Two days ago I ignited a fire storm by mentioning that men and women were different: shaped differently by evolution, shaped differently by gestation.
The funny part there is that this wasn’t even the main point of my post. The main point of my post is that men and women had different wellsprings of strength and gentleness and trying to turn men into women would only break them, not improve them.
I thought the part about men and women not being the same was self evident. Ask any biologist. Yes, there are outliers. Yes, some women are stronger than some men. Some cats are bigger than some dogs, too, but that’s not the way to bet.
Even the most tomboyish of girls is more feminine than 99% of men. Again, statistical distributions – it’s the way it breaks.
But apparently saying this makes me bigoted and a “hater” – I’m rather puzzled at how stating a fact that any biologist will know makes one “bigoted” or who I’m supposed to hate when the fact is rather that I don’t hate men and I do grant them the right to be different.
I find that it’s mostly a lot of reading stuff I did not say that drives people insane – like I’m supposed to be homophobic, because you know, people who are gay think the genders are indistinguishable, and that’s why they are only attracted to one of … Oh, wait, that makes no sense!
Or the gentleman who objected on my facebook that there was sexism against women (of course) and therefore we should stop considering adjectives feminine and masculine. The example he gave was sensitive, which was a bit of a puzzler for me. He says we shouldn’t consider it feminine and since I never have (how many characters have I described with sensitive features or sensitive hands? Go and check how many are female. Probably none.)
And this is going to lead me to tell you something that is probably a real shocker.
I’d almost guarantee if you’re the average person everything you think you know about the relationship between men and women is wrong and most of it comes out of movies, and a lot of it comes from the sixties obsession with rebelling against the fifties.
What am I talking about? Well, about twenty years ago, a friend who was very well educated and also genuinely intelligent was talking about men and women and said men had ways of doing things “because men couldn’t cry in public.”
She was talking about the middle ages…
Now there have been times and places where men couldn’t cry in public (the Romans had issues with certain kinds of crying for males…) but it was not universal and certainly not forbidden in all situations.
In the same way, she was convinced that women never worked except at domestic tasks. This is true, of course, for societies wealthy enough to keep their women immured indoors and busy only about the comfort of the house. I think if you look at the totally of the human experience that might account for oh, 1% of the times and places.
Even in Victorian England most women HAD to work outside the home. It wasn’t a choice or empowerment.
Throughout most of history women and men worked side by side – they had to. There wasn’t enough surplus in the system.
Yes, there were professions reserved for one or the other, usually because it fit the normal man or woman better. Mostly the men did the brutal, dangerous stuff. (Not that housework wasn’t brutal or dangerous by our view. All of it was. But home stuff was COMPARATIVELY less brutal and dangerous. And yeah, most of it was deadly dull.)
But it wasn’t unusual for men or women to take on the other gender’s tasks. I mean, it wasn’t unusual over history. It was unusual – but existed – at any given time. The outliers – all 1% of them – often crossed over. Thus we get a lot of women soldiers, though most of them would inspire no one’s romantic fancy (which was the fly in the ointment of the maiden who goes to war tales. But ah, that makes a better story, and therefore the troubadours do that. Mind you, not being able to inspire anyone’s romantic fancy didn’t mean they didn’t reproduce. Witness how many pirate queens and mercenaries pled the belly.) I don’t know any legends about men who did the equivalent, besides one or two about princess’s maids who… weren’t.
There were certain facts of biology – which science has all but abolished – that dictated treatment of women throughout history. I.e. a man wanted to make sure the children he was rearing were his. What is curious is that in most cases this didn’t lead to systems as restrictive as sharia. Yes, women had to mind whom they talked to and whom they were alone with. Yes, in many societies they were treated as property. In many others, though, they were considered equal with restrictions. Of course men had restrictions, too, but not the same.
To interpret this as men oppressing women is a big piece of folly. Given how much stronger than us they are, they could have made our lives unremitting living hell ALWAYS. (And if you’re going to say it was, keep in mind that the life of the average peasant until two hundred years ago was living h-ll to us, whether the peasant was male or female.
Yes, women were restricted, but if you read even regency romances (and keep in mind that’s the upper class) so were men. At least if the romances are accurate. You could get a bad reputation for very little.
And yet… Read the beginning of Our Bones Are Scattered about the Kanpur massacre. Just at the opening it relates the career of a Victorian lady. Three marriages, children from each marriage, and a thoroughly modern life.
Individuals were still individuals and rebellion ain’t nothing new. I would almost bet you none of even the most restricted Victorian maids fit the pattern – quite.
And now? Now the pill and the ability to genetically test offspring has changed everything. To keep hitting men and screaming “help, help, I’m being oppressed” is not only wrong, it’s a very ungentleman-like trick for people who want to be considered “equal.”And if you want to be equal you should be a gentleman, because those are the virtues for public life.
No good will come of this.
And no good will come of telling those of us who chose to stay home and raise our own kids that we’re gender traitors or – worse – that we’re oppressed.
The funny thing, you know, is that – I was thinking of this yesterday – when we got married we sat down and evaluated our chances for surviving and for one of us, at least, being able to make it in the arts (I wrote. Dan wrote and composed.)
We judged that because he had a much higher earning potential (if we lived here, something we decided for reasons having nothing to do with money and complex enough they’re not worth putting here) I’d stay home with the kids (because what’s the point of having kids for strangers to raise) and pursue writing. (He tried to convince me to do it before kids, and if I knew what I know now I’d have done it. I’d have gotten in before publishing because completely non-functional and we MIGHT have been able to have him quit and pursue his stuff too.
I considered this a gift – He was sacrificing his artistic aspirations, so that we would have three squares, a roof over head, and enough to raise the kids on.
Was it easy? Well, no. I was often – still am – more housekeeper than writer. Days can slide by when I get only an hour or two a day to write. But then his path isn’t easier.
I’m completely puzzled by the dogma that man’s work is better than women’s work. It is different, of course, but I’ve done both: skilled office work and housekeeping and for me, for the way my mind works, I’ll take housekeeping.
You see, it’s brutal but I set my own times, and can approach tasks the way I want. And I can save a few hours to write in. Dan has had jobs where he worked eighteen hours, came home to a colicky baby and volunteered to take over, while I got a couple of hours of sleep. Then he got a couple hours, shaved and went back to work. And even now, he manages the money side of my business, and he works, and he’s rarely “alive” enough to come home and work.
So I thought of being able to stay home and try my hand at making a living from writing as a gift. In fact, I have male friends who were given the same opportunity by their wives, and they too consider it a gift.
Why should I consider it as oppression just because it fits tradition? Why should all “tradition” – and this one very recent – be tossed over? I value questioning everything – I’m American — but surely there is a baby in that bath water. Why should I consider it as oppression because someone else’s doctrine demands it?
Why should I take in account the opinions of people so wholly unconnected with myself? People who think all of history was the Victorian ages and the Fifties?
People who think saying men and women are DIFFERENT and each has different approaches to the world is “hateful” and “bigoted”? People who think adjectives apply only to one gender?
Pfui.
It’s not elegant, and it’s not eloquent, but that’s all I have to say: Pfui.
UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club.
According To Hoyt 
I agree– and the hubby has given me a gift by working (we had decided when I had my MA that I would work) so that I could write and get my degrees. He gave me a greater gift when I became ill and continued working and taking care of me. I write… I consider it another gift. So I have a soft spot for strong men– and competent men.
LikeLike
Do the folk complaining have any idea how much I’d like to be able to quite my day job, stay home, even take over my wife’s share of the housework (and I’ve lived in a single household enough that all those “trading places” type movies and TV episodes? Spare me. I never found them funny because the plot only works if both people are raving idiots) and have more time to write and to spend time with my daughter?
Oh, please, oppress me!
LikeLike
Wot ‘e said.
LikeLike
My Calmer Half is the at-home one of our pair. His love is sure as sunrise, and his faithfulness in making sure that I get up to a packed lunchbag, a travel mug of tea, and a friendly reminder if I sleep past the alarm is awesome. When I come home after eleven or twelve hours, he has dinner waiting – if he knows it’ll be a long day, he waits until I call to start cooking, or does a crockpot dish. Laundry, dishes, garbage being taken out – I’m spoiled by him, and I adore him for it. On my weekend, he has to put up with me tripping down to his writing nook and asking him to work on longer-term projects, an impulse road trip, a visit to the zoo, or other priorities of mine that aren’t his, interrupting his work. He takes it in stride with grace.
Of course, when he’s wrestling with the last hundred pages of a book, or formatting for createspace, I may come home to a bleary-eyed husband who greets me with apologies and a “I got so wrapped up in the book, I forgot the time..” – and that’s what leftovers or treating him to a restaurant is for.
(I haven’t quit all the house chores – I do the sweeping and mopping, and the catbox cleaning. But that’s not enough to say I really do domestic duties!)
LikeLike
As an old white guy I am by definition a bigot and a hater. You, young Portagee, being female and of somewhat darker complexion have had to work to earn the labels. Welcome to the club.
As for equal, to borrow your term Pfui! No one ever wants to be equal. Those on the bottom end, or who perceive themselves to be in some regard disadvantaged, always lust after turning the tables. They do not want equality, what they want is reversal of roles. Yes, there may in fact be a few occasional individuals of noble character who really do want social equality, but IMHO they are few and far between. And exceedingly odd, which may explain why we see them more often, like gravitating to like. I will grant that a typical small “L” libertarian mostly just wants to be left alone, but we seem to be getting scarcer by the year.
LikeLike
“what they want is reversal of roles”
Trouble is, it’s even worse than that. What they want is not the reversal of the _actual_ current roles, but the exchange of what they _imagine_ their role to be with what they imagine our role to be.
Or else they imagine that “equality” means that everyone has to be identical in every significant respect. (“2+2”, “42-38”, and “16**0.5” are, after all, all equal. Despite also being all different.)
LikeLike
Part of the problem derives from a basic rule of human nature: in any social exchange, each party tends to undervalue what they receive and overvalue what they give up.
Thus He sees it as no big deal for Her to forego Friday afternoon’s installment of her favorite soap opera to pick him up at the train station from his commute home. She sees it as no big thing for him to forego watching the first half of his “superbowl” game in order to help her strike the tables from the church bazaar.
Similarly, on a date he doesn’t recognize the whole cost of her getting her dolled up so she looks good on his arm on their date and she doesn’t recognize the full cost of taking her to a restaurant she likes rather than a diner.
Intellectuals, in particular, underestimate the skill and effort involved in such “menial” jobs as plumbing, carpentry or running a small business. They take a side and marshal their facts in support rather than assemble the facts and deduce from them.
LikeLike
They do not want reversal of roles. They want to live as they imagine those better off than them live. Which is why it always turns so brutal.
Envy. Pure envy.
LikeLike
The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is predicated upon a massive collaboration of everyone in the power structure to deny that which they clearly see and silence any contradictory voice.
If you state that boys and girls have some inherent difference in their natures due to boyness or girlness (which is the clear testimony of your senses), you fail to participate in the collaborative enterprise of women’s liberation. And all the means of silencing dissent in general will be applied to you.
Thus, the collaborators of the women’s liberation enterprise will conflate your dissent with the worst abuses of sexism, because all means of silencing dissent must be applied.
This is an obtuse perpetuation of an untruth, but hey, truth flows from the barrel of a gun.
LikeLike
I’d almost guarantee if you’re the average person everything you think you know about the relationship between men and women is wrong and most of it comes out of movies, and a lot of it comes from the sixties obsession with rebelling against the fifties.
Almost all the dumb stuff I run into, if I manage to find a source for the impulse that birthed it, boils down to “well, I feel a lack in this area, so I’ll focus on that– and forget that those I’m teaching do not have the same background I do.”
LikeLike
Normally I don’t go in for the psychoanalytic community’s pat “Just So” stories of human behavior, but when folks like that scream “HATER!” at folks like Sarah, the word “projection” just springs completely unbidden into my mind, and refuses to depart until confronted.
LikeLike
It’s almost axiomatic at this point for me to assume projection whenever the vile progs start to accuse the perceived “other side” of something.
For example, the war on women. Conflated with the stories told yesterday regarding Ayers’ treatment of same. In the words of our illustrious hostess, PFUI!
LikeLike
Oh good Lord! Democrats screaming “war on women”? Yeah, let’s take a look at Bill Clinton, serial sexual harasser (possible rapist); Bob Filner, serial sexual harasser; Anthony Wiener, a cheater who couldn’t even stop after he got kicked out of Congress & while he still wanted a political career; Ted Kennedy, at the very least, guilty of negligent (wo)manslaughter; Jim & Pat Moran, woman-beaters.
But it’s those nasty Republicans who hate women, primarily because they’re opposed to having unborn infants literally torn limb from limb. I don’t know where I’ve last seen such stunning hypocrisy.
