was. The “fundamental transformation” may be nearly complete.

              1. Yeah, and the other thing to remember is that all of the domestic unpleasantnesses we survived were when there was somewhere the losers could be sent to or migrate to and start over. Not sure we have that now.

      2. Visited some distant relatives in the South in the early 1970’s. My elderly aunts, the oldest born in 1890, talked about Sherman’s March to Atlanta as if it had happened to them. It’s also when I found out that “damnyankee” is one word, not two.

    2. One thing is certain in any war: whichever side wins or loses, the ones selling the weapons will profit.

      Which is why, in the words of J. Wellington Wimpy, “Let’s you and him fight” are so frequently accompanied by an offer to hold the combatants’ coats (and examine their wallets.)

      1. Just ask Dives.

        Then terribly ‘rose Satan, and darkened Earth afar,
        Till he came on cunning Dives where the money-changers are;
        And he saw men pledge their gear
        For the gold that buys the spear,
        And the helmet and the habergeon of war.

        Yea, to Dives came the Persian and the Syrian and the Mede —
        And their hearts were nothing altered, nor their cunning nor their greed —
        And they pledged their flocks and farms
        For the King-compelling arms,
        And Dives lent according to their need.

  11. I have my parents to blame.

    I was taught I’m an individual first (which caused a lot of problems when I went boarding school for my last two years of high school. Heh, that was educational, but not way the parents wanted) gender/sexuality second. My mom unless it was something that would impact the entire family, always acted independently of my father and vice versa.

    One thing I’m going to point out about a lot of the “Rebel Women against…whatever the hot term it is for patriarchy is this year” is that a lot of them were raised in homes that were less than…I’m not even sure of the right word here… they were raised in very very strict “christian” homes. Their actions today are while in rebellion against something… it’s not against what they think it is.

    I went through that stage. Still have a particular bent against males…the ones who don’t seem to grok what being an adult is anyways….

    1. Eh, don’t overestimate the strictness of their upbringing. Some were, no doubt, but a lot were red-diaper babies. And between their tendency to interpret any restriction at all as tyranny, and their advantages in lying about a repressive childhood, there’s the question of how many of those claiming it suffered it.

        1. I can’t speak for anyone else, but to me, being a man is a goal, not a destination. Every day I try to meet the challenges of that day in as manly a fashion as possible. Some days I succeed. Some days I don’t. Most days I’m not sure. I’m hoping to grow up real soon now.

    3. I went through that stage. Still have a particular bent against males…the ones who don’t seem to grok what being an adult is anyways….

      Oh, I think most men who DO grok being an adult have a bent against those who don’t.

      1. Most *especially* those men whose job it is to go about cleaning up after those little boys in adult bodies. Be they policemen, emergency services personnel, or military. Or perhaps just brought up to a standard that says “being a man requires sacrifice and responsibility in near equal parts. Do these things well, and you’ll find no end of work.”

        Took me a while to recognize that “no end of work” could be a reward, not a punishment. *chuckle*

  12. Related news – A class of women will be sent to US Army Ranger school this women. This presents the Army with a very PC catch-22. If at least half the women don’t pass, heads will roll. If the women do pass, then it is obvious that they really didn’t attend the same Ranger school as the men. (The average woman could not physically survive the full course, much less pass. I’m not sure about now, but the course used to kill a few men a year – and those were acceptable losses. Biology makes a difference.) And that will destroy the men’s opinion of not just those women, but of the course and the leadership that would allow such obvious fakery to happen.
    See Kratman’s articles on EveryJoe for someone with more details and writing ability.
    And no, I’m not an alumnus of the course, so I have no emotional investment in it.

    1. I’m curious why they couldn’t preserve the integrity of the course for men by
      a) Never asking the female students to do anything.
      b) Automatically passing all female students, and telling them that they pass as soon as they show up.

        1. Hasn’t stopped the Navy with the no-rates, they just start figuring out where to stuff wastes of space.

          Two examples of the mindset’s results mugged a little old lady while AWOL from a command wide mandatory fun event where we were warned over the 1MC, several times, that they would be checking that everyone showed up.

          While wearing Navy PT hoodies.

          They were over six foot tall, and black, in Japan, and it sure wasn’t Tokyo.

