*Sorry to use a bfp. I actually slept, which means I must be getting used to sleeping sitting half-up. But I slept too late, and I have a ton of work to do. So forgive me the repeat, which is relevant to shirtstorm. (BTW supporters of the turpid Rose Eveleth on twitter were accusing instapundit of “Doxxing” her for calling her a horrible person. Because libeling a law professor is a sane strategy. Of course, these people haven’t seen sane in the last ten years, not even through a periscope.)*
I’m very afraid this is another of those posts that will get me accused of being a “gender traitor.”
That’s just fine. If you think a gender – the fact that you were born with one piece of physical equipment – demands your loyalty and forces your opinions to be the same as those people with the same piece of equipment, call me a traitor. Guilty as charged.
You see, I tend to think of people as people. This has largely been a handicap in writing fiction in the current age, because I’m expected to view women as saints-and-martyrs and men as oppressors-and-satyrs.
Have I met some examples of those? Oh, heck yes. Hasn’t everyone? But I’ve met the opposite too. Hasn’t everyone? So why is only one of those the “correct” thing to put in a novel?
Ah, but you’re going to tell me that pushing women as victims, as saints, as nurturers is the way to go, so we can carry on with the feminist victory and equality of the sexes.
(Looks across the computer at you) I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Equality means, in this as in anything else, equality before the law not equality of results. This is something that we keep forgetting. Look, that was the ultimate difference between the American and the French revolutions. Americans wanted equality before the law. The French wanted equality of results.
They had justifications, too. They were dealing with an historically beaten-down peasantry, starved, uneducated (though not nearly so much – the revolution happened because education had started to spread. Never mind. We’re going with how they viewed themselves) used to being deferential. They needed more than just equality before the law, they said. They needed to redistribute some of those advantages, to enforce equality of results for a while.
We all know how that ended up, right?
It always ends up that way. Humans are individuals, not groups. When you empower the groups, you empower the worst in any group. The power-thirsty, the aggrieved, those who want to manipulate group-outrage for their own purposes.
It is the same with women. It’s lots of fun to read the more sentimental writers of centuries past (and the not so sentimental and totally un-ironic feminists of the last century) go on until your eyes bleed about women being kinder, gentler, softer, nicer.
Poppycock. Poppycock with powdered speciousness. Yes, women presented that way. This was the result of centuries where women had the subservient position.
The first one of you to open her mouth about how this is the injustice feminism needed to correct is going to go to the corner with the dunce cap, so help me bog.
The reason women were “oppressed” for six thousand years (longer, for certain values of women) had NOTHING to do with men dethroning the goddess myth and destroying the perfect matriarchal society because they’re evil or any other re-writings of the Judeo-Christian myth of Eden. Marija Gymbutas was – yes, I’m crossing Godwin, and I have a reason – as much of a fabulist as Hitler, and about as good a scientist. She didn’t have armies at her disposal, but those who believe in her might in the end bring down civilization as effectively as the Nazis would have done, so I do not apologize for using the analogy. (If you don’t think convincing women that all men are their enemies, handicapping boys in school, running men out of the teaching profession, and generally making men guilty-until-proven-innocent is a civilization-killing meme, you need to go out and meet some real men and some real women.)
Women were subservient in society due to that horrible oppressor: biology. When you were going to have to be a celibate or spend half of your life pregnant, you missed out on other aspects of life. Yes, I love those of you who had no problems in pregnancy. I had two diametrically opposite experiences: the first pregnancy would have killed me without strict bed rest, for the second I kept forgetting I was pregnant. HOWEVER in both of them in retrospect, not at the time, I missed vast chunks of intellectual function. There is an hormone cocktail that is supposed to make you fat, happy and dumb during pregnancy. It is what it is.
Worse, even for women who never get pregnant, until modern hormonal treatment, we women were prisoners of our hormones. Even now I have more than a friend who hit menopause and… became someone else. In very rare instances, the change is for the best. Most of the time it’s a “What on Earth happened to your brain?”
I thought I had dementia for a long while – I literally couldn’t remember the names of my characters or what had happened from a chapter to the next. And if I wrote it down, I’d have to go look at the notes, and then when I came back to the book I’d forgotten what I’d looked up. For a while (most notably the last Musketeers mystery) I had to have a friend check my work because I’d forget what I was doing and had tons of internal inconsistencies.
Turned out it was an hormonal problem, not dementia and not menopause, as I thought.
Now, that’s an extreme case, mind you. But it’s not unusual. And though men, too, can have this type of issue, it is considerably more common in women. What makes us women — the ability to generate new life – also makes us cyclical creatures, both in the monthly sense and in the life-cycle sense. And if you think your hormones don’t affect the way you think, let me tell you the only reason you think that is that you’re inside your skull and being affected. Until my experiences with hormonal insanity I too thought I was impervious.
Anyway, the point is until modern medicine with contraception and hormonal supplements, women were swimming with an iron vest strapped on. Add to that that only women can be sure that their children are theirs. This made men – of course – wish to make sure women were controlled, to make sure the kids they were providing for were their own. It made for a society where women were somewhere between children and chattels and men had all the responsible positions. (Though even then some women managed to break through. Individuals are… individual. It’s one of their characteristics.)
Does any of that still apply? No. Thanks to modern medicine, we even can figure out whose daddy is whose without keeping women in purdah.
And though it took a little while, society changed. Women started taking the place of equals in society. Like the French peasantry, which would have come along once barriers to their equality under the law were removed, we have started taking intellectual callings and sometimes physically intensive callings.
We are now, if we want to be, equals.
The problem is that most of us don’t want to be equals. And the reason for that is that most of us have been sold on the feminist creation myth of the great mother and the perfect society with men as the spoiler of paradise and the villain. And most of us are stupid enough to buy it. (Yes, I know men worshiped goddesses. If you think that made the society feminist, you have birds in your brain and you probably also believe there’s some magical herbs that are as effective as the pill and have no bad side effects. (No. There aren’t. There was a bush that had similar properties, but it went extinct in Roman times). Societies that worshiped goddesses often demanded the most control over women and engaged in temple prostitution. They also had a marked tendency to child sacrifice. On the other hand, most societies worshiped both.)