LikeLike
Men are men. Women are women. We are biologically and psychologically different. Neither is better than the other. We are just different. We have different biological imperatives and our brains work differently and anyone who refuses to believe that is fooling themselves. I prefer men to be men and women to be women… it makes life nice and tidy. By the way, humans are also animals — not vegetable or mineral and denying that will not change it (I’m baffled by people who get insulted when you point out that we are biologically animal rather than rock, crystal or plant, and therefore have biological differences that cannot be “taught” away).
LikeLike
You would think people who so loudly proclaim their proud allegiance to Evolution would see its working in sex role differentiation. It’s almost as if, though they keep using that word it does not mean what they think it means.
LikeLike
If you judged by practical actions, you would think that the people who understood evolution best were those most opposed to teaching it in school.
LikeLike
If you’re referring to the slow-motion demographic suicide of the affluent atheist class, who (in America and Europe) are having no children (or when they do have children, have just one or two at most)… yeah. Funny how it’s the religious folks (especially the Christians and the Muslims) who have all the 4- and 5-children families. Case in point: I personally know two families in Houston with 7 and 8 children respectively. Both families devout Christians, of the “independant Bible church” variety, who homeschool their kids. And the kids, having gotten socialized mostly by adults and other homeschooled kids, are FAR more mature for their age than your average public-school educated kid who’s learned from only his age cohorts. We’ve been over the “socialization of homeschooled kids” subject plenty of times before around here and we all know the tune, so I won’t expand on it: but both these families would be perfect examples of Mary’s point.
LikeLike
And to correct my own mispeling ;-), that should have been “independent”, not “independant”.
LikeLike
Bingo.
LikeLike
I keep asking this question, and never get an answer: If the Left is killing itself off by not having children, then why is the percentage of the world (and the US) voting Leftist *increasing* every year?
LikeLike
In part, I’d say it’s the fact that the dead vote a straight Dem ticket.
LikeLike
Because they’ve managed to get a near-lock on early childhood education, and indoctrinate kids with the idea that the fairness of kindergarten (enforced, incidentally, by an all-powerful* and all-knowing** Authority™) should also apply to all factors of adult life. With, naturally, the same Authority™ to enforce it.
* Most kindergarten teachers aren’t exactly body builders. But in comparison to a 5-year-old, ANY adult is all-powerful.
** Again, by comparison only.
LikeLike
Whoops, didn’t finish my response. I meant to add that those same kids, when they grow up, then try to put that Authority™ into power so they can finally have Fairness™ again. Some manage to break the programming by exposure to reason and logic, but many don’t.
So the leftists are reproducing, but not by demographics. Rather, they’re converting other people’s kids to their ideas, and making those kids’ parents raise what will essentially be someone else’s offspring. Kind of like the cuckoo in that respect, come to think of it.
LikeLike
The explanation for Leftist reproduction, then, is that they are a parasitic* virus?
*Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
LikeLike
Brood parasitic, yeah.
LikeLike
Yes, there is.
The problem with this parasite is that it kills it’s host.
LikeLike
All parasites kill their hosts. Only symbionts don’t kill their hosts.
LikeLike
If it has to be said it probably wasn’t, but the footnote was intended as ironic. Apparently my sense of irony is anemic.
LikeLike
You see the Australian and Norwegian elections?
LikeLike
In part, they are the ones who choose the pedagogy in the public schools and are in charge of a majority of the universities. They indoctrinate other people’s children.
LikeLike
Evolution to the vile progs does not mean a mechanism by which species, by sexual and environmental selection, adapt to changing environments and diversify and speciate to fill new ecological niches. To the vile prog evolution is a way to tell people of faith that [and imagine that I am screaming scarlet-faced, spraying droplets of saliva], “your God and your bible and faith are lies and there is no way of making me stop saying it to rub your face in it you filth”
It is always terrible to see the thoughtful work of a thoughtful, kind-hearted, and intelligent man be used as a weapon to bludgeon people who’s only crime is to want the world to be better, and the very people who who hate them to be happier.
LikeLike
And of course Darwin had ten kids himself. Unfortunately, two of his wives died along the way. (And seeing as he was a doctor, it had to have hit him hard each time.) This retired history guy from OSU has a book out with bios of the kids, and I happened to catch him talking about it.
LikeLike
The Daughter often points out that what is taught as evolution in elementary through high school has to be untaught when you enter college biology courses. She insists that, therefore, evolution should not be taught because they can’t get it right and are wasting everybody’s time that could be better spent teaching the real and useful basics of science.
LikeLike
My younger son spent three months obsessed by evolution. It’s how he works. He has the sort of mind that obsesses on something till he grasps it, then goes on to something else. Very bad for schooling when they want to teach you a lot of things simultaneously and gradually. He says that most ardent defenders of evolution (in which he believes, btw) aren’t actually describing evolution.
I was taken aback yesterday — myself — with a passage in Starship Troopers, which I am listening to while walking. He was talking about Sanctuary, the planet without radiation and he talks about most humans there “falling behind the others” unless they dosed themselves with radiation. All of a sudden it hit me as very silly. Evolution can be non-beneficial as well as beneficial. Mutations are USUALLY non-beneficial. So what if these people just ended up smarter than the other branches of humanity? Or living longer? By NOT evolving.
It struck me as a very weird argument from Heinlein of all people.
LikeLike
Re: the low background radiation on Sanctuary. IIRC, Heinlein put that argument into the mouth of a tour-guide or other local, and Johnny didn’t think much of it. I always considered it no more than an example of local ignorance or local color rather than the author opining via one of his characters (that’s what Lazarus Long and Colonel DuBois were for:-).
LikeLike
Having realized that God is, by necessity, outside of His creation the whole issue of the exact how He did it is a separate issue to me.
Evolution seems a bit imprecise, since as you note, most mutations are not advantageous. Also, those mutations which would be held to be ‘good’ would have to not only raise survival chances, they would have to be genetically dominate. But if evolution was how God choose to do it, I am sure that He could work all that out. So, who am I to question? The theory will do until next better one comes along.
Meanwhile, it would be nice if those who profess to believe in it would get it right.
LikeLike
Practically speaking, by employing modern medicine, humans have already short-circuited natural selection. We have people who survive and pass on their genes while possessing serious, sometimes life-threatening conditions. Depending how strict you set that measure, I myself might be a case, and my own problem is pretty clearly heritable.
Unfortunately, any suggestions to “fix” this “problem” pretty quickly start sounding like Nazi-ism, so we’re kind of stuck.
LikeLike
What immediately came to mind was the image of Donald Sutherland at the end of the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake, for more reasons than one: http://youtu.be/GEStsLJZhzo
Can’t be allowed to speak of that which is ungood.
LikeLike
“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah,” said Mother Jaguar, ever-so-many-times-graciously waving her tail. “These people who trouble you are morons. Why do you pay them any heed?”
M
LikeLike
because I can’t eat them.
LikeLike
From what I’ve seen of how they live you really wouldn’t want to anyway. Eewwww!
LikeLike
I cannot imagine the process you’d have to take to make them edible.
I had a friend, once, who tried his hand at cleaning out some animal intestines and eating them (apparently a bit of a delicacy where he was from).
I think he was sick for a week.
LikeLike
Animal intestines? better known as sausage skins IIRC and if the animal’s sheep and the intestine stuffed appropriately they are the divine haggis
LikeLike
All I was getting at was that prior to the appropriate preparation, they’re both full of crap.
But I’m sure haggis is wonderful. Properly prepared. My BiL swears by it.
LikeLike
Or .. (urp) chitterlings. Or as they say in the deep South – chittlin’s. Or as I said, when one of my cohorts in the women’s barracks at Yongson AIG (a woman of color and irreproachable character as an Air Force NCO) decided to get in touch with her cultural heritage and fix a mess o’ chittlin’s on a Sunday afternoon; “You boil those damn things in our barracks kitchen again, I will get in touch with MY cultural heritage and boil about ten heads of cabbage to death and beyond!”
Chitterlings cooking smelt like a vile mixture of bacon and pig-sh*t. Yes, I can see how if you’ll get hungry enough, you’ll eat anything – but in my culture, pig intestines are to be used to encase sausage. And I don’t know what needs to be done to make them fit for that purpose, although I suspect a lot of water and salt is involved. Plus something savory to stuff inside them.
LikeLike
It’s not the intestine itself, just the outermost membrane. I never contacts the material.
And haggis is stuffed into a sheep’s stomach.
LikeLike
I don’t give a good (insert imprecation here) what they are – they smelt vile, and I’m sorry, I don’t think normal humans can be made to eat something of their own free will that smells that bad. Although I have heard that there are some nasty cheeses that also smell quite revolting. Sorry, we have a sense of smell for a reason, people!
And yeah, once upon a time I tried to make menudo, with tripe from the supermarket. It smelt revoltingly of innards, and I poured it down the garbage disposal. My Hispanic friends tell me that you have to cook them in beer to take out the smell. Sorry – waste of good beer.
LikeLike
Did you ever read Three Men In A Boat? There’s a passage about a cheese that “reminded me of dead babies.”
LikeLike
Ah! I see. But can you not spurn them ‘neath your heel?
M
LikeLike
Vocally ;)
LikeLike
It took me a long time to differentiate “can not” from “may not”.
You certainly *can* eat them. However you *may not* and you *should not*.
LikeLike
I also can’t — I don’t have the time to go on the hunt.
LikeLike
Ah, but that is what friends are for, I’ll be sure to drop the next one off on your doorstep, for you. :)
LikeLike
That’s a matter of choice, not possibility.
I’ll grant you it’s the RIGHT choice, cause while there might be quite a bit of eaten on some of them, it ain’t gonna be *good* eatin.
‘sides, if they ain’t careful they’re going to declare open season on themselves.
LikeLike
One of Dorothy Sayers’ essays, in a little collection titled “Are Women Human?” envisioned someone asking why we didn’t see men rushing in to get into women’s jobs—and answered that they already had: In the Middle Ages, the entire pickling and food preserving industry was carried on in the home, by women, often on a large scale; in her modern times, a huge part of it was done in factories that mainly employed men. She had other examples, if I recall—it’s been some years.
LikeLike
Beer industry. Motion picture direction and screenwriting.
“Are Women Human?” had a lot of good stuff in it. Something sensible to torque off everybody, or make them smile and cheer.
LikeLike
Not to mention that in the old days, the reason a master tradesman in the guilds was expected to be married was because not only would his sons eventually become apprentices, but his wife would be expected to run the business side of things (sales, customer service, collecting the money…you know, the essential white-collar stuff), while he and his journeymen did the physical labor.
But yeah. Women didn’t matter in society until feminists came along.
Riiight.
LikeLike
Bingo – in working-class and independent businesses even into the 19th century, the wife was the co-owner and manager of the family enterprise. There are women who wound up owning the business on the death of the husband, too – like Angelina Eberly, the innkeeper of republic-era Austin, who finished up building, owning and running a hotel of her own in Indianola, Texas … before the Civil War … after burying two husbands. I know there were helpless, hapless high-Victorian middle-class women who were absolute prisoners of their circumstance … but I know of so many who weren’t. I’ve always wondered how many of those ladies were rendered helpless by chains that they put on themselves…
LikeLike
IIRC, there was a lady in the middle ages who was *very* well documented for starting a hugely successful bunch of breweries when her husband cut her fripperies budget.
LikeLike
I’ll do a lot for fripperies!
LikeLike
I’ll do a lot for beer!
Looks like we have ourselves an economy.
LikeLike
I just shared this with the Oyster Wife, who replied, “Well, who else are you going to trust?” Makes sense to me!
LikeLike
It probably doesn’t help that most people think of “men and women” as a binary set, rather than a pair of bell curves, and react accordingly.
LikeLike
Um. Where women technically speaking cluster in the center and men hit the edges. So you have more male geniuses. Also more male morons. I wonder what the “odd” distribution is. For evolutionary reasons there would seem to be fewer odd females, otoh because any woman who wants it (and lowers standards enough) can reproduce, I’m not sure.
LikeLike
There’s the way that even an odd female will probably fit in a bit better that would mask it, too.
LikeLike
Factor in the Boob Effect, whereby men’s intelligence (particularly verbal aptitude) is materially impaired in the presence of an attractive female. This will generally cause women to underestimate male intelligence.
LikeLike
Right, but that only applies to attractive women (here I’m using the male definition of “attractive”: A woman who will have sex with me). I don’t see how that leads to feminists thinking men are dumb.
LikeLike
Well obviously we’re stupid… we’re not attracted to their superior selves.
LikeLike
Not hugely attractive, but as the navy boys put it “Any port in a storm”.
LikeLike
I was Navy, and I’d rather deal with the storm.
LikeLike
I was Marine. I don’t think I need to go into further detail except to say I specialized in crazy.
LikeLike
You know, for the really big storms, all the ships leave port and put to sea.
There’s a life lesson there, I just don’t know what it is.
