The Myth of the Peaceful Woman by outofthedarkness

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Myth of the Peaceful Woman by outofthedarkness

There’s a persistent trope in science fiction and fantasy about a society consisting solely of women. It’s a peaceful and prosperous society, free from all violence. There may be some female warriors, who are somehow better than all male warriors everywhere despite having no real pressure or battles to harden themselves on. As a female reader with a strong taste for rational thinking, I am begging authors to stop doing this. Every female over the age of seven knows that a planet full of only women would not be peaceful. Every female Odd will picture this situation as The Special Hell. Allow me to explain the matter for anyone confused as to what this situation would actually look like.

Female social structure is completely different from male social structure. Men tend to organize in a hierarchy of sorts. There’s one guy at the top, a few guys he trusts underneath him, etc. downward until you reach the guys that are on the bottom of the pile. The structure makes sense. It’s efficient, everyone knows who’s in charge, and it’s largely based around the individual. Someone can rise or fall in this hierarchy based on any number of things, but their position is usually pretty clear from the outside looking in.

Female social structure is more fluid. It’s based more on group identity than on individual characteristics. You tend to have one woman who is kind of in charge, your queen bee as it were. Those in her favor circle around her, and the circles continue outward until you have the women who are not part of the group. They aren’t at the bottom of the pile, they pretty much don’t exist. At least, if they’re lucky they don’t. One’s position in the social hierarchy can change at any time, to include who the queen bee is. Remember the scene in Mean Girls where Regina tries to sit at the lunch table with the other plastics but isn’t wearing the right color clothes? She was just knocked out of her position in the social hierarchy.

In a social structure like this, there’s no room for difference of opinion or people who stand out too much. If an individual, even by noncompliance, threatens the group identity; she will gain the ire of the entire group. They will hunt her without mercy until she complies with the demands of the group, is removed from their reach by either death or physical distance (which is getting much harder with the internet), or manages to win enough females to her side to either form a new group around her or replace the existing leader. The last option allows her to push her standard on the group as a whole. There is no option to live and let live. In other words, female social structure is closer to the Borg than the complex world we currently enjoy.

I can already hear the cries of, “But women aren’t violent!” If you’re talking about direct violence, you’re mostly right. Women are not men, and we don’t hunt in the way that men do. Our weapons are usually words and emotions, not direct violence. Instead of a brawl in which two people fight it out and determine which is the strongest, you’re looking at extreme emotional abuse for anyone who is outside the group and unlucky enough to have their attention. Emotional abuse attacks a person in the most deeply personal of ways, and the scars it creates are more damaging than the physical scars of a beating. We wonder why girls who stand out grow so bitter, but if you’re a little too pretty or a little too different, other girls swarm on you and rip you apart with constant emotional abuse. They attack who you are at the base of your being, your very self-perception. This is why you see truly beautiful women who struggle to see their worth. Other girls have been ripping into them since the nursery, and it only gets worse as they get older. Boys court you and try in their awkward boyish way to get your attention, but you’re mostly convinced that it’s a cruel joke they’re playing on you, because of course you aren’t pretty or smart or special. The scars run deep and never fully heal.

However, physical violence is not out of the question either. Female genital mutilation is a very physical violence that is inflicted on women, mostly by other women. It is not unique to or even required by Islam, the religion we think of most on this issue. It’s tradition, and women will inflict this on their daughters and granddaughters quietly in dirty back rooms with rusty and unsterilized razor blades if the society they live in declare it to be illegal. If enough women decide to mob on some unfortunate outside their group, they may well turn physically violent and the beating will not stop once the point is made. It will stop when the target of their wrath is dead or nearly dead. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.

So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.

When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.

 

505 thoughts on “The Myth of the Peaceful Woman by outofthedarkness”

  2. So you’re saying that a females-only world would be the SJW paradise writ large. It’s nice to hear that we men are what keep you women civilized. 😀

        1. Lemme guess, you wrote

          <grunt> <scratch> <spit>

          right? You’ve got a choice: use real angle brackets, e.g.,<blockquote‹grunt› ‹scratch› ‹spit›or write “&lt;grunt>” instead of “<grunt>”.

          (And of course, when this posts I’ll see where I messed up the HTML entity escaping.)

        2. Lemme guess, you wrote

          <grunt> <scratch> <spit>

          right? You’ve got a choice: use real angle brackets, e.g.,

          ‹grunt› ‹scratch› ‹spit›

          or write “&lt;grunt>” instead of “<grunt>”.

          (And of course, when this posts I’ll see where I messed up the HTML entity escaping.)

          1. But of course! Fighting with WordPress to get things to display as I want (WordPresso Delenda Est!) would completely belie the caveman vibe I was going for…

            1. Doug, I’m not getting the emails from TVIW, I think the clustereffe of emails that stopped working this year has something to do with that. Can you get them to change it to my hotmail account? We need to sign up and book this month.

              1. I’ll pass the request on to the appropriate folks at TVIW. Send my your account info at my gmail address, just to be sure I put it all in the proper place and state. By the way, Gray Rinehart, Geoff Landis, Les Johnson, Toni Weisskopf, and Larry Niven are already registered (along with Jim and Greg Benford), and Jack McDevitt and Allen Steele are expected to register pretty soon. Jerry Pournelle might do so if health permits, I’m told, but he’s certainly interested. (I know Jerry reads your blog, so I’m sure he can speak for himself if he likes.)

              1. “Happiness engineers.” Heh. What a Brave-New-World-ish term. It reminds me of the name of Woodrow Wilson’s proto-SA private intimidation group, the American Protective League.

        1. Keeps your playing cards from getting greasy, is what it does.

          Very important, that.

      4. Yeah; it isn’t so much one side keeping the other in line as the dynamic tension between the two that makes anything civilized possible.

      5. Somebody I heard on YouTube summed it up simply:

        Men build things, but who do we build them FOR?

            1. There’s enough theater nerd in me that I can’t help but cringe a little when I see The Scottish Play referred to by it’s actual title.

      6. Women don’t civilize men. Men do. There’s a reason inner cities are teeming with wild, violent young men: women are in charge. Older men civilize young men. When women take control of politiics, as they have in inner cities, women push men to the margins, have children with whomever they want, then collect government checks. Their little girls grow up to be selfish, entitled sluts, the same as their mothers. Their sons grow up to be violent thugs killed on the street corner because the adult women prevent adult men from being their children’s lives.

        The inner city is the matriarchy Sarah describes in this post.

    2. I think it works both ways. And that’s a fair chunk of what’s being lost with this whole ‘gender fluid is the new norm’ thing. Men and women are different. We do things differently. Remove one or the other totally from the equation and the result is profoundly broken.

      1. Typically when you generalize roles you get a muddled mess of good enough but the negatives shine right thru. We have derided honor, inverted compassion but now both sexes thrill in cattiness and destruction.

      2. Complete agreement here. It’s nice to know that we (the sexes) are a close binary, each unstable without the other. As Frank said:

      4. I think the term “gender fluid” is something vaguely disturbing in and of itself. It has connotations, to me, of “bodily fluid” – the kind where you’re getting out the gloves and clorox if you encounter.

      5. Men and women are different. We do things differently.

        Way to get yourself fired from a job at Google, there… 😉

      1. Not unusual – it’s the immediate, personal partnership that creates a civilized entity.
        Note in how many close couples, one partner does not outlast the other by more than a few years… we need our complements.

        1. My maternal grandparents were married for sixty years before Grandad died of cancer. Grandma lived another fifteen years or so after he passed, but I don’t think she would have made it nearly that long if my daughter and I hadn’t come to live with her. She’d been in the hospital twice for dehydration before we moved to be with her; in the eight years that we were together she wasn’t in the hospital at all until about two weeks before she died at age 97. It really is important for people to have companionship.

          I have my youngest daughter, who is mentally handicapped and can’t live by herself (not even remotely possible — she functions on about the level of a three-year-old). She’s frequently difficult to live with, but even so, she offers companionship.

          A spouse would, I suppose, be better than the two above examples, but it isn’t always possible.

  3. I read an article about primate social structure. The particular example they used—it may have been chimpanzees—included a tidbit about high-status females harassing low status females until they were so stressed that they stopped ovulating. IOW, it’s an evolutionary-based reproductive strategy to bully other women.

    Doesn’t make it any better in our resource-rich world, but at least it explains why it’s so prevalent and deep-seated.

      2. Anything this deep and this prevalent is obviously built in.
        My daughter is in college now, studying chemistry. The low level classes are about 50/50 male/female, but she can tell that won’t last. At every lab session, the boys organize and immediately get to work, giving and taking orders. The girls mill about, each doing their own thing, pretty much ignoring each other and actively resisting my daughter when she tries to get them to cooperate. (I’ve worked hard at raising her to be able to ‘speak male’ when appropriate.) Doesn’t matter how smart they are, they just can’t/won’t work as a group and accept directions or guidance. This has led directly to some of the experiments being failures, and it annoys my daughter to no end. She really prefers boys as lab partners, and is looking forward to the coming year, when there will be fewer girls in her classes.

        1. McChuck, the behaviours you describe are typical of human behaviour and is a result of the genetic pre-conditioning that ensured the survival of our species. If you were to imagine a homo sapiens family unit of the past 100 millenia, the male would take his spear (or throwing stick, or whatever implement was found to be an effective killing tool) and head off to hunt for meat to feed the family, together with the other males of his social group.
          The females stays behind to look after the offspring and gather fruits, roots and berries (Note: in more primitive hominid groups, it is believed that women also participated in hunting, but then who is looking after the children? This may have been a factor in their extinction?).
          This division of labour imbued the two genders with specific skills that were essential for the success of the tasks and hence, the survival of the family unit (sic. the human species). In the case of the males, a successful hunt required co-operation and teamwork amongst the hunters. In the case of the females, the requirements for child-care, plus all the other duties of gathering food and whatever other chores were necessary then has imbued the female of the species with “multi-tasking” skills (it is genearlly agreed that to this day, women are inherently better at this than men). Another significant female trait, which emerges is the keen awareness and sense of suspicion necessary in order to protect her young from predators (always on her guard against the possibility that a wolf of sabre-toothed tiger will pounce and drag away her offspring).
          Both development and expression of both these behaviours were essential for the survival of the species homo sapiens. Hence, it is easy to rationalise the behaviours of modern men and women, against this genetic predisposition for collective transaction between the male of the species, as opposed to the more solitary and self-reliant imperative of the female.

          1. Women didn’t participate in hunting. Oh, sure, there might have been one a century. That’s feminist anthropologist balderdash. I read about every find made.
            It is possible women killed small game while out gathering. that’s not the same.

        2. McChuck: I am a female senior citizen. I had a similar experience while trying to organize a neighborhood event with several women neighbors. Whenever we would meet we would start out talking about the event topics, but after a few minutes the discussion would devolve into personal stories or general chit chat like you would expect to have at a lunch. It would take hours to make any decisions about the event. I like socializing with the ladies, but when it comes to planning, I think I take a more masculine approach.

    2. I believe I saw that same article (or from another outlet reporting the same source story) and it included the datum that dominant females would even interpose themselves between another female and a male during copulation.

      “Not just you but your bloodline too” is a perilous threat.

    3. But the thing is, not all females act this way (in humans — I don’t know enough about chimps to speak about them). Do the girls who DO act this way learn it from their mothers?

      1. If not from their own mothers, then from the girls around them who learned it from theirs…

  4. Sounds like most Silicon Valley tech companies that have grown to the point that HR really runs things.

    That oogle place is one example.

    1. *shudder* I had the misfortune to work at a company a few years ago where HR DID pretty much run the company. The amount of control they attempted to have over the employees was disturbing. I hope I never have to work in a culture like that again.

      1. I can see that working….right up until they managed to piss off IT. Hard to keep monitoring people for compliance when all your monitoring tech will show you is midget porn….

          1. I read a couple of episodes. Kinda like Lawdog, actually. Then the site went into a ‘you have just won’ cycle. In the first place, I doubt it. In the second place, fishy ain’t biting. In the third place, who the hell WANTS the junk you say I’ve won?

            *sigh*

            1. Simon’s BOFH stories go back to Usenet days, before the Web. They got into a couple of IT broadsheets and then became an online column.

              If it’s the same guy doing BOFH, his style has changed a lot over the years.

              Some of the BOFH stories were useful in the workplace when I wore the +10 Jackboots of Administration myself. In particular, Simon’s description of his “cable of doom”, which had an Ethernet jack on one and and a wall jack on the other. Simon used his to kill people’s equipment, I used mine (improved with a cobra head of jacks on the equipment end) to make sure intermittent hardware faults ceased being intermittent…

              (as in, some very expensive equipment that had to be Fedexed to its maker for repair, and Fedexed back, and they claimed it worked just fine, with a fat invoice. And proceeded to open a subspace channel to V’ger minutes after plugging it back in. When it went back the next time, yea and verily, there was no question there was a problem!)

        2. Not when IT leadership just nods.Typically we just ran internet reports at the request of a user’s manager, HR, or if we saw lots of funky stuff coming from a system. (True story, we had a 3rd shift guy actually get something about ‘tranny-elf’ porn into the top 5 sites of the day all by himself). Not sure how it missed the filter but after going through that guys history he needed to be working for one of the filtering companies because he had a knack for finding sites that didn’t register as porn.

    2. Working at a state institution of higher indoctrination isn’t far from that point.

      1. I’m trying not to think about that. I’m starting college classes in about 3 weeks to finally get my degree. The liberal influence was bad enough in the 90’s. I’ve been putting it off for a long time but the job market is changing enough I’m feeling the need to get that piece of paper that says I’m all smartified and stuff.

        1. Mouth shut, eyes open, do not ask questions. You’ll be fine. Enemy territory. Plan accordingly.

          1. I’m hoping this one won’t be so bad. They are requiring 9 hours of what amounts to American Exceptionalism classes. It’s part of the reason I picked this university. Plus I’ve only got 2 gen ed classes left. The rest is all cybersecurity related.

  5. Is it safe for a guy to “like” this post? :nervous smile:

    Seriously, I agree.

    C. S. Lewis once said something about why “men are in charge of the family”.

    Basically, IIRC he said that women “in defense of the family” go “take no prisoners” against anybody who “threatens” the family and what the women see as a “threat” the husbands might not see as a threat.

    Men on the other hand have to “work” with other men and a “take no prisoners” mindset would endanger the working relationships.

    On the other hand, I may have butchered Lewis’ words. 😉

    1. In a properly ordered society, women are the last line of defense between the invader and the children.

      If a conflict gets to the point that the women must fight, there’s no room for mercy or honor.

      1. It’s the cornered cat. A cornered cat will do anything to protect her kittens. Likewise a woman after the Bad Guy has gotten past the men.

        1. Which has me re-thinking the whole ‘men protect the women thing’. We’re actually protecting the other men from the wrath of our women. It’ll at least be a cleaner and quicker death. . .

          1. Eh, not entirely. Unless firearms enter into the equation, I’d be pretty easy pickings for a determined male. Short-sighted without my glasses, can’t run quickly for long distances, weaker than most men, shorter reach than the average man. So yes, I greatly value the men who are willing to step into the breach. I can and have defended myself in the past, but not well and not always successfully. (Four on one is always chancy, but four on a smaller and overweight one… the one is not going to fare too well. I didn’t.)

            1. For four on one I’d be wanting a gun as well! (Unless it’s just guys messing around or in the dojo).

              I’m wondering how long that mentality is going to last. Feminism seems to be doing it’s best to convince everybody that women don’t need anybody to protect them (while discouraging them from learning to protect themselves).

              1. Those things tend to self-correct sooner or later. Probably very messily when it happens. The survivors will go back for what actually works (or are the ones who stayed with what actually works in the first place).

                1. Yeah. One of the things that worries me is that the self-correction will involve the roles going back to being tight, rigid boxes with no flexibility for misfits. A system in which the response to a misfit is to pound them into their assigned box until either the stuff that sticks out gets broken off, or they shatter altogether, at which point it’s sweep up the pieces and throw them away.

                  And the sad thing is, this whole thing started with misfits trying to carve out an accommodation where they could be themselves instead of having to squeeze into a box that didn’t fit. And while most women probably are happier in something close to the traditional female role, there are a certain number who are simply not going to fit into it, will be miserable trying, and if you try to force them into it, things will go very badly. Best case, they’ll just do a lousy job and everybody is miserable. Worst case is active abuse, physical or mental — there was a woman in the community where I grew up who was known to tell her children “you were a mistake.” It was pretty clear she felt forced into the role of full-time homemaker by community expectations, and resented the hell out of it. A resentment that spilled onto her children.

                  In the backstory of one of my characters, her father decided she was going to learn the skills of proper feminine domesticity if it killed her. It came very close to not being just a figure of speech before someone managed to get dear old Dad to see that no, it was not passive-aggressive sabotage, but genuine lack of aptitude.

                  1. FWIW, from my family history, there has ALWAYS been places in the US for women who were willing to flip tradition the bird.

                    Not that it’s not a risk to be fought, just that OUR tradition is against it.

                    2. I hope you’re right, and some of the stuff I’m hearing is just blowhards sounding off. But I have to admit that their eagerness to implement such things is a little disturbing.

                      And to give my fictional world credit, they didn’t view fathers as having the power of life and death over their children. Although the civil government was disinclined to intervene in the private affairs of the family, if it got egregious, charges could be filed. And even if the criminal justice system was too willing to accept a flimsy account of an “accident,” the faith tradition would have regarded a father who beat a child to death as being guilty of the child’s life. But when we meet the character in question, the incident’s all past history, and the most important thing that comes from it is the life-debt she owes her uncle.

                    3. Should probably notice it wasn’t easy, but it WAS allowed– my mom was the first gal to work for Mr. Batman in their area, he did it mostly because she was willing to challenge him, and he praised her until he died.