Also, most men are of course bigger than us. Stronger. And there’s the whole historical inequity. Just like the French peasants. So we demand laws that favor us and more importantly we demand the blood of our enemies. And we demand to be treated with a respect and a care that would have scared Victorian maidens. We use the slightest thing as a weapon. Because only when the oppressors are gone, will we be free.
This was bad enough when it was the French peasantry. But men are not some aliens dropped on the Earth from afar – they’re our fathers, brothers, sons and husbands. They’re an integral part of what makes humans humans. They’re not a monolithic group, just like women aren’t, but statistically they’re better abstract-and-visual thinkers and the people who are more likely to think outside the box, just like statistically we’re the socially-oriented people, more detail-specialized and better at cooperating.
Society – a civilized society – needs both to survive and go forward.
But women have been sold on males-as-the-boogeyman and therefore they see evil intention and coordination and conspiracy behind males’ being people. Meet one abusive male, and you’ll go through life convinced that all men are like that. Does anyone do the same when meeting an abusive woman? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had bosses from hell in both genders. So, why is only one accused of being “oppressive”?
Because it’s the myth. And it’s a myth the power-hungry people who took charge of the feminist movement (one that initially only wanted equality under the law) are happy to perpetuate. It’s a myth every college, every entertainment gatekeeper cherishes.
It’s a poisonous myth. It’s also a stupid one. No one in their right mind would talk about “War on women” for instance. Are you insane? Why would normal men – yes, your husband, your brother, your son – want to make war on women? And yes, that means you, your sister, your mother. Hell, even my gay male friends like women and have mothers and women friends. And yes, for those of you about to be stupid, even males on the opposite side in politics have all of those, and no, none of them hate women. (Except perhaps the occasional pathological case.)
(If you bought that wanting to not pay for contraceptives out of the public purse and at the expense of other people’s religious conscience is a “War on women” you might want to inform yourself. Not giving you something for free is NOT restricting access. Otherwise, people are restricting your access to food, housing and entertainment. Is that a war on humans?)
I’ve watched the rise of this myth with slack-jawed amazement. HOW can you even think that? Guys, my men – and I live with three of them, husband and two sons – couldn’t “conspire” to keep chocolate hidden from me (they’ve tried.) And they’re all three of them brighter than the average bear. WHY would you think men in general would want to conspire to keep you in submission? Most modern guys wouldn’t know what to do with a truly submissive woman.
Oh, I know. It’s the myth you heard, from Gimbutas and her sisters in school all the way to the latest movie you watched. Males want power over you.
Well, some males maybe. Those who belong to a religion that dresses women like upholstered furniture. But it’s just one culture and there’s reasons for that (including but not limited to a culture of scarcity and a tradition of bride kidnapping.) It’s not all men, and it’s certainly not MOST men men of the western world.
Like the women who no longer remember why women were “historically oppressed” the men alive now were never in a society where men had the upper hand.
I have a friend who believes that it’s a pendulum. Men had the upper hand, now women do, then it will swing back.
Unless science has some sort of pendulum too, I don’t see where she’s right.
What I see is women who were freed by tech advances and who THINK they were freed by marching shoulder to shoulder and taking permanent offense. These women live in a state of paranoia, dreaming up male privilege that is invisible to anyone but them, and taking offense at ever more ridiculous things – even things that have nothing to do with gender – because they’re so terrified of men taking the upper hand again.
I look at them going to war with spelling: Womyn, Herstory. I look at them dancing around dressed as vaginas (!) because apparently the most important thing in these women’s lives is their sexual organs. I look at them acting as a pack and attacking whoever they’re told to attack because “so and so is anti-woman” and I think… these are humans? These are civilized people? Don’t they see they’re being tools of the Marxist divide-and-conquer strategy? Don’t they see the end of this is either societal destruction or TRUE backlash for the sake of saving civilization?
Apparently not. So… carry on. Dance around in your little fabric vaginas. Think that all men are out to get you. Refuse to have children, because some of them might be male. And scream, scream, scream about made-up outrage.
That’s the way to bring civilization down and destroy the technological advances that brought us equality. If that’s what you want, DO carry on.
Apres nous, le deluge.
According To Hoyt 
Don’t they see the end of this is either societal destruction or TRUE backlash for the sake of saving civilization?
What if that’s the point?
Murder/suicide on a massive scale.
Given how many of them convert to Islam, I have wondered if they WANT to be enslaved and are raging at a society that refuses to do it.
Exactly.
John Norman called to say: “I told you so.” 😉
*snerk*
Gor Blimey !
You just *had* to say that, didn’t you ?
Back in Montréal late last millennium (late 1970s), John Norman’s books made excellent rabid feminist detectors … it seemed to only take about 2 or 3 pages before the frothing at the mouth would start …
I would think all you’d need to do is show them one, and they’d react like a vampire confronted with a crucifix.
I wonder if Ringo’s Keldar books work as well?
“Oh, no, John Ringo, no!”
Reaction equivalence: 100%.
This is all going to end in blood and Gor.
Q: What do you call ecological bondage?
A: Al Gor.
Yet, when women were “oppressed” in Kipling’s time, people believed his poem about the “most dangerous of the species”. [Evil Grin]
I went round and round in a discussion thread for an indy author’s group with one particularly rabid and self-righteous woman who insisted, insisted! that women had only gotten full legal, political and social rights with the right to vote (in the early 20th century) and up until then, they had been completely oppressed and marginalized without a shred of any kind of authority, rights and independence.
I kept pointing out the number of perfectly respectable 19th century women who had prospered through their own efforts – run their own enterprises, been full partners with their husbands in others, who had trained and practiced as doctors, lawyers, writers and actresses – and everything else.
She didn’t handle facts and examples well at all. I got very tired of trying to reason with her.
I run into it all the time, and not just with soi disant “feminists”.