          About the only thing they DIDN’T do is have on a name tag or something.

          And that’s one of the results with relatively little damage. (Take a moment to absorb how much PR damage that did, and that the lady could’ve been hurt. But it’s minor, because nobody died or was maimed.)

          1. Hasn’t stopped the Navy with the no-rates, they just start figuring out where to stuff wastes of space.

            I saw a LOT of those when I did a Tiger Cruise on the Boxer last year with #2 Marine son. TO be fair though, almost every large organization or company has a lot of drones they have to tolerate for one reason or another.

            1. It’s not that they have no rate, it’s the folks who get shoved in there with them– usually by flunking out of other schools.

              1. Tom told me there were a couple of small gangs on the Boxer and the same was true for all carriers. Though they did learn very very quickly not to try to fight a Marine. Most of them on board were NOT REMFs. At least half of the 800 were infantry with a few tankers and artillery guys. They did trash the Marine berthing areas when they left the ship in Djibouti and Jordan.

                1. Sadly, there are some gangs entering the Marines, too. Polish Sgt got murdered for being married to a pretty black lady by a couple of black gang members.

    2. Which is precisely what the Marines are finding out in Infantry Officers Training. 26 women have tried and all of them have failed to meet the physical demands…. 24 on the first day.

    3. I know a male that recently graduated. Losing a fifth or more of your body weight during that school is not a joke. And that’s amongst exceptionally fit persons.

  14. “b) Are so good at communicating as a group that they couldn’t coordinate their way out of a wet paper bag, or to quote my friend Kate, couldn’t organize a bonk in a brothel.”

    Um …yeah. Let’s all give a big hand to the women that organized the Normandy invasion and the campaign in the Pacific, the first Constitutional Convention, the Lewis & Clark expedition, the building of the Empire State Building… wait, what? That was men? Unpossible!

    Not that I disagree with the overall point of the post, but this stereotype of men as hopelessly disorganized is really just another one of the baseless feminist attacks on men. Careful of drinking the Kool-Aid.

      1. Oh good gracious, yes. Imagine a group of men. Say five. Normal enough men. Trying to organize a surprise party for one of their women. Yep. Surprise. As in, totally secret from the suprise-ee.

        Yes. That disaster you’re imagining? *Far* less disastrous than what maybe-could-have-probably happened in real life. The only thing that saved these very hypothetical men from death would be that the ladies were laughing too hard to pull it off.

        Women and such things? Flawless. Oh, they might stress and worry over every little thing, but that’s *nothing* compared to how men might in-some-totally-not-real-world manage it. We’re just not put together that way.

        2. I’ve done it for my wife. Got friends to take her out for the afternoon, others showed relatively on time (this was a bunch of Goths fer chrissakes).

          Went off pretty flawlessly.

    2. But those are hierarchical organizations. Men have figured those out since the first organized hunt. It’s peer to peer, self-organizing groups where women take control.

        1. I hate to be argumentative (not, really, but I hope to be engaging rather than obnoxious about it!), but I’d disagree with both of those examples.

          Assume, for starters that, in history, conspiracies have existed. Given that assumption, and given the relative roles of men and women in history, how likely is it that most historical conspiracies were dominated by women? Men must be able to do conspiracies.

          As for peer-to-peer self-organizing groups, (maybe pretty much the same thing as conspiracies, though there’s no reason a conspiracy *can’t* be heirarchical, such as soviet spy cells), again, throughout history, there have been self-organizing groups. Heck, you could call Islamic terrorism a peer to peer self-organizing group (though a particularly nasty example), Islamic terrorism is male-dominated. Probably most of the informal self-organized groups in history (French & Italian resistance movements, underground railroad) have been, if not exclusively male, very frequently male-dominated.

          I just don’t see any sign that men are inferior at any particular type of organizational dynamic.

            1. Oh, yes. But women as well as men would be utterly unable to carry out — well, Talks-With-Plants’s theory that all men have throughout history consciously gone about colonizing and destroying women. A theory far from unique to her.

              Heck, I get annoyed when I read urban fantasy where you have a secret culture of people who could tear your average human to shreds, and who have a normal variety of personalities, who nevertheless manage to keep themselves concealed from mundane awareness voluntarily.

