Holding Women Back

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So there’s been an awful lot of talk about people wanting to stop women from writing (does sinal salute with thumb and forefinger on either side of the nose, head inclined.)

Since we don’t live in Iran or another of the places that legitimately make it difficult for women to write or even to learn to write, this was a bit puzzling.  It was all the more so since the people accused of wanting to make “women stop writing” are people with almost no power in the traditional book marketplace.

I mean, seriously, on the Sad Puppy side you have Baen authors and indie authors.  That the other side manages to simultaneously characterize us as small fish who don’t matter AND gatekeepers who can keep “women, minorities and all these new voices” out of the field is a feat of mobius thinking that goes with their belief a highly regulated top-down economic and political system is “freedom” and that justice is collective.

However, possibly the funniest of their attempts at speaking power to truth is the accusation that we want to make women stop writing.

(Okay, yeah, you might have noticed that Kate, Amanda and I are women, but that’s okay because they have an answer for this too.  We’re tokens or mascots.  On their side, though, where the best selling authors (you name them in your head) that promote the party line are male and white?  Yeah, there the women are totally empowered.  (Can someone find my eyes.  I rolled them so hard they fell off.)  Isn’t it amazing that they don’t EVER think “How would my hypothesis that these are racist, sexist, homophobes be falsified?  And if it can’t be falsified perhaps it’s a religious tenet?”  Never mind.)

First, I’m less than impressed with the new attempt to claim that women were always held back from writing and that ZOMG they’re only now receiving their due.  Pfui.  Flummery.

Look here and here for refutation.  Women have been in the field almost since the beginning and the GOOD ONES got awards almost from the beginning.  Yeah, there weren’t a ton of women initially, but that might have to do more with society in general than with science fiction or science fiction holding them back.  Most nerds love women.  More on that later.  (And btw, even if women were scarce in sci fi they were hardly discouraged from WRITING.  Romance is dominated by women writers to the point men writers use women pen names — this also happens in UF and PNR now, I hear, not that I care. — and before you wrinkle your nose at the “romance” it is still the best selling genre in popular literature.)

The thing that annoys me about this claim that “we are the first and great strides for women/minority of choice” are only happening now is that it’s an inherently REGRESSIVE claim.  By claiming this, you are denying the true pioneers of the field and those people who embraced it when it was a small and looked down upon genre.

You are also diminishing current women writers, and, yes, discouraging them.

And this is without getting into the insult to the truly oppressed women and minorities around the world.  Go to a Muslim country to find women who are not allowed to read or write, or even drive or be out on their own.  And yeah, I know all this is excused because “little browns peoplez.”  Well, suck it up, buttercup, they’re not any more brown than I am and I’m here to tell you their “culture” is a horror and a disgrace, and Iran’s forced sex changes of gay men rank up there with denying another human being’s humanity and power of choice, and if you weren’t such unmitigated cowards you’d be screaming against it from the roof tops, or even better arranging an underground railroad to save those guys from a fate quite literally worse than death.

But you don’t have to go to the horrors of Islamic fundamentalism to find societies that treat women worse than America does.  In point of fact ALMOST every culture and society in the world treats women worse than America does.  (Exception might go to the Scandinavian cultures but that is changing for the worse with the importation of people with toxic misogynistic cultures.)

I was born in a country that is at least mostly western and at least mostly … well, probably second world, at least when I was born and perhaps again.  (I don’t know about the again.  I don’t LIVE there and reports can’t be trusted, as it depends from whom they come.)

This meant that legally, in point of fact, I had the same rights as a male born at the same time.  Legally.  What goes in between legally and culturally is… a lot.

In the Portugal I was born and raised in, a woman could not walk outside after about 8pm without a male escort.  This wasn’t written anywhere, but if you were outside at that time, alone, you were assumed to be a prostitute.

If you were between the ages of 9 and 80 you were ALWAYS catcalled and had bizarrely explicit suggestions shouted at you when out of doors.  Forget construction sites.  There was always what my husband calls “three Portuguese guys leaning on the wall” outside every store, who made sure they knew that if you could lick that popsicle you just bought, you could lick other things.  (I never understood the point of this, btw.  Do they really expect us to turn around and go “oh, yeah, I never thought of that before.  That’s what I want to do” or is it a macho thing for their buddies?)

These were minor annoyances, but they did restrict your life.  Like, I was careful not to wear short-shorts outside the home, unless I was going  by car to a friend’s house and no one else would see me.  And I had to give a pass to college electives that ended after 8 pm.  (Of course I broke that last rule.  Because I’m an idiot.  This led to some interesting incidents, mostly involving my using dictionaries as blunt instruments, until my dad decided the best part of value was to pick his crazy daughter up at college, and drive her home, when her classes ended after 8.)

The more serious, all-pervasive encumbrance was that people literally and clearly assumed women were dumber than men.  Blame Latin culture and Muslim influence, but professors would actually say things like “I was surprised the best grade in this test went to a woman.”  Sickly smile at the guys.  “You men need to work harder.”

And then there was the “nice professions for women” which might or might not have existed mostly in my mom’s head, and which I never got.  Stuff like “buying and reselling” was a nice a profession for a woman, but refinishing furniture wasn’t.  I got nothing.

Now, understand please that I’m not running Portugal down.  this was the sixties and seventies, and if you talk to people from around the world, you realize none of these assumptions are rare or even strange.  Yeah, some people in the US have them too, but few of them, and even those who have them wouldn’t dream of voicing them.

So did I protest the patriarchy?  Sometimes.  At home.  And I did stupid things like book night classes.  And I took unholy delight in doing better than men at things.  BUT — but — in public?  Did I spend my life writing about how the patriarchy was holding me down?

No.  What would the point be?  In a really patriarchal culture, where these things are so deep down and so ingrained they’re presumed and never really discussed, you don’t protest, and you don’t agitate and you don’t talk about microaggressions.  (for one, you have tons of macro ones, every day.)

You don’t do it, because in a true patriarchal culture people won’t beat you down.  They’ll just ignore you.  If you intrude on their consciousness, they roll their eyes and say “oh, please.  She must be nuts.  Everyone knows women aren’t that smart.”

What you do instead is what you CAN do.  You surprise them.  You work harder, you work smarter, you devote your energies to being better: you win academic honors, leaving men in your dust; you win writing contests; you never cry in public, and you never give up.

Fair?  Of course it’s not fair.  What is this, kindergarten?  You come into a world that has assumptions about who you are, whether you’re a woman or a man, and whatever your level of tan.  The only thing you can do is fight to do what you want to the best you can, and IF POSSIBLE to open up the way for others.

This doesn’t mean whining and complaining and moaning you’re oppressed — that only works in a culture in which you have some power — it means being the best you can possibly be.

I know this.  I’ve done this.  I’ve done it all along in the field, including mentoring beginning men and women by the dozen.

But the pampered children of privilege among American women (and some rich European women) who were born at a time when everyone told them how special they were and how they should be bowed down to don’t get any of that.  They don’t know how long the way has been.  They think women were held down, not by biology, pregnancy, early death (they also don’t get that in the middle ages everyone was held down by nature and lack of resources) and the other peculiar downsides of being the child-bearers, but because men were “afraid” of them.

In their minds (do they even know any men?) they think men are this cohesive and hostile group, perpetually seeking to hold them down or to push them down again.

And so they view anyone who says that women shouldn’t get prizes just for being women as “wanting to hold women down.”  (I’m not sure in what world that makes sense.  Are women so inherently superior that just possession of a vagina makes them smarter and better writers than men?)

Since in the past women didn’t get prizes just for being women, it was a time of darkness, they think, and only now are women coming into their own… or something.

What they miss is that this type of nonsense holds women back.  Just like the incident at that college, where a statue of a guy in his underwear was considered so scary it had to be removed, and which would give any impartial observer the idea women weren’t ready for prime time, holding up mediocre (or at best “competent”) writing (or games, or anything else) as extraordinary because it was created by a woman only gives impartial observers the idea that women can’t achieve like men can; can’t create like men can.

Making special prizes for good little girls because vagina and actually going so far as to argue that creations like games or books which are engaged in as ludic pursuits don’t need to be fun, but only relevant, and that you should enjoy them even if you don’t enjoy them because they’re created by women, does the reverse of what I (and a lot of others, I was not a paragon.  I’m using my experience because I lived it) did when I had the best grades and won contests DESPITE the inherent prejudice against me.  I and others like me proved women can be grown ups and can function in the adult world; these victimhood pony-riders are convincing people who by an large believe in female equality to reconsider and think that women are fragile, not so smart creatures who need easy steps and easier tests and accommodations to function.

And btw, the exclusion of all of us who don’t believe in making it easier for women to win prizes, or in giving women accolades just because their women from the argument by calling us “tokens” or “mascots” is in itself a slap with the back of the hand to women who are striving to write and express themselves.  This is particularly awful because it comes from the powerful publishing houses and the writers they support and promote.  It tells us that there is only one way to be a woman, and that this way is to act victimized and helpless.  If you don’t act that way, they erase your identity as a woman and do their best to silence you.

This, my friends, is what we call holding women back.  It is convincing them they can’t achieve anything unless these — mostly white males, btw, even if they rage against other white males — people in power give them a hand, and unless they behave exactly as these powerful people expect them to.

Does it compare to the oppression of Iranian women?  Oh, not even close.  But I’d say that the people on that side, accusing us of what they’re doing and acting as though WE (a ragtag collection of indies and Baen authors) were SOMEHOW gatekeepers, are at least as annoying and disgusting as the generic three Portuguese guys outside a shop telling you to lick their popsicle.

I didn’t let those stop me before, and I have no intention of letting the newer version stop me either.  At most I find them annoying.