                  2. Sadly, the terrible old system you describe is better, on average, for the group (and women especially) than the current system. Example: in a group of 100, one person has to pay $100. Ouch. In the current system, all 100 have to pay $5. $5,000 instead of $100 is not a good trade.

                    So, while I agree with you that it would be nice to “carve out” a little space so the misfits only pay $25 instead of $100, if it can’t stop there (and it SEEMS that it never does – maybe someday, eh?), then it’s a bad idea, and a society that just accepts the 1% getting clobbered will come along and replace it.

                    I’m not in any way saying that I like that or want it to be that way, but that’s what decades of studying societal changes says.

              2. Four on one is never a good idea, even if you are Jean Claude, it can be done but it requires several things to be successful. First and foremost is luck, next is a lack of skill and/or weapons on the part of your attackers, third is your own skill and ruthlessness because you need to incapacitate as many attackers as possible in as short of a time as possible. The most efficient and effective way to do this is with a large caliber firearm and an open field of fire, with your attackers far enough away they cannot close with you in the time it takes to incapacitate them all. I say large caliber, because it requires less skill and precise aiming while incapacitating much more effectively on marginal or even lethal hits. Give me a 22 rifle and ten men standing still in a room and I can drop every one of them with head shots, but I can’t do it with them charging before most of them get ahold of me, and a 22 isn’t going to stop a determined attacker before they can get ahold of you with anything but a head or spine shot. It doesn’t really help you if the die from a heart or lung shot a minute after they bashed your head in with a hammer. A larger caliber to the torso will be much more (not always, but much greater chance) effective an incapacitating them, even if it isn’t a lethal wound. This is why they make special self-defense ammo, it is designed to maximize shock and stopping power, which doesn’t necessarily maximize lethality, although it usually has that effect. If you are caught without a gun (something I don’t ever recommend, but it happens) use anything available and absolute ruthlessness. Break bones, hit kidneys, groin, throat or abdomen or joints like knees and elbows(unless you’re a guy with the strength to hit hard enough to knock out or at least down, or you have a weapon capable of doing so punching them in the face is generally the most spectacular but least effective in terms of incapacitating someone so you can get away) rip radio antennas off of cars if you are in parking lot and use it on them, hit them with a pool que, shopping cart, bicycle lock, absolutely anything that increases your reach and effectiveness.
                I’ve been in three on one, I don’t care how good you are, without a gun (and possibly with one, depending on circumstances) unless your attackers are totally incompetent you are not going to come out of it unmarked, and if you worry for an instant about doing too much damage, or killing them, and don’t use absolutely every advantage, weapon, and dirty fighting technique you can, the results are going to be even worse. A sufficiently hard (and most women can provide strength, especially if using something harder than their hands) kidney strike can drop an attacker, a broken knee means that attacker isn’t going to be chasing you very fast, a collapsed windpipe (aim for the adams apple, not the chin) means an attacker can’t get air, when they can’t breath they can’t chase you, a dislocated elbow means an attacker has one less arm to grab you with, while a broken nose and a black eye merely hurt and tick them off.

                As TXRed points out, if you are a small woman or out of shape guy even using every possible advantage your chances of coming out on top aren’t very good, unless you are extremely well trained AND your multiple opponents are bumbling incompetents. Even for a trained, well built and in shape, large male doesn’t have very good odds. This is why I recommend everybody carry a gun; Remember, god created all men equal, Sam Colt made it a reality.

                1. The only thing I’d add is that ALL kids should have a knowledge of where the easy-to-reach major blood flows are– my mom taught them to us out of fear a barn cat would reach them, but more than once I’ve put hand to a pen knife with intent to open them if things went “odd.”

            2. You assume a fair fight. As Lord Peter observed in Busman’s Honeymoon, Harriet was the one person who could almost certainly kill him.

            3. One on one, you’re toast.

              But women don’t FIGHT one on one– they (we) seem to surrender, and then a decade later knife you in the night.

              For obvious reasons, this ain’t healthy for a culture.

              2. Just finished watching a foreign TV series. Halfway through the second season, a new male character was introduced as a competitive counterpart to one of the female leads (who was also highly competitive). The first time we see them, they’re having a sparring match… which she wins after getting knocked down, waiting for him to move to help her up, and then sucker-punching him. And then we find out that she used to do it to him when they knew each other in the past.

                This turns out to be foreshadowing, because in the second to last episode, she does it to him *again* in a much more critical situation.

                  1. She’s in a bad place by the time the guy is introduced, and her “win at all costs” approach is part of the reason why. So while it’s not explicitly stated to be a bad thing, it feeds into some of the problems that she’s having. And the foreshadowed use of it late in the season is very definitely not a good thing.

              3. Yes. The Broken Sword by Paul Anderson. I’ve never forgotten that night the horn signaled for every elven woman to turn to her sleeping captor troll and stick a blade in his neck.

            4. Any act of violence, even one-on-one, un-armed, is a significant risk. Think of someone strung out on PCP and you’re their punching bag.
              First rule in self defense is to avoid the fight if at all possible.
              Second rule of self defense is to accept the fact that you might be hurt, badly, no matter what you do.
              Third rule of self defense is to go all out, no holds barred, hurt, maim, destroy, kill your attacker if that’s what it takes to stop them from coming back at you. Don’t just knock them down and try to run away. Put them down so you KNOW they aren’t getting back up to take you from behind.

              1. Someone strung out on drugs is a whole different story — sometimes it’s almost impossible to take them down, no matter what you hit (or shoot) them with. Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was in college, my small dorm (small college) had boys in one wing, and girls in the other, with the living room and Head Resident’s apartment in the middle. The HR’s husband had just come home from Vietnam (which had just ended); he was Special Forces with multiple black belts. One of the boys in the dorm was a nineteen-year-old Eskimo named Charlie, who was as sweet as could be when he was sober, but he had a serious drinking problem dating back — literally — to infancy (his father used to put whiskey in his baby bottle). When Charlie was drinking, even the HR’s husband almost couldn’t put him down — he said he wished he’d had an entire squad of Charlies (minus the drinking problem) in Vietnam.

      2. To Kipple (just the relevent portions):

        But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
        Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,
        And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
        The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

        She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
        May not deal in doubt or pity — must not swerve for fact or jest.
        These be purely male diversions — not in these her honour dwells.
        She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

        She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
        As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
        And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unchained to claim
        Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

        She is wedded to convictions — in default of grosser ties;
        Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! —
        He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
        Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

        Unprovoked and awful charges — even so the she-bear fights,
        Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons — even so the cobra bites,
        Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
        And the victim writhes in anguish — like the Jesuit with the squaw!

        1. A character I’m working on– story probably never will get finished, I can’t figure out a POINT– is a guy who’s a villain for a pen and paper game.

          Basically, by the woman removing her barriers of “civilized behavior” and treating the “party” as an enemy. For the game.

          (Twist, they do that cliche “everyone becomes their character” thing and that is exactly WHY the party isn’t slaughtered– because she doesn’t REALLY think of them as enemies, they’re friends, meaning family, so…)

          Yeah, it’s an elaborate sermon on sex psychology, thus the “never gonna have a point” thing.

          1. Oh, I don’t know…perhaps you could turn the “never gonna have a point” thing to your advantage…maybe you just need to mix in some nihilism, and throw in an oppressed minority or two, root out any remaining semblance of plot…

            You could win a Hugo!

            Of course, as a result, no one’s going to read the thing…but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

      3. And yet why are so many Western women embracing ‘refugees’ and showing sympathy for Islamists?

        Ayden Paladin tackles the question. The answer she comes to is chilling

        (Watch to the end. She addresses some of the alt-right race-based culture arguments and counters them, but comes up with another rather chilling conclusion)

        1. Remember, just like the college idiots, the “so many” is “they exist at all and the media wants to publicize them.”

          There’s somewhere between two and ten percent of the population who give utterly batshit insane answers to ANY survey.

        2. I’ll watch it later, but my thinking on the question is that:

          First, we don’t have a properly ordered society.

          Second, these women don’t actually believe that the Islamists are a threat (i.e. the men will fight them off no problem, it can’t happen here/to me, they aren’t really as violent/misogynist/rapey as the media say they are, etc),

          AND/OR

          These women believe that the Islamists are inevitable and there’s nothing that can be done to stop them, in which case it’s better to surrender and preserve your own life, because there’s nothing you can do to save anyone else’s.

          “Women as the last line of defense between the children and the invader” is how it ought to be, especially when you know that the invader’s aim is the complete destruction of your culture and way of life. How better to do that than kill the men and children, and rape the women?

          But if you don’t believe that the invader is an existential threat…

          At any rate, the best a society can to is inculcate people with the “ought” so that when it comes down to it, “ought” becomes “is”. And you never know if it’s worked until it’s put to the test.

        3. Ms. Paladin is really over thinking this.
          Some women just want to have sex.
          Other women like dangerous men.
          This has always happened, and always will.

          (The converse, of course, is true for men.)

        4. Not necessarily my opinion, but I do find aspects of the theory a rather misogynistic acquaintance of mine espoused that I found… Potentially explanatory of the behavior.

          Her theory (yeah, she’s a woman–And, she hates women. Why? Because, as she put it, she knows them, from the inside…) is that the fundamental reason you see so many European women gravitating towards the Turks and other Middle-Eastern types is that they lost all respect for “their” men, their fellow Swedes and Germans, when the men failed to fight back and put the women in their places when they acted out and successfully “took power” in society… Resulting in the women then seeking out the “strong male” that their subconscious drives demanded. That these males are the outsiders like the Turks and other refugee migrants from Third-World Moslem hellholes is a natural outgrowth of the natural desire on the part of a lot of these women to be dominated. In her view, they are more like spoiled children seeking to goad Daddy into setting limits, and when he doesn’t…? They’ve rebelled.

          I’d argue with her, but I really can’t. In our circle of mutual acquaintances, we have more than a few examples of the syndrome that she can throw at me, if I were to contest her idea. One of them is a girl I knew through taking college classes after duty hours, and she was a typical SJW-in-training, whose white-bread middle-class effeminate boyfriend was her carpet, and who also espoused feminist and SJW positions on nearly everything.

          She left him, and hooked up with a Guatemalan highlander who regularly beat the crap out of her, is functionally illiterate, and who has extremely misogynistic tendencies. She married him so that he could become legal, and I’m just about certain he’s fairly active in the illegal substances trade, never having done an honest day’s work in his life.

          My acquaintance with the theory thinks that women are going to be the death of Western society, and will hold forth on that for hours if you get her started on it. I’m not sure that she’s entirely wrong, and I see a lot of other people are coming to a similar set of conclusions–I was a little shocked to see the YouTube screed by Black Pigeon Speaks, which echoes stuff I was hearing from her some twenty-odd years ago. If you’re curious to hear a lot of the ideas she talked about, go look up the video “Why Women DESTROY NATIONS”, and watch the whole thing.

          1. Have you read Gates of Fire, about the Spartan stand at Thermopylae? “With your shield or on it.”

            1. Yes, and more than a little bit about the actual history of the era.

              There is, I might point out, a serious dearth of dedicated, self-interested Spartan matriarchs these days. They’ve been supplanted by hedonistic sorts who don’t seem to be too interested in the perpetuation of their own culture and bloodlines–Hell, they seem positively hell-bent on extirpating their own, in several European countries.

              One of the points this acquaintance of mine made was that the inevitable result of “letting women go their own way” was just this–Unbridled exogamy, and a disinterest in perpetuating their parent culture. I’m not sure I buy the whole set of arguments she made, but I can see where she’s got some ideas that at least seem to be relatively applicable to current circumstances.

              Taking a look at the current fertility rates for the various native European ethnicities, you can easily see where there might be interest in curating some “heritage stocks”, in order to prevent extinction. Sort of a human equivalent to the Svalbard seed storage facility, or the various domestic animal variety preservation programs.

          2. I actually stumbled across that Black Pigeon piece a year ago. I didnt like his conclusions, but it’s hard to argue with. I’m still digesting it.

            I think your friend is wrong about the motivation though. I don’t think Euro women lost respect for their men because they were allowed to act out. I think it came later when their men were impotent in the face of Muslim gang rape gangs. Beginning with the “men” of London standing around staring at their shoelaces as one of their soldiers was beheaded in the street in broad daylight. And it was a woman who risked her life to talk him down.

            If that had happened in Texas we would have rounded up every Muslim male and shot them dead.

            I still remember in my youth all the women who complained to me that they wanted a nice guy who would treat them with dignity and respect…and then jumped in the sack with the Bad Boy who slapped them on the ass. I think something similar is in play here.

            1. I think this is crazy cakes. If you think European women can “act out” you haven’t lived there. (rolls eyes.) As far as I can tell the level of “women acting out” is the same as in my grandma’s time,a nd the primary enforcer of their not is… other women.
              SERIOUSLY. This whole discussion is based on something that never happened.
              You know what made them lose respect for their man? What always does. He doesn’t have a job. Unemployment in Europe is disproportionately male. Yes, partly because they imported affirmative action,b ut there’s more to it.

              1. I wouldn’t term it “acting out”, exactly. There’s a bizarre phenomenon I’ve observed a couple of times with different couples, mostly with Northern European female halves. They married, she dominated, she lost respect for her “carpet husband” who acquiesced to her every whim, and she discarded his ass shortly thereafter, moving on to a perceived “manly man” she found. Economics and employment had little apparent influence on these choices–One case was a Dutch girl who divorced her boringly conventional Dutch husband who was an insurance executive, to marry a Montana cowboy type she met while he was in Amsterdam on a leave from Germany, another was a girl who married her US officer husband after they met in Germany, and who she left for a black enlisted guy who she thought was an exciting gang-banger… He wasn’t, but he also wasn’t a complete pushover, either. In all the anecdotal cases I’ve seen, mere economics can’t be the major driver for these female choices–If it was, the women in question would have to have been remarkably stupid.

                What the pundits term “female hypergamy” isn’t a universal phenomenon, nor is it well-defined or understood. But, I do think that a lot of the people discussing it are on to something, or we wouldn’t be seeing the things we observe going on, like young women holding signs up at the various railroad stations expressing a preference for refugee rapists rather than native-born racists…

                Some of this stuff gets expressed in rather odd ways, and goes back a hell of a lot further. I spent a Christmas with a German family during an exchange program, and one of the odder things about that experience was noting how the mother doted on their adopted Iranian boy, and virtually ignored her own children, who also were harshly disciplined compared to their little Cuckoo’s Egg. Seriously weird household I made a point of not developing a relationship with–The sheer “do-gooder” vibe was just disturbing, and I’m pretty sure that the mother was trying to connect me with her network of folks who were involved with encouraging deserters and so forth. Language barriers kept me from being certain about that, but it was strange to be offered “refuge from the authorities”, if I ever needed it…

                1. Yes, this is true among the very wealthy. One of my suitors was British aristocracy whose wife had divorced him for a Spanish Matador. BUT for the love of heaven,t hat’s a set of the VERY wealthy everywhere. The phenomenon is not widespread, except in certain American minds.

                  1. Observationally, I’d have to differ with you: I’ve seen it in a bunch of different socio-economic classes, and I can point to numerous instances of this same sort of irrational mating choice in my own immediate family.

                    The trouble with a lot of this stuff is that when you hear someone say that “Well, the research says…”, and you look around yourself and see nowhere that what that “research” said jibes with the reality you observe personally (RES, I’m lookin’ your way, here…), you really start to wonder whether that “research” was ever valid in the first place.

                    Sarah says that most women mate rationally, for economic reasons. Or, at least, do some careful calculating along those lines before saying “Yes!!!” to that proffered ring.

                    Experience and observation say to me “Well, some few do, but… A hell of a lot emphatically do not.”. Not in the world I’ve experienced, and had to deal with the consequences thereof.

                    I gotta be honest with you all: I think that if the world were really that full of rational, calculating people… It wouldn’t be as full of people as it is. Flatly, in my personal observation, damn few young couples even stop to work out things like “Can we even afford to get married, and how will we pay for the kids…?”. Most of the women I know didn’t marry for carefully considered economic motives, like some kind of carefully arranged business partnership. Most married ‘cos “…he made my knees weak…”, or some variation thereof.

                    Yeah, a few may have looked in the wallet, beforehand, but the thing is, that was more along the lines of seeking rationalizations to
                    give their friends and families, rather than conducting an actual financial analysis: “Oh, Dougie is a dentist! He makes good money!”.

                    Yeah, babe–Dougie has two sets of alimony and child support to pay, and he really wants to drop dentistry to write the Great American Novel, whilst you fight off the ex-wives, their kids, and the creditors from his failing practice with your financially rewarding career as a massage therapist.

                    My own mother? LOL… She married neither wisely nor well. Twice. Both of her mate choices were men who, frankly put, I wouldn’t have trusted to take care of a rattlesnake, let alone gone into partnership to have children with. Suffice to say that I’ve got volumes worth of material from those two, if I ever decide to open a few veins and bleed onto the pages…

                    I love my Mom dearly, but… Lord, I cannot even begin to describe how badly her personal life choices went, when it came to her marriages. Poster child for the pitfalls of giving into exogamous drives, she is… Quantity of thought and careful consideration given to either husband’s economic prospects and potential productivity? Nought, nil, nada, nothing, zero, zilch and precisely zip. And, I might point out, Mom ain’t exactly an upper-class Euro type, with money to burn, either.

                    I mean, in a way, I’m grateful, because without that series of misadventures, I’d not be here with the family I have, but… Jeezly Jones, I’m pretty sure she could have done better, emphatically should have done better, and sure as hell deserved better. Gimme a time machine, and I’d like to have a short, emphatic conversation with her back when, the one my grandparents should have had with her before trundling her off to the college where she met my dad. She could have at least gone into the whole damn thing with open eyes, y’know…?