          2. Assume, for starters that, in history, conspiracies have existed.

            Depending on how you’re defining “conspiracy,” that’s assuming the conclusion– we have lots of evidence of people failing to hide a single piece of information that was known to significantly more people than could be killed in the process of hiding it, like that guy who assassinated someone so their name would be remembered.

        2. BTW, the first Constitutional Convention, in operation, was anything but a heirarchical group. It was a dynamic, constantly reorganizing group of peers, influencing each other through charisma, ideas, popularity, force of will.

          1. Yes, indeed. But this wouldn’t be a conspiracy limited to SOME men in one place, but practically every man in history. Are you going to contend men are never doofi and morons? Statistically, you know, more men are morons (just like more are geniuses) than women.

            1. Of course, men are sometimes morons. As I said, I agree with your overall point, and I think the idea of a conspiracy through all of human history is ridiculous.

              I was pointing out, almost as an aside, that your (or your friends’) characterization of men as “couldn’t organize a bonk in a brothel” is the sort of anti-man talk we hear from the feminists all the time — ironically the same time as they’re saying we’re evil masterminds who’ve run a conspiracy against women since time immemorial. Hey, I just realized this sounds like liberal tirades against George Bush: “So dumb he can barely talk, but such an evil genius he conspired to deceive the whole country into going to war in Iraq!.”

              It goes along with the popular sitcom presentation of men as big lovable doofuses (not that we aren’t lovable! (sometimes)). It’s just rather crude and tiring, like I imagine it must get if you have to put up with too much of “Ha ha, those women, not interested in anything but gossip and shoe-shopping!”

              1. My husband is a genius mathematician. My dad is a gifted artist. Men focus better than women. When at home both could pose for “absent minded scientist.”
                In the home sphere men sometimes seem morons because simply not interested. (Only I know the difference between morons and strange overachieving.)

                2. Or we know it’s freaking pointless to try to keep up and remember where you’re storing the oven mitts today.

                  1. I do tend to rearrange things in the kitchen frequently. No idea why. When my behavior is extreme he’ll give me the hairy eye-ball. We have a male dog. Our neighbor has a female dog he’s sweet on.My husband has talked to the dog, saying that he’d have to share his chew bones with her if he was married to her. We talk to our dog frequently. sometimes one of us will take the dog’s side in a conversation..

                    1. As a man who maintains the household, barely, I would take offense, except…
                      I have many feminine traits to my personality, and I know I am an outlier, not the mainstream average. I realize that a lot of what we are discussing covers the average, not the Odds that generally frequent this blog.

      2. Don’t kid yourself. In every hierarchical organization, the real work of organizing is done by a parallel, informal structure – and this is true even when the organization is exclusively male.

        C. S. Lewis describes the phenomenon in considerable detail in ‘The Inner Ring’.

          1. Like Cloudbuster, I was objecting to your ‘couldn’t organize a bonk in a brothel’. You appeared to posit that men could build formal hierarchical organizations, but that only women were any good at building informal social networks. This is manifestly not the case.

              1. and how
                “no need to be catty about it” et al are not about guys (usually) after all.
                Guess growing with three sisters gives me a slightly different perspective

              2. Backstabbing is not how you build an informal social network. It’s how you exploit one to destroy people – which is not the object of the exercise.

  15. May be off topic.

    A few years ago, I heard of a woman giving a lecture on “why men don’t commit”. She talked about women who tried to manipulate “their” men into changing (this was before they had married). Unfortunately, “their” men knew what the women were trying to do but the women would deny it. So “their” men would leave. As the lecturer said, “why would a man commit to a woman who wasn’t honest with them”. My thought was that those same women would object if the men tried to make them change. [Sad Smile]

    1. I’ve had that experience. I went out with a girl for awhile. Very smart, honors degree in engineering. Attractive. A bit temperamental, but then so am I. We started talking about getting married. And then things got weird…

      All of a sudden, I’m not allowed to eat steak anymore. I can’t drink scotch. Reading is a no-no. Listening to hip hop is not permitted. All clothing worn must meet her specifications. And ummm…yeah.

      She denied that she was doing it, too. Too bad for her my IQ is over forty, because I wasn’t dumb enough to believe it. I informed her that she would deal with me for who I was or find someone else to deal with. Last I saw her she was driving away from my house crying. Why? Because I don’t think so. Jimbo don’t play dat.