“America never had to deal with Terrorism before 9/11”; Oh, really? Set aside both the previous attempt on the Towers, and Lefty idiots like the Unibomber. Go look up “Bloody Kansas” and “Molly Maguires”
“The Watts riot were the first race riots”; Tell me the draft riots,in New York during the Civil War, weren’t race riots. I need the laugh.
The total lack of any depth of historical knowledge is astonishing, and depressing.
Tulsa and East Saint Louis race riots after WWI – made Watts look like a quiet day in the park.
The Zoot Suit Riots of WWII were basically race riots.
Check out the film Zoot Suit (1981) for an excellent exploration of this.
Tulsa can also be understood as an act of political terror. Depending on whose estimates of killed you believe, the combination of hiding the mass grave, and government pretending for decades that nothing happened is pretty chilling.
As an aside, that event relates to some of my doubts about a certain Baen author’s judgement about institutional problems of a certain sort. If my understanding is correct, she would have joined the Oklahoma Democratic Party well before it could be credibly claimed that said organization had opened up about the sordid past and made a credible commitment to change.
IIRC, the Tulsa race riots happened in 1921, when the Democrats were the only power in Oklahoma. This is close enough to the likes of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust that someone prepared to forgive and forget one should be prepared to forgive and forget the others.
A major mover and shaker, involved in the Oklahoma Democratic Party since the 1930s, only was forced out of politics in the 2000s. He got charged by the feds for crimes related to his political activities, and had the pull to get himself a sentence of community service giving advice to politicians.
“From the shores of Tripoli”
Wasn’t added to the song just because it rhymed.
USMC, fighting Islamic Terrorism way before it was cool.
did she maintain as a corollary that we had gotten them then, and so later efforts were superfluous?
No, she flatly disbelieved any of my cited evidence arguing that 19th century women with certain ambitions and peculiar circumstances did have a great deal of economic and social autonomy, and even a bit on the legal side – like women in Wyoming having the right to vote … in 1869. She was, by her admission, raised in a non-US country, and had by way of argument, her memories of how women were abused in whatever second or third-world nation she had come from.
Really, at that point, I gave up. She was arguing from her own personal experience and extrapolating it to the larger world. Very exasperating, from my point of view.
With such people there is no arguing.
All you can do is draw them out enough to expose their insanity for all to see.
Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms and Correct Writing, copyright 1878, has this to say on the subject of marriage: “Unmarried ladies of mature years are proverbially among the most intelligent, accomplished and independent to be found in society. The sphere of women’s action and work is so widening that she can to-day, if she so desires, handsomely and independently support herself. She need not, therefore, marry for a home.”
It was an intensely popular book for its time, selling so well that leather-bound copies in Good condition can be found for under $100 even today. I really want one. The letter of declining a proposal because the man in question smokes is worth the price of admission alone.
Catherine The Great. Elizabeth I. Victoria. No power at all!
Marie Curie, the only double Nobel Laureate in two different sciences (Physics and Chemistry). She was oppressed!
The Brontes. Austen. Fanny Hill even.
Not to distract from the central thesis of Sarah’s post, but I realized that sometimes women leaving the hospital after birth can’t necessarily be sure the child is theirs, due to the occasional switched-at-birth screwup. Not common, but not outside the realm of possibility.
As aside, in many modern maternity wards, the baby never leaves the mom’s side. Women give birth and stay in the same room.
That’s probably a good idea. I wonder if that was in response to switched-baby incidents, or if other medical or cultural changes were the drivers for change.
I blame it on Rob Petrie.
Yep. we just had to be careful if we heard someone coming. Mostly Marshall slept ON me (first month of his life, really) but the nurses hated that, so we’d put him back in the bassinet if we heard them. Dan was there too, to make sure he wouldn’t fall off, etc, while I dozed, so he was safe, but… nurses.
I got taken away a lot and Mom hated it. My brother came out significantly darker-skinned and slept more, which may have prevented them from diagnosing baby jaundice and also allowed the plea that he’s asleep, surely you don’t want to move him and wake him up now!
When I gave birth in LA to my first born, it was POLICY at Kaiser that a woman giving birth NOT give birth alone. My mother had to go with a nurse to the nursery. The first thing they did was put a security band around my daughter’s leg, after they bathed her. It was no different from those big, clunky security tags they have in clothing stores, and it was so heavy all my wee baby could do was wriggle her leg. Going home was a big event because we had to be accompanied by the nurse supervisor, who needed to remove the tag before we got to the doors leading outside the hospital.
I relate this story to my Aussie friends and relatives, and it sounds so completely surreal to them. Women give birth and stay in the same room for the most part, and the baby is put into the arms of the mum right away.
Two of the three times I’ve been in a maternity ward, there were active attempts to enter and one attempt to exit by people who were not even connected to those who were supposed to be there.
Yeah, I was in for nearly a week because of c-sections each time, but it’s not like there were dozens of women and babies in those hospitals.
My husband was paranoid about this, and followed both boys around the whole time they were out of our sight. His fear was not so much raising someone’s baby — I’m convinced given the option of bringing the whole nursery home, he’d have said “we’ll take them, don’t bother wrapping” — but the fear of one of ours growing up in uncongenial surroundings. Fortunately the entire two weeks I was in the hospital with Robert, (I had a uterine infection, after the birth because 3 days hard labor) there was only one other baby there, a girl. Also, he was a baby of unusual size (22 inches, 8 1/4 lbs, massive head.) With Marshall, we stayed in less than twenty four hours, and he was never out of my sight, as mostly he slept in a little bassinet next to the bed. So except for being weighed/footprinted, which was done in the room, and Dan watched (I was being sewn together. Given birth from first contraction to baby out in less than 2 hours does damage.) So, they’re both ours from the tippy of their little horns to the bottom of their little hoofkins which they don’t got. Now, if anyone has extra babies and wants to leave one on my doorstep, (if it’s as cold as now, kindly ring the doorbell) I’m okay with that. We’ll take them and raise them. We believe in humanity and we believe in the future.
Here here! (Raises glass). My Father was adoped. Few social movements infuriated him more than adopted children seeking thier “real” parents. To his mind, the man and woman who took him in, loved him, and raised him were his real parents. The two he never knew (and never wanted to know) were merely his sire and dam.