LikeLike
They observe men who are smart acting like idiots and detest and resent the men for it. Just as they resent those women able to manipulate men in ways inaccessible to them.
Example: How To Change A Tire:
Feminist: first you put the car in park and set the brake. Extract the jack, handle and lug wrench from their storage location. Loosen the nuts, then place the jack under the reinforced stress point and raise the car. etc.
Babe: I stand there looking cute and helpless.
LikeLike
Heck, I’m not a babe, and I never have had to use any muscle I don’t want to… I smile hesitantly and look helpless… Men materialize to help. Don’t ask me…
LikeLike
I was already well into middle age, and quite fat when my car’s exhaust pipe fell off while driving (slowly, thankfully).
So, I’m used to at least trying to do temporary fixes if I can figure out how, and that seemed fixable, it was dragging on one end but still up in the other. So after I parked on a bus stop (late evening, I figured I’d have at least 10 to 15 minutes before the next bus) I got out and looked.
Looked fixable. And I had some steel wire. So I get the wire, lie down next to the car and start working. Was nearly done when a car stops and two young men get out to ask what the problem is and if they can help. Had to decline (nicely, I was quite pleased by their offer) their help since I was already almost done.
You don’t even need to look helpless and cute. Maybe I reminded them of their moms. :) (And my fix held until I got the car to a garage, next day)
LikeLike
Note my comment below, unless you were driving a VW bus and looked like a bunny-hugger chick I would have stopped to help you; regardless of your looks or lack thereof.
LikeLike
Yep, I didn’t read the whole thread before commenting.
Hey, I’d take any car I can find as long as it’s cheap and runs when I need one, so a VW bus might be a possibility. And I did have a couple of bunnies for a summer as a kid, although as far as I remember they weren’t quite tame enough to tolerate being hugged.
Then they went to my uncle’s farm in the fall since my parents didn’t want them inside, and weren’t anywhere next summer. Snif. I didn’t even get to say goodbye in the dinner table.
LikeLike
I envy that ability *sigh ;-) I must look too capable.
LikeLike
Actually it did happen once in Germany… one of the brackets for the tail pipe broke. I was looking at it trying to decide if I had anything to tie it up (I didn’t) or if I should just drive the next mile to the mechanic. A German man stopped and helped me tie up the tail pipe and drove behind me to the mechanic shop. I think it happened once in Japan if my mind isn’t faulty. But in the US? I don’t get a second glance.
LikeLike
One should always have steel wire in the car. I think that has been the most often used thing of the arsenal I tend to have in the trunk (no training in things mechanical, but I have been able to figure out more than a few things anyway :)).
That’s interesting about getting help, by the way. I am under the impression that Finns are becoming a bit less likely to stop lately too, partly because everybody has a cell phone – or at least that’s the assumption – plus there have been, first time in my lifetime, occasional problems for people who have stopped because we have been getting visitors from Eastern Europe, mostly Romania, and the ones who do come here are often the petty criminal types, ones more brazen and used to using violence than our own. One of the problems with EU – the police of different countries do co-operate, but mostly only when the crime is big – lots of money involved or somebody died and so on – so doing something which would not get one any kind of heavier sentence in one country and then going back to your own with the spoils seems to be a fairly low risk occupation since the police rarely have the resources to do anything much about those. Kind of like those old westerns where the bank robbers are trying to get across the state line ahead of the sheriff’s posse, and once they do they can stop running and relax a bit.
LikeLike
In the US, we call it “bailing wire”. As in, “I fixed it with bailing wire and bubble gum”.
And it is indeed a necessary tool.
LikeLike
Thanks. I think I knew that, I would definitely have recognized it. When I don’t quite remember something I sometimes end up using what would be a word for word translation from Finnish rather than bother trying to find the right combination when posting comments, or posting on my blog (and when to use ‘on’ and when ‘in’ can sometimes be bit of a problem too, you seem to have a few slightly different ideas about what things are in and what on something than we do). When I’m writing a story I will try to look, but I suspect some of the weird sentences some people mentioned bothering them in a few places in the Fourth Sword are those – something I had probably figured I’d fix later, and then didn’t notice it in the editing phase because it made sense to me, through Finnish.
LikeLike
It wasn’t criticism. Your English is fantastic.
LikeLike
Thank you. I do think those are pretty much the only recurring mistakes I do make nowadays. :)
LikeLike
Steel wire is correct, but in the US baling (not bailing, we’re not in a sinking ship you undead Roman!) wire is commonly used to ‘farmerize’ repairs. Baling wire is the wire used to bale hay with. In actuality these days tie-wire (soft steel wire, used for many purposes, but originally to tie rebar together for concrete) is what is most often used, but baling wire is the commonly used term.
LikeLike
Not stopping because of risk– one of our family stories is about listening to what your gut says when you’re driving, and GTFO when it’s bad.
My granny was driving, alone, to Kansas to visit family. She saw a lady at the side of the road and was slowed down to stop when suddenly she just went into a panic– hit the gas and took off instead of stopping to help.
In the rear view mirror she saw several guys running out of the ditch, where she hadn’t seen them, and the gal was making rude gestures at her.
LikeLike
Hey! You just implied I’m a feminist! I’m insulted!
LikeLike
Well… my normal approach to things I like doing is like a “tire changing feminist” BUT I don’t like changing tires.
Hey, three more years and I can pull off “helpless grandmother” if I let my hair go gray. ;)
LikeLike
There are (at least) two ways for a woman to get a man to help her by smiling and looking helpless. One is to be a babe and hit the “let me show off my masculinity to her” button in the male psyche. The other is to be matronly and hit the “let me help out my mother” button. (There may be others I haven’t thought of, hence why I added the “at least” qualifier.)
If you’re no longer fitting into the “babe” category as you used to (from what you’ve told us about your teens and twenties, it appears you were quite a babe back then), then you may be hitting the “Mom” category for many young men.
LikeLike
Quite possibly. :)
LikeLike
Huh. I meant to post that in reply to your 10:58 PM comment, but WordPress wouldn’t let me for some reason, so I posted it here instead. And thereby managed to post it in reply to a comment that basically duplicates what I just said. Such are the vagaries of WP, I suppose.
LikeLike
Terrible thing is that this same kind of thing seems to happen when you’re fat. I’ve had people offer their seats on a crowded bus, for example. I still have enough masculine pride to get irritated at that.
LikeLike
Then there’s the combination of the two: “She was probably a babe back in the day. Maybe she has daughters.”
LikeLike
Ooh, I didn’t think of that one!
Plus there’s the factor of having an attractive face in middle age. I believe it was Coco Chanel who said, “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.” (Example: my grandmother, at eighty, was one of the most beautiful eighty-year-old women I’ve ever seen. Her loving, cheerful personality just shone in her face at that age.) Therefore a middle-aged woman with a still-attractive face = a woman who was non-b*tchy all her life = a woman who likely raised her daughters (if she has any) to also be non-b*tchy = someone I want to have a favorable opinion of me, because her hypothetical daughters might be good prospects. Not that this logic chain EVER reaches the conscious levels of the mind, of course.
LikeLike
I reject that thesis and offer as contrary evidence:
Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro
Congresswoman Nita Lowey
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
Secretary Hillary Clinton
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(I would offer more counter examples but having just thrown up in my mouth a little bit I must go gargle)
LikeLike
Re: RES’ comment and listing, I reiterate the Coco Chanel quote I posted. (I came up with the same idea independently in my early twenties after observing my beautiful-at-eighty grandmother, but Coco Chanel said it better.)
LikeLike
That be a helpless babe act generally just pissed me off, so I showed them how and either stood over them while they did it, or wandered off and let them have at it for a while.
The worst offender is how a defense lawyer in STL. Should have shot her and buried the body when my folks owned enough land.
LikeLike
Heck, babe or mom appearance isn’t necessary in Texas, if it’s a woman with car trouble. Pop up the hood and look worried, and guys will be falling out of the trees offering help. This has happened to me over and over … well, until I sold the ageing car which frequently stranded me by the side of the road.
LikeLike
Honestly, I was the only one in my driver’s ed class that knew how to change a tire– and I’ve discovered that just not bulling over guys will get it changed. (My first flat was in Mississippi. At four in the afternoon. In a rather poor, black area.
And then the church next door let out. The gentlemen wouldn’t even let me hold their coats!
LikeLike
There was a time when I could change a flat tire in about ten minutes, counting in the time to get the spare out and the flat one then into the trunk (well, at least if the spare was in an easy to get place in the car – I really hated the car where it was under the car, in this contraption you had to first lower by turning some sort of screw thing… fortunately the only time I got a flat with that car I did get help).
Now it takes nearly half an hour because I need to take breaks. Knees don’t handle kneeling all that well anymore.
LikeLike
Recently had occasion to be at a car dealership. The salesman was a very straightforward and honest guy, thoroughly geeking out about cars. He must be the rare exception to the stereotype, which isn’t surprising because he’s a part-owner of the lot.
Anyway, after the third car, he realized we had a pattern – I sat in the front seat, adjusted it (or rejected it as difficult to get rebuilt knees into), and checked the comfort and visibility. Then I studied the instrument panel, determining if everything as easily laid out and ergonomic. Then I’d open the trunk, and check the condition of the spare tire. (His were all in good shape, but three needed air in them.) If it passed, I had Calmer Half check if he could get into and out of the car without difficulty.
As we walked to the fourth car, he blurted out, “Do you guys get a lot of flat tires?”
Calmer Half smiled, and looked at me. I explained. “I’m from Alaska. We put gravel down on the roads for traction every winter. In the spring it melts off, and leaves drifts of cut rock over asphalt and potholes from the frost heaves. And then there are the gravel roads, and the roads we wish had gravel…” I shrugged. The salesman looked at me like I was an exotic creature, and then looked to Calmer Half for confirmation.
Calmer Half’s smile had a faintly impish quality, and his accent got noticeably thicker. “I’m from Africa.”
“Oh.”
LikeLike
Personally I am much more likely to help a woman who is trying to do something on her own than one who just kicks back an expects someone else to do for her. (of course women know how to use this to their advantage also, by making an attempt at doing something while looking clueless they can be assured that practically any man coming by will quickly come over and show her how to do it properly… for the next time, of course)
LikeLike
I literally have never had to do this. If it’s something I don’t want to do, guys come out of the woodwork to do it for me. When I was young, this made sense, although most guys were perfect gentlemen around me. But without asking for help, I NEVER had to carry my own suitcases while traveling across Europe…
LikeLike
I make enough money to call AAA.
LikeLike
Do you ever break down where you have cell service? Ok, first I would be ashamed to call somebody to change a tire, and second, as far as more serious break downs are concerned, I never seem to be where I have cell service when that happens, so AAA is useless.
LikeLike
I make enough money to be too busy to wait for AAA, when it’s something I can fix myself. :)
(Seriously…I’ve _never in my life_ had a tow truck arrive in less time than it takes me to change a tire. So I only call for one when the problem is something that needs a mechanic to deal with it. It helps, of course, that I got a _lot_ of tire-changing practice in my 20s…for a while there, I couldn’t go three months between blowouts.)
LikeLike
My wife and I raised two boys in the deep south, or Huntsville which sort of is and sort of isn’t, so my experience with female children is mostly hearsay. But my wife’s daddy had a plain and simple rule, she was not allowed to take the car past the city limits until she proved by example that she could fill the tank, check the oil, and change a tire. That was of course in the pre cell phone days, but even today a lot of city folk do not realize just how much dead air still exists in flyover country. AAA does precious little good when you’re broken down at midnight ten miles from the nearest light and you have no cell service.
I do know for a fact that at least a couple of my work associates with female children taught them safe gun handling and presented them with a cute little pistol when they went off to college. One of these sweet young things came to work with us and was scandalized to discover that we strongly suggested she not carry her firearm when traveling on the corporate jet. We did a lot of day trips in the plane and no one knew she was packing until she asked for advice over what to do if we missed the return trip and had to fly commercial. It was always a possibility as the plane was under the direction of the senior passenger and they could have an emergency that forced them to return early. So we all carried charge cards as backup, but the young lady knew that a commercial flight would not let her bring a gun as carry on. This was pre 9/11 so things were a bit less tight back then, but still I took her aside and suggested strongly that she leave the ordnance at home, but if by chance she ever found her in that situation to take the bloody thing apart, pitch the ammo, and mail the pieces home in at least two packages.
LikeLike
Buy a lockbox and check it with the baggage. Airlines carry firearms in the baggage compartment all the time. They just don’t want them in the cabin.
LikeLike
” I took her aside and suggested strongly that she leave the ordnance at home, but if by chance she ever found her in that situation to take the bloody thing apart, pitch the ammo, and mail the pieces home in at least two packages.”
Rather practical, if illegal, advice. It is legal under Federal law for a person to ship a handgun to him/herself via UPS or Fed Ex but often those companies will often frustrate the attempt. USPS does not allow shipments of handguns by mail by persons other than 01 FFL holders. USPS does allow shipment of long guns by individuals to themselves or residents of the same state.