                    Insane thing is, I think that even if I did go back to warn her, she’d probably have followed the same course, made the same choices. Madness.

                    Y’all can insist that the statistics and studies are accurate all you like, but when I look around me, and I see a complete obviation of those statistics and studies…? This does not make me trust to their veracity in the least little tiny bit–Were I to see some congruence with reality as I observe it, I’d probably be able to write off a lot of the “anecdotal evidence” I see around me. However, huge ‘effing comma, that manifestly ain’t the case. So, Imma gonna go with the “anecdotal evidence” that experience has shown me, and hang the studies and statistics.

                    You say a majority of women are making rational, carefully calculated economic choices about who they marry…? Oh, dear God… Stop; I can only take so much in the way of mad, hysterical laughter–The dogs are looking at me funny, and showing signs of deep canine concern; I’m scaring them.

                    Seriously, anyone who thinks that this is a common, standardized phenomenon needs to go spend some bloody time herding troops in the military, and then go looking around at most of the working-class communities I’ve lived in and around for my entire life. Marriage choices made with even a semblance of rational calculation? LOL…

                    It’s more like “Marriage via misadventure and massive miscalculation…”.

                    What’s the phrase…? “It was a calculated risk… But, boy, am I bad at math!”.

                    The majority of the women I know who even bothered to think about the issues of economics and “will he be a good provider” managed to delude themselves quite nicely into thinking that they’d be able to reform Joe Dumbass and/or that “…he’ll change, once we’re married and he has responsibilities…”. Practical effect is usually the female equivalent of “thinking with his member”, and ignoring the guy’s track record and prospects. The girls do what the girls nethers wanna do, and then deal with the consequences. Much like the boys, as a matter of fact…

                    Seriously, folks–I can think of only about one or two couples I know where the idea of vetting either partner for the likelihood of economic success was ever even vaguely considered, and those couples were both made up of highly abstract and unemotional thinkers on both sides of the marriage bed. Everyone else? It’s been difficult to tell whether there was any real thought of any kind going on, let alone any sort of practical economic calculation.

                    It’s one reason I’m gradually coming around to thinking that the Indian tradition of arranged marriages carefully worked out by the elder generations might have its merits, ‘cos the current chaotic crap we have going on in our culture ain’t exactly working out too well for an awful lot of folks. And, more importantly, their kids…

                    1. “ou look around yourself and see nowhere that what that “research” said jibes with the reality you observe personally (RES, I’m lookin’ your way, here…)”

                      Well, Kirk old buddy, you’re looking in the wrong place because I didn’t say anything about what research shows, I simply said I doubt your circle of acquaintance amounts to an adequate sample size in a population of (Lessee ,,, USA is about 330 million, plus 739 million in Europe … I think that includes Russia … plus another 36 million for Canada* and that gives us a total population of European-based cultures … oops! another 25 million for Australia … carry the one annnnnd ) 1.1 billion.

                      For your circle of acquaintances to run even one one hundredth of a percent of that you would have to know, somewhat well, a but over 100,000 people. I suspect your circle of friends runs less than one percent of even that, and is not likely to be a representative sample.

                      So, anecdote =/= data and you, nor anyone else here, knows enough people to make such projections. As for “research” I make no claims of its validity until I have reviewed the methodology of the study. Probably not even then as I doubt I’ve expertise enough to opine on such a matter.

                      *Geeze, no wonder they can do universal health care, sorta.

                    3. Sarah says that most women mate rationally, for economic reasons. Or, at least, do some careful calculating along those lines before saying “Yes!!!” to that proffered ring.

                      …..?

                      I think there may be a gap in what she says and what you hear, either that or in what she says and what I hear, because I heard her saying basically that women go for guys who can provide for them. That means money, yeah, but also defense, and making a home.

                      Gals want guys who can fill the need– get your mind out of the gutter– that’s going to depend on what they think and sense the “need” is.

                      Elf provides me balance, although he’ll grumble that I don’t need it–we’re two sides of a circle, like the ying/yang.

                      Women do mate rationally. The problem is figuring out what facts they are leaning on, which mightn’t be factual.

                    4. Not simply can provide for them, but will provide for them, and for the long haul. Most gals can claim an effectively infinite number of guys willing to provide for them for the night, and maybe even to invest a few night’s provisions, but that isn’t what they are looking for, not even the floozies. People want a mate they can be proud of and who they can trust with a pillow while they are snoring. Is that irrational? How did you decide which junior officers you could truly trust when you were in the service?

                      Given how deeply the nesting on this has progressed, I suggest the topic be tabled. It isn’t as if anybody’s opinion is going to be changed or, if changed, as if it will matter one whit in this crazy mixed-up world of ours.

                    5. BTW, Kirk, I think you are miscalculating the type of rationalization going on. Most women (most men, as well, albeit in the opposite direction) choose their mates by the observation of certain markers of class, status and whatever other factors go into such decisions, mostly occurring on a subconscious level.

                      Among the social cues sought out are peer status (will my friends & family accept/approve/be impressed by this partner?), availability (ahem. You cannot catch trout in the ocean, you cannot catch them in a brook if you haven’t the right bait) and similar factors too numerous and subtle to mention. And most people are selecting on insufficient information — if projecting the physical and character development of an 18-year-old male were easy the MLB draft would produce more routine success and we’d never see a sixty-second round draft pick entering the Baseball Hall of Fame. Heck, I even suspect the task of recognizing and promoting potential generals and senior non-Coms would prove much more effective than it currently is.

                      The human species has developed its means of encouraging reproduction, and most of them operate on a level far below what we can grasp. It ain’t rational, it ain’t necessarily irrational, it is simply what it is. Nor, I think, does it much matter because we didn’t seem to do all that much better when the bride’s parents negotiated with the groom’s folks to match the lineages. Perhaps government, with its vast resources and wealth of rigorous, dispassionate scientific processes would be better at matching mates — but even were it true I do not expect many would agree to that.

                      I’ve no evidence to support this, so discard it as you like, but I’ve been participating in and observing the culture for some sixty years, and most of that experience convinces me that we have not the slightest idea why others do what they do, and are better not attempting to understand (unless we’re sitting at the Backgammon board together and there’e money on the line.)

                2. Well given the incredibly severe social and legal penalties for a man who doesn’t bow down to the modern Western wife’s every whim, and then risks everything anyway even if the man gives in (wife leaves him because ‘ugh, DOORMAT! I want a REAL man! And I want you to give me alimony and child support and support my fucking around financially!) I really cannot blame the MGTOW movement. I know of perfectly good young men who are reluctant to risk their hard earned livelihoods and futures on a woman who could, in every sense of the word, fuck them over.

                  1. AGAIN you guys re indulging in the same sort of crap as people who “know” the US is a military dictatorship from our press.
                    PLEASE trust me on this, with the exception of the scandinavian countries which are a thing onto themselves, most European feminists would think even moderate US feminists are crazy.

                    1. I wasn’t! I was talking about the guys I know, locally and from the gaming clan (which is, membershipwise, scattered across the US and Europe, with some Aussies sprinkled in.) I’ve had the entertainment of trying to explain US feminism to female Europeans in clan, who consider themselves feminists, and they boggle at the crazy.

                      Though, the example of men trying to arm themselves in prep to protect their women and getting arrested was in Germany.

                    3. I think in the German example, they didn’t go with guns. I think one guy was arrested with a cleaver, which is the one I remember particularly; the others might have been armed with other things, but no mention of firearms. There was mention though that the reason why they armed themselves was because the gangs of ‘immigrants’ they were likely to face were also likely to out number them.

                      It’s been a long time since I’ve been exposed to casual street violence in Europe, but when I was there, there was… a rather strong vibe of ‘run for the authorities, defending yourself is wrong and bad.’ Doesn’t matter if you’d never seen your assailant before and couldn’t recognize him or her in a lineup. ‘Go for the authorities.’ It seems to smudge into the anti-gun stuff, perspectivewise.

                    4. Folks, we need to maintain awareness of the problems of small sample sizes and the degree to which the most observable examples may not be normal for the category.

                      Observed characteristics can seem predominate yet still fail to be representative.

          3. so many European women gravitating towards the Turks and other Middle-Eastern types is that they lost all respect for “their” men, their fellow Swedes and Germans, when the men failed to fight back and put the women in their places when they acted out and successfully “took power” in society…

            Add to the fact that those same women basically crippled men legally from defending them (men who armed themselves and basically tried to prepare themselves for fighting in defense of their women in the wake of the various sexual assaults were arrested and charged with carrying deadly weapons) it’s no surprise.

            It’s shit like this that gives those shitheads espousing the Game mentality an honest foothold, because their initial premise of women wanting strong, assertive and aggressive men isn’t, of itself, wrong.

            And yeah, unfortunately, your acquaintance isn’t entirely wrong either, the same way the Game guys aren’t. They have a bit of truth, and a bit of being correct.

    2. Women are in charge of the family, at least in the USA. That’s the part not one feminist gets. Far as I can tell, Mother-in-Law is in charge, too, in her very different culture. It’s just not done by blatant physical force. Men do what women want because sex with a willing partner. Also she’ll poison your dinner, murder your offspring, etc.

      1. My birth family is always ruled by a matriarch. Going back I was amazed to find my very mild SIL is taking over from mom, and changing a lot in the process.
        Instructive. I’m glad I stepped out of that hierarchy. when I go back, SIL tries to subtly put me in my place. Eh. I don’t have a place, and I don’t envy her her future job.

        2. To become myself, move to the States, educate myself, and marry, I abdicated my position as oldest daughter (of 5), and left the current position of matriarch, willingly, to my next sister.

          This COULD be viewed as payback for supplanting me in the nuclear family – never did understand why my parents wanted more kids (good Catholics? back before BC (birth control)?).

          It is rather convenient – and she does a much better job of it than I ever would. Many people in Mexico City actually don’t know there IS an older daughter until one of my too-rare appearances.

          She also married rich, got a PhD (after mine – for the credentials in her field, where men tended to condescend to her as another nice Junior league lady), and has organized far better care for my parents. She learned well from Mother and Grandmother. I just skipped out. I think I knew what it entailed, and I had other fish to fry.

          I admire her. I’m proud of her. She’s also an extreme extrovert who has had lunch with Laura Bush. I would never trade places with her.

            1. Heh, between learning this, and knowing that you weren’t initially a wanted child, this gives me the fanciful notion that G*d wanted you to be an American, but didn’t have an opening in an American family (for whatever reason) so He had to make do with your Portuguese family, until He could find a way to get you to America.

              A stupid notion, to be sure, but one that causes a weird touch of laughter in the corner of my head for some reason…

              1. Nah, It is because English goes through other languages’ pockets, looking for writers on the loose and ready for a change.

                Either that, or Portugal fears the weapon it loosed upon the world.

                2. Naw. You just caused a fork in the space-time continuum. In the other universe, Sarah stayed in Portugal, got married, had 4.2 kids, and died a bent and wizen crone at 55 from heartbreak and overwork. This universe has it’s faults, but at least that isn’t one of them.

                  2. You took the wrong fork. In the right other universe, Sarah became a simultaneous translator at the UN, where she slyly exposed their plotting for world domination and became a world-wide heroine and (ultimately) a glamorous courtesan strewing broken hearts in her wake. Childless herself she established a charity where orphans and cats were raised according to the precepts of RAH and established a libertarian (small “L”) regime across the face of the world.

                    1. As opposed to the other alternate universe where she was kidnapped away by aliens at the age of 19 and became the beautiful (but evil) space princess

                3. I de-existed myself. I think I just had too much of being the oldest daughter growing up, which is sad, because my mother also taught me so many things. She’s still here, but can’t talk, and I lost the chance to talk about so many things. And to listen to so many more. She was always the one who knew the stories about everyone.

          2. Whereas when you’re an only child . . .

            Technically eldest brother-in-law’s wife should be running the show. Since his generation all ran off to America, Mother-in-Law didn’t get to pick her. Or any of the daughters-in-law, a cause of much grief on occasion, as we’re all Americans.

            For better or worse, I am an only, so my husband has had to fit into an unfamiliar family culture, which he has done remarkably well.

      2. My father used to say that the Philippines was a very matriarchal society, because in traditional Filipino families, it’s the mother who rules, and is the heart and center of the home and family, not the father (who is more a figurehead / front facade.) She’s the one who raises the children, who tend to adore the mother more (versus the more distant respect/fear father), manages the household finances, is aware of social goings on, and so much more. The power wielded by a traditional woman far exceeds that of the screeching feminist today (who would be looked down on as having no redeeming features, nor social graces, skills or virtues.)

        1. That is a very common pattern in most societies. The father is the officer, mother the senior NCO and children are the troops. Officers set policies, but NCOs are the ones implementing it.

          And woe betide the officer who intrudes in the NCO’s realm or tries to set policies the NCO deems imprudent.

          1. Daddy, on your 50th anniversary, can you tell us your secret? How are you and mom so happily married?
            Well, dear child, when we married we agreed: on all major choices, I would rule. On all minor choices, she would rule.
            Oh, really?
            Yes, dear child. And in 50 years, do you know what? We haven’t had a single major choice….

          2. *grin* As I’ve told the Housemate a few times, my role in the house (budget) is that of Quartermaster. My job is to ensure supply is ongoing, and make sure everyone has what they need to have the household run smoothly.

            I think he understood it when I said that, and he started laughing.

            His role is IT guy.

            In the Philippines, a slang word for ‘wife’ is ‘Kummander/Commander.’

            A friend of mine who used to live in Hawaii used to talk about how it was a common sight for him to see big, tough, rough military men meekly obey their frequently much smaller, feminine (and, he noted, Asian) wives. And that they seemed content and happy in their marriages. “Yes, dear” was a common response.

      3. My family is IN the US because great great grandma decided that her darling baby WOULD NOT WORK IN THE COAL MINE.

        But yeah we’re totally male dominated because two guys came over, and then everyone else followed. Like, totally.

        Never mind that the buddy from home who came over went back when they went back to get everyone, and didn’t return to the US because his Girl said “sure, I’ll marry you, but I ain’t leaving.”

        But yeah, TOTALLY no power. Because not officers and junk.

        1. Of course deciding “who has the power” in a marriage can be “interesting” looking from the outside (even if they are your parents).

          I know that Dad did things he didn’t want to do because Mom wanted to do them.

          Yet, on at least one occasion I know that Mom wasn’t going to do something because she thought Dad wouldn’t like it.

          Note, in that situation Mom hadn’t even asked Dad and I was sure (from an early conversation with Dad) that he would have gone along with what Mom wanted.

          After all in the Military, officers sometimes do “follow the advice” of their top NCOs. 😉

      4. Side note– I actually try to be careful with my husband– because he WANTS me to be happy, and if I get in a snit it can really upset him for way longer than I’m upset. Intellectually he gets the whole “I am just in a bad mood” thing. Emotionally, he wants to FIX IT.

        1. All of the preceding is true, and it is true because of what you write above. It all works out because your spouse wants you to be happy. It is best if you expend every effort to ensure that your spouse continues to want that.

          Ian Fleming’s Quantum of Solace is the truth.

        2. All too true. Most of us guys have a fix-it mentality. The splinter hurts, we pull it out. We don’t put up with it and let it fester.

          1. and this being a continuum, last week I got screamed at for being “such a guy”. The person just wanted to vent. I was frantically looking for solutions, because it’s who I am, it’s what I do.

            1. I tend to want to fix things, too, even though I’m female. I get very impatient with people of either gender who constantly complain about things that COULD be fixed, if they would just get up off their doofuses and fix them! I’m even willing to help with the fixing, if they want, but they have to show some effort themselves first.

              1. I do, too – look, there’s a problem – let’s FIX it, not groan and moan endlessly about the problem itself.
                Just another reason that I think I am one of those women with more of a man’s attitude to things. Look, I’ll listen sympathetically to you moan for about five minutes … but if you aren’t willing to go and take action to actually fix it … then my well of sympathy runs dry.

              2. Yeah – genderculturally (word!), the middle-of-distribution guy approach to living is project-oriented: define problem, fix problem, move on; vs. m-o-d gal approach of (I think…) process: provide support or pressure here and there as needed to keep most things going.

                Overlap between the distributions is large, and any given person/situation may fall into one or the other. Not that some people don’t simplify their lives by always defaulting to one approach whether it’s the best they could do or not.

                1. A critical job skill for women is raising and civilizing of offspring. Often the solution to most of their problems involves listening, acknowledging and reassuring them that their problems are recognized, legitimate and surmountable. Transferal of this solution matrix to adult problems is of limited use but when your best tool is a hammer …

            2. I have a solution for this! (Possible irony alert…)

              When someone gets angry at you for trying to give them a solution, you say “Stop for a moment and answer this question: do you want advice, or are you blowing off steam?”

              If they say they’re blowing off steam, you say “Alright, Proceed” and leave enough of your attention on them to “uh-huh” and “ah” and “That sucks” and “What a bitch” in the appropriate places, while your hands or the rest of your brain do something more interesting.

        3. Rhys is like that too. And David does the same thing. Rhys has learned to differentiate “grumbles” from ‘real upset’; I’ve had to explain a few times to David when I’m just ‘being Aussie’ (which, apparently, translates to David as “complaining because it’s the Aussie thing to do and not because it’s a real problem.”

          He’ll still see what I’m bitching about is something he can fix though; if it isn’t really a problem then he’ll diddlybop back upstairs.

    4. Found it!

      The relations of the family to the outer world-what might be called its foreign policy-must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?

      While when dealing with non-family stuff, yeah, I’m the “nice one”– dear husband KNOWS I’m a bloody minded fanatic when it comes to threats to our family, and adjusts accordingly.