My attitude fairly well, though it might have helped if family medical history had been provided, and I’d have liked to know my ethnic background. The latter I could find out now easily enough, but it is less important to me in later life. I just like to identify as Human-American.
Only about half of all adoptees try to search.
One adoptee at an SF panel talked about the frustration of that trope in stories, especially since — in what other way can you make the adoption something other than random noise in a story?
“Given birth from first contraction to baby out in less than 2 hours does damage.”
Not to mention the whole horn / hoof thing… 😎
That too was a slight problem…
Aaaah, I couldn’t let go of an abandoned baby. Just couldn’t.
“the bottom of their little hoofkins which they don’t got.”
I’ve just been re-reading that for the first time in a decade, so that amuses me.
My daughter did stay in the nursery post-birth, but they brought her to me for breast-feeding, and she could stay with me as long as I was awake. What they DID do, immediately after birth, and before they even cut the umbilical chord was to put those plastic bracelets on each of our wrists; they had a matching number, and a metal crimp to secure it, so it could only be removed by cutting. As part of checking out from the hospital, I had to compare and verify that the numbers on our bracelets were the same. Mixing up babies and mothers accidentally would have been impossible.
The medical profession is getting a lot more professional about those sorts of things.
The Operations Guy in me was really pleased to watch how they lined everything up, double checked (two party verification. Awesome) the medical instruments, sponges etc. as they cleaned up after my wife’s Caesarean. It was really well done–as they opened a sponge they’d put the wrapper on the little tray. As they took them out they went back on the wrapper, and they had a paper count. So they knew how many pieces sponges they *should* have, and there should be 1 sponge for every piece of paper. Same sort of thing with the tools.
That sounds like a good way to do it. My youngest daughter had to be put under for some dental work one time (she’s mentally handicapped, so she has to be put under for anything but very minor procedures like teeth cleaning), and the dentist accidentally left a metal clamp with prongs into her gums in the back of her mouth. She doesn’t communicate very well, so it was two days later before we finally figured out why she wasn’t eating or drinking anything! If the dentist had used a procedure like this, he might not have forgotten that thing in there. (It was to hold her mouth open while he worked.)
If this was any time this decade the man is…no, not going to sugar coat it. He’s incompetent and needs to be straightened out.
There’s a figure floating around Gun Control circles that goes something like “98k people killed every year by doctors. 30k a year killed by guns, and GUNS are the problem?”
Doctors got all pissy about that, except that it was *true*. In the 1990s medical misadventure, pharmaceutical mistakes, problems with MRSA and the like killed three times more people than *all* gun deaths (sucicide + murder + accident). That was embarrassing as all hell.
Which is why a bunch of them got *really* serious about stupid mistakes, and from this are the protocols we see now. Two party verification on stuff that isn’t supposed to stay in the body. Double checking the wristband before administering an aspirin. Matching wristbands on the mom and the baby before the umbilical cord is parted, etc. From what I understand deaths from “Uhoh” are *way* down.
” people than *all* gun deaths (sucicide + murder + accident).”
You forgot, killed in self defense; which is ALSO added into gun death statistics.
Patients knowing what to throw fits about matters, too. Use to be that you might not know anybody who’d had something done– now either you or your kids are looking around for support groups to ask questions.
Kaiser now uses QR codes on medications and on hospital bracelets. Scan the bottle, scan the wrist, everything ends up in the medical record and presumably something starts beeping if it’s not authorized.
When my son was born, they handed him to me first. He had some issues but they still handed him to me first and before they left the room he had a band on his wrist and ankle that matched one on mine and on his father’s wrist. Every time someone came to see him they checked for the bands. Every time a nurse wanted to deal with him, we were to check for certain badge criteria and not let anyone take him who didn’t match those criteria. (And trust me, IV or no IV I would have been out of that bed in a heart beat if anyone had tried, though odds were against anyone getting to him before his daddy got to THEM.)
well, if you’re a sex-traitor (minor pet peeve, “gender” is not a synonym for “sex”), then move over sister, because so am I.
The sexes are complimentary and that doesn’t make one “better” than the other. Our genders are, 99.9% of the time in line with our sex. Unfortunately now “gender” is less an observation of what is but another declaration of politics as sex is.
Yes, technology and modernity have allowed a great many more choices to women in following their passions … whether it is The Pill or kitchen appliances.
The one glaring thing I note about contemporary “Feminism” is that each new “outrage” about The Patriarchy(tm), is the aim is never to reconcile the sexes to be keep them apart and to obliterate the family unit.
So much the better to have The State as ultimate God/Parent/Spouse.
Yeah, but they call me “gender traitor” — they wouldn’t know sex if it bit them… er… never mind.
Oh, they’d know it. They’ve seen pictures.
Some have even heard “Wham bam- thank you ma’am.” Before riding into the sunset.
As Camille Paglia put it, women have the power of life, and all that attends that incredible creative power, and men’s achievements are an attempt to make up for that.
In any event, sexual dimorphism is the product of many millions of years of evolution, and has created tens of thousands of differences between men and women, not oppression. And if you have taught hundreds of young children, as I have, some of the differences are apparent from the earliest age.
And if you don’t care for the body you have, go argue with God; people had nothing to do with it.
I suggest studying Judaism, BTW. The Jews have a looooong history of arguing with God. Probably where we get the core of the idea of The Rule of Law; they are always trying to hold their God to his Word.
Arguing with God, and winning the argument.
(Short version: The Rabbis disagreed about the interpretation of the Law in a particular case. Rabbi Eliezer was in the minority, and could not persuade his colleagues with his arguments, so he called upon God to intervene. A Heavenly voice called out, “Why do you dispute with R. Eliezer, with whom the Halakhah always agrees?” The ploy didn’t work, and the matter was decided against him. It is told that God smiled with pride that day, saying, “My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me.”)
This aspect of the Jewish tradition makes that God markedly superior to any pantheistic Gods I have ever heard of. Can you imagine Zeus or Woton doing anything but torturing a believer who disputated with them?
Depends… what she look like, and does she have a thing for swans?