She should have brought along a rigid locking container and checked it in after declaring it at the check-in counter of the airline but if not possible, I’d recommend paying a gun dealer in the location to mail it to a gun dealer in one’s home city via USPS.
LikeLike
Somebody better tell the local Postmistress that, then, because she told me it is fine to ship handguns by mail if either a) it is going TO an FFL, b)it is being shipped for repairs or being returned after repairs (no don’t ask why it is acceptable to ship a gun that by definition has been fixed and is functional to a non-FFL simply because it has been repaired) or c) has the action disassembled and at least one piece removed.
LikeLike
On the contrary – it’s unwise in the extreme to even carry or otherwise transport a handgun onto Post Office property which may include the parking lot for public parking off-street – though a handgun has some specific definitions as a term of art. And for the run of the mill citizen (not a member of the new class nobility the rules are pretty much
LikeLike
Notice also that even assuming arguendo that the Postmistress has a point that such mailings as described by necessity involve at least one party holding an FFL – and notice too that in some places any transfer as frex the current owner redeeming a gun that has been pawned requires a background check – gun owners are discriminated against compared to say jewelry owners but that seems to be what society wants – and similarly a transfer back to the owner of a repaired handgun from a repair station is still a transfer and so may require a background check as in Colorado these days.
Lots and lots of gotch’as in transfer background check without too much case law for guidance. We can be sure many jurisdictions will be pretty strict in enforcing any gray area against the gun owner given the policy of hassling perfectly legal and acknowledged so exercise of rights.
LikeLike
As the saying goes: It could be worse — it could be California.
Pay no attention, it’s just that Mooney-owned paper.
California’s great gun grab: State’s sweeping gun control bills target firearms, ammo — and hunting
By Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times
Breaking new ground in the state-level battle over firearms, the Democratic-dominated California state legislature has taken gun control into uncharted territory with a flurry of new bills that target not just firearms and ammunition, but also recreational hunting.
LikeLike
Note that I have had both Ruger and Taurus send me perfectly functional repaired handguns via USPS (the Ruger was even loaded with fired brass from testing). The Ruger was also sent to them for repair (revolver that functioned fine, but would not group, each individual chamber would group, but the cylinder as a whole shot a pattern not a group) via USPS*. And yes I know the Post Office has signs all over it stating it is a federal offense to carry a weapon on their property. It isn’t locally enforced, but I would not walk into a strange Post Office while openly carrying. (not a good idea even in the local one, because it is against the law, but I have seen multiple people do so, and am pretty sure I have done so without thinking myself)
*I asked the Postmistress what I needed to do to ship a gun through the mail, and this is when she informed me it was fine as long as it was unloaded, with no ammo in the package, that they could be sent in for repair whole (or back to owner after being repaired) but if not being sent for repair the bolt, cylinder, or other action item (depending on action type) was removed. Whether it is legal or not I declared and insured them, and never heard from anyone about it.
LikeLike
AAA does precious little good when you’re broken down at midnight ten miles from the nearest light and you have no cell service.
Note: he’s not talking about traffic lights. He’s talking about electric lights.
I grew up more than ten miles from a TRAFFIC light….
LikeLike
Option Three: if it’s in a dangerous, difficult, or extremely unpleasant location and related to the car (usually involving pulling out of snowbank and back onto ice-covered road as opposed to changing tire), call male friend and offer pizza and beer (or sushi and sake, or chocolate and coffee, depending on friend) in return for help towing the car out to a safer/better place for fixing. Know that said friend will end up changing the tire/ crawling in the icy mud to attach the towing strap even if I want to do it; make mental note to repay friend with surprise down the road as well as the food & drink.
Caveat: expect random phone call from said male friend at some point in future, asking for help running errand / cleaning apartment before date comes over / dropping off or picking up at airport / choosing interview suit / pet-sitting / cooking for a dinner party. Favors are just the help friends give friends, and I’m going to be asked to provide help that falls into my skill set.
LikeLike
We used to know how to change tires — but with having AAA and reliable cars/tires, we haven’t had to do it in years. So when our rental blew a tire in Ohio, on way to airport, we TRIED to change it — everything is different now.
Fortunately young man pulled over and changed it in five minutes. We gave him what money we had $20 or $50, I don’t remember with “Buy yourself some beer or dinner or something.”
LikeLike
The only time I called for help in changing a tire was when I discovered that my new car (new to me) had “locking hubcaps”. I couldn’t get to the tire nuts. Very Very Annoying.
LikeLike
We didn’t know where to put the jack. We’d never had to change a car with fiberglass body. And yes, the hubcaps were weird. We were baffled. It never occurred to us before that things had changed so much we didn’t know how to change tires.
LikeLike
Oh yea– I don’t know if I could change a tire anymore (locking hubcaps and fiberglass body), but the hubby keeps a good eye on the tires and we had to change two tires on our last trip (we went to a tire place, lol)
LikeLike
Isn’t the idea that the newest cars don’t even necessarily have a spare tire, or if they do it’s some sort of flimsy affair which is supposed to only get you to the nearest garage? Instead they are supposed to have something like a system which sprays some stuff inside the damaged tire to seal it and then gets air there too, or something like that.
Well, not my headache. The only time I’m likely to drive anything new is if I rent one for a day or two. Otherwise I will presumably have to stick to ones which are at least a decade old right now. Those ones are usually still somewhat comprehensible.
LikeLike
The problem with “space-saver” spares is not simply they are only intended to get you to the tire store. The space they occupy in the trunk is not enough for the full-size tire, leaving you with an inconvenient lump where it fails to set into the tire well in the trunk. This is commonly discovered when your trunk is filled to capacity.
The problem with the patch & refill cans is they don’t always fully inflate the tire. The reinflation cans can be expensive, especially if they don’t.
LikeLike
You mean not everybody carries a 12 V air compressor?
Weird.
LikeLike
“You mean not everybody carries a 12 V air compressor?
Weird.”
Yes, they can be bought at Wal-Mart for under $15, the first time you go to change a tire and your spare is flat, you will consider that money very well spent.
LikeLike
Oh my — y’all realize it was just a quick and easy joke exposing different approaches, right?
It probably has more to do with unresolved Daddy issues than anything else. It might be interesting to graph upticks in “feminism” with acceptance of paternal abandonment acceptability.
LikeLike
Oh my — y’all realize it was just a quick and easy joke exposing different approaches, right?
And that would stop us–alright, at least me– from nuking it WHY?
Taking jokes far too seriously is a major source of amusement for me. Also puns.
LikeLike
Obviously you’re not alone, there. :)
LikeLike
Not sure exactly what you’re getting at, but I suspect you’re looking for the bathtub curve.
LikeLike
I think all here endorse the belle curve. All the ladies should embody it and the men should stand erect and salute
LikeLike
part of them at least.
LikeLike
Curve, singular?
LikeLike
If only one curve it is no belle.
LikeLike
Wait, wait, now I understand why the No Belle prize has gone downhill in recent years… they’ve been grading on a curve!
LikeLike
curve, collective.
LikeLike
I’ve been known to state that I like women with curves, not a curve.
LikeLike
yes.
LikeLike
Sigh – I went round and round in one of my writer discussion groups about this. It got very ugly, to the point where I really wondered about the writer who was screeching about how wymn were oppressed! Oppressed and third-class citizens without any political or economic rights, I tell you, until the very year that women had the right to vote in federal elections!!!111!!!
Never mind a number of examples that I brought up, off the top of my head, of 19th century women who were entrepreneurs and did very well in a number of different careers … she segued into a rant about women being beaten and mistreated in some second-world hellhole that she was supposedly brought up in.
That’s the party line, and she was sticking to it. Any disagreement was further oppression and denial!111!!!
The thing that I noticed over twenty years in the military was that there were people who were good at things, and there were people who were not good at things. Men tended to be good at some things and women tended to be good at sometimes at other things – but it wasn’t absolute. There were outliers a-plenty. Why anyone has to have a major cow over this and start screeching oppression or sexism is a mystery to me.
LikeLike
They make their living by screeching, they are completely brainwashed, they are dumb as a slug, they are batshit insane. Any one , combination or all of these situations explains these people.
LikeLike
Let’s see. The woman who is recognized as the first female self-made millionaire in America was also the first in her family to born free in America. Sigh. All done before the ‘liberation’. None of that stopped her from building a very successful business or from training others how to build their own businesses. But I guess Madam C. J. Walker does not count.
You hear big talk about celebrating wymyn’s success, but forbid it isn’t under thier regime.
LikeLike
She also made her living selling cosmetics. And what’s worse, cosmetics to make blacks look less white.
And still worse, she allowed women to become independent as saleswomen. Women should become independent on welfare, so they will vote as they are told.
LikeLike
There’s a bit, “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy” that’s been making the rounds – you can read it here – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html or not.
I found it .. interesting, and germane. Many of those “Gen Y Yuppies” are, in fact, women, and are much *much* happier to blame “men” for the lack of rainbow-vomiting-unicorn topped careers (read it and you’ll see) rather than blaming the true problem source .. their *completely* unrealistic expectations.
Men, on the other paw – even the Gen Y versions – have learned that our – as a gender – lot in life is “quiet desperation”.
Mew
LikeLike
Hey Mija, do you have extra Male Privilege that you could send me? I didn’t seem to get any. [Very Big Evil Grin]
LikeLike
When you make yourself into a victim, you are making yourself unhappy. And who the heck wants to either hire or marry a bitter, unhappy, angry prisoner of their own belief system?
LikeLike
After being accused of having “Male Privilege” and not seeing my self as being Privileged (or a victim), I’d like to see what this “Privilege” is like. [Wink]
LikeLike
“Male privilege”, like “white privilege”, consists of not having had to undergo the alleged victim experiences that all other classes (i.e., women or non-whites) allegedly had to undergo. Which means that when you start using pointing out, with reason and logic (hiss! spit!) examples of how the alleged victim classes aren’t as victimized as had been previously alleged, the allegation of “male privilege” is a convenient way to silence you, because it says that since you didn’t experience said alleged victimhood, you (being a mere man and therefore devoid of any capacity for empathy or imagination) cannot understand what it was like. In other words, your own experience of not being oppressed is, allegedly, not the norm that you think it is. Or, to put it another way, facts and reason don’t matter; only experience matters. And if you have the “wrong” experience, we’ll brow-beat you until you admit that your experience doesn’t matter after all; only the experience that we tell you about matters. (Evidence? Why should we need to produce evidence? We’re the ones who are compassionate and caring and nice, unlike you dirty rotten scum.)
LikeLike
Oh, boy, you just hit a button. Not, “white privilege” or “male privilege”, but “alleged victim experiences that all other classes (i.e., women or non-whites) allegedly had to undergo”.
Wife was watching Survivor tonight, and for the umpteenth time, one of the gay contestants was telling his sob-story, broke down crying, and I nearly lost my s***. I am so sick of every single homosexual on these “reality” TV shows being such a big victim. Naturally, I know these things happen, but most of the gays I know haven’t had much of a bad time since they got out of middle school, where calling someone gay is still an insult. I just want to find the people who do the selections for these shows and beat their heads against a wall.
/Rant Off
LikeLike
You have hit on one reason I post under a nom du cyber that is intentionally non-revelatory of my gender or melanin count. Anybody makes an assumption about either of those and I hit them with the “you are making assumptions based on your own prejudices” card.
Besides, until the operation I was neither white nor male.
Because on the internet nobody can tell you’re a dog.
LikeLike
With my first name, people who guess my gender without knowing me are about 60% likely to get it wrong. The fact that I chose a gravatar that’s based on a pun instead of representing my face doesn’t help people guess. So when it’s actually relevant to the topic in discussion, I usually have to specify.
I don’t usually enjoy baiting people into making assumptions (I tend to wince rather than laugh when I come across stupidity), so I don’t tend to play it up. But if I were the type who enjoyed making fun of stupidity, I would have a pretty easy time doing that “you’re making assumptions” shtick.
LikeLike
It worked for me for a while, which is one of the reasons I went with an initial. (The other is that my first name is long enough to make a typo inevitable sooner or later, and it would be very embarrassing to misspell my own first name.)
LikeLike
Is that you, Rumpelstiltskin? :-P
LikeLike
*squeeks up* I thought you were female for at least a month, probably longer– One being the name, two being the lack of your own picture.
Meanwhile, even after picking as girly a pic as I can– she’s got BOOBS!!!!– I still get folks telling me that, as a man, I can’t __________.
LikeLike
Your full gravatar pic may have boobs, but it’s impossible to tell from the head-and-shoulders crop that shows up here. On the other hand, the pic’s hairstyle is girly enough that I always “read” you as female, as you intended.
LikeLike
She has two gravatars, the other is a profile view of the same ‘character’ why wordpress changes gravitars for certain people I have no idea.