      1. You must know my neighbors.
        HE is a nice guy.
        SHE is a cast-iron, thrice-be-damned, female dog.
        Reminds me of the time she screwed her own mother-in-law just to be able to piss us off.

      3. Hunting large game requires teams. Keeping a team together and focused on mission requires negotiation. Negotiation requires ideas such as “choosing your fights” and “not majoring in minors” – ideas I think more taught and exemplified in “guy culture”.

        1. Except that the easiest way to keep at group together is by picking fights you can win, very easily, and having the group too scared to cross you because they’ll be beat down– also taught in “guy culture.”

          Just not good guy culture.

          Same way women keep a team together by, well, knowing what people can give and knowing what people need, and matching those up.

          They are both required for a team to form, and good leaders with have the good elements of both.

          1. Not arguing much, ‘cept: both your examples, seems to me, are things that might be done between missions – hunting big game or whatever.
            Also, the physical-dominance-selected leader – well, you can’t take time away from the hunt to fight it out (or you’ll lose the game / get eaten), so it results in team members who perform out of fear of later consequences rather than buy-in, which in turn leads to micro-managing, less use of intelligent semi-independent action by team members, and in long run a less successful team… unless you’ve got a hell of a competent micromanager.

            I agree matching resources with needs is important – at a group management level as well as action team level – that’s also PART of the “negotiation” I referred to, ‘tho not usually engaged in during the mission/hunt unless things change (e.g. best tracker sprains an ankle, reassignments done to use 2nd best tracker and fill his role, etc.).

            The kind of “mean girls” status interactions much of this post has discussed interferes with that.

            1. Incidentally, I am far from sold on the new just-so story of “guys are set up for hunting groups, girls are set up for gathering.”

              It does match up with observed facts, but there’s no prediction/falsification options, and you can explain anything with a tiny bit of tweaking.

        2. It may also explain the male’s direspect of emotional epusodes. Bob may the best point man in the pack. But lives are literrally at stake (Steve was skewered by a boar last week). The first time Bob has an emotional breakdosn, he is inconsistent and can no longer be trusted. And is sent back to rear-guard the logistics train.

  6. And let’s not forget that women decide to resort to physical violence, it’s very different than when men do it.

    With guys, fights tend to be spontaneous and end just as quickly. Not only that but when it’s over, it’s done. Whatever the problem was tends to be finished regardless of the outcome. Hell, a lot of the time, the two guys become friends afterward.

    Women, on the other hand, aren’t like that. My son can tell when two girls are going to fight. Why? Because one of them shows up “ready for battle.” Hair pulled back in a ponytail, no earrings or other jewelry that can be yanked, often wearing every ring they can find, etc. As for who she’s fighting, well, it’s usually whoever she’s been sniping with for weeks or months on end.

    Those fights are premeditated and brutal. Not only that but when the end, they don’t really end. The animosity still exists and, if it got to that point, it won’t end anytime soon.

    This actually matches something I read somewhere that a high school teacher noted at their school, so I’m willing to say it’s fairly universal.

    1. IOW, men fight for fun, women fight for real, to loosely paraphrase what you said..

      I can confirm that men are often friends after a fight. I stood up to a bully in grade school, got my butt kicked, and after that we were good friends who had each other’s backs.

      1. Not exactly for fun, but perhaps for social dominance. The message from the winner is “Back off: I can take you.” Social dominance established. That makes it similar to a contest between animals capable of inflicting serious injury on others of their species. While a fight can proceed to the deliberate death of the loser, usually it stops once the social hierarchy is established. OTOH, where animals don’t fight to establish social dominance, any sort of violence tends to be to the death, since that’s the only purpose of combat.

        1. No, sometimes it is simply for fun. Admittedly it tends to establish social dominance also, but some guys will fight simply for fun in a setting where they will never be back to assert or acknowledge that social dominance.
          Usually it is a challenge or competition thing, but not always, or sometimes it is at the least only proving something to yourself not to they guy you are fighting or the group you are in.

        2. Social dominance – or limits: “You DON’T insult my ___ like that, and I will expend effort and pain to teach you that.”

      2. “men are often friends after a fight. ”

        That’s one of the things that woman can and should learn from men.

        Along with the skill of not taking things personally in a debate.

        If nothing else, it makes it easier to communicate with men…

        1. Not sure that lesson even applies to women.

          When men fight, it’s for dominance. The winner proved that he was stronger, and the loser has been put in his place. Usually no real need to continue (this, of course isn’t ALWAYS the case, but in general).

          Women, on the other hand, don’t tend to base dominance on physical prowess. Female hierarchy is based more on “social standing”. For women, physical violence is just another angle of attack. It doesn’t actually SOLVE anything (it isn’t intended to) It’s just another way to embarrass the opponent and hurt her social standing. It probably has a lot to do with why hair pulling and face scratching (targeting the opponent’s looks), and tearing clothes (to cause embarrassment) are such a big part of “girl fights”, because those things can effect the opponent’s social standing.

          1. On the other hand I knew a couple girls in school that fought like guys. One (a friend of mine) I saw get in two fights with guys, both of them were two hit fights, she hit them, they hit the floor. Well actually one of them hit the stairs and bounced his head off of every concrete step down to the next floor; but both were knocked cold. She was more masculine than most women, by which I mean she was broad shouldered, and strong, not that she didn’t have, umm, feminine curves. And she seemed to get on well with guys, more so than with girls, but she never had a problem with girls, they didn’t want to fight her because they KNEW she wasn’t going to fight like a girl and she wasn’t going to hold back the star football player would either.
            The other was a tiny little thing, she wouldn’t have reached five foot in high heels and couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet. But it was quite instructive to watch her bulldoze a girl twice her size up against the pop machine and proceed to whale on her (mainly uppercuts to the stomach because that was about as high as she could reach) until the girl went down where she could put the boots to her. After that the other girls gave her a wide berth also.

            I don’t know anything about the latter, but the former girl has been happily married for twenty years, with several kids, so while she may have been “more masculine” than the average woman, and more comfortable around guy friends, she is still a “feminine woman” not a guy with tits.

            1. The other was a tiny little thing, she wouldn’t have reached five foot in high heels and couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet. But it was quite instructive to watch her bulldoze a girl twice her size up against the pop machine and proceed to whale on her (mainly uppercuts to the stomach because that was about as high as she could reach) until the girl went down where she could put the boots to her. After that the other girls gave her a wide berth also.

              *cackles* That could describe me.

            2. That is EXACTLY why I never got into fights in high school– I was sent to the office once for fighting, when I tried to physically stop someone who was physically destroying what I was doing. (I didn’t act against her, I acted against the movement of the papers, but that was “too violent.”)

              I also was sent in to the guy in charge at boot camp because someone did the “talk to the hand” thing right at my nose and I properly blocked it. I didn’t have the right words for it at the time, but if you watch instructions of blocking a strike to the nose– that’s what I did. Because I HAD blocked that before, and although the woman didn’t know it, that’s what the “talk to the hand” gesture mimics. (Well, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t dumb enough to actually attack even a fat, hick geek like that in the middle of the barracks.)

          2. It probably has a lot to do with why hair pulling and face scratching (targeting the opponent’s looks), and tearing clothes (to cause embarrassment) are such a big part of “girl fights”, because those things can effect the opponent’s social standing.

            Very likely. I think that was why the female queen bees refused to try anything physical with me when I was in high school after one of their sycophant boys was met with a particularly brutal response (and the teachers refused to back him.) Knowing that their intended target doesn’t respond with name calling, or slaps, and will instead go for kicks in the gut, punches in the jaw and possibly go break necks dampens the enthusiasm for that sort of thing.

            It’s also hard to hurt someone’s social standing when the target in question is essentially socially out of reach (either by not caring about the social standing, or is actually socially far away from them.)

          1. Very likely; my mom managed a similar but stronger response by disarming the local high school gang leader as a newly minted teacher. (They’d driven the prior teacher to suicide…not that anyone told mom.)

            He pulled a knife, she used her obnoxious brothers’ lessons on knife fighting and automatically disarmed him and acted like he was a dumb kid for doing it– which established dominance and NOBODY crossed her because that would mean they were tougher than local gang leader boy. (no idea how long it took her to figure this out)

        3. While I prefer dealing with guys rhetorically, I don’t want women to go in with the casual violence thing– in part because I’ve had women who HAVE done the “I’m going to attack you physically, and after it fails we’re still cool, right” thing– you CANNOT trust them, because they act exactly like a guy who is against violence until it’s useful for him.

          There MIGHT BE women who break this pattern, I just ahven’t met them.

      3. A minor variation– in some cultures, women can fight VERBALLY and it’s alright.

        Part of the issue one of my aunts has is that everybody can have screaming fights, and five minutes later it’s alright–not punches thrown, so it doesn’t REALLY matter.

        One of the big trials in my adulthood was figuring out that 1) some of my aunts aren’t that way, 2) some of society isn’t that way.

        They treat yelling like throwing punches; for someone who’s half deaf and all hot-headed louder is just inflection, this is a MAJOR issue.

        1. To me, being yelled/screamed at is just as bad as being physically hit. Perhaps even worse. If someone screams at me, my visceral reaction is, I instantly want to kill them. Seriously. This is rough, because my autistic daughter shrieks and screams at me — she’s always done this, does it less often now than she used to but sounds nastier — and I have to back off and get away from her. She’s my baby; I can’t hurt her. But that internal reaction is to hurt the person who is attacking me with their voice. Our house is too small — I need to be able to put more space between us.

      4. Reminds me about a quoute on the sex differences re conflict. Boys will settle disputes with fists and often become friends after. Girls hone psychological warfare designed to destroy each other’s self-esteem and sends souls to oblivion.

    3. You beat me to it. I second everything you said. Also second a commenter below re. grudges. Women excel at nursing them, mostly to their own detriment.

      1. From the sound of the comments here, single-sex schools for boys, private tutors for girls. 🙂

        2. Single sex for boys, home school for girls.

          Problem is history and modern attitudes. Hey, Ms Feminist, try being in charge of a feudal lady’s duties without significant education in same! But no, since it wasn’t sit in a class education, they don’t like to count it.

          1. *bows* I tell folks what my mom– 60+ years old, serious nervous issues, etc– does each day, and they think I’m exaggerating what *I* can do.

      2. Single sex 7th-9th grade at least, so the first hormone rush gets over for most of the kids and the drama is confined to an extent. I prefer single-sex colleges, most certainly single-sex dorms. But I’m Odd.

    5. This was something I knew in middle school – when the boys fought it was generally over after a couple of swung punches, a black eye and a bloody nose. When girls fought – it was katy-bar-the-door, and the school authorities usually had to send for an ambulance, for one or both of the participants. As the great bard Kipling noted, the female IS deadlier than the male.

      1. Only if you define “deadlier” as “more willing to kill”, not “more ABLE to kill”. Men fighting to kill is a thing to behold, and, for all the bluster here, none of the situations listed are that. Statistically and historically, women fair ***EXTREMELY*** poorly in mortal combat with men (firearms help tremendously, but even that isn’t enough to completely even the scale).

        1. Yeah, I’d go with “more willing to kill”.

          And isn’t that frustrating when you have the “willing” but not the ability to back it up?

    6. The Antifa women are practically on the ‘front lines’ when there’s a clash. They incite, instigate, exaserbate the conflict whenever they can, and when they get knocked down, the Antifa men swarm the one who did it and try to tear them apart. There’s plenty of videos of this phenomenon.

      1. Sounds like a pattern that, if the anti-Antifa ever manage to achieve a decent level of tactical coordination, is easily exploitable.

        1. In this age of social media (and media in general) females are vials of volatile nitroglycerin, and Antifa females exploit it shamelessly. Just look at Moldylocks: she would’ve been turned into a martyr – poor woman attacked by evil my-soggy-knees – if there hadn’t been enough video evidence of her aggression.

          Tangling with them is dangerous on every level, from personal to social, economical and legal: they’ve weaponized women.

          Hmmm…for all the talk about being against the objectifying of women, they never seem to mind being objectified by being turned into a weapon to attack people their higher-ups don’t like.

          1. They’re trying to leverage “never hit a girl.”

            Unfortunately, when I was growing up they were shrilling about “equality”, and I missed the whole “never hit” concept. Looks like I’m not the only one.

            I’m 100% equal-opportunity, non-sexist, pro-equality. Take a swing at me, and I don’t care what’s behind your zipper, you’re going to find you’ve just made another poor life choice.

            1. “Never hit a girl” is complex — it’s understandably applicable in domestic situations (although it’s complicated when a woman has a weapon), and sadly, a guy acting in self defense will sometimes be viewed as an aggressor in the eyes of the Law (even when there’s clear evidence to support the guy’s claim to self defense)…however, it’s a good general rule of thumb that “Guys never hit a girl, and girls never resort to violence.” If a girl *does* resort to violence, the other side of the unspoken cultural agreement ought to become null and void.

              I also don’t really like it when someone breaks into a house, gets shot, and then complains (either directly or from the grave via family members) that the homeowner wasn’t fighting fairly because gun. The problem with that, though, is that the homeowner wasn’t looking for a fight, and the home-breaker wasn’t following society’s norms of fair behavior, so there’s no reason whatsoever to fight “fairly”.

              1. I should add that “a girl never resorts to violence” also applies *only* if she’s not made the target of violence. If a girl is attacked, and the attack was unprovoked*, then by all means, she ought to respond with as much violence she can dish out.

                *(Provoking an attack *always* complicates things, for both men and women.)

            2. The Victorian standard is “a gentleman never hits a lady; and a lady never provokes a gentleman”. The point was that, if you do these things, you are declasse, not of the gentle class, and undeserving of the respect and privileges of that class.

  7. Just about every teacher learns early on:
    NEVER try to break up a girl fight. Call for admins/police, but do NOT get in the middle of it. You will get seriously injured.
    Not true for boys – even in the hood, I was generally safe (OK, except for that time a kid bowled me over trying to get to another kid. But, he was horrified to hear that I had been injured, and apologized profusely).
    Girls – not only no remorse, but no apology. Their fury runs deep. When you have made one of them your enemy (whether willingly or not), they will take that hate to the GRAVE.

    2. I don’t know, a bucket of cold water would probably break up a girl fight pretty well.

      Both combatants are likely to turn on you instead, but…

      1. Bingo. After I escaped High School, there was a girl fight (with blades). Principal tried to break it up. They stopped fighting, threw him into a trophy case, and resumed the fight. Police ended up arresting the two primary combatants and a few others got warning tickets.

        1. Once saw a cat fight between two women wrestlers. The first indication that it had gotten out of control was when two well known wrestlers, in business suits, came down and pulled them apart.

          1. Breach of the peace, disturbance while in school. I didn’t get all the details. There were also in and out of school suspensions. I was too much enjoying the mental image of that particular principal trying to stop a fight of any kind.

              1. I think the tickets were a police thing, but it happened on school property, so it probably got complicated. I wasn’t there at the time so I might not have gotten all the correct details. The two versions I was told matched on the major parts, though.

      2. Sadly I was unable to find a Youtube of the Cat Fight between Frenchy and Ms Callahan from the 1939 Destry Rides Again. It ends with Jimmy Steward trying to hold off a sopping wet still fighting Marlene Dietrich. 😦

        1. Not a real cat fight, as I recall — Frenchy didn’t take Mrs Callahan seriously.

          OTOH, this song has been playing in my thoughts through this whole thread.

          Nothing like a little Brechtian Weillance.

    3. Back my youth, teachers would wade in and break up a fight. It might take strong corporal punishment administered by the Board of Correction, but they’d do it.

      Was reminded of all sorts of things teachers used to do when the grandson of a coworker fell and apparently damaged the septum of his nose. I have seen teachers grab a nose that looked crooked and pouring blood, and pulled it straight to correct such before it swelled. Probably not a wise thing to do, but they did it.

      1. “grab a nose that looked crooked and pouring blood, and pulled it straight to correct such before it swelled.”

        Actually, it’s the exact same thing the doctor is going to do. You put traction on the bones, move them into alignment, and relax the traction until the ends meet up again. That works fine with simple breaks. You do not want to do that if the bone (or nose) is shattered. That usually requires surgery.

        The advantages of using a doctor is they usually administer anesthesia first.

        1. If you have an old-school doctor, maybe. A new doctor… between the DEA and the AMA, you might get a prescription for aspirin after they get done.

    4. “Girls – not only no remorse, but no apology. Their fury runs deep. ”

      There’s brain scans to explain that.

      Here’s why women overthink everything
      [SNIP]
      In the biggest brain imaging survey ever conducted, scientists have discovered that the brains of women are significantly more active than men’s.

      Particularly in the cerebral cortex, which is primarily involved in impulse control and focus, and in the emotional areas of the brain, involved in mood and anxiety.
      [SNIP]
      The fact that women showed greater blood flow in the prefrontal cortex compared to men may explain why women tend to exhibit greater strengths in the areas of empathy, intuition, collaboration, self-control and appropriate concern.

      The study also found increased blood flow in limbic areas of the brains of women, which may partially explain why women are more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, insomnia and eating disorders.

      [END EXCERPT]

      Women (in general) are fundamentally more emotional than men (in general.) Men who give in to their emotions on the hunt become lunch.

      1. he fact that women showed greater blood flow in the prefrontal cortex compared to men may explain why women tend to exhibit greater strengths in the areas of empathy, intuition, collaboration, self-control and appropriate concern.

        Per Girl Genius, if I killed everyone who seemed like an idiot, tehre wouldn’t be many left……

  8. But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
    Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
    And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
    The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

    She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
    May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
    ———
    I know Sarah mentions it at end of her post but I quite like female of the species, it was one of my granda’s favourite.

    Millions of females abort their pre born babies every year, that’s plenty violent. Female cats catch mice while male sits on your lap and has his belly rubbed, female mosquitos are the ones who bite humans for our blood …..