      2. What cracks my pot about it is how many women will just try to brush it off as a stereotype we got from sitcoms, not whats really happening at all, nope, nuh uh…

        1. Much as I despise the “therapy culture” there is a difference between pseudo-therapy you get from your friemds or the Sunday suppliment and the advice of an actual therapist. And when you have a potential partner who won’t see a pattern that is driving you crazy, a therapist is your best friend.

          Now, it doesn’t sound to me like this girl was worth it, BUT a therapist (a good one, anyway) will act as a referee. And teach you a lot of skills for fighting fair. My Lady and I have found these invaluable. And he/she will call BOTH of you on your behaviors that your don’t acknowledge.

          My Lady would not – WOULD NOT – place value on my time. Part of it was tyat she was losing time (dissociation) and part of it was lack of empathy. Every therapist we have ever had called her on it.

          There is a world of difference between actualy therapy and what gets passed around in society.

          And too many women are adicted to pseudo-therapy and never get the real thing … and because men rapidly learn that the pseudo-therapy is bullsh*t, they assume that the real thing is too.

          1. As I think I’ve mentioned before, the wife and I were having troubles because she wasn’t listening to me, and would forget things that I told her.

            It came to a head one day when she insisted that we had not talked about something that involved a piece of paper that I handed her, and she had promptly filed.

            Now I don’t file things. If it’s important it’ll stay on my desk, or the originator can send me email. She files stuff, so when I insisted she get that piece of paper–that mind you she’d never seen and I didn’t give her–out of her files, well, she went to prove me wrong.

            She went to the doctor later that week and told her about my complaint and what happened.

            The doctor then shocked the shit out of her by saying “You probably aren’t listening to him, you’re focused on your kid”. Which was really only 1/2 the problem. Her being focused a bit on the kid was fine, putting me in 3rd behind the rest of her immediate family was *NOT*.

            Being that this was a woman doctor my wife paid attention to her. Also a blood test showed a vitamin B deficiency.

            Moving to Australia solved the other members of the family problem for at least a while.

            1. Yes! We have the idea that all therapists automatically side with the woman, because that is what the pop-culture tells us, and most of the pseudo-therapy claptrap that gets passed around fits feminist preconceptions. And, to be fair, there ARE dogmatic feminist therapists out there (we’ve run into one, which is a very small percentage, but we aren’t going to free clinics either,which probablyaffects matters). But the majority are serious prefessionals who are far more interested in helping their patients than in dogma.

              The pop-psyche twaddle that turns up on MSNBC or in the Sunday paper has about as much to do with legitimate therapitic practice as any high energy physics you might get from the same source.

              1. That’s somewhat true now…. but the latest trend is to require certain credentials and screen the entrants into the programs that provide them for goodthink. It’s pretty much 100% in education… to the point that people who try to go into it as a second career are being frozen out.

        1. Because you are supposed to be paying attention to me, doing what I want, watching the movie I want to see, doing chores for me, listening to me, me, me . . . would be my guess. Kinda like my cat, but you can’t lift that the cat down and go back to reading (assuming you have put things up where the cat can’t leave little reminders of his/her/its displeasure with your self-centered behavior.)

          1. Oh, with my ex it wasn’t reading, it was ‘on the computer’ ad she couldn’t tell the difference between me reading websites and doing work….
            And didn’t understand why i couldn’t finish a new polished demo reel.

        2. The one time I really felt like crying at work, (a used book store) was when a gentleman brought in a huge box of Baen books to trade in. I asked why he was handing in so many good books, (shooting myself in the foot, I know) and he told me that his girlfriend said he was only allowed to read “real” anymore.
          I had to take a moment before I could speak.
          Then I went off on a diatribe of how those same authors had taught me about the rudiments of politics, history, logistics, socio-economics and a dozen other subjects.
          The man just nodded his head as I spoke.
          At the end, as I handed him his money, all I could say was, “Stay strong, man.”
          It still brings a tear to my eye.

          1. Yeah, I’m sorry, if my girlfriend told me to stop reading Baen…
            Done.
            Gone.
            Irreconcilable worldview differences, glad you told me this before the engagement.