LikeLike
Re: WordPress changing gravatars for some people, it may be because of the email address the person entered. Gravatar (the site) lets you register one gravatar (the image) per email address you have on file with them. So if I used my rmunn@(something).com address for one comment, and my Robin.Munn@(something else).com address for another comment, I could display two different avatars for those two comments.
LikeLike
how well I remember the troll telling me I talked that way because I couldn’t find a woman willing to reproduce with me.
LikeLike
Well, can you? :-)
LikeLike
No, I can’t either. Also, it would take a lab. And science we don’t have.
LikeLike
Were you using this name?
I’ve had that said to me while I was using a female name. I also got called a sick gay guy… while using a female name. (Mind is boggled.)
LikeLike
I confess to a significant incapacity for remembering who around here is male and who is female. Almost on a par with my indifference. Last I noticed neither facts nor logic had aught to do with the personal plumbing of the person arguing them.
Personal experience has some evidentiary value, but given the willingness of people to make things up and assert non-demonstrable claims (“When I was in the trenches of Verdun I learned that the commanding officers could be relied upon to do the stupidest thing possible) I am disinclined to give much weight to unverifiable assertions.
Those with the leisure and inclination might well be amused by Larry Correia’s recent exploration of the topic in last night’s The Internet Arguing Checklist. Might be worth turning into a Bingo! game.
LikeLike
This is such a weird argument, since liberal scholars claim you can’t tell whether someone is male or female by the way they write – and what other information could they possibly be going on? Unless they are assuming anyone conservative is male – and that’s just bigotry of a different kind.
LikeLike
Larry’s list would make a great Bingo! card. Maybe that could be a topic for a semi-open thread day, Sarah: what squares to go on such a card, and what prizes for calling Bingo. (A year’s worth of opprobrium from Mother Jones? The troll’s overdrawn race card, suitably framed?)
Yeah, I’m in a silly mood. Two stories just broke open as did The Dreaded Sequel, and the weather is cold at long last. And we got over an inch of rain yesterday.
LikeLike
Tomorrow I have a proposal for this disreputable group of rogues.
LikeLike
A “Modest” Proposal?
*chuckle*
LikeLike
As a buddy of mine once told a beggar “Dude, when I starting getting checks from The Man I’ll share it with you. Until then I work for a living and so can you”.
LikeLike
Sorry, Drak, fresh out.
Mew
LikeLike
Yes I thought of that article too.
A big part of the problem is that the eddication establishment and the hollyweird crowd sneer at pretty much any productive career and this sneer gets taught to the kiddies. For example I’ve met a bunch of perfectly nice Gen Yers whose entire life plan was go to college and work at a non-profit. Working at a ‘for profit’ business in any capacity was verboten, though public service (i.e. working for the government) was an acceptable alternative. Furthermore if you asked them what they would do at their ‘non-profit’ they had little or no idea. And god forbid if you asked them how much they should expect to receive in salary and how far that would stretch in terms of the lifestyle their parents had let them become accustomed to. In fact they got all snotty when I suggested their
Many of these kids have now grown up, graduated, failed to find their dream non-profit job and settled down to perfectly decent ‘for profit’ jobs but many of them still seem to feel that they have failed by selling out to capitalism.
Being taught budgeting, and being exposed to trades – from metal bashing to nail polishing – would be far more beneficial for the children concerned and society at large.
LikeLike
Yes. My kids tell me the same thing. They all want to work for “a non profit.”
LikeLike
Well, the marginal firm makes zero economic profit. You should ask your kids why they’re so interested in working for someone on the brink of failure.
LikeLike
Speaking from experience: no they don’t. They really don’t. Nonprofits are often equally as commercial as for-profit companies, but you don’t get the benefits of profit-sharing, good bonuses for good work, holiday bonuses, or healthy advancement opportunity. In fact, because nonprofits are so beholden to generous donors, the donors often get their kids hired on in good positions – squeezing out experienced and talented personnel.
Besides, those who work for nonprofits find out all their dirty secrets. I lost one job because I was pursuing a case where multiple clients of mine had accused another employee of sexually harassing them – these were vulnerable welfare-to-work people, good women in a tough position who were uniquely weak compared to him (after all, a bad report from him and they could find themselves out of the educational program or with a low recommendation to take to employers later). At United Way, I found out that when you earmark your donations to go to a specific charity, they subtract an equal amount from the total they would normally give to that charity. In other words, only if earmarked donations totalled more than the total amount United Way normally sent to that charity would your earmark make any difference at all.
Tell them that, unless there’s a charity they’ve worked for that they already love, THEY DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS.
LikeLike
Ok, I’m not sure if I misunderstood what Sarah meant, or you two did, since she didn’t respond to Jeff’s comment above. I took her comment as meaning that her sons are telling her that their friends (or other students they know) are telling them that they want to work at non-profits, rather than her sons telling her that they want to.
LikeLike
Yes. Their friends, NOT my sons. My sons want to do “real” stuff. Well, Robert might end up being “non profit” if he does become a doctor under the mess known as Obamacare — but what he wants to do is heal people, particularly brain issues. It’s a vocation, like my writing. It’s not the pay, he needs to do it to be whole. (I know the symptoms.) Younger son wants to “throw things at Mars” and maybe move there, if it’s ever possible. Not.My.Fault. I knew I was in trouble when the Heinlein juveniles interested him MOSTLY for the engineering, and he loved REALLY HARD science fiction.
LikeLike
Now those are some cool goals. A rocket scientist and a brain surgeon?
LikeLike
One can look forward to the family arguments of the future:
“It’s not like it’s rocket science.”
“You’re no brain surgeon.”
LikeLike
Well, I got younger son a rocket surgeon t-shirt…
LikeLike
That’s what they want to do. Whether Robert can navigate admission procedures is something else again.
LikeLike
Oops, yes, I did – but the info still stands. NO kid should have as a goal “going into nonprofit work.” It’s as useful as the goal “going into politics.” Well, for what purpose? What are you trying to accomplish? If you don’t have some specific purpose or heart’s desire beyond helping people/power, you are going into it for the wrong reason.
LikeLike
I completely agree. I was just trying to get clarification on where that sentiment was supposed to be targeted (first wrote, “tarted”, which creates a very strange visual: sentiment, all tarted up and heading downtown… :-) ).
LikeLike
I don’t know if the question was about my anti-non profit rant, although I think my disdain for such institutions sufficiently broad as to have been clearly not targeting any individual(s).
The clear question one should ALWAYS ask about ANY not-for-profit or charity is “How efficient are they?” It is one thing to have a flow-through of better than 90% (over ninety cents of every dollar donated is applied to the ostensible benefits the organization purports to deliver) and another thing entirely to have an efficiency rate of less than 10%. Far too many celebrity “foundations” exist primarily to promote the celebrity, enhance their reputation and pay for lavish “fund-raising” parties with most of the funds raised going to pay for the party.
Equally important is the agenda of the not-for-profit. I suspect most of us would be less likely to endorse as meritorious a foundation that sought to place federal bureaucrats in charge of land development nationwide, yet that could be argued as a primary control of the Sierra Club. Equally, while many of us disapprove of Planned Parenthood many more of us would disapprove of an organization with the express goal of cleansing the Earth of racially inferior humans by limiting their reproduction. It also makes a difference if you view the Boy Scouts of America as providing a healthy environment for boys to develop resourcefulness, resilience, tenacity and good character or as an exclusionary organization dedicated to preserving ancient outmoded prejudices against gays and atheists.
Many (most?) non profit organizations present classic “If by whiskey” challenges and the fact they are non profit makes hiding their true agendas much easier. For example, look at recent and ongoing issues surrounding awarding of tax-exempt status to politically active organizations. (BTW – since Progs are big advocates of higher taxes, doesn’t ideological consistency* demand they refuse tax-exempt status?)
*Stipulated that applying a standard of ideological consistency against Progressive groups misunderstands the whole point of their existence in much the way that thinking their “war on women” rhetoric requires they not personally assault or harass women fails to recognize that Progressives want to assert for women rights which they are not personally bound to respect, while Conservatives wish to personally respect women without granting them extraordinary privileges.
LikeLike
I’m afraid my experiences with non-profits is that the bulk of them rely upon virtually slave labor – underpaid rank and file – with overpaid upper executives. The majority of non-profits are daily committing some form of FLSA violation in how they treat employees.
LikeLike
I got a first rate inside view of The American Cancer Society about 1990 shortly after the move from Manhattan to across the street from the CDC.
Much of the paid staff was there because of family involvement with cancer and otherwise driven by the purposes of the organization so that Pournelle’s iron law was delayed – though not denied. Paid staff had often started as volunteer at the state and local level. The organization really did and does do a great deal of good in many ways that only a nationally recognized group can do. FREX Diet experiments were often controlled by matching groups in the armed forces without especially asking for individual volunteers to do their bit.
Given that a high proportion of the paid staff likely carried cancer genes it’s no surprise that medical benefits, and some other expenses, cost way over national averages. Probably an element of sophisticated users there as well.
Most waste showed up as X-inefficiency to the tune of thousands of dollars a week. Examples for the asking. Everybody’s money is nobody’s money. Although like Boeing spending no government money on liquor at the American Cancer Society no donor money was ever spent on liquor.
LikeLike
I know this — but tons of children of boomers do…
LikeLike
Note that they do not specify more precisely than “non profit.”
LikeLike
Note also that they all expect to make a profit, while working for this theoretical “non profit.”
LikeLike
What they generally ignore is that non profit does not mean cheaper, more efficient or nobler — it merely means they don’t have any responsibilities to shareholders. Shareholders who might say things like “we are sure your work in generating electric power from potatoes is promising, but we have widows and orphans to support and need to produce some income.” Or even something like “the proposed marble flooring is lovely, as is the wainscoting in the office areas, but until this place starts producing something we can sell you’re going to have to live in cubicle farms.”
Mind you, for those at the top of a non-profit, such as United Way, the rewards can be both non-financial and lucrative. While paying a salary of only $250,000 a year (cheap for somebody running a charity so far-reaching) the non profit might also provide luxury condominiums in NY, Boston, San Francisco, DC, London, Paris, Brussels and Riyadh — in order for the president to properly meet with supporters, heads of state and, of course, hold fundraisers. Furnished condos, with First class travel expenses paid by the non profit. There might also be separate budgets for entertaining (guests must be plied with the sort of food and drink to which they are accustomed, nyet?), cleaning & maintenance, limousines & drivers, clothing (can’t have the non profit’s president looking shabby) and, of course, a daily stipend (not taxable as income) for such mundane matters as meals while travelling, tips and incidentals.
LikeLike
only $250k? when i was homeless, he was making $800k/yr
LikeLike
Nonprofits have “stakeholders,” which includes anyone the nonprofit touches including politicians (“community leaders”). This gives them an excuse to lobby the hell out of elected officials and basically ignore anyone else – after all, you must dip into the crass in order to support your mission.
BTW, I really loved one nonprofit I worked for, Goodwill Industries of Kentucky, and found them to be totally aboveboard and moral. That was because of their top officers – who were as straight and honest as they could possibly be. Few nonprofits, especially well-established ones, are blessed with this sort of leadership.
LikeLike
And don’t tell theme these ‘non profits’ are corporations, their little heads will explode.
LikeLike
The ranters (with apologies to the Ranters of English history) seem to forget how many women used their “separate sphere” as a launching pad. Women who wanted to clean up their cities and improve sanitation, for example, began by arguing that the neighborhood served as an extension of their homes, and referred to the movement to clean up and improve the city as “urban housekeeping.” And then who would want their children eating and drinking bad food and water? No one, so women organized to work for better municipal water supplies and sewage services. After all, children’s health and well-being depended on their mothers’ care and concern. Men served as the women’s representatives and eventually male engineers and other experts got involved, but women started a lot of the push in the US. And that’s just the example I know in the most detail.
LikeLike
This clears up a rather muddled pool of ideas I’ve had for a quite a while. Modern “feminism” looks real confusing when I compare it to personal experience. Smart women, and the women in my family have been quite intelligent in the main, realize what power they have. It isn’t physical strength that matters in most situations. Really, if the relationship becomes a constant contest of strength, it has ceased to be meaningful to both parties long since.
It isn’t even about sex, despite how wonderful and great really good sex is. It is trust, shared effort, and respect- these things are the marks of a good relationship. I remember years ago when one of those modern feminist wymyn started running her yap on tv about how oppressed she was, my mother snorted and said “That woman doesn’t know how to be a lady.” I’ve learned this to mean a lady knows how to get what she wants most of the time, and doesn’t abuse that by manipulating a man over trivial things.
Granted, there are men who don’t know how to be gentlemen, either. There is quite a lot of disfunctionality on both sides. A man who disrespects women might get laid, but will miss out on the gentleness and strength that a lady can offer him when she stands at his side. A great relationship is complimentary. Equality is a rather meaningless concept when each person lives for the other.