    2. Apparently I didn’t read entire title. My apologies to outofthedarkness, I enjoyed your article.

      1. Since I can’t comment there (I don’t have an account, and I’m not in a state of mind right now to create one), this passage struck me:

        “””Similarly, when I became aware of sexual pleasure, it was never just the pleasure and fun; I knew that sex also was for the reason of reproduction, and the pleasure existed to encourage humans to go forth and multiply. Yeah, I know, I can hear the screeching about how that POV ‘reduces us to animals’ already, but it’s not the sex that elevates us from animals.”””

        I have never heard this claim before, but I can’t help but wonder why understanding this would put us on the level of mere animals, because this is true for *all* animals, and even *all* plants (to the extent that growing gives a mostly unconscious being pleasure), but how many animals actually understand that giving in to this pleasure results in multiplication? To the best of my knowledge (I doubt research has been done in this — and how could it? It would involve getting into the mind of an animal, to determine if they know what they are doing, and whether they hold off until they are prepared for adulthood — and it’s not at all clear how we could do this…) we’re the *only* beings that understand this, and can use this understanding as part of a decision in whether or not to seek the pleasure, or wait until the time is right to start a family. (Whether a given person actually does use this information is an entirely different matter entirely.)

        I can’t help but think that it’s the “sex is only for pleasure independent of reproduction” claim that reduces us to animals….

  9. I can already hear the cries of, “But women aren’t violent!”

    Yeah, sure. Dream on.

    ‘That’s what women do. We’re catty!’

    ‘Women have such intense relationships with other women. Which is wonderful! When that relationship turns sour it turns ugly.’

    1. Overheard more than once: “Meeeow-ch, Sister!” Usually just before the wiser or more experienced people left the room/found another table/suddenly decided that a break of some kind was in order.

      1. There was, once upon a time, a bit of fluff going around the internet. Remember “how to give a cat a pill”? This was “how to stop a fight between two women.” Remarkable similarities between the two…

      2. More than once I’ve sat up, looked at someone doing that and flat out said something like:
        For the last several months you’ve watched this bitch assault me, and only NOW that I have any sort of a reaction do you comment? Seriously?

        Yeah, there’s a reason I don’t have a lot of friends/

        1. Ooooh yeah. That’s my reaction too.

          (Prolly why we get along.)

          Also, this was why the teachers I had in high school knew that if I actually physically lashed out, it was because the girl or guy in question took it to a physical level. I flat out told them I’d ignore words, but I also knew that someone would be stupid enough to try catch my attention or get me to react would put a hand on me, and at that point, all bets are off, because that’s a trigger for me to basically take out the enemy.

          Maybe the teachers didn’t believe me until they saw entire classrooms of kids actively trying to get a rise out of me and me actually just not giving a shit. A couple of the teachers actually talked to me, worried that I was being affected – and laughed when I said “This is high school. I won’t be here forever. I’ll graduate, go to college and go abroad, and live a life they’ll never be able to imagine except on TV. Their words don’t matter to me. They don’t matter, and they’ll be here their whole lives.”

          I said that to the teacher so they wouldn’t worry about me, that mere words wasn’t enough to make me flip my shit into physical violence, but…

          When I entered the workplace I really, really hated that the last part ‘They’ll be here their whole lives’ – was true. It was just LIKE being in high school all over again, except now the catty bitches (both male and female) could fudge your performance reviews and get your ass run out of a job.

          I had a trainer get so angry that I wasn’t behaving in the way she felt I should (and there hadn’t been anything I was doing actually wrong, I just was missing all her social dominance cues, and not being deferential, just ‘polite’) that she flung a chair at me in uncontrolled rage. The sheer disbelief on her face when I simply walked out of the room to report her to HR without attacking her – verbally or otherwise – was actually what clued me in to what her mad was all about.

          Apparently, she also didn’t like it that, when I was finished with an exercise, I’d draw while waiting for everyone else to get done. That was somehow disrespectful of her. One of the other trainees suggested that it might have been because I spoke English better than she did that got her initially riled up. This never made any sense to me, as you’d think that would mean she had one less person to worry about, but … people. Are strange and often irrational, and do things that are completely inexplainable.

    2. Heavily armed archaeologists can have partial success.

      Yeah, I think Daniel’s lucky he left the planet not long after that.

          1. I never pretended to be peaceful. Besides, I’m the one in the kitchen with all the knives. (Someone used that as a great (and affectionate) exaggeration of a fictional portrayal of me that I still chuckle over, because it might not be as fictional or exaggerated…)

            75% of the shit that ‘women’ are ‘supposed’ to care about, I am too lazy to expend energy on. (the 25% that remains I’ll allow for cooking, housekeeping, traditional things.)

                1. NCIS had ONE episode where someone did that, and the lady ran out of the kitchen, right past the whole knife block, TO THE COUCH, jumped on it– and pulled a gun out just as the guy tackled her for assault.

                  Ventilated! Trope twisted SUCCESSFULLY!

  12. Physical violence can hurt but outside of gangland combat and nuts most dead kids come from being driven to suicide. But we’ve allowed that to be used to make words even more powerful. Define everything down as bullying and the best actor will win. Work and everything else is defined by what HR would feel threatened by so piss someone off and “they feel unsafe” tosses a bullseye on back. And do it enough and you end up with a three strikes firing. If accuser is lucky they drink to death or suck start a shotgun. But destroying someone’s life to the point that they end it isn’t violence. That’s the victim’s fault for making accuser mad and not shrugging off weaponized policies.

    Bullscat.

    1. The problem is that the schools come down so hard on physical violence, and use zero judgement.

      When I was in grade school I saw multiple incidents where some smaller kid finally hauled off and whacked his tormenters and when the ‘victems’ complained they were told “well, you had been asking for it for an hour”.

      Teachers knew who had been tormenting whom, and there was still a general sense of parents supporting the teachers. So, not every incidence of bullying got sorted right, but most of them did.

      1. ““well, you had been asking for it for an hour”.”

        The great Adam Baldwin shows how it’s done.

      2. I kicked the 8th grader that hauled at most 2nd grade me off the playset to attack… they TRIED to expel me.

        Um.

        Not a good idea with my mom, who knew the attacker wasn’t getting crud. (Because he was a know bully, AKA “had known issues,” so no expulsion.)

        1. “he was a know bully, AKA ‘had known issues,’ ”

          In tort law, doesn’t the failure to address the existence of a known condition which poses a threat to the public constitute liability? For example, if you’ve a dog that attacks folk, doesn’t failure to leash, cage or put down the animal render you liable for any injuries inflicted?

          Any scholars of the law want to comment here?

          (I will stipulate that the school system likely has sufficient lawyers on retainer to stall this forever, especially if the local political establishment does not want the matter addressed.)

          1. It’s worse than that, RES– they killed him.

            Before he as 25, he was dead, in an utterly predictable way for anybody who watched him grow up.

            The only up point is that he died on the side of the law- he was a bouncer at the time. He was TRYING to get better.

            The bastards killed him by failure.

            1. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” But as you say, a lot of them still angle up towards the light.

              I’m sorry that he didn’t get more of a chance to fix himself when others didn’t help him early enough to make it easier.

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

    Kipling, last stanza of The Young British Soldier

  14. When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
    Rudyard Kipling
    In a primitive society the men hunt with spears and arrows, but it’s the women who process that meat with their very sharp knives which they are exceedingly skilled in the use of.

  15. My history’s a little hazy, but IIRC the Persians used to have women in their armies, though that practice stopped after they met with Western forces (Greeks) who understood the importance of protecting women and that a super easy way to do that was to keep them out of the army.

    1. Some African tribes also did that, but in ALMOST every circumstance these were show-battalions, designed to APPEAR tough and show that “our women are stronger than your men” It was psychological, not …. brute force.

      1. The one semi-modern instance I know of where they were NOT show troops was … well, they were crazy. And everyone feared them. They weren’t the main component of the army, but when they were brought in, hooooey!

        (I’ve done a bit of research on “amazons” for some RP world-building. There are really only a few examples in the real world, including the ones in Greek myth – who were probably real, though exaggerated.)

          1. Women can shoot, yes. In fact, some women are better shots than most men (my grandmother won a turkey shoot against a bunch of men when she was fifteen — that’s her in my avatar picture alongside this post, picture taken at the turkey shoot). But there is much more to warfare than shooting. There is humping huge packs; being able to navigate obstacles; being physically capable of carrying wounded male team-mates to safety; and much more that most women are still not physically capable of, no matter how well they can shoot.

    2. The Cumans/Kipchak* allowed women warriors, as well. Enough so for it to be commented on by other cultures of the time. They were moderately effective (and mixed in with ‘the boys’).
      Interestingly, as soon as they married, they were no longer allowed to be out there, as they had more important things to do.

      (* The blond, blue-haired, horse-riding folks from the eastern steppes – like Mongolia – who came into the area north of the Black Sea around the 10th century. They continued moving west, and merged into Eastern Europe.)

      1. *facepalm*
        The blue-eyed, horse-riding folks……..
        I’m *really* surprised that didn’t get a comment in the hour it’s been hanging there.

        1. We just figured they were really old horse-riding folks and you were being mildly pejorative. 🙂

          1. “That woman up ahead has had the turn signal on her horse for the past 50 miles!”
            “Keep quiet! She’s a Cuman/Kipchak – if she hears you she’ll ride back here and kick both of our butts.”

          2. Pa would describe some gatherings of older ladies as being like a certain mid-1800’s US conflict: The blues and the grays. This description generally occurred well away from such things.

  16. Yesterday TXRed posted an article from the Vulture about a toxic twitter campaign over a YA novel. You want to see how some women would go about running the world read this:

    http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html

    In a nutshell: A book is denounced, with lines selectively produced out of context of the story to prove its despicable unworthiness. Once the book has been pilloried anyone who openly considers reading the book to make up their own mind are likewise accused of detestable thinking. Meanwhile a campaign is started to get the book withdrawn. Fortunately in the case of this book there are a few clearer heads along the way.

    It made me think of the library and bookstore displays we see during ‘Banned’ Book Month. Of course if such forces can get a book withdrawn it won’t be available for display or reading during Banned Book Month.

    1. I may check out my library and see if they have this book. This kind of hysteria tends to get my attention, but not in the way they intend. 😉

    2. Based on that article, it really seems like ONE person had a problem with the book, and everyone else has declared it racist on her say-so. At least, if there was a second person who thought it was racist after actually reading it, I didn’t see any sign of it.

      I must admit that based on the description there, I have no interest in reading this particular book either, not because its racist but because it sounds like an overly preachy narrative based on bashing you over the head with “racism is bad, m’kay?” Leftist always eat their own.

      1. Yup, that one alpha woman declared it problematic. The flock fell into line.

        Another woman declared anyone who read a book so identified despicable – her tweet expressing graphic violence towards any who would consider doing so. Within the circle this expression went largely unchallenged.

        A member of the circle, insisted on talking to the author under an assumed name. “If anyone found out I was talking to you,” Mimi told me, “I would be blackballed.” (We are told earlier that ‘Mimi’ is not the girl’s real name.)

        What does this indicate about how such women would create their peaceful society?

        1. I noted the need for anonymity. I also noted that “Mimi” had not read this book that she was so looking forward to before it became blasphemous. I wonder if she hasn’t read it because she really does have so much faith in Alpha Female’s judgment or if it’s because she doesn’t–because she’s afraid if she reads the book, she might like it and then need to keep her heretical thoughts to herself.

          1. Either way the Alpha Female retains power over Mimi. (Although in the latter case it could become the first step to ‘Mimi’ gaining freedom and a life of her own.) Which is the likely reason for the campaign by the other female power figure to condemn anyone would would think of reading a book that has been so disapproved by the Alpha Female.

            Who knows, if ‘Mimi’ does go off the reservation and read the book she might start making other reading choices for herself. She might even go on to read something that would really challenge and upset that Alpha Female. Something really good, like a book written by the like of Andrew Klavan or Robert Heinlein or possibly a book from Baen’s YA lists? Who knows where that might lead? We can hope.

    3. Years ago I read an article (in the Chronicle for Higher Education, which I occasionally read while in Grad School) critical of Phillip Pullman’s criticisms of C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia”, and who pointed out that not only was C.S. Lewis innocent of the charges Pullman made, but Pullman was guilty of the sins he was laying at the feet of C.S. Lewis in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy.

      My reaction was “Hey, that’s an interesting article! I’ll have to get those books and see for myself if the author of the article is right!” I did, and found that the guy was right about everything he wrote about Phillip Pullman’s work.

      The story was also pretty good, excepting for the heavy-handed anti-Christianity (which ironic, because while Christianity was an important part of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, it wasn’t nearly as heavy-handed), and I couldn’t help but notice that, for someone who wanted to write an atheist version of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, he spent an awful lot of effort in reconstructing the Christian creation myth for atheists!

      It was really bizarre, but don’t take my word for it. Find the article, find the original Pullman article (which I would have to confess that I don’t think I did — but then, I read the article on a *piece of paper*, delivered *physically* to the Math Department Mail Room — weird, I know!), read “The Chronicles of Narnia” and then “His Dark Materials”, and decide for yourself.

      I find the notion of “This book is racist! Don’t read it!” to be really alien. Why should I take anyone’s word for it? *Particularly* if I can find the time to investigate it for myself?

        1. “ ‘This book is racist! Don’t read it!’ ”

          Is it okay if I only read the black parts?

  17. This describes my elementary and Junior High years, except I wasn’t one of the pretty ones. The scars still hurt sometimes today.

    (I hope this doesn’t triple post. I tried posting via my phone and it didn’t seem to work.)

    1. I am sorry you were targeted. It sucks.

      I have observed those hierarchies of girls (of whatever their age). You could be stutterer, have unfashionable hair, be a shy girl, a bold girl, a tom-boy, be a straight A student or an utter failure at academics, it doesn’t matter if they choose to embrace you. If they choose to target you whatever perceived sensitivity they can find, even if it is baseless, it will be weaponized to use against you.

      I have concluded that they are called Mean Girls not just because they behave towards others in a cruel manner, but because their actions display their own mean little spirits

    2. I was, in retrospect, very pretty, but I did NOT KNOW IT. I formed my idea of my attractiveness before 12, when I had eczema all over my face. (visualize burn unit patient.)
      It was hell. No, not the eczema. The other girls. hell is an all-girl school.

      1. For males “value” tends to be objectively measurable: strongest, fastest, throws spear farthest and most accurately, shoots fastest and straightest.

        For females, “value” is far more subjectively measured. Even “beauty” is subjective, a matter of having the right style. Queen bees get to set styles, others follow.

        1. For older women isn’t it who has the best husband? Wealthiest, highest status, best provider?

          1. Aw, gee – I canna decide between the joke about Bill & Hillary discovering her former boy friend running a gas station or referencing Lady MacBeth.

            It might be noted that the whole issue of “Trophy Wives” raises more hackles than the idea of women “marrying up” — using one husband as access portal to hunt the next social level.

          2. “Best” husband is variable.

            That’s why a whole bunch of female groups is important– if I had to compete with my husband’s DnD group, I’d be in major trouble, but since we’re different it’s OK to have me (GM’s wife) and (Grandma gamer) and (drop dead gorgeous single lady gamer) and (proud married non-gamer) lady and my cousin (duh, cousins) all in one area.

            We don’t even OVERLAP, although I have to work to not mother at everybody.

            Um. Any of our lonely guys in El Paso…..?

      2. I actually liked my all-girl school. Of course, it was also a private school, which means that students could be expelled if the administration felt like it, and it had an admission exam, which did skew the population a bit more towards those who liked to learn.

        I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t unpopular either. I was sort of off to the side, in the corner of “academic kid with tons of interests who doesn’t seem to care what we think and is safe to ignore.”

      3. Meh. I found the status politics at the all-girls school I went to for high school much less obtrusive than the status politics at the co-ed school I went to for middle school. Okay, it was at the all-girls high school I royally pissed off a substantial percentage of the students and at least one of the teachers by writing an editorial to the school newspaper saying that Oxfam American’s claim that 10% of Americans were malnourished was an insult to my intelligence, but they didn’t succeed in making me care about their opinion except to the extent that I thought the arguments were fun. (I think the editor of the school newspaper had a thoroughly miserable month or two, though.)

        1. ….oh my gosh, they use to claim even DUMBER stuff?!?!?!

          Now it’s “one in five kids go to bed hungry.”

          Based off of a survey about getting as much as you want of waht you want.

          …guys, my kids ain’t fat, but no more than once a week do they get the ice cream they want, and most nights one declares dinner to be “but I don’t WANT that.”

          1. Heck, I have a son who often wants to eat just before he goes to bed. We’re working to convince him that he needs to eat at dinnertime if he doesn’t want to go to bed hungry.

            I have a funny feeling he’d count as the “1 in 5” who go to bed hungry…

          2. One of the summers that I worked at summer camp, we had a *wretched* lead cook. The staff always ate last, so there were multiple times when we got to the line and most of what was left was downright inedible. (And the salad table—which was always there for those who didn’t like the main dish—would be picked over or browning. Not to mention the PB&J table.) A week or two in, I realized that my stomach hurt, and it was because I was hungry. (I’d gained my “freshman fifteen” at college—lost it all up at camp that year.)

            He was only there for four or five weeks, but boy oh boy, he was memorable. The camp director did a desperation hire, literally putting someone in charge who wasn’t technically old enough because he was competent and signing the forms himself. So for those four or five weeks, the large portion of staff not yet at the age eighteen were “going to bed hungry”. I won’t even speculate if any of the scouts were, though most of them had other resources and were only there for a week at most. That wasn’t lack of resources; that was incompetence.