Bull.
I love that story. The variation I’d read before had the rabbis tell God that this argument was not in His jurisdiction, citing precisely why. Instead of being angry, the story ends with God laughing with joy, as He said His children had bested Him!
Not a variation; I just elided the details I thought were too technical and less relevant to the point I was making. I should have had more confidence in Hundom. (Hunity? What’s the plural noun for the locals hereabouts?)
The Horde?
the Huns.
Fans → fandom; humans → humanity; huns → ???
Shadowdancer’s suggestion works.
C4C
2d4
2d6 . . . awww man. Lost the “save labor” roll and have to go shovel the driveway.
Well, it’s snowing but likely won’t be more than an inch and I’m in an apartment so somebody else would *have* to shovel the snow. [Very Big Grin]
2×8
Make your career survival roll.
(Traveller: The RPG that kills characters during character creation.)
Paranoia
http://rpggeek.com/rpgitemversion/168926/pdf-version
Seems appropriate.
The computer is your friend.
(Note: what is it with RPG game publishers and pricing PDF copies of games like they are the print versions? Especially when the artists and writers were paid decades ago?)
Why do you want to know this? This is above your clearance. Please stay where you are a trouble shooter will be by shortly to take care of you.
want to know this because if i am going to go back and redo any of my old stuff for new editions, i think the cover price should be lower or I should get paid more.
Re bosses from hell … the only one of those I had was a woman. And it wasn’t just me, the whole department saw her that way. I had male bosses who were doofuses, unconcerned, and depressed … but the only demon from hell boss was a female.
Yeah. The floor manager I had who bitched at me for coming in well dressed in a long sleeved business shirt and slacks was a woman. Didn’t matter that I had great customer satisfaction feedback, and I had the best handling of difficult customers, including customers with nigh-incomprensible accents, she bitched at me for wearing officewear in black. Which wasn’t against the clothing policy (business casual, meaning ‘no suit jacket required, collared shirts required. So polos were fine. I wore jackets because it was cold.) The training officer who found my ability to speak in English without issue so offensive that she hurled a chair at my head was a woman. Crazy rumormongering female supervisor in a different company? Check. I had an easier time dealing with the customers over the people who were direct supervisors. In customer service.
The shit male supervisor I had who viewed the women under his potential fuck harem? Just one.
On the other hand, the most bitchy male co-workers I had were … rather effete in their mannerisms
I don’t know about the rest of the guys, but I’m doing my part to ensure that these knuckleheads don’t pass on their beliefs to their offspring…..
Saw a comment on Instapundit. With a little application of effort we can have this out of the gene pool in about two generations.
The problem isn’t them passing along their beliefs to their (mostly non-existent) offspring, it’s that they want to pass them along to ours.
How successful have they been passing them along to yours?
Mine are home educated. And I don’t live in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and the like, where they are doing their damnedest to regulate parental choice out of home education. But I still hear how my kids are ‘deprived’ and ‘won’t be well socialized’, because the facts forced them to give up on ‘ignorant’ and ‘uneducated’.
My son picked up bad behaviors when he started going to school. I still would like very much to strangle the temp teacher who kept encouraging the kids to express their every. little. hurt. feeling. By crying. The end result was that the regular teacher, when she came back after a week and a half of being sick, was regularly faced with a class full of crying children who bawled like they’d been beaten with a whip when she had to scold them when they misbehaved. The temp teacher was told she was no longer welcome at the school. We’re STILL trying to undo the damage because goddamnit.
Shadow,
Get the little man his own copy of Meditations, and tell him if he is to ever grow up to rule the world he can’t be going around crying over every little thing.
😉
I am just shaking my head and as slack-jawed as the next “real” woman.
Not quite a comment on this particular entry, but dear Amy Alkon has commented on that infamous shirt: “On a side note, there’s a certain kind of nerd who wears that kind of shirt, and I’ve always had a soft spot for that guy and the way he sees the world. The sort of hope and love of space fantasy and dream of a bullet-bra’d fantasy woman of that guy is the stuff jobs landing spacecraft on comets are made of.” http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2014/11/15/the_reverse_boo.html
You know one reason Christendom kept having the priests bitching about women being a corrupting influence?
Women of non-serf status would use “I have a calling” as a refuge of last resort from political relationships they wanted no part of. So you’d get nunneries – and often the best-funded ones – with significant percentages of women who had no particular interest in practicing the kind of self-discipline that monks and nuns were supposed to be living.
Thus a given nunnery might have a significant demand for both porn and male visitors. And since the majority of men are not biologically inclined to strict celibacy, any number of otherwise well-meaning priests would succumb to the temptation of _sub rosa_ access to sex. And some percentage of them would feel guilty about it, and some percentage of _that_ subset would draw parallels between _their_ discretions and Adam passing the buck onto Eve.
The “naughty nuns” narrative is a strong one, but I have yet to see solid historical evidence for it, frankly. It mostly seems to have been dredged up to break the political power of some inconvemient Mother Superior, during a show trial in which any connection between the charges and the truth was largely coincidental.
I’m sure it happened, somewhere, sometime. I just haen’t read of a case where official charges didn’t boil down to essentialy a witch-hunt.
I recall of reading of one nunnary that was excavated, oh, about 15 years ago. They found copius infant remains under the basement. The theory is that the nuns were having a lot of inconvenient children which were then disposed of. Unfortunately this was years ago and I don’t have a cite, so feel free to regard it as an Internet myth. (unless you can find one).
That might’ve been that really horrible mangling of a story of the graveyard that all the locals knew was there– look for the recent “septic tank full of dead babies” story that was quickly put out, and quickly debunked.
Short version, the lady was doing work on a nunnery that cared for unwed or just too-poor-for-a-hospital mothers, and they had a cemetery that the locals knew quite well and are still tending, for the high percentage (even with the BEST medical care– the percentage was horrifying to modern eyes) of those (mothers and children) who simply didn’t make it, trying to organize a formal memorial for them all from the nuns’ own records and their quite official death certificates for those who were old enough, legally, to be granted them — kind of like the folks who update poor veterans’ graves, or donate headstones to the homeless.