LikeLike
“The machine shop guys *loved* me”
Hell, Sabrina, after reading what you wrote, even I had stirrings… or maybe it was just gas. At my age, it’s difficult to tell the difference.
LikeLike
“It isn’t even about sex, despite how wonderful and great really good sex is.”
Hmph. That’s not how I remember it. To (mis)quote the Duke of Wellington on the topic: “The position is ridiculous, the pleasure momentary and the expense damnable.” That’s more how I recall it.
LikeLike
*chuckle* This is why I took care to specify *good* sex. Even bad sex can be good if you can have a good laugh over it and enjoy the other person’s company. With the right person, it is well worth practicing, often, to make sure it’s good. *grin*
LikeLike
Wellington was a notorious ladies man. For all his complaining.
LikeLike
Well that follows, doesn’t it? If the pleasure is fleeting, then the only solution is to make it up in volume.
LikeLike
It appears that he did.
LikeLike
Modern feminism is incoherent. I have actually heard people say that you can’t reject for a certain view, because it’s so “diverse.”
Are women as aggressive as men? Are you asking whether they should do as well in business, or whether they can ever initiate domestic violence?
Do women belong with their children? Are you asking about whether they should pursue a career, or whether they should get custody — assuming they want it?
Are women responsible for anything in history? Are you apportioning blame or credit?
LikeLike
To keep hitting men and screaming “help, help, I’m being oppressed” is not only wrong, it’s a very ungentleman-like trick for people who want to be considered “equal.”And if you want to be equal you should be a gentleman, because those are the virtues for public life.
Yes. One of the down sides of the ‘We’re not different’ set’s taking over the pedagogy, discarding the idea of ladies and the general public behavior they display has been to throughly discourage anyone who is not well self-grounded (these days this usually means an ODD) from being a gentlemen.
LikeLike
The other day, I said something in one of my classes, whereupon some twerp (male) said, “That’s quite offensive.”
My response: “Boo-f*cking hoo.”
Best part was that it was the girls in the class who laughed the hardest at him. Of course, the college is in north Texas, which may explain things.
LikeLike
If I could stick up for this poor fellow… *possibly* he’s hyper sensitive to what is offensive and what is not because (like a 5 year old) he’s desperately trying to learn the rules of how the world works so that he doesn’t get in trouble and (like a 5 year old) is bound to notice and complain when someone else doesn’t follow those rules he’s finally figured out.
;-)
LikeLike
Clearly this poor fellow already had a stick up his ahem.
What is “offensive” is, of course, subjective, a matter or preference and culture and well-bred people do not seek to impose the values of their culture upon others, not hold them to those strictures. It is only by learning to tolerate the (airquote)offensive(airquote) values held by others that we can achieve true diversity and true enlightenment. That beneficiary of male privilege had no business assuming the prerogative of defining for others what is or is not (airquote)offensive(airquote).
LikeLike
People say women were property like that is a bad thing. Have you seen the care some guys lavish on their cars? Or how some women tend their houses? If wives were property they could have sold them when they got run down, if only to the knacker. As was, sure, they could abandon them but women abandoned husbands, too.
By and large most modern feminists are so stupid they would be better off property. It ain’t as if a woman has to work very hard at managing her man unless she is in utter denial about human nature.
:-P
LikeLike
All relationship language is possessive language. People get all torqued if you say things implying that your children are *your* children, too. But it’s everything, *my* parents, *my* children, *my* husband, my grandparents, my cousins… you get kicked out of the family and you get…(drumroll)… disowned. Ownership of family, something that goes beyond “hey, I like to hang out with you when I feel like it” is important. English maybe doesn’t have a good word for it, and I don’t know if other languages do, but it’s a level of permanent belonging that humans need for their psychological welfare and I think it’s downright *abusive* to deny it to people.
LikeLike
I agree with everything said but, the only offensive about being called property, is being considered a thing and not a person.
LikeLike
I always get kicked for saying this, but one of my basic tenants is that the main thing you own is yourself. It is being owned or being controlled by others that is offensive. Owning yourself is a great liberation, one that has been sought after in vain for millenia.
And by that I mean legally as in tribute, taxes, or chattel slavery. Someone mentions “being owned by your children” and I can only say stop conflating ideas and denigrating your own value in the raising of your family.
LikeLike
Tenets. No, seriously.
LikeLike
He was speaking of one of the tenants in his head.
LikeLike
Spelling is indeed important.
LikeLike
I was recalling the other day to a co-worker about the Gilbert and Sullivan character who had retired to the ruined chapel to brood over the remains of his ancestors. When questioned about this, since he had just bought the estate and no relative of his had ever been on the grounds, he responded that he bought the property with all items, buildings, and accoutrements, and by that purpose the bones of the inhabitants of the crypts were as much his as any rock or tree.
LikeLike
“Frederic, in this chapel are ancestors: you cannot deny that. With the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don’t know whose ancestors they *were*, but I know whose ancestors they *are*, and I shudder to think that their descendent by purchase (if I may so inscribe myself) should have brought disgrace upon what, I have no doubt, was an unstained escutcheon.”
LikeLike
I read a discussion about rape in historical romance that pointed out that rape has always carried severe penalties for the obvious reason that if nothing else, it damaged valuable property.
LikeLike
There’s a lot of people seeing what they want to see too (re: discrimination/favoritism/whatever gets the lovies shrieking). Case in point. My thesis advisor thought it terribly clever to send me (only female grad student in the lab) to the machine shop when we had a crucial thingamajig to be made in a hurry. Now, in his defense, the thingamajig got made fast, but not because I am female. Nope. Because I had taken technical drawing in high school and knew how to do a machinist’s diagram, complete with milling specs and dimensions, so they could set up and get it done without asking a million questions first. The machine shop guys *loved* me, just not…that way. My advisor simply could not comprehend this. Had to be because I was female. Sigh.
LikeLike
“The machine shop guys *loved* me”
Hell, Sabrina, after reading what you wrote, even I had stirrings… or maybe it was just gas. At my age, it’s difficult to tell the difference.
LikeLike
Snerk. May all your internal rumblings be pleasant ones ;-)
The admiration was mutual, by the way. We had a very good working relationship, for one thing because I was respectful of their skill (I never look down on good craftsmen!) Anyone who can mill mini nylon pressure gaskets is awesome. I can do basic machining, milling, lathe work etc. but I’m not going to be doing .0001″ tolerance Acme threads in aluminum any time soon. And they would listen when I explained that yes, I knew beryllium copper was a right b!tch to machine but I had valid experimental reasons for specifying it so sorry, could not substitute brass.
Also, there had been an interesting changing of the guard while I was there. The *old* machine shop head had been a bit of a goat, at least in the sense of having posters of Vargas-style girls “riding” giant wrenches and whatnot (I even ran across a full nude poster in a corner of the shop). I appreciate vintage art, but it was a bit startling in a work setting ;-) .
When he retired and the new guy took over, that all went away. New guy had a swimsuit calendar in the lid of his toolbox, but you had to go all the way inside the shop and stand behind HIS bench to see it. I had no problem with that at all (they weren’t very high coverage bikinis, but at least the poor girls had SOME clothes on!) As far as I know nobody had complained about the Vargas girls (I certainly hadn’t) and it was nice not to suddenly come across some pneumatic beauty in the tool cupboard. A pleasant example of mutual consideration and non-shrieking working out.
LikeLike
When I worked in the hangar, I left the seat up and the gents switched to bikini babes from Page Three pictures. We were all happy. Until I discovered that I could fit into the h-ll hole of several airplanes and still had enough room to move things or work a bucking bar. The joys of being small, young(er), and limber.
LikeLike
I love it when you talk dirty…
LikeLike
It was the aluminum Acme threads, wasn’t it? Yeah, cutting fluid is pretty grimy ;-) I’d make suggestive comments about 312 vs 314 stainless formulas, but Sarah would tell us to get a room…
LikeLike
beryllium copper for me
LikeLike
Men in the Middle Ages cried manly tears when they needed to. Nobody who swings a broadsword for a living has to prove he’s masculine.
Of course, in the Middle Ages the English were notorious for greeting each other, male and female, with big kisses, for drinking wine, and for being generally emotional. Things change.
LikeLike
Funny, that. As boys, we learned that crying revealed weakness, hence it was to be avoided. Of course, this was in an all-male boarding school, so that was probably why. I still don’t like showing emotion to strangers; family is another thing altogether.
LikeLike
But isn’t that a cultural gender thing. That is another bug-a-boo I have. The people who seem to think that the culture they know is the culture that is. If you come from some areas of New England you would grow up learning that adults of all stripes don’t cry in public except under the most unusual of circumstances.
LikeLike
If you’ve developed a new joint in a major appendage, or the cut is deep enough that you can see internal organs, you can cry.
Second or third degree burns are also an acceptable reason for tears, if the coverage is sufficient.
Otherwise don’t go out in public.
LikeLike
To be sure, one did expect an appropriate occasion for such tears. One’s lord died, or one witnessed a miracle of healing. . . .
The sentimental era, on the other hand, regarded easy tears, male or female, as a sign of exquisite sensibility. So there’s variation in that.
LikeLike
The US military has re-designed many “physical” jobs so that women are eligible. My son worked in Air Force base operations where both genders performed duties moving cargo, etc. Intrestingly, the men outnumbered the women who chose this duty, and after the few women got a taste, most of them got pregnant or claimed “injury” or used sexual wiles to get one of the rare inside jobs. The shifts were 7 to 7, 4 days on, two off. Pretty demanding physically. By the women not performing their share of work, more fell onto the men. They asked for a meeting with the captain, and asked him to get more workers who worked according to schedule, and he insisted the girls were performing their share (political correctness turned him into a liar, and the guys lost total respect for the captain).
Just saying.
LikeLike
I really wish reality would give those “wymen” a smack down.
LikeLike
It does. They just don’t see it.
LikeLike
1. Some “activists” are mistaken. Others are crazy. Others are out for power and view decency, fairness, and open-mindedness as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
2. A lot less of this dangerous nonsense would be going on if the emphasis were on treating people as individuals first. Since that can’t be done perfectly under all conditions, it doesn’t appeal to utopians who espouse ideal solutions no matter how horrendous in practice.
3. Sooo, Sarah…what are your thoughts about racial differences?
ducks
LikeLike
What division of people into races are you talking about? The topic has been fluid throughout the last century.
LikeLike
I don’t know enough to answer your question. This is the kind of thing I’m alluding to.
LikeLike
Or this.
LikeLike
This too.
I’m joshing that if our hostess is going to be damned for a sapling, she might as well get damned for the whole forest.
Also, it’s worth noting that the Chinese are going full steam ahead on research into human genetics.
LikeLike
Ah, well — the Chinese consider human beings a renewable resource to be developed and exploited, same as ducks, chickens, pigs and dogs.
LikeLike
So do most of our political elites, they just don’t put it like that.
LikeLike
Interesting to remember how party line infects all issues.
One of the women in her 15 minutes of fame, inter alia an author touting a book on a talk show out of Philadelphia but mostly an academic, has it imbedded in her belief system as part of the feminist agenda that child care by rights is a public good to be provided by the central authorities.
That is no woman is liberated until she can at least by choice have her children cared for by the state so the mother can express herself and also so mothers as a class reach wage parity and beyond with folks not on the mommy.
Given such beliefs the party line – so long as such endures as the party line of a significant party – will demand what a neutral observer if such there might be will see as a drastic overreaction.
My point is not to express an opinion on such belief though I do have an opinion. My point is more that this party line is a tyranny over the minds of men leading to a totalitarian approach when dealing with others. Followed by a suggestion that so is any party line – Larry Smith was doubtless right to cross a party line when “this bill must pass” and a RINO is not but still freedom of thought should come first.
Frex this group will invariable piñata any favorable mention of of Marxism. When I was in involved in economics in the 1970’s somebody observed that the neoclassical synthesis (after Samuelson’s Elements….. mostly would as expressed in regression terms
(all we could do in those benighted days at least with our computer accounts that kicked us off the mainframe after 2 minutes – the U of Chicago Computer Center had a big warning sign to the effect that if we catch you trying to invert a large matrix we’ll take privileges away – it wastes resources to no good end and the results are meaningless with normal precision anyway. It all changed very quickly with the ability to compute large Markov Chains but there is still some of Dr. Pournelle’s voodoo and over reaching)
have an r squared value of maybe .65 to .85 in explaining economic variability. Marxism would have an r squared value of maybe .2 at best – that is explain very little and not predict as well as flipping a coin but still there was some explanatory power in Marxism not captured in the neoclassical synthesis and of course vice versa as never the twain shall meet. Still with party lines drawn and fear of something close to cognitive dissonance there is so little room for discussion.