            1. As a follow-up, the next year we also had a memorable cook—for the opposite reason. As in, “How did you manage that on this budget?” Never late, always excellent food. He worked there a few years, I’m told, and he took the job because he loved the mountains.

    3. I believe we have all heard about the girl cliques in middle and high schools, and the viciousness thereof.

      1. For some reason, high school wasn’t so bad. People started respecting my smarts and I found some others to hang out with so that insulated me from the vicious ones. In college, I found the Odds. (Though, looking back, there were a few Odds here and there that probably helped me keep sane.)

        1. Having taught school, I think that the middle school age group is, in general, the most difficult age to deal with. Boys and girls. Maybe because they realize they are starting to grow up, but don’t realize that they aren’t there yet, combined with hormones starting to go out of whack?

    4. In fairness, “being nice” does this too– I can’t trust anybody I LIKE when they say I look OK, because basically everyone decent will lie their ass off to make me feel better about looking like Samwise in a dress.
      From the little objective evidence I can gather.

      1. Sounds like you need someone to tailor clothes for you. It’s amazing how much better you feel about how you look when clothes actually fit the way they’re supposed to. I’m speaking from the astonishment of looking into a mirror a couple of years back when I finally got some properly-sized shirts—I’m tall, but short enough that it took photographs and (later) having kids to show me that regular shirts were simply not sized correctly. Even little things like the length of shoulder seams make a huge difference. (I no longer look like I’m outgrowing my clothes!)

  18. There was an Outer Limits episode “Lithia” from 1998 starring David Keith. Only women had survived an apocalyptic war. They live a communal existance, protecting the environment.

    A soldier is unfrozen from his cryogenic sleep. After awakening, he begins to take over and generates jealousy amongst the women as they desire him. The women’s leader has to destroy him so they can go back to their idyllic lives. Biggest load of crap.

    I come from a large family on a farm with many sisters. Them living together was certainly not peaceful and idyllic.

    1. Chinese, or Japanese maybe, one of the ideographic languages… the symbol for chaos was two women under one roof….

  19. Oh goody! I get to play the victim today! /snort /chuckle /giggle /grin

    Let’s talk about unfair.

    Instill the idea of chivalry in a young boy. Teach him that he must always treat women with courtesy, and under no circumstance would a gentleman ever strike a woman.

    Then throw one of those queen bees and her fan boy and fan girl entourage at the poor sucker.

    Yeah, welcome to my childhood. And people wonder why I have such a belligerent streak.

    1. That, sadly, has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with…um… Sarah, I’m probably not allowed to use that kind of language here, right?

  20. “There’s a persistent trope in science fiction and fantasy about a society consisting solely of women. It’s a peaceful and prosperous society, free from all violence.”

    Anyone who has ever worked in a hospital knows this is balderdash. The average hospital is full of stressed-out women clawing and backstabbing each other to the exclusion of virtually all else. The violence is slow and quiet, and happens mostly to the patients.

    The other day there was a study posted, can’t recall where, to the effect that women -hate- working for other women. It was done in law offices, and the conclusion was that women really are the worst bosses. They’re uniformy horrible to work for and with.

    Naturally, this was explained by blaming -men.-

    1. I’ve actually had several women bosses over the years (high tech industry) – including my current one.

      Most were OK to work for/with. But one was such a “do it my way, even if our working styles are different and objectively you accomplish more doing it your way” nit-picker that I changed jobs with a few months of her promotion. That might have been personality, sex-related trait, or culture – for whatever reason, she’d always been very particular about her work strategies. But a pleasant coworker turned into an inflexible would-be martinet when put in charge.

      I can’t usefully generalize that to “all” or “most” women from one example, but I try to avoid working with anyone – male or female – that shows that sort of behavior. While cherishing coworkers and managers who’ll happily Leave Me The Hell Alone as long as the work gets done.

      1. I’ve seen this in new managers of both sexes, but with males it usually gets knocked back pretty quick via backchannels and informal counseling with beer sessions. Not so much with females.

        I’m wondering if the reason there’s no such thing as the “look, dude, you’re f—ing up, get your s–t together and knock this off” for the female side is that any such attempt would immediately engage the hard wired mean-girls loss-of-status reaction.

        1. It might merely be that the potential for blow-back is much greater with a newly promoted female. There is no male equivalent of “You just can’t handle a powerful woman.”

          1. Sure there is. It’s just that outside of certain Internet circles no one takes it seriously.
            (Seriously, the only thing that might be more dangerous to one’s person than the self-proclaimed strong/powerful woman is the self-proclaimed masculine man/alpha male.)

    2. I think law offices would have a high percentage of the personality types that would make for the worst female bosses. I’ve never had difficulties working with or for other women, but I’ve been cycling through more of the creative fields (like photography.)

  21. I hope the real name and employer/publisher of the author of this post never gets out. In today’s climate, a twit storm will blow up and reek all sorts of havoc.

    Not that outofthedarkness is wrong. But that doesn’t seem to have any impact on the number or outrage level of the twits.

  22. “[The women who are not part of the group] aren’t at the bottom of the pile, they pretty much don’t exist. At least, if they’re lucky they don’t.”

    People do tend to forget the opening situation of the Cinderella story, don’t they? Those not part of The Select are condemned to be drudges.

    Note, also, the significant absence of Father-In-Law jokes in our society. Why would the Mother-In-Law be such a locus of hostility?

    1. Ah, drudges. Reminds me of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider series. The entire weyr internal support structure was built on the backs of drudges.

      1. Heh. Some were treated better than others, to be sure. But I’m surprised that the casual serfdom hasn’t gotten more attention in those books. (*Everybody* thinks they’re going to get a dragon.) (Incidentally, there’s a great argument for why Kylara, of all horrible people, gets a dragon. Dragons are drawn to strong leadership qualities and highly developed empathy. She’s not nice, but she’s weaponized her sense of empathy quite effectively.)

        1. its part of the whole back to nature idea, where people ignore the drudgery of everyday life

        2. I think this applies to *all* science fiction and fantasy. We always imagine ourselves to be the survivors of the adventures, and never among the people who get killed, or otherwise get the short end of the stick….

    2. ….I could publicly complain about my father in law, but it would hurt my husband.

      And wouldn’t help anything.

      I HAVE actually pushed back… not much effect. There is an uneasy truce.

      (My mother in law, while not perfect, is a special case.)

  23. The first four in my family were girls. I consider it a special hell to grow up with that many girls. Plus my sisters were conformists and I was Odd.

  24. I was listening to Fresh Air the other day and their TV reviewer came on extolling the virtues of the Baroness Von Sketch show on IFC (An all female sketch comedy troupe). The clip he shared was of a meeting of the world leaders after women finally supplanted men and took over the world. The clip was neither funny, nor original, nor realistic, as each of woman just went around saying how everything was great for each topic that came up for discussion.

    1. See, that’s what was funny! The overt back-patting and virtue-signalling of the members of the comedy troupe, while undoubtedly unintentional, was quite amusing to everyone whose ability to recognize reality isn’t completely subsumed into the cultural marxist mindset.

    2. Heh. Somehow I don’t imagine a meeting consisting of President Palin, Prime Minister Merkel and the ghost of Maggie Thatcher quite running that way.

    3. I realize no one is here but… the thing that Carol Burnett did of the star ship enterprise crew getting gender swaps was desperately funny.

  25. “However, physical violence is not out of the question either.”

    Girl Fight!

    Those words resound from my school days. Guy fights were common and generally brief events: some shoving, some punching, some rasslin’ and ended at first blood or one one of the participants said “Uncle.” Girl fights, while rare, were truly vicious affairs, involving clawing at face, eyes, hair and clothes, their purpose the utter humiliation of the opponent.

    1. *First* blood? I remember busted noses, knuckles, skinned knees, black eyes, scrapes and all sorts of blood. Came out of one with the both of us looking like a car accident (head wounds, they bleed lots). Mostly, not serious wounds, but that “first” comment gave me a chuckle. *grin* Ah, youth!

    2. Thanks be to God, I managed to accidentally bypass those– a guy grabbed my backpack (full of books, making it 20lb heaver than expected, instant advantage) and I beat him up (…by the idiot figuring, because grabbing your bag and swinging it so they got sprawling is TOTALLY the same, right?) so nobody tried a direct assault besides the chisel stabbing.

  26. Umm… while this sounds like it would be awful to live in, it sounds like an amazing setting for a court politics fantasy or sci-fi series. Plots within plots within plots.

  27. A High School girl in my town got bullied at school and was so astonished that she somehow got an anti-bullying law passed. Reading between the lines she was one of the in-group and was then othered and bullied in a very aggressive way. She reacted by using her social capital and the school system’s support to lobby the government to draft an anti-bullying law.

    Reading the draft law I was horrified because the kind of bullying I received in the same school system would be not only enabled by the draft law but emboldened by it. Not by what it says but in the way in which it would be applied. Essentially, if you say the right words, to the right person, at the right time you can destroy your enemies. As in, if I (on the bottom of the hierarchal stratus) went against the wrong person or said something they disliked they didn’t just have the tools to destroy me personally (ostracism and the like) but they had the weight of Authority to help them do so.

    To be clear, the only bullying I worried about in school was the social bullying because my above-average size and strength (coupled with fighting an older brother constantly) meant physical bullying was mostly off the table.

    The ‘mean girls’ couldn’t destroy me because I didn’t care about being at the bottom, but my friends? Who were desperate to rise up? And the girls I knew on the outskirts or the middle? Good lord. That ‘anti-bullying’ tool, in the wrong hands would bully them while declaring them the bully.

    But it passed because politicians like to ‘do something’ that looks good and don’t actually care about the effects it might have.

    Steve

    1. I read so much of the anti-bullying material and cringe. All it does is give the bullies new tools to use.

      I was lucky. The mean girls had already decided I wasn’t worth messing with because I didn’t even notice them. OTOH, the guys went after me hard. *shrug* Even my enemies were comparatively Odd in their choice of targets. What can I say?

      1. “OTOH, the guys went after me hard. ”

        cough*hack*splutter

        Somebody find me an eleven-foot pole.

        1. It all depends on the definition of “bully”, doesn’t it?

          Apparently the mere awareness of his existence inflicted intolerable psychic trauma on them.

        2. Bullies always learn how to game the system to their advantage. See also: CHORFs.

        3. Only saying this because Dear Husband doesn’t read here much…but I still feel guilty about his first RPG group.

          It got taken over by a toxic female bully, who was totally OK with him– but six years later, when he has a FEMALE? Who doesn’t even notice most of her stuff, and shrugs at the rest?

          He was accused of harassment when has at sea for 3 months, and in violation of guild standards they never said what I was accused of.

          1. We often hear about how male harassment (heck, even male behavior that isn’t necessarily harassment) can push women out of tech or other male-dominated activities. But this comment (among other things, to be sure) makes me wonder: have there been any studies on how a single toxic female bully might affect the atmosphere for other women?

            I think the answer is “Yes, occasionally”, but when it comes to diversity initiatives, these studies seem to be practically ignored.

        4. Bah! That only showed that he was such a bully that the poor girls’ lives were dominated by his actions, and they saw him as a threat all the time.

          (you were lucky; they were probably expecting the usual whiny mother “my child wouldn’t do that” and your reaction steamrollered past the usual “double down” point)

          1. Nah. I just realized the school was too corrupt, and no one in the region would sue it, because it had a reputation. So I couldn’t get a lawyer. I pulled the kid out and homeschooled him for a year.
            These chicks then proceeded to PHYSICAL attacks, from egging our house, to intimidating built-as-a-brick-shit-house older son. Yeah.

            1. “These chicks then proceeded to PHYSICAL attacks, from egging our house, to intimidating built-as-a-brick-shit-house older son.”

              It is appalling what people will do when they think themselves immune to retribution. Used to be you had to belong to the nobility for that kind of impunity, but in America we have no nobles.

              2. When you control the government so laws aren’t enforced when you violate them, you ARE the nobility.

      3. I recall being sort-of-bullied in the seventh and 8th grades by a certain coterie of wanna-be-mean girls, but in the summer between 8th and 9th, I discovered the power of “Not Giving a Damn”. Why should I allow these people, whom I neither liked, or respected, and whose company I did not particularly relish, to ruin my day? It was an awesome realization. So, I walked away from caring at all about them, and their nasty female-dominance games. It helped, as I moved to high school, and into the Honors and AE courses, and a circle of rather nerdy and intellectually-oriented friends; about twenty guys and two other girls. We even had our own table in the cafeteria to hang out at during lunch. I was occasionally threatened with physical violence by some of the tough girls, but they never delivered. A smart mouth was my best defense and it never failed.
        And also, I think – I had enough allies among the tough element, who appeared to believe that someone who could get As and Bs effortlessly was clearly in league with Dark Powers, and therefore ought not to be messed with.

        1. The internet gave me that power.

          I suddenly had friends, friends they couldn’t see, couldn’t attack.

          Friends who didn’t act like I’d punched them if the word “metaphysics” came up.

          Yeah, no wonder “screen time” is so unpopular.

          1. “Back in the day” there were hand-wringing articles about how children, and people in general, were losing the ability to interact in meatspace, spending far too much time online instead of in “the real world.”

            There are several blind spots in that attitude, first being that “friends” are available in meatspace, second that just because your main interaction with someone is over a wire, they’re not real.

            I expect the second is how bureaucrats could send entire demographics to concentration camps. “They’re not really people, they’re just pieces of paper.”

            1. “first being that “friends” are available in meatspace”

              SO MUCH THIS. I was one of maybe three kids on our street within a couple years’ age, and the one friend I had in grade school moved away by fourth or fifth grade. I went to a magnet school, which was great for the scholastic side, but it meant that any of my classmates were up to twenty miles away, not exactly accessible for the youngest child of a largish family and lots of necessary trips. I had a somewhat local friend in junior high, and finally got a best friend in high school. (Still in contact with her.) I have far more friends now because of cyberspace, and some of them are even reasonably close!

              1. I told Dan yesterday you can pick kids like us in any playground. We’re the kid walking around the perimeter, balancing alone on a ledge, or reading in a corner.

                1. Yes, that was me. And in reference to B. Durbin’s post just above, the only friends I had growing up were cousins. I didn’t have any non-relative friends until college (and still stay in touch with some of them). There were only a few people in high school (or jr. high) that I would even talk to, and they were generally also Odds.

                3. Hrmm.. no ledges really. Perimeter, sometime I suppose. More than a few times making a big diagram of crystal set in the snow by shuffling around. And, yes, reading if I could get away with it.

          2. This was something Rhys and I had to deal with a LOT. Our relationship wasn’t ‘real’ because it was 1) mostly through the screen and 2) long distance, even when he was visiting, saving up to visit, etc… it wasn’t ‘real’.

            I love the Internet for giving me the ability to find ‘my people.’ *opens arms wide to include y’all*

        2. Hehe, at one point I had a couple of IRL associates congratulate me for being “so brave”– took me weeks to realize that the idiot feather weight girl was trying to be intimidating because I woudln’t do what she wanted.
          Dude. I have a little sister. And either way, she’s WRONG. No, not gonna intimidate.

          1. The number of times that I was told “She’s trying to get in your face/be intimidating” was met with “…Oh? I hadn’t noticed.” was probably the most deflating thing to ever happen to the would-be antagonizer.

            Why would I notice? I had my face in a book.

    2. One of the gals I was “bullied” by in high school jumped on the band wagon.

      I pointed out, in detail—thought not historical detail– how it would be applied.

      I got blocked….

      1. yeah, one woman i barely remember from high school wondered why i didn’t interact with her on the book of faces…

        hey lady, maybe its because your husband was my primary bully in high school?

  28. I noticed years ago that Boy Fights had changed. It happened in Dallas, there was a Boys Fight and one of the Boys tried to gouge out the others eyes. No remorse, just all in. Why? I believe I have the answer. The schools started teaching that fighting is wrong, no mater the reason, no mater who starts it, absolutely wrong. No body taught the Boys the general rules for Boys Fights. So when something happened to cause the fight, there were no rules, so trying to gouge out eyes was fine. Video games are not helping either. Anything is acceptable.

    1. I’d say it’s more along the line of feminizing the next generation so much; boys are starting to adopt the girl’s method of combat.

  29. Women as the gentler sex? Don’t make me laugh.
    We are capable of gentleness, of course. But, as others have said, it’s coupled with a very sensitive ‘otherization’ skill, probably because of our instinctive drive to protect the babies. This was useful when we lived in caves, and even up to early modern times, when life was much more precarious than we’re used to.
    But it can be hell for Odd women. Some of us (read: me) are missing some vital component that would allow us to hear changes in tones of voice, or see subtle expressions. We don’t react to social cues the same way everyone else does, and that makes us the ‘other’.
    (Insert ‘We have found a witch; may we burn her?’ jokes as you see fit)
    Compared to other commenters who’ve shared their stories, I had a relatively easy time of it in school, partly because I was SO oblivious that the mean girls (male and female) couldn’t understand why I wasn’t reacting to their provocations and moved on to more interesting targets. The other reason was that I was the tallest one in my class until junior year and everyone knew I lived on a farm (nonchalantly wrangling livestock from the age of five tends to give a certain no-nonsense image).
    But there were a few years in which every interaction with a peer ended in my lizard brain going, ‘Something is wrong; that person’s facial expression isn’t what it should be, but I don’t know HOW it’s wrong or what to do about it.’ I’ll never know how many awkward encounters passed off where I didn’t even notice something was wrong. I’m lucky I grew up in small and relatively safe town, or I would have been dog meat the moment I stepped into kindergarten.

    2. But there were a few years in which every interaction with a peer ended in my lizard brain going, ‘Something is wrong; that person’s facial expression isn’t what it should be, but I don’t know HOW it’s wrong or what to do about it.’

      To quote Lewis, “I thought I was the only one.”