            1. Sometimes that’s *why* women (and men) make outrageous demands.

              It can have at least two forms– a test of devotion, and a test of conflict resolution. May or may not be conscious.

              It can also be a communication problem, where one was expressing temporary annoyance or just making noise, and the other heard an ultimatum.

              All of those are communication things that have to be hammered out before you get married. They can all be toxic, or just a thing to be aware of; a lot of times I notice that a relationship is stressed more from people assuring folks who were doing fine that They Have A Big Problem than from having problems. (And you can’t usually see that from inside, because it feels like when you know there’s a problem and so everything feels like an assault– ie, the fad for articles about “X privilege” when they mean “your way gets results I want.”)

          2. Had she been smarter she would have not given a direct command (admittedly, it seemed to have worked, so there is that) but rather have subtly convinced him of her point by slightly disparaging Baen books and authors. Sniffing about their weak characterizations and banal plotting while harping on the books being childish amusement, lacking subtelety or nuance.

            That’s how the SFWA and publishing in general do it.

          1. I can’t begin to describe how many of my buttons that would push if someone actually said it to me.

  16. To these dreamers I say spend a week as a girl in an all-girl school.

    I know I’ve read this post before, but this time that line stuck out.

    I think that’s exactly the problem– they don’t imagine being “a girl” at an all-girl school.

    They either imagine being a guy*, a teacher, or the queen bee, depending on their inclination.

    Yeah, it’s a variation on the old observation that they always imagine being in the middle ages as the queen, not a peasant….

    *things are different when there’s a guy around

      2. You mean nobody else was a blacksmith who single-handedly kept a brewery in business with his patronage?

      3. To land in such a cushy place now (Western Cit, USA, 21st century) I suspect I must have been the slop servant, nightsoil collector, tanner’s apprentice, or something equally lovely in a previous life.

    2. I *was* a girl in an all-girl school. Thankfully, it was a small one, and so it didn’t have toxic levels of anything. (I think many of the problems of modern schooling have to do with the populations being so large that problems aren’t visible.) I was one of those people sort of off to the side of things—not really with the in crowd, but respected enough that nobody bothered me, either.

      And don’t discount the people that are nice, too. I was in track my freshman year, and when the yearbook came out, there was a picture of me running, square jaw set, flat-chested, and basically, as I said (and as is very important to a high school girl), “I look like a *guy*!” And popular girl Lindsay, cute as a button, looked over and said, “That’s a great picture! Look at that muscle tone!”

      Um… digression.

      1. Bah, it’s good to honor the little graces, especially when– as you point out– they’re important to those involved.

        A lot of the problems I notice in schools are from teachers forgetting that the kids are kids, not small 40 year olds.

    1. I wish I thought that her mother, or any of her mother’s friends, would learn anything from that story. But they won’t. They will insist that she is a traitor to her sisters for exercising her freedom to choose in a way they disapprove of.

      1. Their “freedom” sounds more like selfishness and immaturity than anything else. I wouldn’t treat a dog the way she treated her daughter.

      1. Partly sad, but mostly (to me) enraging. And what enrages me is that society encourages this crap. George Orwell once wrote:

        If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.

        And here we are, less than a century later, and Hollywood is defending and lionizing Roman Polanski, and making heroines out of women who pride themselves on the ideological purity they show by persecuting their own daughters.

      2. My hat is off to her father and his wife Judy for being able to show her that there were other possibilities.

        Ugh. That’s the sort of thing that makes you kinda wish the old tradition of “gift children” was still in practice (i.e. “giving” an extra or unwanted child to relatives or close family friends who wanted/ had the resources to raise them.)

    3. Glad she got a little boy like that.

      It is kind of ironic– she was explicitly raised to go against feminine norms, and it didn’t stick. Suggests their theory is wrong. (not that they’d allow it, but eh)

      1. I believe it was Shadowdancer who linked us to an article where a lesbian told other lesbians that they should not become mothers — and assert motherhood privilege at her expense and that of other childless women — to raise a new generation of lesbians. Most of their daughters would go straight because privilege.

        They’ve figured out that it happens pretty often.