LikeLike
I read about a demand for free, 24-hour-a-day daycare in the 60s. To which I immediately thought, “We’ve got that. It’s called ‘placing the baby for adoption.'” But, of course, they wanted a form that did not infringe on their rights, just relieve them of all responsibility
LikeLike
Is this Greek to anybody else? I’m not sure what you are saying, so can’t say as I agree or disagree, but childcare (free or otherwise) is NOT A RIGHT!
LikeLike
I thought it rather incoherent, but did not want to say anything for fear of getting an additional dozen paragraphs in explanation.
LikeLike
Not to mention a back-handed remark regarding perceived closed-mindedness couched in mathematical terms and without good tag hygiene Frex, I think that it might have been more obvious to the readers what Clark was trying to do with the paragraph in parentheses with a blockquote tag, but that’s just me.
I’m no statistician, but I am a thinker, and it occurs to me that if anything does deserve a good pinata thwack, it might be the favorable mention of Marxism. Admittedly, even a perceived favorable mention of equality of outcome will bring out the sharp elbows here, and I’ve felt them m’self, but I suppose that might have something to do with the familiarity of the subject with certain regular commenters and our dear Hostess, who have had up close and personal experience of the effects of increasing socialism leading towards communism.
I suppose it might also have something to do with millions and millions of dead killed by those who at least claim to ascribe to Marxist philosophies. For some reason, the people here get a bit tetchy about that.
I even suppose it might have something to do with your own statement above regarding Marxism being able to predict things less well than the random chance of a coin flip.
So, no – I wouldn’t say it was cognitive dissonance so much as reason and logic, but, again, I’m no statistician.
LikeLike
That, and he had created a sort of Kafkatrap in that any explanations for why Marxism is so readily rejected here (being a little Marxist is like being slightly pregnant; some Marxism in an economy is like some arsenic in the water supply — a small dosage may be tolerable initially but eventually you reach a critical dosage; Marxism in an economy is like crack in a body because no matter how much you say you can control your habit it eventually controls you; Marxism in an economy is like metaphors in an argument: eventually somebody gets beaten to death) would be cited as proof of his accusation.
It is mindful of defenses of Velikovsky’s theories on the basis of his correctly predicting the atmosphere on Venus — just because Marxism provides some tools for economic analysis that doesn’t make it fundamentally invalid and prone to lead people astray.
LikeLike
In other words “even a broken (analog) clock is right twice a day”.
LikeLike
Anything they want, including slaves, is a right to them.
LikeLike
Most women did work at home, once agriculture (rather than horticulture) got started. They did not have the brute strength for the plowing, and so they did the stuff like the textile work, and food preparation, and soap-making, etc. for which the home and the workshop were identically. Men who did not work in the fields also worked at home; a blacksmith or a miller would not have a home separate from the smithy or mill.
LikeLike
Yes, of course — sorry, it was early. I should have defined “worked for profit” versus “homemaking.”
LikeLike
At which point I pile on higher by pointing out that most women — and men — worked for their own consumption, not sale. 0:)
LikeLike
Sort of. Trade has been going on for very long and in my experience even subsistence farmers did something “for trade.”
LikeLike
“They did not have the brute strength for the plowing,” I’m not saying that men didn’t get those jobs first, but plenty of farm women do heavy stuff too and build those muscles up over time. My dad tells about hauling some heavy speakers into the church and I think they’d set them down half-way there and one old lady asked if they were heavy. Dad says, probably about 70 pounds. She goes, huh, picks one up, one handed in a straight arm lift, sets it down and says, “Yup, about that.”
Her husband may have been doing the plowing, but she spent most of her life lifting milk cans.
LikeLike
Brute force isn’t just strength– to plow, you need to be able to throw your weight on and hold it there.
LikeLike
And there’s a big difference between plowing with a metal plowshare and horsecollared horses/oxen, and plowing with wood or a big pointy stick.
LikeLike
I am soooo happy to live in a country where men are allowed to be men, women are allowed to be women, and each sex thinks that’s just Jim Dandy!
LikeLike
How are things in Antarctica?
LikeLike
I was going to post something witty premised on the recent cooling of the Antarctic ice sheets and the resulting effect on mating interactions of research scientists. Then I recalled some of the stories I’ve heard about the …energetic shenanigans? naked fifty-below-zero tomfooleries?… that transpire at the south pole station among the stay-over teams during the long dark during southern winter, and I realized that the folks involved do apparently appreciate the differences just fine. So nevermind.
LikeLike
Well according to someone I knew who worked at the British antarctic survey “everyone down there (Antarctica) is either a wanker or a liar”
LikeLike
I’ve some acquaintances who have worked down there. Can’t argue with yours.
LikeLike
I would only object to the unexamined assumptions behind “men are stronger than women.” In what sense? In terms of sheer muscle power, i.e. how much you can bench press, that is true.
But so what? It has been a very long time since human activities rested on the mere unassissted muscle strength of individuals. Even the Egyptians used levers, inclined planes, and the efforts of massed individuals. That completely negates the importance of individual muscle strength. If you need women to pull a 2-ton block up to the pyramid, you may need to use more women, or a more gentle ramp, but those are just engineering details. They would certainly not be a reason to segregate the sexes by job classification.
However what does matter is that the sexes are different. Different strength, yes, but also different height, different ratio of leg length to arm length, different flexibilities, different refractory periods after muscular effort. When you design machines to assist bare human strength, you need to assume a “standard” human. You can’t really be always designing two different machines, one for your male workers, one for your female. That’s insanely inefficient. So the more salient reason for segregating the sexes by occupation is the value of having one set of tools. You can build a ship so that the average man can operate its ropes and oars, or the average woman, but designing one to operate with a mixed crew is much more expensive.
Futhermore, there are areas where women are “stronger” than men, and this has an effect, too. Women are generally better at enduring pain, boredom, or sustained low-level effort, such as walking a long time carrying a light but valuable burden (like a child), or doing some modest but repetitive and boring task over and over again, like picking berries or foraging. So…that’s what they do.
Men are “stronger” in certain psychological aspects, too: they are generally bolder (“more foolhardy” in female), quicker to take decisions, more ambitious. That makes them naturals for tribal tasks that involve high risk and/or low probability of success, like hunting large animals, going to war, deciding whether the tribe stays in the mountains during the summer or follows the game down to the plain (where the predators live).
And, of course, women are “stronger” in tasks that require patience and empathy, like tending the sick, teaching children, cataloguing the different kinds of roots and berries and which are poisonous.
Why women should object to all this is unknown to me, but I wonder sometimes if they really do. Leadership tends to be a male quality (just as preservation tends to be female), and I wonder sometimes whether the “women’s” movement of the 60s wasn’t actually a young man’s movement — to throw off the burdens on men of traditional sex roles, such as not being able to fuck girls you’ve no intention of marrying, or of having to support women and children before you’re considered grown up. Keep in mind this is the immediate post-war generation, and they must’ve had an earful from their fathers and mothers (the GG) about how important it was for them to man up and take responsibility. Maybe they just thought….ah fuggit. To hell with that. Let me convince the girls to put out and not expect me to be a gentleman and champion, and (tee hee) I’ll convince them it was all their idea, and the real point is to free them from the housework so they can go out and work 12 hours a day as an office drone and that’s so much better.
LikeLike
” It has been a very long time since human activities rested on the mere unassissted muscle strength of individuals. Even the Egyptians used levers, inclined planes, and the efforts of massed individuals. That completely negates the importance of individual muscle strength. If you need women to pull a 2-ton block up to the pyramid, you may need to use more women, or a more gentle ramp, but those are just engineering details. They would certainly not be a reason to segregate the sexes by job classification.”
Unless of course you were wanting to make a profit at your business, using more employees (slaves for the Egyptians) to do the same task, or reengineering and building more often larger (longer, more gentle ramp for example) tools all cut into your profits. If you are having to compete with Joe over there who has five guys who can do the same amount of manual labor in the same amount of time as your eight women employees (and without the expense of special tools) he is going to underbid you on every job. He can even underbid you while paying his men a higher wage than you are paying your women, because he has to pay less total workers.
Sorry I have worked manual labor most of my life, and I don’t care if you squat or stand to pee, but when I tell you to grab that and carry it over here, I expect you to be physically able to do so. The bottom line is most people that don’t do Manuel Labor regularly are incapable of doing so efficiently, regardless of sex. But a lot more men than women will be capable of doing so with practice. I will restate that I have absolutely no problem with hiring a woman, I have worked with some that could work 9 out of 10 men into the ground; but as has been stated repeatedly they are outliers. Every time you have to obtain and use an additional tool to compensate for a workers lower strength efficiency goes down and overhead goes up.
LikeLike
Good read. One thing kids need to understand is there is no such thing as a ‘non-profit.’ I took on a part-time job teaching DUI School for a non-profit. Tuition was $250, fine of 1K plus court costs, Insurance went up, the court also had them do some community service, 60 hours. Normal salary, 10 bucks an hour equals $600 equivalent the court received gratis. We figured it up to $2500 per Dui, Between 1 and 2 million DUI cases a year 2,500 Million to a half a billion dollars a year. The government makes a good buck through the ‘nonprofit’ scam. Other government programs do the same with tax dollars. The Red Cross takes blood, sells it to the hospital, who sell it to the patient. Most charities keep between 50-80% for ‘operating expenses’ ie salaries. In contrast- gas companies make a profit of approx. 4 cents a gallon of gas, the government 50 cents a gallon. Tell your kids to be ethical and go to work for a for-profit business. They’ll cheat the citizens less.
LikeLike
One thing kids need to understand is there is no such thing as a ‘non-profit.’
Egg-zactly.
The best non-profit is really just a public statement that a particular enterprise will never repay those who fronted them the operating capital they need to do their thing, no matter how much internal profit they generate, with the blessing and tax exemption of the current government, supposedly for a public good, but hey, as long as you vote the right way we’ll let everything slide.
The worst is a straight out scam, where the tax-exempt status is basically a cover for the pillaging of that same capital.
For stereotypical corporate-baron-type personalities, complete with everything save the twirling mustaches, but including the evil laugh, the worst I’ve ever met (and this includes politicians and lawyers) have been the high mucky-mucks at non-profits.
LikeLike
Take the HSUS (please… and do whatever you want with them, especially if it is painful and or lethal) for example. Technically a non-profit it doesn’t show a profit, what it does do is produce six and seven figure salaries for its high muckety-mucks. The main difference between the Board of Directors of most non-profits and the investors/owners of for profit businesses are the tax forms they fill out.
LikeLike
1) “Men couldn’t cry” — has this cretin ever read some of the post-battle accounts from the American Civil War, among others?
2) Speaking of the ACW, how’s this for “women were oppressed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Bickerdyke .
That’s right — she backed-off *WILLIAM T. SHERMAN*. (Among others.)
3) Can we stop with the “pfui”-ing? I’m having to wear a poncho when I come here. I’m using a computer, not watching a Gallagher concert!
LikeLike
I have a vague memory of hearing a story about one woman in the Civil War-era South who, on hearing that the Union army was approaching and destroying farmhouses on the way (this may or may not have been Sherman’s march to the sea, I don’t recall) got her whole household busy making lemonade. And when the army arrived, she walked out there and offered them all a glass or two (each) of fresh lemonade. Result: the army marched on without destroying that particular farmhouse.
I can’t remember any other details, though, so I’ve never been able to verify the story. Anyone else heard that story? Is it apocryphal, or a real event?
LikeLike
I think this may be a matter not of what you said, but of what ideological category they think your comments can be assigned to.
Back around 1970, at UC San Diego, I signed up for an intro course on cultural anthropology. The instructor organized the class around the three “systems” of culture, society, and personality, and when we got onto personality he talked about how different people had different personalities and anthropology needed to find a way to explain this (I think the subtext was that everything about humans is socially determined, but these people all had the same society, so what’s going on with differences between them?). So I raised my hand (it was a small seminar) and asked about genetic differences. And the instructor looked alarmed and warned me—and it sounded like a warning—that if I talked about genetic differences between human beings that led straight to racism and Nazi death camps. Because the Nazis said that there were genetic differences between human beings, so if you said the same thing then you were supporting Nazism, I guess.
So I STFU. It would only have caused unrest if I had said (in some cases, if I had known) that the Soviets, who thought it was all environment, had murdered more people than the Nazis, so look where environmentalism leads you; or that the Nazi understanding of genetics was a travesty and their methods could not possibly have worked; or even that I was talking about genetic differences within a single remote village in the New Guinea Highlands or the Brazilian interior explaining personality differences there, and all those people in that village were likely of the same race. But it baffled me, and I went on thinking about it. . . .
I wonder if, in an alternate history where the Nazis won and the Soviets lost, we would have seen environmentalism go massively out of style, and Lamarckian inheritance and Lysenkoism be massively feared by all American social scientists, while overreliance on genetics was commonplace?
LikeLike
Gah. Sorry, you’re right, that’s how they think. I run into this all the time because I refuse to think in “categories.”
LikeLike
This is vile. How do we get rid of this?