  30. I have a wife and three daughters.
    In our society, that somehow makes me a misogynist.

    Look, just because a nursery rhyme says that girls are “sugar, spice, and everything nice” doesn’t make it true. There’s quite a lot of vicious and vindictive hardwired in.

    1. Ah, but it *is* true. It’s also good to remember that ghost peppers count as “spice”.

    2. “Not all girls are made of sugar, spice, and everything nice.
      Some girls are made of adventure, fine beer, brains and no fear.”

  31. Emotional abuse attacks a person in the most deeply personal of ways, and the scars it creates are more damaging than the physical scars of a beating. We wonder why girls who stand out grow so bitter, but if you’re a little too pretty or a little too different, other girls swarm on you and rip you apart with constant emotional abuse. They attack who you are at the base of your being, your very self-perception. This is why you see truly beautiful women who struggle to see their worth. Other girls have been ripping into them since the nursery, and it only gets worse as they get older.

    Oooh yeah. There was a reason why I really, really hated being back in the Philippines – the men also engaged in that shit. Rumors that I was a slut and at the same time somehow undateable started with the teenage guys – who knew from my already then established violent reputation that attempts at physical sexual harassment would be met with a level of physical violence they were not mentally or socially prepared to deal with. So, they went the female route. It also didn’t stop at high school – I saw variations of the same from small men put in management positions. Social structure and interaction wasn’t any different even with a man in the queen bee position.

    People find it strange when I said I preferred the violent racism I experienced in Germany and France over the catty bitchiness I encountered in the Philippines after I came back after years of living abroad. I prefer the clean fight of fisticuffs – and at least I knew the reason why I was hated! And until I was able to ‘prove’ I wasn’t a weak, crying little girl (whereupon, oddly, my former tormentors decided I wasn’t so bad after all) I had the option of fighting back. I also knew and understood what to avoid and when getting into a fight was going to be unavoidable.

    There wasn’t much I could do against whispering words and rumors and social ostracization in the Philippines… except go ‘well, fuck you all’ – which seemed to piss the social queens even more. Once I found other folks to be friends with, fellow anime and reading fans, it was even easier to ignore the buzz-buzzing. (Warning my teachers that if those students also crossed the line from rumormongering and jeering to trying to hurt me gave me quite a bit of leeway when it came to fighting back; I was lucky with my teachers, looking back.)

    Both groups hated me for ‘being other’ – in Germany and France, because I wasn’t white and because I was apparently not fitting the neat little box they felt little Asian girls like me should fit in; while in my country of birth, I didn’t ‘fit in’ because I didn’t know all the local social cues and ‘proper’ body language (and worse, I committed the great sin of getting to live abroad, and not know how to speak Filipino without an accent!) and my hair had gotten sun bleached for a while in the year (?) I stayed in California.

    The weirdest thing is, the only place I was ever really able to fight my way out of the racism box was in Germany. France had the same ‘effeminate’ social fighting and would only break over into violence because the school I was in at the time also had a significant Muslim population, and apparently I was offensive because I wasn’t subservient, dared to have greater intelligence and not hide it, and spoke English, which Asian girls apparently weren’t supposed to be able to do in their worldview, to which they responded rather aggressively – and it wasn’t limited by gender. I encountered that crap from both male and females. The best part about this was I actually had less racism from the native French white people* (though there were a number of really racist assholes who stand out in my memory, they weren’t someone I encountered much), and encountered more of that shit from the younger immigrants from Africa/Middle East. (The older ones, the ones who’d been there more than maybe ten years or longer, not so much. How would I know they’d been there that long? They’re the ones who go ‘Oh a new face! Did you just get here?’ Cue friendly chatting in French, where I’ll eventually get from them, “j’habite ici plus de (x) annees, pas mal ici, beaucoup mieux que (place of origin), tres paisible”.)

    *I’ll admit though I wasn’t there to compete with them for work and the stories I hear from nonwhite migrants who were trying for white collar work… yeah. Culturally accepted racism was very normal.

    1. Digression– thank you.

      Partly because of your posts, I was able to recognize some really dumb stuff that hispanic guys tried to pull here– I don’t think it was actually malicious, but they just assume things like I won’t bring the car in for another 100k miles or something.

      So I could be polite, and get what we needed, and get the rest later.

      1. To be honest, I think it’s how they’ve learned to interact with women. It’s sort of ‘somewhat learning how to talk in their language’ – complete with the subtle emotional and verbal pressures used by women on other women. Yes, it’s manipulative, but when that’s what women do …

    2. Huh. My sister-in-law came from one of the “back islands” and that doesn’t speak Tagalog. She spoke “language” and a bit of Spanish before moving to Luzon and picking up Tagalog and English.

      I don’t know what her Tagalog sounds like to a native speaker, but while there’s nothing wrong with her English vocabulary or grammar, she was an adult when she learned to speak it, and her accent is so pronounced it always takes a while before we can establish two-way communication.

      1. She’s probably have to a native Tagalog speaker, a regional accent. I wouldn’t be able to really tell, myself.

        It seems to be a thing for us. Rhys notes that I cannot for the life of me pronounce ‘th’ and after speaking to my Mom for a bit in Taglish I’ll have a fairly heavy Filipino accent (to him); a friend of mine in the Navy said that talking to my mother was a bit like listening to an Eastern European speak English. She’s more of a polyglot than any of us, actually, as she speaks at least 6 regional languages, and two of them, to my ear, sound exactly the same.

        I’ll admit though that learning proper Tagalog was something I never really got a handle on. Despite what people say, it’s a tonal language, There’s a common example used online:

        Person looking to enter elevator: “Baba ba ba?” (Is the elevator going down?)
        Person inside: “Baba ba.” (Going down.)

        and one of my bigger issues was I was using the wrong tones and emphasis on certain syllables and apparently coming off as ‘angry’ or ‘aggressive’ or something and even mimicking wasn’t getting it through. A Filipino friend who’d also grown up in Germany had similar issues and simply took the route of not talking much in the language, preferring English. His being a guy though, that was fine. My doing the same was seen as ‘putting on airs.’ Which, to this day, has me snarling.

  32. Why I cringe every time someone says to a teenager, “your high school years are the happiest times of your life.” Unfortunately, I always intercept even a private conversation with the remark that, “I have been happier as an adult no matter what the problems that I have faced. Don’t believe what he/she just said.”
    However, after reading the comments about male/female bosses in the work place I am beginning to think that all life may be high school. Horrible thought.
    I had both male and female bosses and much preferred males, as they just expected me to do the work MY WAY and get it done.

    1. I’ve always figured that people who said that high school was the happiest years of their lives must have poor memories.

      Or a really bad adult life.

      1. Potentially it is.

        You have available the pleasures of adulthood, but the responsibilities of childhood.

        You’re the right age to form deep, lasting friendships (it gets harder later) and potentially to find first love.

        Of course not all people, or environments, are the same. And to some, adult responsibility is a plus not a drawback.

        1. College is better for forming deep, lasting friendships than high school, and, if done right, gives you some of the pleasure of “I’m capable of living on my own.”
          YMMV, of course.

          1. I have no friends from high school (never been back for reunions), and no friends from my college days (no reunions there, either; both in same town); they’re all from my service days.

            2. I have a few people from college that I stay in touch with, but none from high school. I did go to our five-year-reunion, but felt just as uncomfortable with the people I’d gone to school with as I had when we were still in school, so I haven’t gone to any more reunions.

              I do know people who loved school — that always blows me away. I hated it, and was so thankful to be done with all of that. And I was never bullied (at least not that I recognized — the boys that I thought were being ‘mean’ were just trying to get my attention, I think), I just didn’t fit in.

      2. My mom had a talk about how pathetic their lives must be– we grew up knowing both of our folks’ high points rather well. Yeah, no.

      3. Yes. I think of such as Al Bundy. Though in a way there it could be possible, it’s just one would have to remove the actual high school experience itself and spend more time with family and actual friends rather than mere age-cohorts. I suspect that age-segregation in schools is one of the greater subtle(??) evils perpetrated on the alleged modern world.

      4. Or they were in the 3% that made up the Proud Crowd – ball players, cheerleaders, prom stars. The whole school existed only for their convenience, and the 97% were required to cheer them at mandatory pep rallies and support them financially by mandatory candy sales.

        1. Football coach didn’t like me much as I’d only stand for the National Anthem (and/or) Pledge of Allegiance, but NOT for the school spirit song/cheer stuff – and would read during the rest of the assembly. Cockroft-Walton machines were FAR more interesting than any mere game or whatever he had to say. The only slightly amusing thing about the man was his family name reminded me of German Measles.

          Eventually I realized I didn’t have to go, but I couldn’t get out. So I just stayed at the desk in the last classroom of the day. Somehow trying to get me to go stopped being of import when it was down to having to physically carry me to the wretched thing. Why, no, I do not go reunions.

      1. “Happiest”?

        They keep using that word. I do not think that it means what they think it means.

          1. I totally stumbled into exposing our kids to that fact– that song about “I wish I was cool” or something came on, my daughter asked if daddy was cool, and I said something like no, he was too busy doing the right thing and having fun to be cool.

            While he agreed, he was mildly offended.

            Note they didn’t ask if mommy was cool….

          2. Except it’s not. For some people it’s true. It depends on the person and the situation.

            Claiming it’s strictly a lie, is a lie.

            1. Odd to follow up myself, but I have an additional thought and you can’t edit posts.

              It may be sad and pathetic to ‘peak’ so early, with so much of life still ahead of you – both in terms of length and variety of experience – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

              Have a listen to Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’. Or (for some reason I’ve always loved this one) try Harlan Ellison’s ‘The Cheese Stands Alone’.

              1. Springsteen’s Glory Days features people who gave into defeat when the world knocked them down as the world inevitably will. Instead of working to building a better future they are drinking and dwelling in their past — a past seen through rose colored glasses.

                1. People who peaked. Their gifts and development suited them to a certain environment. When life moved on, as it will, they didn’t have what it takes to move with it.

                  Some people are *capable* of developing and moving on, but they bring the past with them. They turn what should be adulthood into a bigger version of junior high, except THIS TIME THEY WIN. That’s their fantasy. A lot of liberals are like that, and they’re the people who are always talking about how junior high/high school are the worst hell on earth.

                  It’s not heaven, it’s not hell. It’s an environment where you don’t have adult responsibility yet, but for the first time you experience your first full adult (physical, intellectual, um, sexual) powers. Nowadays college is basically an extension of that, with, if anything, less responsibility and oversight.

                  1. Because “Their gifts and development suited them to a certain environment” they failed to develop those gifts to the fullest extent. It is the tragedy of the prodigy: he for whom things come easily never learns to work for that which doesn’t.

            2. yeah? Well, I was telling that to my kids BECAUSE people kept telling them that, when they were having trouble at school with their peers.
              The people for whom it’s true don’t need to hear either of those.

              1. I have kids. The symplifying lie because they’re still too young to understand and deal with the full truth, is a valid thing.

                But we’re all adults here, no?

            4. It IS a lie. It may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that doesn’t make it less of a LIE. You have to work really hard at failing for the rest of your life to make it true no matter how popular you were at school. Frankly, it typically only becomes true when the lie becomes an instrument of self-sabotage.

    3. For me, I have a lot of good memories of high school, heck even junior high. Most of the bullying I’ve faced was limited to Junior High and Elementary, and between that and participating in extracurricular activities I like, I enjoyed high school quite a bit.

      There’s an idiom among Latter-day Saints that your mission is supposed to be the happiest two years of your life. OTOH, I remember someone making the point that they should be the happiest two years up to that point, but it shouldn’t be the *peak* of your happiness.

      So far, I have found happiness in all sorts of life. I have yet to find happiness professionally, but I’ve had happiness with my family in parallel to that. I’m not sure I can call one stage happier than another — the periods where I found happiness, they produced different kinds of happiness, so it’s difficult to say that one is better than another.

    4. I had a teacher in high school tell us that “anyone who tells you that these are the happiest years of your life is lying.” (Or amnesiac.)

  33. Maybe this explains some of my problems with my oldest sister. She was always of the opinion that Mom wasn’t hard enough on the rest of us. My view is that a sibling is an equal and while Grandma and Mom might have authority over me, she doesn’t.

  34. I’ll stop laughing soon.

    My mother is a berserker. In the literal sense of, having a history of going berserk, in public, with witnesses. Classic, blind rage, ignoring pain, not remembering it after. Great family stories.

    Her father was a Norwegian guy with a terrifying temper. Her mother was a Polish woman who scared him into granting a divorce, and making tracks.

    Women aren’t violent? Have people who say that *met* any women?

  35. I have thought that it would be wonderfully funny to dump the “a woman-run world would be a peaceful, eco-friendly Utopia” fools into the world of Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price. There, twenty girls are born for every boy, and men are rare and kept in what amounts to purdah—and the place is anything but a utopia.

    1. Ah, but that’s just fiction, not like the other stories that are simple projections of what society would be like if only women* were in control and their pure nurturing nature could just be unleashed, which are then wrapped in a fictional setting so that we could see how much we are missing because the guys are in charge.

      * Ignoring, of course, what women like Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, and Jezebel, among others, have done, when they have been given the reigns of power…

  36. Ah, something just came to mind.

    Women initiate domestic violence roughly as often as men. Nobody seems to want to talk about it and the feminists try to suppress the research….. Here’s a useful article with some links that might be worth following.

    http://time.com/2921491/hope-solo-women-violence/

    According to a CDC study, lesbians pretty much get the shit kicked out of them, and gay men report a lower incidence of partner violence over their lifetime than straight men.

    1. In fairness, a dude “initiating violence” matters a HELL of a lot more than a chick, unless we’re talking guns.

      Suggesting anything else is counter reality. (And this is from someone who HATES female violence.)

      1. In fairness, if A shoots B with a pellet gun and B shoots back, killing A, then it’s justifiable homicide.

        In fairness, if a small man insistently picks a fight with a bigger, more muscular man by hitting, slapping, jabbing, etc. and the fed-up bigger man punches the small man out then we say of the smaller man, “He had it coming” and consider his whupping justified.

        Why the excuse-making when the more lightly armed, weaker instigator is a female? It’s not that I don’t get it, it’s that I’m no longer buyin’ it.

        1. Why the excuse-making when the more lightly armed, weaker instigator is a female?

          Your own comment starts out by sorting female violence into pellet guns and male violence into real guns.

          Pretty obvious that you agree it’s a significant difference, even if it upsets you when someone recognizes that.

          1. The whole ‘domestic violence initiated by a woman is no big deal’, apparently because women are too weak to hurt you, is a shameful stereotype, sorry.

        1. Of course, you silly ox. You’re mired in gender-normative heterothink. Male lesbians are totally a thing nowadays, and we’ll send anyone to disagrees to the re-education camps!

  37. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.

    This is why the “women aren’t violent” thing is so very important- not because women CAN’T be violent, but because if it isn’t hedged in it’s insanely destructive. (Both because women are AT so many vulnerable points, and because the best way to fight a violent women is to have men who think violence against women is alright. Guess what, putting a sub-featherweight against someone who maxed out the weight classes DOES NOT TURN OUT WELL.)

  38. Haven’t read the other comments yet, so don’t know if anyone has noted– one difference you didn’t note is that females are…. not tolerant, but FUNCTIONAL with multiple command structures.

    You can’t be queen bee in two or three different structures, but you can be queen in one, a countess in another, a pleb in five more– there can be a bunch of different, partly overlapping structures with women, although a bad leaderess will try to destroy all others. (a sort of toxic masculinity, like so many things have toxic femininity as you so ably paint a picture of it; they’re toxic because they take strengths and make them terrible via going too far)

  39. In defense of the thesis, I will assert that there are peaceful women aplenty, albeit they are all in their graves. Plenty of peaceful men in graveyards, too. In fact, the graves a fine and private place, I am told.

    1. I got curious as to if rotating the phone would cause word order inversion as had been seen here from time to time. Evidently not on that model with that browser. And now I know.

  41. Whenever I hear people say that if women were in charge there’d be peace, I tell them, “Yeah, Maggie Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi never went to war, did they?”

    1. I am sure that they only went to war because there were men advising them, and there were men running the countries against which they warred. Argentina was run by generals, after all!

      I don’t quite know how to explain Meir, given that she led a nation in a war of conquest against oppressed indigenous peoples, but I’m sure if I drank enough I could find an explanation.

  42. …female social structure is closer to the Borg than the complex world we currently enjoy.

    That’s why we keep the cell phones away from the females. Huh? What’s that you just said? They’ve done what on the Monkey Planet? Idiot humans, they’re going to evolve into the Borg and doom us all!

    1. WHY?
      Because women are not peaceful? Because they use manipulation to establish THEIR pecking order?
      Then men who aren’t peaceful and use force to establish theirs should also not have the vote?
      The vote is not a reward for perfect people, sir. It’s an attempt to dilute individual defects by submerging them in a crowd with other defects.
      And it’s a horrible system of government, save for everything else.

      1. Just feeling a bit snarky but yes, men who are violent (aka felons) aren’t allowed to vote. };op

          1. True but I ~think~ the point was equating the physical violence that men use with the emotional violence that women do.

        2. In Virginia they are, thanks to Gov. McAwful. Restoring the vote to felons is a widespread Progressive project.

          The Democrats have a lengthy history of allowing the violent to vote, stemming back at least as far as the Jim Crow era and even in our present day the unions are legally permitted to use violence against scabs, strikebreakers, blacklegs and rats.

  44. At the risk of being a tad blue I have a simple suggestion for people who think women can’t be violent: ask people who are in the S&M community to rank the various gender/power combos for two person play (ie, a man spanking a woman would be M/f) in order of how hard they play.