Women who let themselves be suppressed and held back deserve to be suppressed and held back.  Women who need prizes for being good little girls might want to grow a spine and some self-pride.

As for me and mine, we’ll just continue working.  In the end, it’s the best revenge.

303 thoughts on “Holding Women Back”

  1. Sarah, you forgot that you’re a “Traitor to your sex”. [Very Big Evil Grin]

      2. You was conscripted. All the benefits they provided — no-fault divorce, ready access to abortion, birth control paid for by others, equal pay for something or other — are granted categorically, so as a member of the beneficiary category your lack of gratitude for benefits you didn’t ask for and don’t want is harmful to their campaign to increase the range of unasked for and unwanted benefits, privileges and rights of your category.

        They’ve assigned you a category and your demands to be treated as an individual threaten to disrupt the whole system of categorization. That makes you a traitor to your category regardless of any disinterest in being categorized.

        1. The sad part is that this is indeed the ‘place’ for women in modern society. Remember ‘Julia’ in the Obamacare propaganda? There was a woman happy with her victim status and the benefits she received without earning them.

          1. Funny how all Democrat solutions to problems seem to increased greater dependency on a third party. It’s almost as if the Democrat party has its origins in slavery and seeks continually to return to that program.

        2. Dad gum right. A woman’s gotta know her PLACE in life. Ain’t no call fer women to be all independent and such. They ain’t got the right ‘quipment.
          Now, missy, you just go back to yer tattin’, and let the menfolk handle this.

                1. Sarah, my dear, you may be oppressed in any way you like.

                  Just so long as you remember, you are oppressed. Denial of oppression is evidence of internalized oppression.

            2. Hey, a lot of damage can be done if you know the right place to stab with your picot hook!

              And since no one else is making custom cammo lace to go on my cammo clothes, I gotta either make it myself or do without.

  2. Judging from the Uncanny piece, the other side seems to honestly believed that SF was not only a field invented by a woman, but dominated by them until Evil Men (pardon the redundancy) drove them out. What struck me is that it’s the inverse of what the Puppy-kickers believe about us. They claim falsely that we think that SF was male territory until Icky Girls took over and drove us out.

    Social Justice Projectors.

        1. Given that the difference between “religion” and “cult” is often number of believers, and given how many minds the SJW’s have unfortunately warped, I’d suggest religion may be the right word.

          1. Since my religion has more falsifiable statements about reality than do these feminists, I object.

            Even if you assume that all religions are equally false pipe dreams, comparing them to this nonsense hardly seems fair. To the nonsensical religions.

    2. Social implies group so they really are talking about group justice or more accurately mob justice. Not true justice.

    3. I would say it was invented by a woman (or at least, Frankenstein was the first work of SF).

    4. The question of the “invention” of science fiction is an interesting but ultimately un-resolvable one. Certainly, Mary Shelley was one of the early science fiction writers (and she wrote more than one work of science-fiction, even though she’s most remembered for Frankenstein). On the other hand Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels a full century earlier than Shelley, and that’s definitely a work of science fiction as well. We can go back even further to Milton (Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which are consistent with the known science of the mid 17th century), Dante’s Divine Comedy (ditto for the early 14th century) or (if we like) even back to the Classical Greco-Roman predecessors of the genre. Or we could go forward and note that most (but not all!) of the late 19th century authors of Victorian and Edwardian science fiction were male.

      If we go to the point where science fiction emerges as a self-consciously separate genre (the 1920’s) we see numerous female authors right from the beginning. The SJW’s delusion about having, sometime within the last 20-25 years, invented female-written science fiction is based on a tremendously short historical awareness.

  3. *Snort* When I was flying, I didn’t sweat that guys could do somethings I couldn’t. Like what? Like fly spray planes – I’m not physically large enough to handle a fully loaded sprayer and don’t have the endurance to cope with hours and hours of high G flying close to the ground in the summer heat. Neither do a lot of men. Ditto flying fire bombers. I have trouble with Commander aircraft because I’m not heavy enough to trip the seat-adjust mechanism (can’t slide the seat forward so I can reach the pedals). So what? I worked around it. You see job ads for airline pilots that say “we cannot accept applications from women because [third world airline] will not hire women.” As if I want to fly for [Middle Eastern or Chinese] airline. Just like my books, I want to be graded on skill and professionalism, not chromosomal content. (And do NOT get me started on the idiot chick who used her “feminine wiles” to get into some jobs, proved inept, and ended with the rest of us female pilots locked out of the local corporate market for almost a decade.)

    OK, who else wants the soap box?

    1. The WASPS met all the physical training requirements for male US Army personnel.

      (Granted, this was the WWII requirements, which assumed a somewhat smaller and less fit male population. But still.)

      1. Yep, they did. And I met all the FAA requirements for a 1st class physical (with a vision waiver. I can see with my glasses on. Otherwise all I can see clearly is the instrument panel. not so great for flying by reference to roads and water towers. 🙂 ) I’ve gotten to fly some of the WWII birds, including the B-17 and He-111. I would not want to try crop-spraying with them. (Although using them as water-bombers comes close.)

      2. Not to disparage the WASPS accomplishments, but the physical training requirements were a minimum, and one established when LOTS of warm bodies were needed.

        That being said, my main issue with women in combat roles is not that they are incapable. Most of them can’t pass the current requirements for males, but then a fair portion of the male population can’t either. Ignoring the obvious evidence that the current Powers That Be are more than willing to fudge requirements or lower standards so women qualify, if women qualify on an equal field as men, I am still against it. For the simple reason that having women present is more detrimental to OVERALL performance of the combat arms. This isn’t due to an inferiority in the women that pass the same requirements as the men, but rather to elephant in the room that everyone wants to ignore. Men, particularly men in their late teens and twenties, react differently in the presence of women, particularly in dangerous situations.

        Israel proved this pretty conclusively, maybe in a couple thousand years we could change those reactions, but our Armed Forces need to be prepared to fight a war tomorrow, not one in a couple thousand years.

        1. Given that thing about men reacting differently in the presence of women in dangerous situations like combat, I wonder if the Starship Troopers setup would work — where women were often (though not always) pilots, even of combat aircraft. The “protect the women” instinct might not kick in when what you see is an airplane, not a woman. Sure, your forebrain knows that a woman is piloting the plane, but does your hindbrain know that? I’m not sure.

          The rest of the service, yeah, I’m with you on “no women in combat roles”.

    2. Back in the early days of Desert Storm, there was a story floating around about an ATC in Riyadh who would not talk to a particular incoming aircraft because the pilot was female.

      1. There was also a story about a female troop at a base in Saudi (AKA, The Magic Kingdom) who for whatever reason, was being given a ration of sh*t by one of the local mutaween — the religious police. It lasted until the point where he laid hands on her … and she cold-cocked him with the butt of her M-16.
        The legend was that after that, the mutaween discovered things they had to do, far and away from places where US troops of whatever gender were performing their assigned duties.

        1. I’ve heard that one from a few sources, punks in middle eastern countries trying to -buy- one of the female troops, stuff like that. Usually comes to a screeching halt when GI Jane punches them in the face three times in two seconds.

          However, at the risk of driving some women’s libbers crazy, let me drop this atom bomb. Risking the mothers of the next generation in combat is the same insanity as turning food into alcohol and burning it. The only time it makes sense is when you are in the last ditch, and you’re going to die otherwise.

          Or if you want to eliminate a whole cohort of the population. Lefties are known for doing things like that, and worth considering is the fact that white women from flyover country make up the bulk of women in the military. Also inconvenient visible minorities from urban areas.

          Just something to consider.

          1. “Risking the mothers of the next generation in combat is the same insanity as turning food into alcohol and burning it.”

            That would entail a duty to have children on women’s part. At the very least, social pressure would be respectable.

            One also notes that the risk has been — mitigated — insofar as you are going to lose a lot fewer of them in childbirth nowadays, and a lot more of their children will grow up, so one woman could easily replace four who died in combat by having ten kids. Of course, that would really escalate the duty. . . .

            1. I knew somebody would get to the oppression thing.

              You will note I did not say or even imply that women might have a -duty- to procreate. Anymore than food has a duty to be eaten. It’s food. You can’t eat it if you burn it.

              Women can’t replenish the tribe if they’re all dead from being in combat. Or maimed, or PTSD out of their minds, etc. Who’s going to marry the burn victim, right? Funny how Liberals who say women should have the ‘opportunity’ to be in combat always seem to forget the wounded.

              I have noticed however that most women would -like- to have children, if they could afford it, or could find a man who’s not a useless wanker to back them up, or if all the stars aligned properly. Children are generally a feature of life, not a bug. Like pets, only better.

              In my life there have been plenty of people, usually Lefties, who have been happy to tell me I have a duty to do any number of things. I generally tell them to cram it where the sun never shines. I would expect any FREE woman to say that to the cretin that informs them of their duty to become mothers.

              Lots of people are busybodies. Just tell them to go pound salt.

              1. If she doesn’t want to be a mother and has no duty to do so, then we’re not risking a mother of future generations by putting her in front line.

                1. The greater the % of fertile women eliminated from the population, the greater the pressure on the remainder to bear children. Thus, even if she does not anticipate wanting motherhood (minds have been known to change on this subject) her participation has long-reaching effects.

                  1. The greater the % of fertile women who choose not to bear children, the greater the pressure on the remainder to bear children. Works the other way round, too.

                2. It is a population dynamics problem, not an individual rights problem. Societies that send their young women out to fight will do much less well than societies that keep them home and protected. Pure numbers game.

                  I note at this time that historically there is NO society which sent its young women out to die in battle en mass as a standard thing. Human beings do not appear to work that way. In the Human race, men fight and women get fought over.

                  There is also the fact that while a young woman may not want to be a mother this week, she might want to next week. It is difficult to change your mind when you’re dead.