It also had an older, shaft-type burial vault that some local ten year olds had opened up, and then freaked out when they saw skulls, and told their folks about bodies in a ‘septic tank’…who were familiar with the fairly popular 19th century design and didn’t do much about it besides tell their kids not to do that. That was in ’75.
Someone mixed those two bits of information together, “quoted” the lady doing the name collecting as having said some of the kids may have been in that “septic tank,” and the telephone game took off so that all the “nuns killed their bastard children” myths were invoked.
It’s also possible it was a similar, ignorant story where they didn’t realize that a lot of kids died back then, and nuns were usually the hospital.
Oh, and I forgot one angle– a couple of professional Catholic bashers got involved, too, flatly making stuff up and telling that to reporters. At least two of the folks they claimed said stuff to them have come forward saying they said no such thing. (One was one of the kids that found the grave, the other was the memorial lady.)
It’d totally forgotten the “based on a true story” bigot was involved until I poked around a bit more:
http://www.catholicleague.org/debunking-mass-grave-story/
That was one allegation of the famous Maria Monk story. Always be careful to check up such claims, because they were a standard of anti-Catholic bigotyr.
What nuns mostly got in trouble for?
1. Traveling around on pilgrimages, visiting family, or doing business, but a lot more than people expected of cloistered nuns, and taking longer about it than necessary. And when cloistering was tightened, it was often “the abbess traveling on business a lot.” Of course the abbess was usually fully chaperoned, but looking frivolous made the monastery look bad.
2. The convent getting too nicely appointed. Not all orders had vows of poverty, and some had vows of poverty but flexible ideas about what goodies should be communally owned.
3. Choir sisters (or other high status/high investment religious women) having a hissy at the lay sisters, or vice versa. And of course the usual mean girl stuff occasionally comes into play.
4. Sisters refusing to accept results of election or appointment of abbess, or abbess flouting the rules to continue being in charge. “The abbess is out traveling and spending the monastery’s money while we’re doing all the work back here” is also popular.
5. Feuding with the bishop, local clergy, local male convent, etc.
6. Fake and/or heretical apparitions, prophecies, miracles, or relics. Often combines with #7.
7. Heretical devotional movements. Declaring yourself to be pope or the Holy Spirit will usually get you in trouble. Sex does often get involved with this, but it’s usually in step number two, when the nuns voluntarily or involuntarily leave the monastery to spread their new Gospel.
Protestant here and the “naughty nuns” thing sounds more like a slam against the Catholic Church by some Protestants.
IE Nuns were intended to be “whores” for priests.
Made worse by the modern obsession with the notion that nobody ever eschews sex, ever, for any reason.
I mean, yes, sex is one of the primary drives. That said, it isn’t impossible to be so dedicated to something else that it doesn’t control your entire life.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the modern world is far too enthralled by “natural”. For social apes, Natural is fighting over the Apha male position, and killing off the offspring of the loser. We don’t do that so much anymore, nor should we.
Well, for the Left, position’s like W.J. Clinton’s, T. Kennedy’s and C. Dodd’s might be their alphas, and abortion might be a way of turfing out the reproductive potential of the low status. Nasty thought that.
That second point ain’t a “might be”. Some day when you need to fast, take a look at Margaret Sangar’s writings (Founder of Planned Parenthood).
Yeah, but that is racism rather than general low status.
No, she wanted the inferior whites to stop having children, too.
Oh, wow, apparently it’s a traditional form of slanderous fiction– and predates the internet. “Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk” seem to be the most popular origin these days.
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/convent-horror-stories
The time-period I’m thinking about is more 11th and 12th centuries, as Europe started to approach the limits of what the feudal system could support. In the 13th century reformers apparently spent considerable effort bringing independent monasteries and nunneries under central authority.
Then the Black Death comes, and the underlying socio-economic issues start to shift away from feudalism.
I find references to this being in Mexico, “South America– either Chile or Argentina”, Spain, “Europe,” France (Chick tract has that version), etc.
Those where there’s enough information to research seem to be, indeed, based on finding out that there were graveyards near places where the sick were cared for.
Found one theory that it might have some kind of basis from the Renaissance, but that was 100% guess from someone who’d also heard it claimed to have been found in Italy.
Oooh! I think I found it– could it have been around the ancient Roman ruins? One of the places I found mentioned that the bodies found in the “Cloaca Maxima” were attributed to the nearby Church buildings, until someone figured out the bodies were way too old.
I’m not Catholic but I’d like to see some primary sources about this.
Like the “Black Legend” (ie fake stories about the Spanish Inquisition), these stories sound like stuff made up to “bash” the Roman Catholic Church.
Even if the stories were things “said to have happened” before Luther, I take these stories with a Ton Of Salt.
In some academic book I read about nuns prior to the Reformation, ballads/songs about “poor me, in a convent against my will, I just want a good man to save me” was a trope. (Kinda like all the Childe ballads about girl forced to marry against her will.) I don’t have the book at hand or I’d give you the title.
Pietro Aretino’s “Secret Life of Nuns”? (Warning: the Amazon edition of it describes the author as the inventor of European pornographic writing.)
Well Alma is boning up on European history.
Umm, sorry, that pun was unintentional. I can’t believe considering the current level of discourse on yesterdays post that I wrote that without seeing that. What I meant to say is that she is researching European history, including that of churches, I could see a book supposedly about Nuns, by the “inventor of European pornographic writing” as a totally logical research source.
Alright, managing that on ACCIDENT is hilarious!
I thought the original pun was in slightly bad taste, but it was also excellent use of an opportunity, so I did the standard grimace… that you managed on accident has me grinning. 😀
Naw, the one I thought about and didn’t write, was the totally clean one about her reading the book before the Reformation.
No, it was more of an overview of convent culture and the role of women in the church, IIRC. It’s in a box in my storage unit, way in the back, under some furniture. Unless it is back on the shelves at Redquarters (Mom and Dad’s house).