  18. I’m a woman raising girls, and I also dislike the “girls rule, boys drool” attitude that prevails. Women have two X chromosomes; males have just one. The Y chromosome is only one-third the size of an X chromosome, so the number of X chromosomes a person gets matters for a lot more than just “plumbing.” Think of every trait influenced by DNA in the X chromosome…now realize that men don’t get a backup X chromosome in case some of the DNA is mutated (positively or negatively) while women do. With our backup X chromosome, we’re just less likely to be “extreme” on a lot of behavior spectrums. It would behoove us women to refrain from jealousy of men when they end up extreme in a way that is better remunerated (rocket science, NFL, computer programming, etc.) seeing as our more middle-of-the-road tendencies mean we’re also less likely to commit violent crime or die of three days straight of video gaming.
    On a sort-related note, I hate how feminists constantly demand “powerful” women in films because of the absurdities that result. Did anyone else groan when tiny, little Anna punches big, muscular Hans, and he falls off the boat into the water at the end of Frozen? My girls will learn the laws of physics, according to which Anna should have broken a finger or two and Hans should have flinched a little. They need to realize that women generally only win fistfights with men if the men hold back.

    1. Hollywood and movies in general have always been really lousy with the physics of fistfights–well, physics in general, but fistfights exceptionally so.

    2. About Anna and that idiot Princeling; I took it that she shocked him so much, and he was so unused to being hit (hopefully his brothers will fix that) that his falling off the boat was HIS muscles, not hers. It just made sense that way to me. If he’d been expecting it, or even kinda used to getting hit, he would have stayed standing. As it was he jerked back, and he didn’t have enough back to,jerk into. Splash.

      I do prefer “strong” women who have to work for a win against a bigger male. And we don’t really see it that much, which is a pity.

      1. I worked for a photography studio that did schools, and I was very pregnant one cold morning when we were doing one of those photos where you form the senior class into their graduating year. And there was one student who sat off to the side and wouldn’t join his classmates. So I grabbed his hand, hauled him to his feet, and told him to get with the rest of his class. And he was shocked that this pregnant lady just hauled him up like he was nothing, and did as he was told.

        I didn’t bother to tell him that once I’d done the initial tug, he’d put his feet under him and lifted himself. Never underestimate the power of suggestion.

      2. Interestingly, although it was TOO one-sided to be believable, the first live-action Scooby-Doo movie did it that way with Daphne (who had taken martial arts because she was tired of always needing to be rescued) taking on some wrestler dude. He basically had her butt kicked, but she got REALLY pissed and used probably all the trick moves in her repertoire, and basically surprised him.

    3. I actually really liked the Anna and Hans scene– she chose a good spot, even if he had been expecting a physical reaction her holding Sven back and talking first put him off his stride again, and basically all she did was hit him enough to make him flinch and trip.

      I’ve punched people like that, and I’m smaller (though broader) than Anna. She wouldn’t break her fingers because she doesn’t have enough force to do it– but the punch probably worked even better than a slap, because of the direction of the hit and the shock value.

      Like cspschofield says, it wasn’t a “fist fight” type punch– Hans basically flipped himself over the edge of the ship, and her hand didn’t get hurt because he was jerking back.

      My husband and I have made a point of showing our girls how she wasn’t stronger, she fought smarter. (Which, since Anna apparently has the forethought of a butterfly for the first two-thirds of the movie, is a pretty big character development without being unbelievable, especially since it happened after the really obvious “think about the consequences, make the right choice” scene with her sister.)

  19. I have always held that civilization was a product of women not wanting to sleep on the ground, in drafty cold caves… because all the men wanted was to hunt, fish, and fight and then drink beer and find a woman… yep, you used too many words but I do know that the two sexes must work together to survive and prosper. But then I am a quick study.

    1. You might appreciate this– there’s an old Indian lady (or was, a decade back– she’s been old longer than I’ve been alive and may have passed on by now, if she’s ever going to) who sells artwork in my aunt’s shop. Because it is Indian themed, she’s got a rather hair-raisingly obscene response to folks who promote the idea of the “noble Indian savage”– because her mother left her father’s (traditionally living– most weren’t by that time) tribe while pregnant with her the lady’s little brother, because she was not going to “give birth squatting over a hole in the dirt in winter” when there was a town with a doctor and good houses.