                  1. “It is difficult to change your mind when you’re dead.”

                    Not all that difficult. Many staunch Republicans have been known to vote for Democrats after their deaths.

                  2. Likewise, historically there is NO society in which child-bearing was optional for the vast majority of its young women.

                    But since we are discussing a hypothetical in which young women would die in sufficient numbers to be a serious demographic threat, I can also point that she might want to be a mother in 25 years, when in all likelihood it would be moot, since she would be infertile. Facing the choice of maternity or military young would avoid that, and since they are obviously facing total war, it would be urgent.

                    1. Not so. Check out European countries, especially France, this past century. Or China since Mao’s one child policy began.

                      The West has privileged childlessness and China has demanded it whike retaining a socio-economic structure in which only sons provide old-age security.

                      The results are interesting

          2. “ Also inconvenient visible minorities from urban areas.”

            The real threat to proglodytes from this is that the military, which cuts no significant slack on racial grounds, produces mature minority women who have no desire for liberal largess that denies them personal agency.

            See: Meet Jenean Hampton, the first black statewide officeholder in Kentucky. And, she’s a Republican.
            [SNIP]
            Here’s what you need to know about her and her election:

            Name: Jenean Hampton

            Age: 58

            Key childhood moment: Hampton was born in inner-city Detroit. Her father worked on the manufacturing line for Chrysler, while her mother took care of her and her three sisters. When she was 7, her parents divorced, and her mother, who lacked a high school diploma, struggled to provide for the family.

            Nonpolitical résumé: Hampton told the Courier-Journal’s Phillip M. Bailey those early years made her vow she’d never live a life in poverty. She resisted the pull of Detroit’s car industry and joined the U.S. Air Force, where she spent seven years writing code and managing software like the radar used to find enemy planes in Operation Desert Storm, where she was deployed. She then spent 19 years in the corrugated packing industry.

            [SNIP]

            Hampton says her guiding light is constitutionally limited government, and she told Bailey that when trying to climb out of inner-city Detroit, she felt government and friends and family around her were rooting for her to fail:

            “A huge part of what formed my opinions was the peer pressure that I got to fail,” she said. “These were kids who questioned my good grades, questioned the way I spoke, questioned my choice in music and the fact that I was reading all the time. I just remember wondering, ‘Well, jeez, when do I get to just be Jenean with my own likes and dislikes?’ “

            As she got older, she said she despised Nixon’s Republican Party but came around to the GOP when Ronald Reagan was president because he reflected her own optimism about the American Dream, according to Bailey.

            [SNIP]

            Black conservatives in the state told Bailey that Hampton “humanizes” a GOP that has seemed distant to African Americans. Rick Howland, a conservative radio show host in Louisville had this to say about her:

            “We know Democrats ain’t doing nothing for us and we’re afraid of Republicans, and all of a sudden here’s a woman standing in who isn’t afraid of them. Are there racists in the room with her? Sure, but there are racists in the Democrat room, too.”

            RTWT

            Emphasis added. Last I knew, computer code didn’t care if its author was male, or female, nor any particular ethnicity (although I have heard rumours it fears Panamanians.)

            1. “Last I knew, computer code didn’t care if its author was male, or female, nor any particular ethnicity (although I have heard rumours it fears Panamanians”

              Or as Suzette Hadin Elgin put it in her inimitable Ozark novels: I’ve heard tell of men’s work, and women’s work; but I have never heard the work complain about who did it so long as it got done.

  4. Just like the incident at that college, where a statue of a guy in his underwear was considered so scary it had to be removed…

    God forbid any of the complainers should ever see Michelangelo’s David.

    “Offense” culture has gone to unbelievable extremes, and the “angry ugly girls” are in the vanguard thereof. There are “women” who claim that merely to be looked at by a man constitutes a form of rape. There are “women” who are offended that their pudenda worship, whether actual or verbal, does not, in others’ eyes, constitute an act of art or valor. There are “women” who cannot stand to be differed with, much less criticized, on any subject, who will file sexual harassment charges against the offender for that and nothing more…yet will claim to be men’s equals in all things.

    It would be funny, if it weren’t tearing our society and our culture to shreds as we watch.

    There is no cure except a sudden, wholly unprecedented attack of maturity. Anyone who knows how to bring that about, please, please clue the rest of us in.

    1. Well if being looked at constitutes rape maybe they want to wear a hijab so no one can look at them.

        1. *evil snicker*
          Yep, it might at that.
          (which reminds me, purchase another couple of boxes of ammunition at the end of the month … the Daughter Unit and I need to put in some time at the range…)

          1. Purchase by the box is not your best choice. Now by the case you can get some real deals. And by the pallet even more so.

            1. Yeah, but I don’t have the space to store a pallet of ammunition…
              On the brighter side, I finished uploading my two latest books to Amazon/That Other Place today, and updating the pages for them on my websites … and my Concealed Carry licence came in the mail today.
              Great was the rejoicing in the House of Hayes! (And also it rained already. Even greater rejoicing.)

                1. Thank you — I was pretty much chained to the computer for the last month to finish both of them; one which I started in about February of this year, and the other in late July. I know that one of the classic SF writers once managed a book a month … but they must have been a fairly short books, and the writer must have had nothing much else to do during that time. (Housekeeping, cooking supper, walking the doggles, etc.)
                  Not that I am complaining, mind.

                  1. It wasn’t all that long ago that novels were about half the length of what you find on store shelves these days. So one a month might have been a bit easier to do (though that’s still quite impressive).

              2. “Yeah, but I don’t have the space to store a pallet of ammunition…”

                Take out the kitchen table, a piece of plywood on top of the pallet of ammo will work just as well to eat off of.

                For some reason Martha Stewart has never contacted me for decorating and furnishing advice.

                1. *teeny voice”
                  I don’t have a kitchen table.

                  I do have a small dining room table, though. But it’s one of those small, gate-leg folding ones. Not big enough to fit anything underneath.

                  1. My problem isn’t having room to fit anything underneath my kitchen table, there is plenty of that, but there is never room to put anything ON my table. 🙂

                2. There’s always room for a pallet of ammo under the bed. Particularly when you get two pallets of ammo and put the mattress on top. Added bonus, no creaky bed issues. ~:D

                  1. Not to mention that a solid platform is better for your back and makes the mattress last longer.

          2. If you’re shooting 9 then Lucky Gunner’s got some good prices on 1000 round cases.

            1. One of the guys on theakforum.com stuffed enough ammunition in a closet to collapse the floor. There’s a long thread with photos of him in the crawlspace jacking up the floor joists.

              Since one of my mottos is “learning from the mistakes of others” I put steel reinforcements under my floors for various… ah… heavily-loaded areas.

      2. But that’s blaming the victim! (Seriously, if the Muslims do start to make political inroads, they may at least be useful against some of the SJWs.)

        1. Get the SJW’s and the Islamic fundamentalists to fight it out… then attack the winner.

          1. This is like the statement about the Iran Iraq war in the ’80s, can’t they both lose somehow?

        2. Mooselimbs in Toronto are raising all manner of Hell regarding the Toronto Board of Education sex-ed syllabus.

          It starts in kindergarten with ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’, and features all the SJW goodness you would expect regarding AC, DC, solo, 3+, 4+, 10+, acrobatics and fun things to do with all kinds of common household objects. By the time a kid finishes high school they’ll have a black belt in perv-fu. They won’t be able to count back change, but damn will they be able to party!

          Some call it education, others call it grooming.

          Since this whole thing is sponsored by the Gay Maffia, and since the very Premiere of Ontario is a charter member of said Maffia (she looks like a demented librarian) anybody resisting this atrocity against their children is getting smeared with the KKK-brush.

          Except the Mooselimbs.

          Decoder ring liberals can’t yell at them, they are a protected species. Consequently they are showing up in droves to protest in front of city hall, in front of schools, etc. Very commendable, very effective. Gay Maffia in tactical retreat from the Brown Horde.

          One problem, lots of Toronto -public- schools now come with enforced prayers facing toward Mecca three times a day, girls at the back of the room, mandatory hijabs, Sharia Law in the curriculum, and so forth.

          So now you can pick between courtesan or suicide bomber tracks for your kid instead of the more traditional academic/trades split. Awesome, right?

          The question SJWs should be asking themselves is how long all these immigrants can be suckered into voting liberal. If they think women are getting the shaft now, wait until some of the Sharia fans get hold of the levers of government.

    2. “Offense” culture has gone to unbelievable extremes, and the “angry ugly girls” are in the vanguard thereof.

      I remember Rush Limbaugh stating in the early 1990’s that “Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.”

    3. I will grant them a tiny bit of justification on the “drunk guy in his underwear” statue. It was lifelike in features, and colored appropriately. Michelangelo’s David is carved from stone and obviously statuary.

      But once it was explained to them, they should have gotten over themselves.

      1. Heck, no. A gratuitously stupid statue is an offense to the eyes. It should have been taken down.

          1. Personally, my argument would have been “Wait–this is a university campus, supposedly a bastion of higher education, etc…and you want to glorify the fact that too many of your students get drunk and do stupid things?”

            It’s like my alma mater (University of Wyoming) protesting being called a ‘hard-drinking party school’…and yet, they have a bar in the basement of the friggin’ Student Union.

            1. Actually, most Student Unions used to have bars or alcohol-serving restaurants in them, since it allowed the school both to make money and to keep an eye on students, profs and staff who drank.

              Unfortunately, raising the drinking age meant that most of these establishments went away, or became faculty clubs.

              My alma mater had a pizza restaurant that served beer pitchers and carded, a Faculty Club that students and staff could not enter, and lots of departmental or library wine-and-cheese receptions that didn’t card polite student attendees.