This is pretty amusing. I have been studying up on ancient Japanese illustrated erotica (I SWEAR, it is for inclusion in the next book in the series, NOT for prurient purposes). It turns out that the most ancient Japanese naughty picture scroll is a 14th century work that shows the High Priestess of the Great Shrine at Ise seducing a courtier. The seduction is celebrated in sixteen highly graphic pictures of them getting it on in various positions. The High Priestess was required to remain a virgin, so her actions were, in the Shinto belief system, the equivalent of your “naughty nun” Catholic despoilations. Now, the really funny thing about this is that, although the earliest extant version of this scroll dates from 1350 or so, it claims to be an exact copy of a 12th century version dating from about 1140, and THAT is supposedly a copy of one dating from the 9th century. So, it seems that naughty nuns, like wicked librarians in glasses are a trope that is common to all civilizations.
they might have tried to use it as a last resort, but the coercive forces arrayed against it were truly formidable. Escapes to the convent in hagiography are filled with as much drama as any action and adventure story. Those who were insincere would have had the same troubles.
Let’s see… there’s AmoDignus (name origin of Amanda, as a friend is fond of pointing out), Saint Francis, um… at least one of the Fathers of the Church, I think… among the males who had to do backflips and bend over backwards, with lots of fighting, to join the Church.
Isn’t there an entire genera of saint stories that boil down to “I consecrated myself to the Lord and then a male power tried to marry me off, and I was martyred resisting”?
St. Thomas Aquinas was kidnapped off the road and grounded in his room for over a year by his crazy noble family for wanting to join up with those shady Dominican friars instead of being appointed abbot of Monte Cassino. (Very well-connected family, the d’Aquinos.) They also threw a prostitute into his room, whom Thomas threw back out again.
Some of his other adult siblings finally got sick of the parental drama and lowered him down the castle wall in a basket like St. Paul, and then helped him escape to the university in Paris, where all of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names (like Dumb Ox).
The freaky thing is that this wasn’t legendary. It was actual historical events. St. Catherine of Siena’s mom was all drama on her, too. Medieval Italians, go figure.
*looks at kids* Medieval, shmidieval, I can see my Irish/Italian henchmen doing something like that.
We’ve had dramatic rescues of teddybears from vacuums, for heaven’s sake.
I’m sure a teddy bear can survive in a Vacuum far better than a human can. Oh, wait, wrong kind of vacuum. Actually, my point still stands….
The folks over in Constantinople, at various times, were big on consigning political problems to monasteries to become monks or nuns (which was nicer than getting blinded to make you ineligible for emperor, which was nicer than execution). So it’s not surprising that there was some of that in Europe also. In Europe, it usually was a result of a deal, though – “If you retire to a monastery and stay put and don’t have heirs, we won’t execute you.”
But it genuinely was popular in many eras to retire to a monastery. Powerful people got concerned about their souls, they wanted to finish their bucket list and their books, they wanted to get the succession going while they were still alive to enforce it… lots of reasons.
It also gets complicated in some times and places. In Carolingian times, there were “lay abbots,” for instance. They were just guys who founded or supported monasteries with their money, so they were in charge without actually being monks or often, even living anywhere close.
Later on, there were some orders that were founded for ex-prostitutes, and some of these were women who got religion and some were women given a choice of prison or new life in the convent by city judges.
Just as in marriage, though, the Church was usually anxious that nobody should enter convent life against his/her will. Parents and others could apply pressure, but there had to be free consent at some point.
Interesting story. My mom was telling me recently about a friend she has, who had 6 children. Four of them entered the religious orders very early in life. One of them? A girl roughly ten years of age. Girl in question chose to enter a convent where they cut ties with the outside world. The order allowed her to stay, giving her the option to leave at any time, and the family was allowed to visit her every week-end, which they did for the next few years. They saw how she lived, and she would detail her days and what she did to her family.
They saw how happy she was in the convent, so when she decided this was the life she really wanted for sure – I think she was 16 at the time – the parents kissed her goodbye. They did periodically inquire to ask about their daughter over the next few decades, and she was content there. In the time that passed, the family saw a daughter become a nun, a son become a monk, and another son become a priest. The two other children, I think, became a teacher and a doctor respectively, and one of them never married, devoted to their own vocation.
The mother recounted that it hurt, hurt a LOT, of course, to let their little girl go and never see her again, but she was happy, she was safe. As a parent, what more could you ask for, for your child? So they let her go.
That’s the way to bring civilization down and destroy the technological advances that brought us equality. If that’s what you want, DO carry on
But that is what they want. Most of the others who buy into this can’t think. They hear it and the person who says it is an “authority” so it must be true.
Culture of death. One of the few things that the Vatican and Ayn Rand can agree on.
So, just out of curiosity, how did fedora hats become so hated by feministas? In my Twitter-dredgings, I come across angry references to “neckbeards” and “dudebros” and “fedoras”.
I ask largely because the last year I’ve seen a number of young ladies wearing fedoras. 😉
It’s…complicated.
Thing is, it’s not a fedora per se–that is to say, they are not hating on the hat of Indiana Jones. What they’re hating on is the Trilby hat, which, IMO, is slightly weird but kind of cool.
Anyway, for some reason or other, the Trilby became associated with PUAs and MRAs, then became associated, to a lesser degree, with the “Nice Guy” who is not actually very nice, or very good.
As to why the girls are wearing it now, I have no idea.
IIRC, the trilby was originally a lady’s hat.
Named after Trilby, the fictional novel character. The eponymous novel by George LeMaurier is perhaps better known as the source of the term “Svengali,” the guy who hypnotized Trilby into being a great singer.
Most modern guys wouldn’t know what to do with a truly submissive woman.
True. I’ve known/had contact with such. Unsettling.
Partnerships, such a quaint idea. Unfortunately my raisin’ didn’t prepare me to play oppressor or subjugated.
*le sigh*
I’d guess a blend of frustration and irritation with shades of panic when he realizes he’s supposed to make all the decisions, handle all the problems, and plan for every contingency. (I had a neighbor in grad school who had/has a truly passive/follower personality. It was a learning experience.)
Several shades of panic, in my case, back in HS.