      In a time when being a single mother was really tough, she chose a small logging town in BFN, Oregon, over the traditional way of life she’d known her entire life.

      I don’t know how much of it is poetic license– she’s been around Irish loggers for a very long time!– but I thought it was oddly similar to your summary.

      1. Pity you can’t get her whole story down, it sounds fascinating.

        It also reminds me of another Indian character who has been old forever. Anyone else familliar with the Montana mysteries of Peter Bowen?

        1. I really need to get my aunt to do it. Transcribing it would probably just get pitchforks out– she has a really, uh, earthy way of describing the ecological damage that was involved in that way of life. That aunt is able to make almost anything more polite, though.

            1. The phrase that sticks in my mind is “and when they had eaten everything that hadn’t run off, shit behind every stone and made such a stinking mess with the guts and bones that even a damned Indian couldn’t stand it anymore, they moved and let the place recover for five or ten years.”

              I’m not kidding about it being really uncomfortable to write about. About the only reason I even got to hear about it is because some idiots decided to take their embarrassment over being ripped a new one by a little old Indian lady who didn’t share their romantic notions on my aunt, who’s looked like a grandma since she was about 30.
              Didn’t work, and everybody to got to hear about it.

              1. Actually, that’s pretty close (although in English and not French) to some descriptions I’ve read by French trappers in Canada about the buffalo jump sites. Something about smelling them for days’ travel away because, well, no one can butcher a couple hundred two-ton bison all piled onto each other before things start getting really, really smelly. Especially in mid to late summer. Apparently even the vultures were going “No, thanks, dude. I’m full. Really,” and acting like a cross between Thanksgiving afternoon meat-coma and New Years morning hangover. So much for the “use every bit of the [animal], never wasted anything, stewards of Mother Earth,” and assorted, ahem, claptrap.

                Thanks.

              2. Yup! Sounds like some of the Indians I worked with up on the Fort Kip reservation.

                1. It really bugs me because folks are likely to read it, and conclude either that that’s all of the Indians, or that I think that’s all of the Indians.

                  Even though it’s from a lady who proves that there were folks who moved to improve themselves when given half a chance, and I’ve got a lady ancestor who did the same, and my cousins that look Indian (different branch of the family) break down about 50/50 on decent outcomes.

                  Hm, now I’m wondering if part of bemoaned “why is it always a grandmother that was Indian” thing is from this effect….

                  1. In discussions I had with people living on the Fort Kip reservation; one of the bigger lamentations they had was how the population kept shrinking. And it wasn’t from lack of births.
                    The locals just kept leaving, searching for better opportunities. And most of them wouldn’t come back.
                    As it was, I’d say 3/4 of the adults I discussed it with did in fact leave in their 20’s, but would come back in their 40’s-50’s to live off the government stipend they received.
                    But most stayed away and just integrated wherever they wound up.

                    1. I got really pissed about it when I read… it was either a late 80s or early 90s story that was possibly the most racist fiction I’ve ever read.

                      It was from the point of view of an Indian.

                      It was a basic assumption that actually integrating with the rest of the culture was bad, marrying out was bad, if you had Indian blood you had to embrace the aspects of culture that the main character did. (Mostly religious, magic and woo-woo, but some philosophy.)

                  2. Great-great granny was a Cherokee who ran away from the rez in Okieland at 17 because she could not take it any more. My youngest brother was a dead ringer for her, male version.

                    1. I love it when that happens in family genetics.
                      I have some facial features that we could never source. It wasn’t until I saw a picture of a four times great grandfather that we finally saw the source of the features.

                    3. Same mindset that wants chickens to be out in the open and able to “socialize,” never mind that it results in the things thinking every movement above their heads is Death Approaching With Bloody Claws and a lot of them get pecked to death?

                      Only way I can get it to make sense is if I either grant them actually believing in some kind of noble savage/it was really great idealism, or if they think other “cultures” are not really people on some level.

                    5. Nothing wrong with it as far as I’m concerned. Some “people” become obsessed with the idea of “culture” and how it must be preserved at all costs.
                      They don’t seem to want to acknowledge that cultures change all the time, and can only be “preserved” through draconian methods.
                      I’m all for absorbing the good parts of any culture!
                      (Mmm, Fry bread.)

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