    4. “Angry ugly girls” screaming about “rape culture” are actually engaging in self-aggrandization: “You want me, I know you do. Can’t have me, nyah nyah. Touch me and I’ll break your arm.”

      I have noticed that a lot of female SJWs seem to go out of their way to make themselves unattractive.

      1. “I have noticed that a lot of female SJWs seem to go out of their way to make themselves unattractive.”

        I’ve noted that an awful lot of them don’t need to, either…

        And, I’m not talking about looks, here. Personality-wise, many of these women are not people I’d willingly associate with. Given the choice between “the lady, or the tiger…”, I’d voluntarily take part in the feline feeding program, only urging the cat on to greater speed to reduce my exposure time to the lady in question…

  5. “women were always held back from writing and that ZOMG they’re only now receiving their due”
    Made me splutter. Seriously? How long had Anne McCaffrey been writing? Or Marion Bradley, (not that I like her or her writing)? I grew up reading a lot of female authors.
    This is just an insult to them. The women writers who wrote good stories, beloved by fans the world over.
    Seriously?
    I’m just insulted for them.

    2. Their minds are made up and your attempts to confuse them with the facts constitutes micro-aggression.

      Just because some women succeeded in overcoming the barriers erected to deny their full participation in the genre doesn’t mean that other women were not kept out! There were probably a lot of women who would have wanted to write if only they didn’t have to spend time on husbands, children, haranguing their neighborhood associations about excessive Christmas displays and other duties imposed on them by the patriarchy.

        2. No, those are lazy, shiftless shirkers who aren’t doing enough to support the wife and children they eagerly (“What?! AGAIN!!!! I thought you were using protection!”) sought. They need to find a second (or third) job and pay that mortgage off before their oppressed wife claims it as her property when she files for divorce on the grounds that he’s never around to provide emotional support for her, forcing had to seek that in the arms of other men.

        3. SJWs want to experience oppression, try being a little bit Aspergers and white male. Holy. Freaking. Mother of Pearl.

          “Your voice is too loud!” “You’re so inappropriate!” “You scare me!” “You’re weird, get away!” “What’s wrong with you?!!!” Also the silent, hostile stare. That’s a big favorite.

          These are responses I have heard to “Good morning.” Always from liberal women who look like a manatee with a man’s haircut. There’s a type that just goes off on sight, usually the ones braying the loudest about diversity and “inclusion” etc. (Chivalry is not dead, ladies. It is the force that keeps some women alive despite their own best efforts.)

          I’m a little cranky about it, even after all these years. Maybe I’ll get over it some day, but I’ll probably be over 100 by then.

          I always thought I’d be able to write a book though, because when you write they can’t see you. Imagine my surprise when I started hearing about ‘flyleaf oppression’, where a publisher decides who to publish based on race/sex/gender(different!)/orientation and so forth. All the stuff you can’t see, because it’s a BOOK for f- sakes.

          I’m still debating whether I should publish as The Phantom, Noah Ward or possibly a one-legged gay black trans-other in a wheelchair. With rickets, like Bent John. And pink hair. The pink hair thing seems to be a selling point among the HolierThanThou manatee set these days.

          Maybe I’ll just be Sally. There you go, Sally Hedgehog of Fatbottom Lane. Because on the Interwebz, nobody can tell if you’re an old white dude unless you tell them.

          I’m not even considering using my real name of course. That would be stupid, in my humble estimation. That’s a fair measure of where we are now, you ask me. Want to publish a fiction story, can’t use your real name because PATRIARCHY!!!1!

      2. I seem to recall reading somewhere that *everyone*–or at least a majority thereof–wistfully dreams about writing a book. Because we are a species that tells stories, I suppose…

        1. I sometimes wonder if that *wasn’t* the actual driver for increased intelligence… He who told the best stories (and lived to tell them, of course), got the girls. I mean, we have the cave paintings. And “fish stories” are pretty much universal. I don’t know of a culture, not one, that *doesn’t* tell tales- tall tales, myths, legends, what-have-you. It’s as much a human trait as any.

      1. A few knew she didn’t get her due, but not a whole crew. Still, she didn’t sue, even if she felt blue.

  6. It’s interesting to me how, if you look at it a certain way, these organizations and movements seem to be operating against what you would think to be their long-term best interests.

    How so? Well, when you think about it from that slant, how better to demonstrate that women really are hysterical and irrational, than to have these people speak for them? What’s going to be the final result, when they’ve finally gotten their way? Are we going to enter into the paradise of feminist dominance, finally? Nope. What’s going to happen is, they’re going to take over, demonstrate their incompetence and inability to process real-world events, and then utterly discredit the gender they’re supposedly championing. Result? Women going back into the purdah of traditional roles, only this time “with prejudice”. Possibly at the hands of a new Islamic majority, who are going to point to the excesses of this lot of idiots as justification for doing so–And, they’ll have no one but themselves to blame. The way social trends are going, I wouldn’t be a bit damn surprised to see a whole bunch of dissatisfied, pissed-off, and presently marginalized young men saying “Screw this… I’m going to convert to Islam, and get me some ISIS sex slaves… They know how to handle women…”.

    Many of these groups are quite of a piece; care to guess whence the Black Lives Matter movement is taking us? Similar place, thanks to their excesses.

    Yeah… If you were a racist KKK leader of the 19th Century, you couldn’t ask for an organization to do a better job of justifying each and every one of your prejudices. I have to wonder how much longer it’s going to be before the shoe goes back on the other foot, and vigilante “racist” justice starts happening again. The only thing I’m certain of is that the wheel will turn, and people who dare excuse criminality on the mere basis of race are going to shut up, or hung in the trees next to the barbarians they’re championing.

    It’s coming, one way or another. The most caring, considerate thing you could do, as a Social Justice Warrior, is teach basic math skills to the black underclasses, because without that, they’re going to commit acts of overreach with this BLM BS that are going to cause the wheel to turn that much faster. A minority of no more than 13%, whose actual birthrate and demographics are dropping (thanks to Margaret Sanger), is not going to remain the tail that wags the dog for very long. As one of my Hispanic subordinates once informed his black peers “We don’t play that shit…” when it comes to white guilt/welfare payments. An Hispanic-majority US isn’t going to have the same sort of tolerance for African-American social dysfunction that we have at the moment. Actually, I think that the race war, when it comes, is going to have the whites on the sidelines going “WTF? Why are all these brown and browner people killing each other? I thought we were the bad guys…”.

    I really, really hope we manage to do the traditional thing for Americans, and pull back before we go over the precipice. But, you can only do that so often before the fools practicing brinksmanship miscalculate, and take us over the edge. We could go a lot of directions, from here, but only a few of them are really positive. There are a lot of dark avenues to explore, and some of our fellow Americans seem hell-bent on taking us down them, all unknowingly, and with best intents.

    1. “Actually, I think that the race war, when it comes, is going to have the whites on the sidelines going “WTF? Why are all these brown and browner people killing each other? I thought we were the bad guys…”.:

      Yep … as my daughter has sourly observed of some BLM idiocy – “If you think that us whites treated you mean, wait until you get a load of what the Hispanics will do…”

      2. Yep, I lived on the Mexican border for years. You want to hear some race hate? Hang out with the Latino population there. And it ain’t the whites they’re hating on.

      3. Or as the – oh so PC – sorry – Hispanic street gangs of Fresno found out 30 years ago, what happens when the little oriental guy they are trying to rob is a Hmong with 10 years combat experience in the highlands of Vietnam, and a large family. (Fresno has one of the largest Hmong communities in the US) – but they all speak English now.
        JPD

    2. I really, really hope we manage to do the traditional thing for Americans, and pull back before we go over the precipice. But, you can only do that so often before the fools practicing brinksmanship miscalculate, and take us over the edge.

      The fools in the White House right now do not want to step over that brink, they want to go over it at 100 mph.

    3. It’s already arriving in Europe. Some little village in Germany is getting something like 4x its population in “refugees”. The only person that was quoted as approving of it was a neo-Nazi who said, “It’s great news. Recruiting will be so much easier.” Pretty sure it was an Instapundit link.

      Don’t mess with the Europeans; they invented modern (how ever you choose to define that) warfare. Sleeping dogs can be awakened.

      Will it come to that here? I don’t think so, but mainly due to luck. I will be very surprised if there are not riots, but despite the publicity, riots in a few cities doesn’t really affect the vast majority of the US; we are awfully large.

      1. Actually, that village of 102 Germans is slated for 750 refugees…. as a concession from the original 1000. One way or another, the original 102 will be leaving…

    4. As SpecFic… I’m impressed. I always thought that the future Society of Hadin-Elgin’s Native Tongue novel was bogus. Pure handwavium to get the story rolling.

      But you’ve just described the back story that makes neo-atriarchy plausible.

      Dang.

    1. That was probably the cats. You really have to be careful with the eyeballs when you have cats…

  8. Sigh. Those people are forever tilting at windmills and demanding rewards for their undisplayed virtue. “Holding women back” indeed! To borrow from Ann Richards’, they were born on Third Base and are whining because they have to run the last ninety feet home.

    SF/F would seem a good fit for them; they already inhabit an alternate reality.

  9. Women are being held back in writing? Seriously? *smdh*

    I admit that there aren’t many women authors on my bookshelves, but that’s because most of the books on said shelves are either military thrillers or military history non-fiction. Not a lot of women authors in those fields.

    That said, I would love to see those morons try to explain how women are being held back in writing when J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer are probably the highest-paid authors in the world right now, and how Danielle Steel continues to outsell damn near everybody except maybe Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare, and I contend that ol’ Willie only sells as well as he does because of high school and college English classes.