LikeLike
Well, if the show “Deadliest Warrior” got it right (while the show was pretty dumb, they did seem to research their weapons), the Mongols appear to have had a particularly effective Mace…
LikeLike
Well, if you’re serious, I think we need to remove most humanities and social science professors from their teaching positions—all the ones who can’t explain the actual content of an argument without attributing positions to the author based on what category they’ve been assigned to.
This vice of categories is not entirely absent from SF fandom, I’m sorry to say. For a number of years the Libertarian Futurist Society was nominating The Lord of the Rings for our Hall of Fame Award, and a couple of years ago it won. And I saw more online comments from people asking how we could give a libertarian award to a novel where one of the heroes became a king! None of them seemed to say to themselves, “Hey, here is a story about a magic ring that gives you the power to Rule Others, and to Take Away the power of other people’s magical rings and Control the Wearers, and not only does it make you a Threat that has to be dealt with, but it’s destructive to you yourself, because Power Is Addictive—and it’s an even more dangerous threat to those with the desire to do good, because it will get at them through their wish to Help Others and corrupt that . . . and could this possibly have any relevance to libertarian concerns?” They had the LFS in the “libertarian” box and Tolkien in the “monarchist” box and that was it, it seemed.
Except for my fellow LFS members, to most of whom honoring Tolkien seemed to make perfect sense. . . .
LikeLike
Stop state funding of universities. Or, if you must, fund only certain sections (e.g. STEM). We’ve got quite enough grievance studies research thank you very mush, we don’t need any more. and in general that applies to pretty much every non-technical area of study.
If they aren’t sucking at the state teat they’ll have to prove their worth to get their funding and that means they either stop promoting idiocy or they starve (and really I don’t see a problem with either option here).
LikeLike
Not even STEM, because that’s how we ended up with all this anthropogenic globull warming foolishness. People have taken to torturing the data until it says what their research grant says it’s supposed to say. Proving the null hypothesis is no longer allowed, not in medicine, not in the other hard sciences (except perhaps structural and nuclear engineering, since liability is greater there).
LikeLike
Sigh — in magic systems you can have a king if what he administers is the magic the … er… life force. Sacrifice is a part of magic and sacrificial kings are hard to avoid.
LikeLike
Good points all. But I still mourn the missed opportunity to explain (in the aspie-obsessive level of detail which is utterly characteristic of libertarians when speaking on matters of political philosophy, most emphatically including myself) why libertarianism and monarchism are not actually intrinsically opposed to one another. (A king needn’t, after all, intrude any further into the private affairs of his subjects than a representative democracy does into those of its citizens. Indeed, popular governments have shown a _far_ worse record on liberty issues than the mean, median, or modal monarchies of history.)
The fact that I mourn this drops me off at the border of the aspie-obsessive camp. But the fact that I refrain from trying to turn this comment thread into a forum for debating the virtues and vices of democracy is proof that I’ve still got at least a couple of toes on the neurotypical side of that border. :)
LikeLike
Genetic differences are _physical_ anthropology. You were taking _cultural_ anthropology. And sometimes there’s feuding between anthropologists in the subfields who are stuck in the same department…..
LikeLike
The feuding seems unsuccessful in weeding them out, I suggest airdropping small arms into the departments.
LikeLike
Nope, they’d all go “eek” and run away from the evil chunks of machined metal.
Airdrop poisons. And daggers for backstabbing. Those they’d embrace in a heartbeat.
LikeLike
Not all of them. How about the ROTC officers and the ex-military and hunters? Of course your response is true at most Northern campuses.
LikeLike
Those are generally a) involved in useful studies, and b) ostracized rather than feuded with on most campuses.
LikeLike
You want to really have a moment of surprise? Read an account of the Univ of Texas sniper shooting in 1966. Not only did civilians accompany the police officers storming the tower to stop him, but professors were sniping back at Whitman from their offices using deer rifles that happened to be in their office.
LikeLike
That would be perfectly legitimate if he had said “We don’t study those differences in this class.” He seemed instead to say that we couldn’t even acknowledge that such differences might exist. I felt as if I had encountered some arcane tribal taboo.
LikeLike
Oh but you did. You see if you were to continue down that path you’d discoevr that the IQ bell-curves for the various subspecies of H Sapiens Sapiens are rather different. And that is (still) taboo in a lot of academia despite there being very clear evidence for its existence.
LikeLike
On the other hand, the difference in the IQ bell curve has much less to do with the success or failure of certain ethnic/cultural groups than their culture. Or to put it another way, the hardware in your head doesn’t matter nearly as much as the software running on your hardware. If you’ve got an IQ of 90 but come from a culture that encourages hard work, perseverance through tough times, and helping out your neighbors… you’re going to have so much more success in life than the 110 IQ guy from a “you’re a victim, wait for the government handouts, get mad when they don’t materialize” culture that it’s not even funny.
So it’s important not to put too much emphasis on IQ either…
LikeLike
Yes, but in saying that, you’re also talking about character. And there’s increasing evidence that several key aspects of character are genetically influenced. Google on “Big Five model” for what psychologists are saying about this now. Though it needs to be read critically: “Openness to Experience” actually is interest in knowledge and abstract ideas, “Conscientiousness” is willingness to accept duties imposed by other people, and “Neuroticism” is the opposite pole from emotional stability, none of which is quite what the accepted name sounds like.
But that’s now; back then psychologists were much more likely to be pure environmental determinists, too.
LikeLike
Yes, but they’ve put culture off limits, and IQ tests are racist becaus ethey don’t “adjust for culture.”
LikeLike
yep.
LikeLike
I am reminded of the time I got to browse through a lovely Victorian-era book called Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms and Correct Writing. It was published in the 1880s in America and was a great snapshot of the times, in that it not only had some general information on the stats you’d expect (such as population figures, exports and imports), but was a style book that used actual writings of the time as samples. It was, for the time, a smash hit, and went through many printings, which means you can pick up a vintage leatherbound copy in Good condition (second only to Fine) for under $100.
There was a section in there on how to write a proper rejection letter to a proposal of marriage, and was introduced by the author in a statement which said, essentially, ‘In this modern age, with women able to carry on a business outside the home, there is no pressing need for a woman to accept an offer of marriage for reasons of financial security.’ This in a time period which symbolizes, to modern eyes, the total repression of women’s rights. Primary source documents make for interesting reading, and it’s a pity that people rely on accounts that are hearsay at best.
(One of the most popular letters in the entire book is in that section, and is the letter of a girl rejecting a proposal of marriage because her suitor smokes. She lays out each part of her reasoning with devastating accuracy—it is not only in recent years that smoking has rightly been seen as dangerous and expensive.)
LikeLike
Well, looky here: http://archive.org/details/manualofsochills00hillrich
I love the Internet.
LikeLike
Frankly, I love living in the future!
LikeLike
The great failure of feminism was to adopt male standards for success in everything. Hence women can’t be equal unless they make as much money or are allowed in all the same clubs. They implicitly and explicitly denigrate female modes of living. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard snide remarks from feminists about women who “only” raise children, as if there is anything more important they could possibly be doing. Instead of raising the profile of women who excel at their own chosen field in life, whatever that may be, they try to shoehorn in women to male fields in the hopes that government-mandated quotas will equal respect. That isn’t how the world works.
LikeLike
” Hence women can’t be equal unless they make as much money or are allowed in all the same clubs.”
Women have always been allowed in gentleman’s clubs.
LikeLike
My poor husband is STILL putting up– very well– with my random angsting about not bringing in cash.
Never mind that in savings, I “make” more than he does– child care is expensive in our area, and that’s not even counting the meals out we don’t have.
LikeLike
I understand the angst– I have worked in the workplace since I was sixteen and suddenly stopped when I became ill (2003). It is really hard for me because I like making money. I do make a small amount now with my writings — enough to cover meds until October when our Tricare changes — they are cutting us down from Prime to Standard. It is pointed at the Western region right now except people who live near a military hospital (we don’t).
LikeLike
When a good woman feels angsty about being a loving wife, capable partner, and caring mother, there’s something awry with our culture.
But we already knew that.
LikeLike
*wry* Same point he keeps making. Heck, I tell myself that I’m being dumb. Doesn’t work.
LikeLike
Not to self-promote, but I did a blog post on this topic not too long ago. http://conservativefeminism.jamiekwilson.com/blog/?p=37
LikeLike
Promote away! Our hostess is known to way in on the topic from time to time.
LikeLike
LOL there are so many people who just spam I’m always reticent to post links to my own work. Other people’s work, now, is a different issue entirely. But I think Sarah knows I won’t post entirely self-serving garbage.
LikeLike
Of course. And no, I don’t mind.
LikeLike
…Goodness, I can see why your commenter needed to choose that name, you wouldn’t get it from his comments.
LikeLike
Compared to many other liberals I’ve engaged with, this one did pretty well – clearly bought into the whole patriarchy/maternalism BS taught in colleges these days, but no name calling, no pathetic fallacy. Little straw man in there, but otherwise. . . I wish I had time to debate this one more. I have too many projects going on outside the blog to keep up with it, and that blog is a test project anyway, for now.
LikeLike
Damn. Yes.
But I do have a couple things to add or mildly dissent with. “Sensitive” would be used more often to describe a guy than a girl, I think, because we writers are more likely to mention things that go against type. It would be redundant, because of the stereotype, to describe a girl as sensitive unless she was remarkably sensitive. A guy, on the other hand, only has to be sensitive in the way we see women as being sensitive in order to require the descriptor.
Men did – and do – brutal, dangerous jobs because, while it’s a hardship for kids to be deprived of a father who can provide material wealth and masculine guidance, it’s even worse for them to be deprived of a mother who directly provides food and protection. Women have always been tasked primarily with the responsibility of protecting children; men are responsible for protecting and providing for women. When that chain is broken, as modern feminism does, it’s worse for children than for either men or women.
On women soldiers and pirates: back to Roman times, men are heroic for taking physical risks. Women are heroic for childbirth (and a nasty, brutish, dangerous thing that was before modern medicine). That means women can be heroic in the masculine sense by taking on dangerous male roles. It is impossible, however, for men to be heroic in a feminine sense without the intervention of the gods. It is always, always, always childbirth that sets us apart – not any inherent weakness or lack by either sex. I think nearly every legend about a woman taking a man’s role has ended with the truth being exposed when she becomes pregnant and gives birth (Pope Joan comes immediately to mind, but I know it’s a common historical trope.)
(back to the modern medicine thing – I wonder if removing so much risk from childbirth has removed women’s view of themselves as heroic for giving birth – and thus influenced much of the modern feminine self-image?)
I can’t say a word about the rest of this without being redundant, so I’ll stick with “ditto.”
LikeLike
Jamie, you may have already found this, but among the Aztecs, a woman who died in child birth received the same rewards in the afterlife as a warrior who died in battle. For the same reason.
LikeLike
Mom has assured me if you die in childbirth you go straight to heaven. I don’t know where the belief comes from, but dang… I missed my only chances!
LikeLike
I used to say that I would rather drink beer with the sinners than live with the saints (in heaven). You have to realize that I was considered a bit of a rebel in my early twenties… ;-)
LikeLike
‘S OK. I suspect this mob are going to Writers’ Green, sort of like Fiddler’s Green but with even wilder stories. :D
LikeLike
I hope that in Heaven you don’t have to stay with the same people but could bop around. I hope that you would say the right thing and not hurt other people’s feelings unintentionally.
LikeLike
Heaven never much tempted me, but having to drink beer would surely count as one of the torments of the damned. Unless it was ginger beer.
LikeLike
Funny. You don’t LOOK like my husband!
LikeLike
Have you ever seen us together?
LikeLike
uh.
LikeLike
I made some ginger beer one time (I’m not making any claims as to quality. Alton Brown told how to make it in a 2-liter bottle). It was… interesting.
LikeLike
I’ve heard that too! but I’m not sure whether I want to go to heaven, at least as it is described. It sounds so dull! I’ll take the Writers’ Green, though, especially if it’s filled with the storytellers who never got to tell their stories on paper during their lifetimes.
LikeLike
The ballad of True Thomas says
Oh see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see you not yon broad, broad road
That winds about the lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Though some call it the road to Heaven.
And see you not yon bonnie road,
That winds aboot the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfhame
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
LikeLike
:) I love that poem! Hadn’t seen it in years.
LikeLike
I really appreciate Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven; he goes over why the picture most people have of heaven (the boring eternity with harps and clouds) is completely wrong, and what the Bible actually says about heaven. It’s a whole lot more interesting than most people think. For instance, there will have actual work to do — the best kind of work, that’s fulfilling and productive and isn’t filled with nonsense like filling out TPS reports.
The book is well worth a read.
LikeLike
Obligatory Kipling reference.
LikeLike
Wonderful! Clams got good taste!
LikeLike
I was wondering if anyone would quote or link to that one. :)
LikeLike