Later on, in other — hm, dustier — climates more frustration and irritation.
The very concept scares me to death, and I’m not even sure if I’ve had contact. (shudders) I can barely keep up with my own life, much less someone else’s.
Although one wonders what such a woman might do if ordered to make her own decisions…
Have a nervous breakdown. Seriously. Seen it, writ small, in my Lady under the effects of certain drugs. It ain’t pretty.
Ugh. My condolences sir.
There goes that idea for getting around programming if the need should arise.
Found this on Twitter:
“KillerBunny Sam J. @PolitiBunny ·Nov 15
Feminist: ALL MEN ARE PIGS!
Same feminist: WOMEN ARE EQUAL TO MEN.
O.o”
101 retweets, so far.
Summary: everyone loves bacon?
Mmmm…. bacon.
*resists imitation of the dog from the “Beggin’ Strips” commercials*
Apropos of nothing, I absolutely HAD to share this:
(NSFW):
http://fav.me/d86klrp
(GOD I hope WP doesn’t try to embed this, it’s huge.)
Okay, a little snort-choke at Nebezial’s. Then I followed his link…
*howls with laughter* Thanks for sharing I have NOT seen that yet…
My wife and I watched “Maleficent” last night. I find it funny in parts, sad in others. And even its underlying message wouldn’t bother me if it were one message in a mosaic of skewed and contrasting messages in the arts/media. What bothers me is the rather viciously rendered contention that the root of ALL that is evil and damaging is the male. There are only two males in the movie that are not evil ravening beasts. One is completely subservient to the woman and the other is so superficial that he is a cartoon cutout. Hitler claimed that he secret to scamming the masses was to tell a big enough lie and quash any coherent rebuttal. Apparently someone was paying attention.
http://nebezial.deviantart.com/art/maleficent-SUPERSPOILER-you-were-warned-476369185
I think, actually, on that note, Brave was much more balanced.
Left unanswered in all the debate about gender traitors is the question: When & Where was the convention in which womankind assembled elected these women their representatives and agents, authorized them to advocate on their behalf and voted on the platform of what constitutes “women’s issues”?
Surely it was in all the papers and received major TV coverage?
Because without such a convening, these women claiming to represent “womankind” are just the usual bunch of self-important hopped up illegitimate intellectual lightweights who drive every political and social movement over a cliff.
So appropriate that I present this comment from NRO’s gangblog, The Corner, in full with rcommendatiion of visiting for multiple embedded links.
Modern Feminism: Appalling Stupidity Backed by Hysterical Rage
By David French
November 17, 2014 2:32 PM
Modern feminism is getting embarrassing. There’s a reason why so few women identify as feminists: It’s less a true “women’s movement” than the public face of hysterical leftist intolerance — combined, of course, with utterly bizarre (and bizarrely stupid) ideas.
While I had numerous brushes with extremist feminists in law school — women who declared that all (heterosexual) sex was rape and often responded with literal screams to classroom speech they didn’t like — it all felt fashionably fake. Surely no one took that level of extremism into the real world, did they? Then my wife encountered a lesbian couple in Ithaca, N.Y., who was raising their child to be “genderless.” They refused to call him a boy or girl, allowing him to “choose his gender” identity during his teenage years. And, apparently, they are not alone.
Most people — including most liberals — believe that kind of behavior is insane. NPR, by contrast, writes a glowing profile of women raising their “boychicks.” It’s hard to craft a more nauseating self-parodic paragraph than this self-identified “queer-identified male-partnered monogamist’s” description of her son:
The true insanity is not that there are crazy people in this world — there always are (I can tell some stories after 45 years in church) — but that modern feminism actually strives to elevate the crazy, the stupid, and the just plain hysterical into the realm of actually relevant cultural and political commentary. Consider these examples:
1. A woman (who likely identifies as a feminist herself) quite sensibly writes that college girls should drink responsibly as a form of defense against sexual assault, and other feminists call her a ”rape denialist.”
2. A feminist hero writes about an extended period of grotesque sexualized conduct involving her sister — conduct that would lead the Left to write any conservative woman out of respectable society — and prominent feminists rush to her defense (though, to be fair, it seems that to some in the feminist world, defending Lena Dunham is a “white feminist” thing to do).
3. A man helped remotely guide a spacecraft onto a comet — let me say that again, a man helped remotely guide a spacecraft onto a comet – but to some feminists that’s less important than his geektastic shirt.
The stupid is so very strong here. The list could go on and on. In fact, we should never forget that perhaps the single-most stupid political argument in modern politics — that you’re waging a “war on women” unless you completely support requiring all employers of any faith or no faith at all to provide employees with free contraceptives and abortifacients — was adopted enthusiastically and wholeheartedly for at least two full years by one of our major political parties.
This is a movement that seems to be all about short-term gains, mostly through name-calling and other forms of online bullying, at the expense of any long-term intellectual coherence or even basic integrity. But in the long run how many women want to be identified with a movement whose champions can’t even listen to a mildly controversial speech without having to walk out to keep from either blacking out or throwing up? How many women want to be identified with a movement that is currently arguing over whether the founder of Facebook’s preference for plain T-shirts is sexist?
All of these reactions display a level of hyper-sensitivity and emotional fragility that every woman I know finds repugnant. Treating women as equals in our culture and politics is simple fairness. Modern feminism, by contrast, has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with the special pleading of its entitled commentariat.
Treating women as equals does not mean that we ignore differences — men and women tend to have different strengths and weaknesses, different likes and dislikes, and will often choose different career paths, family roles, television shows, books, and movies. In fact, men and women tend to like that they’re different and celebrate those differences. Feminism has reacted to this obvious reality by either arguing that our myriad differences are mere social constructs or by arguing that — to borrow my wife’s excellent summary of feminist philosophy – men and women are the same, except when women are better. After all, it wasn’t long ago that one prominent feminist argued that our entire “postindustrial society” was just “better suited to women.”
Feminism doesn’t really have a philosophy. It’s barely even an ideology. It’s mostly just a series of temper tantrums thrown by a small, privileged minority. And, unless it changes, it will soon be irrelevant.