    *continues to smdh*

    I swear, it’s like these maroons and ignoranimouses actually *want* The Handmaiden’s Tale to become reality, i.e. a society where women are venerated to near-godlike status *and* marginalized to below second-class status at the same time. Only I doubt they have the intelligence to realize that’s exactly where they’re steering things.

    1. Women are “held back” in the sense that they don’t have complete and total dominance over the field. And by “women”, I mean “feminist fundamentalists”.

    2. The SJWs would probably insist that it was only through their own heroic efforts that other women, like Rowling and Meyers, were able to achieve greatness. And Rowling and Meyers don’t write “real” fiction anyway, donchyaknow?

    3. Actually, I lost a facebook-friend over Stephanie Meyer’s status as a victim!

      Said facebook-friend posted a link to a blog post by a female “unpublished author”. In it, said “author” explained that she had been told that it was now vital for an author to have a blog. So, she looked for the blog of her favorite author, Stephanie Meyer, and was horrified that there wasn’t one. This meant that Stephanie Meyer was a victim of the patriarchy: she was silenced! Men were keeping her voice from being heard! And, if Meyer was unable to make her opinions known, then what hope had she, an unpublished author? Woe!

      Naturally, I assumed that my facebook-friend was intending to mock this person, and joined in. Alas, no, said ff was apparently serious, and thought this woman was a brave soul for pointing out how victimized Stephanie Meyer was. And so I was unfriended.

      2. Considering how easy it is to get a blog (Even I have one), if Stephanie Meyers doesn’t have one, it is probably is because she doesn’t want one. (Of course you know that already.)

      1. Yeah, but they write for Baen*, so they obviously don’t count.

        /sarc

        * Not exclusively, no, but any contact with The Enemy(tm) is enough to tar their reputation, among the puppy-kickers and their sycophants.

  10. With all due respect to you, Sarah, I don’t want to see women stop writing – I would love to see men start again. And I mean real MEN that aren’t obsessed with homosexuality, diversity, social justice and the associated leftist ass-hattery.

    I have nothing against ‘chick-lit’ or ‘chick-fic’ or whatever they want to call the stuff being written by women for women. I just want the publishers to be honest about it because I don’t want to read it and I sure as hell don’t want to pay for it. Nor do I want to shell out for social justice lectures tailored for the gay and lesbian crowd.

    It’s become so bad now that if the author is female I will automatically skip any reviews and strike it off my list of possible purchases unless I hear it recommended by a reliable sources. Most male authors are just as bad. All I want is a story with plot, characters – and enough plausibility that I am diverted and entertained. Is it too much to ask?

    1. I am not sure what in this particular comment triggered the thought, but does anybody else here realize the degree to which this “problem” resembles Michelle Obama’s “healthy” school lunch initiative?

      They are imagining a problem (“food deserts) in order to justify cramming down our throats a solution which few like and many reject, with the result being that much of what they’re serving is going into the dumpsters and many are dropping the whole process.

      1. I’m also not absolutely sure why he must have all due to respect to me. Is he lumping me in with people who can’t write? seems a mite odd, on my own blog…

        1. I assume the apology is for the assumption that female authors are writing chick lit unless otherwise proven, written on the blog of a female author whose work I at least don’t consider chick lit.

            1. “Unless there are some seriously weird chicks…”

              On the internet? That’s pretty much a given. 😛

        2. I truly meant no offence Sarah. Sometimes I don’t speak my mind well and perhaps I should just STFU…

          1. If you let Sarah get away with pulling your leg like that you risk a permanent limp.

            Assuming your response was not a tweaking of Sarah’s nose, in turn.

            It gets rough keeping up with the meta-, sub-, super- and hyper-threads in this joint. (Looks around … I am sure there are some types of thread I overloo- … damn dragonflies! that bit of flame singed my ears!)

            1. It’s been my experience that sometimes, when a fella talks about women in general, some women will think I am talking about them in particular and take offense where none is meant. I just didn’t want you thinking I was picking on you when I went on my rant.
              I really like your blog and your willingness to stand up for what’s right. I hope you make a million $$$$ with your books.

        1. Eh, maybe. Food deserts are often calculated on the basis of no supermarket. Many of them have plentiful groceries.

          1. But often convenience stores and grocers lack much in the way of fresh food (fruits, vegetables, meat, breads). That’s not just an urban situation. There are rural areas of the US where you can go for tens of miles and find much the same. When I’ve traveled around the nation, I’ve noticed that on the plains and in the intermountain west there will be gas station/convenience store/grocers in most towns, but you might have to go quite some distance to find a supermarket or even a shop with fresh food. I’m not counting the hot dogs, breakfast sandwiches, and sandwiches with multi-week shelf lives as fresh food.

            However, in such areas, residents will go purchase fresh food (if they’re not growing it themselves). In urban areas, too many just can’t be bothered.

            What I don’t see is how this is something the Federal government needs to act on. The lack of urban supermarkets is because city governments are anti-business or locals go stealing too much stuff.

            Lack of fresh food in smaller local grocers may have other causes. Also likely not the Federal government’s job to fix.

            1. I’ve never understood the “fresh food” thing. My parents went grocery shopping once a month, which is how often my Dad got paid.

              Food mostly got selected for its storeability. Vegetables came in cans, meat and milk went into the freezer.

              1. once asked someone complaining about “deserts” and lack of fresh veggies to tell me what veggies are naturally “fresh” in January and February in the northern areas. Also, this same fool was all for “getting back the that way things used to be” (nowhere ever) and “Buying only local Produce”. Two things, especially in say Fargo, or Billings, that means not getting those fresh veggies their “food deserts” usually have within a half hour’s walk.
                Yeah, they got all stompy-foot.

                1. I am old enough to remember when most vegetables (and many meats) were seasonal. Meaning they were only readily and inexpensively available during a relatively short portion of the year that harvests provided them abundantly.

                  Apples? Usually in the Fall, and relatively few varieties. Peaches? July. Strawberries? May – first fruit harvest of the year. December through April you ate preserves, jellies, jams, dried fruit and flavoured liquors for your fruit. Some fruits, like oranges, grapefruit, bananas you just didn’t have in most of the country.

                  Vegetables were two crops a year, mostly. April-May and August through November. Some, like beans, squashes, tomatoes, produced throughout the season while others you staggered the plantings so the plants could be reaped over a longer time.
                  [See: http://www.pickyourown.org/NCharvestcalendar.htm for sample calendar of when crops are “in season” in NC]

                  Always assuming you had no droughts, hailstorms, monsoons or other weather events hit at the wrong time.

                  Preserving food — canning, pickling, jams, jellies, drying, or carefully putting up barrels — was something done by a majority of the population.

                  These twits have no idea how lucky they are. Just as they imagine meat is found in naturally occurring trays at the grocery, they imagine fresh produce naturally occurs year-round.

                  No wonder they cannot grasp that apples from Brazil can actually be less environmentally expensive than ones produced in the next state over. Don’t even try explaining to them the problems of insect and animal infestations — those pretty deer grazing in your garden will ensure you starve or suffer deficiencies next winter.

                  1. Those pretty deer in the garden are apt to end up in the freezer.

                    My mother had bad memories of canning on a wood stove, so we the only thing we canned were pickles, preserves, and tomatoes. We froze everything else.

                    We had something growing most of the year. Late winter it was potatoes, turnips, mustard, and radishes. Spring garden was squash, corn, peas, beans, okra, and tomatoes. Mid summer it was peas. Late fall it was turnips and mustard. Winter it was time to put up the tobacco beds and start the seedlings. Plums we didn’t store, but picked and ate off the tree. Then came the blackberries, then figs. Pears were the big fruit, and ended up canned. We had persimmons, but I was about the only one to eat them. Then came the nut trees. Those kept well, and shelled they ended up in the freezer.

                    We used to plant long rows of Rutgers tomatoes. Rutgers is a determinate variety, so once they made, that was it. Then my father switched to indeterminate, which continues to bear, and had tomatoes from summer until first frost.,

                    1. yet they demand variety all year long too. They didn’t get the news, it wasn’t “Turnips and cabbage again?” because someone was uncreative and boring, it was turnips and cabbage because that was all you had to eat.

                2. The obvious rule there is “Live in California.”

                  You can substitute other regions with all year fresh produce, too.

                  1. even those places tend to have massive holes and there are only a few things they can grow midwinter in them … Then there is the issue of the fellow occupants in Cali where they think the farmers don’t need water to grow things where they could best grow year ’round.

            2. If you don’t have the customer base you can’t sell produce — it spoils too quickly, driving up costs. So, in areas of low population density or where customers don’t consume produce you can end up throwing out three units for every one sold. Not a big deal in rural areas — most people there are probably growing their own anyway.

              In urban areas with high property rents and crime rates …

              What Michelle and her University friends don’t understand is that grocers would happily sell arugula if their customers effin’ bought arugula. But people trying to recover their costs in expensive urban stores there isn’t a square foot available for stuff nobody buys.

              Most towns and cities have Farmer’s Markets, easily accessible by urban transit, places selling good produce at low prices to fancy restaurants and savvy shoppers alike. All a person has to do is show up and load up — especially if they time it at that period of the morning when the growers have made their money and are contemplating the cost of schlepping the unsold produce back home. For a person with no job to report to it should be easy-peasy to get as much produce as they can transport. of course, those growers probably don’t accept food stamps (or whatever euphemism they’ve applied to them now) and any deal to provide labor in exchange for produce is probably a violation of several union agreements, multiple municipal, state and federal ordinances and, you know, work.

              1. When we lived downtown, I used to walk to the farmer’s market and bring back whole crates of produce ontop the baby carriage! Yep, close to closing time, it’s almost free. I once bought five crates of apricots for something like $35. this was back in carb-eating day and I made jam.