    The most hardcore ranked by anyone with experience will be F/f and generally F/m will be #2. That is a world where telling someone they hit like a girl is not an insult. Oddly, being able to take it like a girl is also a compliment…women are better at committing and receiving violence. I have some theories on the latter but I’m still working on them.

    That is also a world where the social constraints on not being violent are loosened and in many cases reversed. So, take away constraints against violence and actually encourage it and women hit harder.

    It also isn’t discussed with outsiders but get the trust of a few lesbians and most will tell you their community has the cases and spread of domestic violence at least as bad as the het world and probably worse.

    Yet I’m supposed to believe a world run by and exclusively populated by women would be peaceful?

    Yeah, right. It would be full of abusers and victims. It might have nothing else.

    1. I brought up domestic violence research and got what appears to be a feminist telling me that violence committed by women is no big deal.

      1. Did you ask, “what if the victim is a woman?” I know feminists don’t think men are even human so wouldn’t care (a PETA feminist will care more about a cow than a human male) but what do they say about women who harm women.

          1. Got better things to do with my time and if I’m going to be abused by a woman more enjoyable ways for that to happen 🙂

        2. *dryly* The fighting rooster over there is attacking me as an evil feminist, for not agreeing that a girl slapping a guy is utterly identical to a guy slapping a girl and to hell with physics.

          2. Physics and intent. A guy who pulls the blow because a)girl more fragile and b)trying to shock, punish, or defend against prior aggression is not the same as guy whose temper and self-control is clean gone and just wants to damage.

            Not sure that, by choice or physics, the average girl can differentiate as well between lesser and greater slaps.

          3. The fact that you automatically assume domestic violence is going to be a slappy fight – which means (but you refuse to see) that the woman’s violence isn’t a big deal because men are better at slappy fights – just proves what I was saying.

            Why do you think it’s OK to trivialize violence initiated by women?

            Seriously. Try thinking.

            1. No, Greg, I didn’t actually assume domestic violence would be slapping.

              I deliberately chose the form of unarmed attack which would be least sympathetic as the form to simplify the argument.

              Seriously, have you ever seen a rooster having a to-the-death battle with a reflection? Or a shadow? Because that’s the impression coming off of you in waves– you’re not even getting close enough to be a pain.

              1. Your evasions are getting sillier, sorry.

                You’re part of the problem. And still refusing to think.

                2. Ah yes, that terrible plague of HORRIBLE people not instantly agreeing with you, no matter what ridiculous accusations you throw at them.

                  ’tis a hard, hard thing.

                  1. You can have your own opinions, but you don’t get your own facts.

                    Dealing with facts about female domestic violence would be a start.

                    You’re so astonishingly in denial, you even seem to think domestic abuse among lesbians is committed by men.

            2. The stereotype of the cast iron skillet wielding woman exists for a reason. Female on male domestic violence is far more likely to involve a weapon, improvised or otherwise, than male on female.

              1. Yes. We’re tool using primates. Who’s going to be the one to assume women are too stupid to use tools? Not me.

                Men also have extreme cultural conditioning to not defend themselves fully, or respond, or even admit that they’re being abused. Because admitting that some small, weak, *woman* gave you that shiner, or those bruises, etc…. shameful. Even some women here seem to have been victims of the same conditioning that leads to that last result.

                And children are purely fucked.

        1. There are several varieties. Whatever she may be, in terms of this discussion she’s acting like a second wave version.

  46. It would be fun to see a Sci-Fi novel that started out seeming to be the “peaceful woman” planet on the outside, but really explored this line of reasoning.

    2. Brin’s ‘Glory Season’ touched on this a bit. A utopian literally rewrote the biology of the two human sexes, and used them to populate her planet. It’s been a long time since I read it, though, so I don’t feel it would be a good idea for me to comment on it.

  47. I haven’t seen it firsthand (in part because I could very well be oblivious with it), but I have heard stories about cliques in women’s organizations in various church congregations. Indeed, in my own religion, I have the distinct impression that a lot of the teachings and training is an attempt to keep such things from developing.

    The fact that such situations sometimes arise in an environment where effort (in theory at least) is made to prevent this from happening should give us something to ponder…

    Both “natural man” and “natural woman” are particularly harsh and nasty. While it’s important to recognize our naturalness, it’s also important to remember that even in the worst of times, our naturalness needs to be kept on a leash. We’re humans, after all. We’re *better* than our natural impulses.

    1. “We’re *better* than our natural impulses.”

      The children of Rousseau would have your head for that.

          1. *thinks hard* People who don’t signal their turns?
            *tries again* Hanging the toilet paper backwards. For any given individual’s definition of backwards.

            1. Child abuse, slavery, female genital mutilation, religious intolerance, genocide, patricide, matricide, fratricide (oh heck, the whole array of -cides), adultery, idol worship, idle worship, boy bands …

                1. Sorry – I confess I cannot distinguish modern evils from ancient ones. I don’t care what colour shell an M&M has, the inner content remains the same. Putting NEW & IMPROVED on the packaging means nothing more than the packaging of the evil has changed.

          2. Better not to kill Hitler. Better to knock him out and perform surgery on his larynx so he sounds like he just sucked a hat full of helium. The podium pounding speeches would have been so much more effective.

            1. You don’t have to kill Hitler, just go and swipe the scissors and and razor out of his grooming kit so he can’t trim his moustache down; the mustard and phosgene will take care of his voice when his gas mask doesn’t seal.

          3. Hmm, after giving this some thought (yes, I know, I was bored), as evil as Hilter was he served a necessary purpose in history by speeding up WWII, without him WWII would have probably been delayed 10-15 years and quite possibility would have been nuclear.

            Marx on the other hand, unless hindsight offers something in the future, has purely been a destabilizing factor for the world and will probably be the death of pro-freedom Western society.

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  51. This post brings the Google memo controversy into a very interesting light. Google is trying to hire more women in tech, but they’re doing it by means of quotas and affirmative action rather than hiring more part-time, providing more flexibility, and otherwise trying the solutions proposed by the author of the memo. As a result, the women they’ve attracted are the “alpha bitch” types who care more about status than work-life balance–or in other words, the women who exhibit the worst kinds of behavior listed here. No wonder they fired the guy.

    1. Google is also, I believe, facing a class action suit brought by (at last count seen by me) some sixty women, claiming discriminatory pay and promotion policies and an unfriendly workplace.

      I do not think tech companies are good at the whole work-life balance thing, largely being built by guys with no lives to balance.

      Tech companies built by semi-evolved code monkeys.

      1. “Code monkey get up get coffee
        Code monkey go to job
        Code monkey have boring meeting
        With boring manager Rob…”

      2. The funny thing is that there’s lots of guys who *also* have lives to balance, and would appreciate the flexibility as well…instead of being required to work long hours because Sales over-promised on what the platform was supposed to do…

        (As much as I am annoyed by it, I understand having to work extra hours because Sales season has just hit, and it has traditionally been a chaotic time as the sales force discovers bugs previously undiscoverable because sometimes you have to test the system hard…and there are only five or so developers to help out with things…but it sure makes it that much harder to find that balance! And a big, stable company like Google should have the resources to explicitly forbid software developers from working more than 40 hours a week…*and* be flexible about what hours are worked…)

    2. Or even simpler.
      > Google is trying to hire more women in tech, but they’re doing it by means of quotas and affirmative action
      As a result, the women they’ve attracted are those who seek the benefits arranged for them by the commissars rather than those who want to do the job. Which is applicable to any other affirmative action just as well.
      While the incentive for competent people may even be negative – after all, those who usually have a good idea of what they talk about tend to despise the commissars and community organizers, for obvious reason.

    3. Unless this is all a clever fraud by misogynists who want you to think that.

  52. So, an occasional reader here, I thought I’d alert you guys that this was just mentioned on Facebook by the fabulous Milo Yiannopoulos, so you may get an unusual level of traffic for a while. Have fun with that.

        1. But think how much nicer the world would be! Lovely lace doilies on ridges and mountains, matching bushes and trees, color-coordinated rivers and streams …

            2. So the mathematician who decided to crochet surfaces with negative curvature is a patriarchial woman hater? That’s sad to hear, because I appreciated her work!

              Some might argue that someone who crochets for a hobby brought some needed diversity to mathematics (even as a male, I have liked crocheting, but I have never pursued it enough to get to the point where I would be able to crochet surfaces with negative curvature), but NOOOO, she doesn’t count, because she brings traditional feminine hobbies into mathematics!

              (Holy cow, as I typed that, I couldn’t help but think: “Oh, I wish this *were* satire!” But it unfortunately very closely skirts the edges of Poe’s Law….)

  53. I always say, too many men and you’ve got a frat house, too many women and you’ve got The Real Housewives.

  54. I don’t particularly agree with this take on a society run by women–and not because I think such a one would necessarily be better. I prefer a balance. However, this sounds like it was written by a victim of female bullying–probably where the social context is western patriarchy.

    Social anthropology simply does not bear out this argument. At all. In fact, it shows the opposite. I think a little research may be in order–and perhaps a deeper understanding of social context. We’re not doing women or the craft of writing any favors by perpetuating this narrow views and stereotypes.

    1. Oh, please. “Western patriarchy” my sore butt. you people wouldn’t know patriarchy if it bit you in the snout. I grew up in a real patriarchy. the author didn’t.
      Get over your idiocy. If you think the US is a patriarchy, you’ve lost all right to objectivity.

    2. My undergraduate Minor was in Cultural Anthropology, albeit several decades ago. Would you provide any citations of specific cultures which bear out your thesis? As you assert Social Anthropology shows the opposite I assume you’ve some particular instance(s) in mind, yet I cannot recall a single one. What matriarchal cultures are you referencing?

    3. I don’t particularly agree with this take on a society run by women–

      And we are supposed to care about your agreement or lack thereof because…?

      and not because I think such a one would necessarily be better. I prefer a balance.

      Awfully full of yourself, aren’t you? You, you, you, you think, you feel, you prefer. And you act like we all sit in rapt anticipation, waiting to hear your every preference and whim.

      You have yet to give me a reason to give half a damn what you think, and your narcissistic self-regard doesn’t really incline me to think “Wow, what a wise and enlightened individual that is!!!”

      However, this sounds like it was written by a victim of female bullying

      Oh, sweetheart, it’s so cute that you think you can slip by an argumentum ad hominem and everybody will just pretend like it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion.

      Everybody knows you’re saying she’s a victim of bullying because you don’t have anything of actual substance to say in response to her argument. If you did, you wouldn’t be doing this old, exhausted impression management in lieu of making an actual argument.

      –probably where the social context is western patriarchy.

      Hunnybunny, you haven’t even begun to establish that there is such a thing as a “western patriarchy”. You’re just using leftist buzzwords because you think they make you sound smart.

      Social anthropology simply does not bear out this argument.

      Asserted, absent any support. At all.

      At all.

      Hey, quit copying me!

      In fact, it shows the opposite. I think a little research may be in order–and perhaps a deeper understanding of social context.

      Says the precious snookums who has provided zero support for her trite, banal, shopworn, clichéd leftist assertions.

      We’re not doing women or the craft of writing any favors by perpetuating this narrow views and stereotypes.

      Because women and the craft of writing need favors to get by. They need help just to survive. Benevolent help, from superior individuals.

      Like you, obviously.

      Nitwit.

    4. Oooh. I rather like that pooh-poohing of female bullying, and somehow it’s still the patriarchy’s fault.

      Noted that this snowflake outright ignored the example of female genital mutilation being a tradition perpetuated by women on other women.

      Yet it’s ‘Western patriarchy’ at fault. Oh wow. You’ve got your head so far up your ass all you see is shit, get over yourself.

      Signed,
      a non-white, brown-skinned female.

    5. Places I have personal experience with that have borne this out: Iraq, South Korea, Germany (Specifically Bavaria), Canada (various regions), and the US (various regions).

      Are you going to try and tell me South Korea and Iraq are WESTERN? really? I could go on with cultures I have INdirect experience with.

      We won’t get into my opinion of “Social Anthropology” as a scientist. It likely won’t be printable.

      2. The Sinbad stories are allegedly inspired by some of the old Greek stories, and the Koreans have had some contact with the west for decades, maybe even centuries. I’ve totally come into contact with over half a dozen cultures wholly isolated from western society in my professional career. The last under Maine, two thirds of the way to the center of the Earth. Perhaps the Social Anthropologists have finally deigned to acknowledge my work? Problem is, I’m not seeing how they came to that conclusion from my efforts documenting those societies before my anti-communism caused enough contamination that they became western. Even the dudes with the actual three physical sexes were not as is claimed.

        Regarding the social sciences, could it be that the social and to a lesser extent the life sciences have so many confounding factors that it is difficult to develop the degree of rigor that is relatively easy in the harder sciences? And that many researchers fall short of that challenge? Please tell me if I have attributed to you thoughts not your own.

  55. Those of us of a certain age will want to doff our hats, 10-gallon and otherwise,in recognition of the passing of Ty “Bronco Layne” Hardin, the man who turned down roles which made Clint Eastwood and Adam West stars.

    Ty Hardin, rugged actor who played Bronco Layne in TV westerns, dies at 87
    Ty Hardin, a popular film and television actor who starred as the gentle gunman Bronco Layne in the TV western “Bronco,” died Aug. 3 in Huntington Beach, Calif. He was 87.

    His wife, Caroline Pampu Hardin, told the Associated Press that he had been in failing health but did not provide an exact cause.

    Mr. Hardin first saddled up for the ABC series “Cheyenne,” an hour-long western that had previously featured Clint Walker as the title character, Cheyenne Bodie. When Walker left the show in 1958 over a contractual dispute, Mr. Hardin — a newcomer from Texas, helped along by an introduction from John Wayne — stepped in as Layne, a former Confederate Army captain who roams the West in search of ad­ven­ture and high ratings.

    The character was a hit with viewers, and when Walker returned to the show in 1959, Mr. Hardin was given a spinoff series, “Bronco.”

    [SNIP]

    Mr. Hardin turned down a starring role in “A Fistful of Dollars,” the 1964 spaghetti western that helped Clint Eastwood become a star, and spurned William Dozier, the creator of the campy television series “Batman.” Dozier had envisioned Mr. Hardin as the Caped Crusader. Instead, the role went to Adam West, who died in June.

    1. Based on these two data points, I’m almost inclined to suggest that being in the running for Batman for the campy Batman show was cursed…but besides the lack of data points, I would also add that I would have greatly appreciated my Dad being “cursed” to die in his 80s!

  56. > Female social structure is completely different from male social structure.
    BTW, have you read Psychopath Code by Pieter Hintjens? It’s about human interaction “protocols” viewed purely from evolutionary adaptation PoV, and exploits thereof (also viewed as an adaptation).

  57. I immediately thought of this movie quote….

    Xavier Fitch: We decided to make it female so it would be more docile and controllable.
    Preston Lennox: More docile and controllable, eh? You guys don’t get out much.

    1. The author, not me. But she’s not wrong, actually. The practice predated Islam, and I don’t think it’s mentioned in their writings, just like veiling isn’t.

    2. FGM comes from northern African animist traditions and was brought into Islam from there. That’s why you’ll notice that the Wahabis, Iranians, and most South Asian Moslems don’t follow that practice. There are arguments within two (if I remember correctly) of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence that women are far more responsible than men are for sexual and social misconduct, because women contain more desire (“nine of the ten parts of desire”), but the major schools of Islamic law do not encourage FGM.

      Veiling may come from the Byzantine nobility’s tradition of restricting upper-class women, and from certain interpretations of the Sura verse about the wives of the Prophet must not be seen by or consort with men outside the family.

      1. If the Koran specifically forbids only the wives of the Prophet being forbidden from being seen by men outside the family, I can’t help but think that there’s room to believe that this restriction only applies to Prophets.

        Which reminds me of how I’m annoyed by both Orthodox and Conservative schools of thought in Judaism: the Orthodox believe in restrictions above and beyond the restrictions given in the Torah, whereas the Conservatives believe that certain restrictions (such as the eating of pork) have been mitigated by things like refrigeration and meat thermometers, but otherwise believe in following the restriction. I can’t help but wonder where the tradition of following the Torah, no more, no less, exists!

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  60. Before I’d been a teacher and watched this first-hand in action as an effective non-person (sure, I ran the classroom, but take it outside that context and you’re “socially invisible” except possibly for waving at in the parking lot), I would have gone “nah, it can’t possibly be like this.”

    Yeah, it’s pretty much EXACTLY like this.

    On the other hand, in sci-fi or fantasy, there might be something which *prevents* it from being like this. And that suddenly becomes a much more interesting question. It’s easy to simply invert a trope and declare oneself clever. Doubling down on a trope and seeing where it leads you? Could be some interesting places.

    So I think the answer there isn’t “don’t do this,” but “if you’re going to do this, do it smarter.”

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  63. Yesterday morning at work, a lead from another department stopped in for a chat (escaping from idiocy actually), and she commented how much she hates her department now, as she has 22 people under her, and only 3 are men. Her dirty look at me when I commented that I’d been assured that the world would be a far more peaceful place if women controlled everything was priceless. As she has a tween daughter, she said she already deals with far too much drama of the female type.

    1. Yeah, the most toxic environments I’ve ever worked in were the ones with women (and effeminate men) were in management positions.

      It’s also particularly bad when the hot, married Australian trainer figures out you’re the ONLY ONE not interested in trying to convince him for a bit of …foreign affairs, and decides you’re safe to hang around and ask where the good places to shop are. (Also, omg, you love books? Where are the good bookstores here? Oh, hey this is a pic of my wife and son! You have kids too? Can I see? *parenting chat ensues*) Apparently, this was ‘monopolizing valuable trainer time’ even though the trainer in question was on break.

      1. But to the grifters his break time was the most valuable time (and it seems he felt that it was too, as he could escape their PIA attempts)

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