          2. What Sean said. And a lot of that stuff is both pretty unhealthy and (relatively) expensive.
            However, given that the government solves the wrong problem and therefore makes the real problem worse whenever it is told to solve a problem, I am in favor of local groups figuring how to deal with it–e.g., urban farming. Inefficient, but if you’ve got time on your hands and land no one’s using because it’s in a blighted neighborhood, go for it.

      3. Michelle Obamas fool plan shafted a woman-owned business that hired local teens (and there aren’t that many jobs like that in a small rural town) because the hand-made pizza (real bread, homemade tomato sauce, local fresh meats & veg) is classified as junk food.

        Screwed the middle school srudents too eho used to be able to get an inexpensive delicious lunch.

        Pettifogging cretins.

    2. Apparently not, given how the ladies of Sad Puppies/ the Hoydens seem to be doing better and better in terms of sales. I know my sales are increasing, even though I write in kinda obscure genre pockets. Ditto the guys of Sad Puppies/ Huns – encouraging stories well told will find a market, even if it takes a little while.

    3. Not at all. It’s one reason I’m trying to encourage the writers in my family and circle of friends. At least they have ideas with plot and characters that are amusing to read. (I come from a family of bards, what can I say?)

    4. Baen only puts out 40 or so new books a year, a number of them by female authors. But add to that list the indie stuff promoted here and at MGC and you should do quite nicely.
      Sad to say, but you simply do not fit the demographic that the gatekeepers of the major publishing houses are targeting. But then again, neither do any of the rest of us here, thank the Lord.

  11. Women coming to the United States (from non-European countries) often find American 21st century feminism to be bizarre. Hell, women in the United States, who haven’t been processed through the bowels of a university gender studies program, find American 21st century feminism to be bizarre. This is why “Feminism” typically polls at Congressional levels, as far as identification and approval go: high teens to low twenties. One would think more women would love to embrace the label, since feminism is actively fighting the Good Fight against the evil hated capitalist white straight Christian male patriarchy — over which women (cough, excuse me) wymyn are endlessly winning, but which also endlessly keeps wymyn oppressed and silenced.

    Can someone explain to me how a movement — that churns out thousands of angry articles, papers, and dissertations every year, and which has celebrity proponents aplenty, plus the entire academic community in its purse — is oppressed and silenced?

    At what point do even feminists stop, look around, then admit, “I hate to say this, but I think we won?”

    Because the feminists can’t have it both ways. They cannot be forever winning the righteous battle, and yet also forever losing the righteous battle. If the hated nasty capitalist white straight Christian male patriarchy is on its death bed, and has seen the last of its days, and has no more power, how then to explain the hand-wringing tirades about how women (cough, especially minority women, cough) are still under the cruel thumb of that very same hated terrible capitalist white straight Christian male patriarchy?

    You cannot be victorious and defeated in the same instant. You also cannot claim men can’t stop you from doing what you want, then also claim men are stopping you from doing what you want. Damn those pesty men! Always weak and stupid and dumb, yet also infinitely powerful and maniacal and keeping Wymynhood chained up!

    I think most ordinary American women know that the battles worth winning, were won a long time ago.

    The real battle now is not women against men — nay, not even women against heinous capitalist straight white Christian men — it’s ordinary women against the doctrinal fanatics from the hothouses of the academic community. The Dworkinistas. The man-haters. The ones who think killing a child in the womb is the ultimate expression of wymynhood. The ones who think being passive-aggressive, lying, manipulative victims, is the equivalent of being “powerful.”

    That is the fight facing women in America, at this time in our history. The sane, versus the not-really-sane. The mothers of our civilization, versus the daughters of postmodernist nihilism.

    1. Nice! When you think about it, really, I think feminists have turned into what men were like over a century ago. Now instead of uplifting and empowering women, they’re just trying to keep men down. Ironic.

      1. You got it. The ideal 21st century woman (for the modern feminists) is not that far from an alcoholic 19th century dock worker who’d knock his wife around a little when he lost his temper. Except 1) the dock workers actually contributed something to society, and 2) the wyminists are addicted to power and emotion rather than alcohol. And they don’t limit their attacks to spouses, neither do they seem to feel much guilt once they sober up.

    2. At what point do even feminists stop, look around, then admit, “I hate to say this, but I think we won?”

      They can never, ever admit victory, because if they admit victory, then those organizations they’ve set up to further their cause will no longer have reason to exist. Which means that the money and power that those organizations bring in will disappear.

      It’s not about rights and freedoms for the “oppressed masses.” Not anymore: it’s all about accumulating wealth and power for the elite few who are calling the shots.

    3. “Because the feminists can’t have it both ways …”

      Until feminists can have it both ways they are being oppressed. Any conter argument is hate-speech, a tool of the Patriarchy, sexisssssst and triggering.

      1. Feminist can have it either way, just not both. Nurturing mother or savvy corporate CEO. Choose one. You can not be both. On the bright side, the Patriarchy can only be the CEO, they can’t be a nurturing mother. The success of the previous waves of feminism is that they indeed made the CEO part possible. They opened many career paths to women, but you simply can not walk all the paths at the same time. Until unicorns fart rainbows the current crop will never be satisfied. Their failure is in blaming the Patriarchy when in reality their failure is not seeing reality.

    4. Indeed. I look at the actual feminists–the women who fought on the political front, faced physical abuse, and even died–simply to gain the right to vote, to be recognized in the eyes of the law as equal to men, and I think they must be appalled at what the lunatics claiming to carry their banner are doing…

            1. I may have to. It would probably be a short story. *ponders* I think the problem would be perspective… Maybe from the undeads’ perspective?

                  1. You might start by looking at the women portrayed in the film Suffragette, returning to take revenge on those distorting their legacy.

                    That might be an interesting concept to pursue — what if Jefferson’s and Washington’s ghosts took vengeance on the people now laying claim to their legacies?

                    2. Or Charles Sumner’s ghost, attacking Democrats whining about “racist Republicans.”

        3. Put some magnets and a wire coil around their graves, and with all that spinning, we won’t need wind or solar to generate environmentally friendly electricity.

    5. But you can have an infinite struggle against an enemy, even when you claim omnipotence and inevitable victory for your side. E.g., most religions.

    6. Those of us who are not completely nuts (Women, not feminists) do what we can, though I think a lot of it will boil down to what we teach our sons and daughters and how we inoculate them against this stupid. We do our best in the fights that come our way and given that we tend to be better company for men, we tend to marry more readily. Which is a good long term strategy.

      1. Wyrdbard, I think you’ve got it. Most of the people who have digested and internalized the mental illnesses common in our academic community, can’t be rescued. They are much too deep in the sauce. But we can prepare the next generation — give them spines, as well as brains. The power to stand up against politically-correct pressure, as well as use critical thinking skills to carve through all the rhetorical lard that will be dumped on them by the activists.

    8. At what point do even feminists stop, look around, then admit, “I hate to say this, but I think we won?”

      Are you kidding?! They’d lose their phoney-baloney jobs if they did that! 😀

    9. My sister-in-law is a Filipina, some some back island that’s rural even by Filipino standards.

      She thought movies like “Friday the 13th” were supposed to be comedies. Obviously, if some whacko with a chainsaw and a hockey mask were to attack, any normal housewife would simply reach for the appropriate kitchen implements and fillet him.

      The “scream in terror and run” part simply did not compute.

      1. I have to agree with your sister-in-law, the hockey mask makes a little sense, but any idiot dumb enough to think a chainsaw makes a superior weapon deserves to be filleted.

      2. Don’t know about “Friday the 13th”, but in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” they took the chains off the chainsaws in many of the scenes as they did not trust the actors with a live chainsaw. (look closely in any scene that someone is running with a chainsaw).

        1. “… they did not trust the actors with a live chainsaw.”

          I gather the main difference between most actors* and trained dogs is the dogs aren’t as tediously boring during make-up.

          Well, that and the dogs are house-broken.

          And the dogs have better table manners.

          *Right-wing actors are generally distinguished on the grounds that few of them seem to take their “profession” very seriously.

    10. My experience is that the “ordinary” women will not admit to feminism, but they sure like the special priviledges and are adamant about the glass ceiling and 76% of what a man would make (or whatever the current stylish percentage is).

  12. I think you briefly touched a topic that explains a lot of the rot.
    “How would my hypothesis … be falsified?” is one of those little details of the scientific/rational belief process. If your statement can not definitively be proven false, then it really wasn’t a hypothesis. Heliocentric solar system, gravitational distortion of Mercury’s orbit per special relativity, mass predictions of the Higgs boson; these are all hypothesis about the underlying reality of the universe. They make specific predictions. They acknowledge if the specific predictions fail then the hypothesis is, at least partially, in error and should not be treated as fact.
    Contrast this to; Anthropomorphic Climate Change, 1 in 5 college women are raped, Black Lives Matter. You have to first completely understand the mechanism of climate before you can start making bold claims as to what the problem (if any) is. The first thing to ‘do’ for college women is to determine the accuracy of the statistics. As I remember, in my 4 years attending The College of William and Mary in Virginia, there was a single case of rape reported. It was not by a college man, but some townie. There were more than 5 women attending college. This statistic flies in the face of any anecdotal evidence. Yes, Black lives matter, but do they matter more than white, or Indian or Asian lives? Are we back to Animal Farm where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others? Are we ever going to stop using Orwell as a how-to manual and recognize his writing was cautionary?
    The only thing holding women back in writing is perhaps their belief that people actually want to read their progressive socialist screeds and lectures and pay good money. Just because they ‘feel’ that we would all be uplifted by their social introspection, perhaps we are just after a way to waste the afternoon. I remember my Aunt being scandalized by my Mother passing along her Torrid Romance Novels to my cousin. My attitude was it didn’t matter what she read, just that she was reading something. I started on comic books and Tom Swift Jr. novels. Of course back then the comics were about superheroes and super villains. Today, apparently all the drama of a comic centers over which bathroom the trans-gendered superhero decides to use. And they wonder why no one wants to read?

    1. At my college I’d guesstimate that 10% of us had been raped or assaulted – before we ever got there. Of the folks I talked with about it, a goodly number of that 10% specifically picked the school because it was an all women’s college and we wanted to get away from teen-aged guys for a while. Skewed numbers? Oh yes. Typical college? Very much no.

    2. “Yes, Black lives matter, but do they matter more than white, or Indian or Asian lives?”

      Granting benefit of the doubt (undeserved but I am feeling generous today), I think the thesis of this movement is not whether some lives matter more than others but whether they matter less.

      The only way much, if any, of their rhetoric makes sense is if you adopt the assumption that the Power Structure devalues “Black” lives and treats them as more disposable than other lives. That this assumption presumes whites would be less subject to harsh response to an attempt to take away an officer’s gun or violently resisting arrest is irrelevant.

      This is not about logic, this is about stoking a sub-population’s sense of aggrievement. That it tends to provoke the sort of actions and attitudes which stoke the fires is a feature, not a bug — as the anti-czarist revolutionaries used to say: The worse the better.

      The fact that such advocacy reduces police aggressiveness in addressing the criminals preying on the subject population, increasing societal anxiety is, again, feature not bug. A culture in which adolescent males are encouraged to act out testosterone rages (and any effort to ameliorate is “police oppression”) is bound to be unpleasant for women, children, the elderly and those exercising self-discipline — but it is great for the thugs who know how to channel that aggression.

      1. “The only way much, if any, of their rhetoric makes sense is if you adopt the assumption that the Power Structure devalues “Black” lives and treats them as more disposable than other lives.” Given that the power structure in big cities, which seems to be where most of the blacks live, is Democrats, and we read about the rotten schools and the teachers unions that support those Dems, and blacks killing blacks and blacks aborting their babies at Planned Parenthood “clinics”, I’d guess that power structure does hate blacks. And the blacks are not seeing who’s doing that to them.

        1. And worse, most of those places have been Democrat controlled for decades, if not since their initial founding, and often are located in states where there’s also a strong Democratic presence (or at least a weak Republican one), so they can’t claim that the problems are caused by “Others” elsewhere (as is often similarly done with gun control laws when it’s pointed out how statistics don’t support the gun grabber claims of greater safety where gun ownership is highly restricted).

          1. Which is why they want everything done at the Federal level. It’s also much easier to win a national election through fraud of various kinds.

      2. The non-GOP elephant in the room is black-on-black crime. The gangs in Chicago certainly do not seem to value black lives. Somehow, encouraging murder of police places a question on if they consider any lives to matter.

        1. the only real “BLM” issue is black criminals who are killed by police (preferably white police, but they will attack “tokens” when the issue warrants) Innocent 9yr old killed by a gang drive-by? Deflect blame to gun control, lack thereof.

        2. Had Treyvon been shot in a driveby, he would have been just another quickly forgotten ‘local’ section blurb.
          Had Michael Brown been killed because of a beef with another urban resident, likewise- zilch.

        3. Have you ever noticed that no one -ever- publishes crime maps? In Chicago a typical murder map will show all the city virtually murder free, with a forest fire of red dots in a few sections down town.

          I have never seen a Liberal who even knows about this, much less one able to explain it. I have never heard an explanation of why you wouldn’t just put a platoon of cops in those red-zones and arrest every single SOB that even looks funny. You could handle the whole thing in two weeks.

          Therefore, shenanigans. Right?

    3. ” You have to first completely understand the mechanism of climate before you can start making bold claims as to what the problem (if any) is. ”

      Heck, you have to know the conditions considered “not a problem”. That’s why my first question for cultists is what they consider the optimum temperature for the planet…. and show how they figured it. Never get an answer.

  13. I confess, I have made it harder for women to write, since I don’t like bad writing and many women write badly.

    For some reason, though, female writers such as CL Moore, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, CJ Cherryh, Elizabeth Moon and even on occasion Joanna Russ seem to be immune to my eldritch testosterone powers. I will have to continue researching their work to figure out why that is.

      2. Of course! You’re one of our mascots!

        (eyes rolling so hard they fall out of my head)

    2. You forgot Sarah .
      It is possibly that those female writers are not loading their prose to be seeping estrogen on every page. That allows you testosterone to remain constant during the reading.

      1. You write wonderfully well my little Portagee.
        Your spelling and punctuation on the other hand…

        2. Spelling and punctuation are for the paying customers. The kibitzers have to put up with the meat raw and untrimmed.

  14. “Okay, yeah, you might have noticed that Kate, Amanda and I are women, but that’s okay because they have an answer for this too. We’re tokens or mascots.”

    No, you’re not. You’re a white Mormon male; you’ve admitted that repeatedly in other posts. I’m reporting you to Vile 5150 for revisionism.

    1. Wait, I thought gender and race were both ‘social constructs’ and could be changed daily. On Mondays, Sarah can be a straight white Mormon male and on Tuesday be a lesbian Wicca woman of color.

        1. You’re not a witch. I’ve heard you on the Baen podcasts and there was nary a cackle.

        2. But I thought the SJWs liked witches and believed they were the bearers of the wise woman feminist torch through the dark ages of the Medieval patriarchy (which we all know only came about due to the evils of Christianity).

      1. Um, speaking of piscatorial products, are “I’ve been carped” shirts going to be available for Christmas/New Years? Asking for a friend. Really.

        1. yes. yes, they are. Cedar is testing a new system of sales. Also, there’s something in store for you my darlings, if I get about a day clear to finish it…

        2. We need “Carp me!” shirts, too.

          Some of us (glancing at mirror) haven’t made carp grade yet…

  15. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for the link.

    I think much of the protests about women being held back can be distilled to “Me!Me!Me! Look at meeee!” These are usually the women who spend more time screeching about how oppressed they are instead of actually writing. What they don’t seem to have figured out (because it would require rational thought) is that it’s more a case of no one being interested in what they have to say than an attempt, organized or otherwise, to silence them. Just because you’ve written something doesn’t mean any of the rest of us have to read it.

    As Sarah and others have pointed out, there are a number of women who achieved much who are now being marginalized (C. L. Moore, Kate Wilhelm, Katherine McKlean, Judith Merril, Wilmar H. Shiras). The field today would be very different if not for the contributions of the early women writers. Would Han Solo as we know him today exist if not for Northwest Smith, to name just one example?

    The difference between the early writers and many of the special snowflakes of today is that those women did what Sarah described. They out wrote their male counterparts while juggling families and day jobs. Far too many of today’s hothouse flowers mooch off other people so they can “write” (and would have been called bums) in an earlier time yet fail to produce anything other than socio-politcal pamphlets dressed up as fiction.

  17. People also forget that the “Patriarchy” is a double-edged sword. It may impose certain restrictions and expectations on women, but it also does the same for men. You touched on one yourself, in that if a woman did good at something, it was assumed the men weren’t trying hard enough and were lazy.

    When I was in High School, I was a cross country runner. And, in fairness, I was very lazy. I had talent, but failed to develop it sufficiently. Anyway, I was at the State meet that year. Barely made it that far. There was a girl who was so much faster than all other girls that they decided to let her run with the guys (the 5k course was the same for both). I was told later that the was one of the fastest girls in the country, at the time.

    So there I am, minding my own business, being lazy and running at a normal, unchallenging pace, and this woman tries to pass me. My Patriarchal instincts, if you will, aren’t having this. So I run faster. This pisses her off, so she does as well.

    This continues the whole time, until in the last 100 yards or so, I’m in a balls-to-the-wall sprint to make sure this girl doesn’t beat me. She may have been better trained and less lazy, but in a sprint contest.. .well, it was no contest. I beat her.

    Then I hurled the contents of my stomach, collapsed, nearly passed out, and had difficulty walking properly for the next 24 hours or so. I ran myself well beyond what I should have and in so doing, managed to record the best time I ever got on the 5k. Instead of being near-last in the State meet, I was in the top third. The girl walked it off like it was no big deal. She, at least, had trained properly.

    Point being, the Patriarchy, or male honor, or whatever, ensured that I was motivated to puke my guts out that day. People act like it’s all some kind of endless buffet of privileges for men. Men get everything, they think, and society is built on the near-enslavement of women, or some such. They forget that the system made sure men were the first to fight and die, those chosen for the most dangerous labor, and those pushed by a misguided sense of honor to puke their guts out on the other side of the finish line.

    1. “… I’m in a balls-to-the-wall sprint to make sure this girl doesn’t beat me.”

      Self-confessed beneficiary of testicular privilege, admission against interest.

      More seriously: this is an example of the ignorance of those advocating for females to compete in male sporting events, refusal to acknowledge it is all up-side for the girl and no-victory for the boy. If she loses it is no surprise, if she wins she “showed those guys what a girl can do!” If he wins, well, so what – he beat a girl. if he loses …

      This is particularly problematic in contact sports, such as wrestling. Two contestants in the same weight class would normally involve pitting a more physically mature (ligaments, tendons, core muscle groups) girl against a less mature boy. Add in that he is hampered by concern over what holds might be “out of order’ and he is at a significant disadvantage. Even if physically equal he is hampered by having to think rather than simply respond reflexively.

    2. You are fortunate it was just a 5k and wasn’t the Marathon. You know what happened at the end of that.

        1. I was thinking of Pheiddepides run to Athens with news of the Battle of Marathon. Evidence that those sorts of patriarchal obligations (to steal Thales terminology) that caused him to run himself to injury over 5k can also cause men to run themselves to death over the longer course. He was in a dangerous mental state and is lucky it was not a longer race or I’m confident he’d have just done himself more injury rather than concede sensibly.

  18. And now we learn that having a steady supply of food suppresses women (and minorities): Zillah Eisenstein, a professor politics at Ithaca College, declared in a lecture last Friday that agriculture is “capitalist, racialized patriarchy.”

    1. that’s because of their made up terrestrial hunter-gatherer paradise where women were in charge and everyone worshiped the great goddess. Honestly, these twits are illiterate in every possible way: literal, economic, historical, etc.

      1. And the people, along with their clothes, were all clean and sanitary. Just see the Hollywood shows if you don’t believe that..
        They need to try spending a day stacking hay bales, by hand…..

    2. She should be taken out to the nearest National Forest naked and barehanded and not allowed to reenter society until she can clothe herself and feed her entire class one meal. Having proved that she knows what she is talking about, she may then resume teaching.

      1. On occasion I will catch an episode of “Naked and Afraid” on the Discovery Channel. Two strangers, one each male and female, left in a harsh environment with no clothes and one survival tool each. Far too many of the ladies turn out to be SJW types with totally unrealistic expectations of both themselves and their partners. They can and will simultaneously demand that the male obey their commands and berate him for not protecting, supporting, and caring for them.
        OTOH, those pairs who are determined to cooperate and support each other generally do just fine. Not a cake walk by any means, 21 days in usually tropical jungle, but doable with the right skills and a team effort.
        Come to think of it, same could be said of a marriage. Guess that explains how that custom has fallen on hard times these days.

    3. The really sad thing is that no one there called this idiot out on this stupid, idiotic, no good, dumb statement. That she wasn’t booed out of the room is disappointing. Not entirely unexpected, but disappointing.

      2. I’d ask if the ‘J’ in ‘JP’ stood for “Jukes,” given that you can get “Kali” by stealing letters from “Kallikak,” but it seems like too mean a joke (besides being obscure).

          1. Sheldon’s from one of those shows I don’t watch, right? And, as far as sociology humor is concerned, I didn’t get it from there. There was a mention of them in an SF story I read long ago (I don’t remember the story or the author at this point). It was years before I looked them up and discovered what the reference meant – I’d put it into the same mental category as the Windsors and Plantagenets.

      1. Hey, I was sleeping most of the day!

        Of course, that just means that I’m so talented at oppressing womxn (I believe that’s the new formulation) that I can do it in my sleep. 😛

    3. I believe that would be the evil White, Mormon male known as Sarah Hoyt, who is cruelly writing entertaining posts and distracting us from writing in order to defeat the patriarchy.

  20. Feminists want to liberate women from motherhood. That’s what it has been about at least since Betty Freidan wrote “The Feminine Mystique” and that’s what its increasingly bizarre mutations and perversions are all about now. The more ardent the feminist, the more she hates motherhood or anything associated with it, or that leads to it.

  22. The great thing about the “token” claim is it’s so inclusive and absolute.

    There’s no diversity on the “they” side? What about a b and c?
    Tokens!

    The Republicans only want straight white males (sound familiar?)

    What about Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. Daughter of Indian immigrants and an African American. Both win re-election in a former Confederacy state. As Republicans!

    But…tokens.

    “Diversity” to a leftie means “agrees with me but looks different”.

    1. And I love the implication that all the women and minorities who engage in “wrongthink” and identify as right-of-center are too stupid to realize that we are being manipulated by the patriarchy. Of course. Because any ol’ idiot can just schlep his butt into medical school and become a neurosurgeon.

      I’d roll my eyes, but I’m getting a migraine – don’t want to barf on the keyboard because it’s hell getting the bits out from between the keys.

    2. “Some people would say today that the GOP is racist, [or that] they would never embrace a black man, but what America is showing you today is that we’re not racist,” Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend and adviser to Carson, told C-Span’s Greta Brawner Thursday. “We’re not interested in the hue of your skin. We’re interested in your ideas, your policies, your beliefs, and whether you can move America forward.”
      http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426665/ben-carson-success-proof-america-not-racist-armstrong-williams?target=author&tid=1211296

        1. They’ve considered it. They’ve apparently reached the same conclusion as Adlai Stevenson did when told “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” … “That’s not enough,we need a majority!”

          It does no good to fish for bass in a catfish creek — you’ve got to change the stream.

        2. The national GOP did consider it, briefly, rejected it as an aberrational belief of the great unwashed and the fly-overs.
          They then returned to the meeting with their sponsors to determine how to keep the populace from coordinating action, and to keep the money circulating among the nomenklatura.
          JPD

    3. A while ago, it was pointed out to me that, while the Dems elect a lot of minorities in minority-majority districts, the GOP seems to be much better about electing minorities to state-wide offices, like Haley, Scott, and Jenean Hampton, the new lieutenant governor in Kentucky.

      Which side believes in tokenism again?

    4. Apparently Republicans are so obsessed with “tokens” that some Republicans will even marry a racial minority just so that they’ll have a token minority spouse to show off years later after they’ve successfully been voted into office.

      1. Such as the evil, racist George W. Bush, who married a Latina woman and had as one of his long-term political advisers — and best friends — a half-black, half-Latina woman. Merely as tokens, of course.

            1. Racist!

              meanwhile, in real life, text book companies have been told that for their diversity quotes, blond or red-haired Hispanics do not count toward the Hispanic quota. Only dark-haired Hispanics count.

    5. Then there’s this comment from Jenean Hampton, Kentucky’s lieutenant governor elect who Tuesday became the first African American elected to statewide office in The Bluegrass State:

      A huge part of what formed my opinions was the peer pressure that I got to fail. These were kids who questioned my good grades, questioned the way I spoke, questioned my choice in music and the fact that I was reading all the time. I just remember wondering, “Well, jeez, when do I get to just be Jenean with my own likes and dislikes?”
      http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/09/matt-bevins-running-mate-m-just-jenean/73145924/

      Gotta love that!

      “Well, jeez, when do I get to just be Jenean with my own likes and dislikes?”

  23. Seems to me that in these parts people mostly talk about “holding women back” for the same reason our Western pioneers prayed to be killed by Apache warriors and Saint Rudyard advised the young British soldier

    When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
    and the women come out to cut up what remains,
    jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
    and go to your gawd like a soldier.

  26. “As Sarah and others have pointed out, there are a number of women who achieved much who are now being marginalized (C. L. Moore, Kate Wilhelm, Katherine McKlean, Judith Merril, Wilmar H. Shiras.”

    Now be fair. That literary authority John Scalzi has said that their royalties would be better off paying new writers, so there’s no real reason to remember them either, is there…?

  27. This is based on observation rather than research, but my impression has been that men mostly prefer to hold women’s fronts rather than holding women’s backs.

    I am open to acceptance of large grants to underwrite the research necessary to establish this preference, or even a modest six-figure grant to develop the methodology for this research through an initial investigation of preferences as demonstrated in various internet videos.

  28. So I’m a day late and a dollar short to these comments, but I’ve been thinking along similar lines lately (partly because I have been reading a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft). It irritates me as an engineer that women spent centuries convincing men that we aren’t delicate wilting flowers, that our fragile brains won’t melt when exposed to mathematics, etc., and now that we’ve reached the point where a woman being an engineer doesn’t raise eyebrows, the third-wave feminists are busy bringing back the delicate wilting flower stereotype. “You can’t make me read that book for class because I will have a panic attack!” “When I heard that MAN say that thing I disagreed with, I became faint and nearly passed out!” Etc.

    And I really wonder how on earth any of these special snowflakes are going to be successful in STEM. Just this week, I was presenting some information to a group of about 20-30 people in the room and on telecon, and I got bombarded with questions and criticisms from every angle – “why’d you do it that way?” “what does that mean?” “you left out XYZ!” “I think you should do QRS!” etc., etc. This is not at all an uncommon experience for engineers, and I can’t imagine your average college student being able to handle it without having to run off for an interlude with play-doh and cartoons. (Personally, I mostly find it funny. It was particularly funny in this instance because it turned out that the system leads wanted all the other subsystem leads to follow my example. Hahaha)

    1. “…women spent centuries convincing men that we aren’t delicate wilting flowers, that our fragile brains won’t melt when exposed to mathematics, etc., and now that we’ve reached the point where a woman being an engineer doesn’t raise eyebrows, the third-wave feminists are busy bringing back the delicate wilting flower stereotype.”
      Yup — this, exactly.
      It galls me also; I knew so many women in the military, who worked their asses off, proving they could do the jobs they signed up for, got verbally tough, learned to give and take in a male-dominated environment … and now we have the delicate little snowflakes apparently wanting to retreat to the parlor and the fainting couch.
      They don’t seem to realize THAT is exactly what will happen. Women will be sidelined again, as being just too fragile for this cruel world.
      There are no chains quite as binding as the ones which we fasten on ourselves.

      1. The appropriate comparison for this might be what unions call “rate-busters” — workers whose productivity sets a standard that other, less energetic workers are unable (or don’t want) to match.

        These shrinking violets are not, after all, demanding all women live in their fragile glass menagerie, constructed with tissue paper walls and toothpick furniture. No, they are insisting that all the world impose crippling limits on itself to conform to their fragile universe. That such imposed fragility engenders ever more tender grapes is as lost to them as is the recognition that eventually a more robust Stanley Kowalski culture will brush them and their dainty Blanche Dubois preciousness aside.

        They do not seek to prevent more robust women from competing with men; their goal is to prevent such robust women and men from competing with them.

  29. I said it before and I’ll say it again: there is indeed a war on women. It is called feminism.

    And by the way you join a real handful of authors who have managed to stump me and send me to the 0ED. Although in my defense, ludic is very modern and has only been in use since the 1940s.

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