Two by Two

324 thoughts on “Two by Two”

1. It makes sense that if rewards become disconnected from effort that guys who’ll respond by simply looting the place and moving on to the next.

   That’s part of the thing about honor codes: they also make you part of the tribe/team. If there is no team, and you know anyone in the group is likely to push you in front of the mammoth and loot your corpse, then the only rational choice is to go f-it and get yours before yours gets got.

   That’s probably also why the guys also, apparently despite being in a hyper feminized sphere, decide to go total barbarian. If they’re going to get stabbed in the back regardless, why not play the fake and get theirs first?

   1. Yep.

      1. The problem with this whole analysis is that all its examples are taken from male-dominant societies, and there are other kinds, even in Nature. Gorillas and chimpanzees, for example, are generally male-dominant, while bonobos are female-dominant. There have been female-dominant societies in history, and there still are a few tucked away in odd corners of the world today. There have even been a few ambiarchal societies here and there. These other societies have very different ideas of sex and gender roles. Sometime read a remarkable book called “The Dominant Sex”, by Mathilde and Matthias Vaerting, first published almost a century ago. It would have become an anthropological classic if it hadn’t been published in Germany, where it was quickly suppressed and has remained so ever since. It’s still available on the Internet if you search a bit.

         1. Whatever we are, we are not bonobos. We’re closer to chimps. Look our size and strength differencees dictated our evolution. You can wish otherwise. It doesn’t make it so.

            1. I propose an experiment. Starting with a breeding population of not less than 1000, raise the male and female children exactly alike: same nutrition, exercise, education, training, dress and expectations — for no less than 6 generations. Then let’s see how much bigger, stronger, and more competitive the males are.

               1. My suspicion is that this will work as well as when 19th century “scientists” raised children in perfect isolation to recreate the language of heaven.
                  I think what you’ll get is some spectacularly bad behavior when half of them hit puberty and have never been taught to moderate urges or superior strength.
                  In some ways we ARE making that experiment, and trying to deny hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
                  May the future not curse us too badly.

                  1. “Half of them”? Why shouldn’t all children be taught to control their impulses or their strength (older children will always be stronger than younger ones, for example)? Why should self-control be taught only to males? Why, for that matter, should bodybuilding and martial arts not be taught to females? Why should females be discouraged from ambition, or action? Does not compute. Let’s perform the experiment.

                     1. Not every one HAS superior strength.

               2. This has been done. The Israelis tried to raise kids in sex neutral kibbutzim, which failed when the kids turned out to not fit the theory.

               3. Do they have to be human?
                  If they don’t, look at the racehorse industry. Find out the proportion of colts to fillies who win the Kentucky Derby. Then try to tell me that chromosomal sex doesn’t matter.

                  1. IIRC, the kibbutz system failed not because of sexual differences but because people still wanted property of their own, contrary to the Socialist ideals of the system.

                  2. Fillies are not allowed in the Kentucky Derby. IIRC, the fastest-clocked racehorse ever was an Australian mare some 50 years ago who never competed against colts because of racing rules. .

                     1. Nope. There is a race for fillies only- the Kentucky Oaks- but they’re allowed into the Derby if they qualify. There are some races that are for colts only, but that’s not one of them.

                        1. So, I did a bit of poking around in the wilds of the internet, and as it turns out, your second statement… isn’t completely wrong. The fastest clocked Thoroughbred racehorse was a filly/mare named Winner’s Brew.

                           I sit corrected regarding the fact but not the conclusion. I still argue that genetics matter, not only upbringing.

                           Winner’s Brew was clocked at 47 mph, but Quarter Horse racehorses are regularly clocked at speeds up to 55 mph. A substantial difference, even when racehorses of both breeds are fed and trained very similarly.

                           And since I don’t feel like starting another comment, allow me to add some personal experience into this discussion. I’ve been in the saddle for 30+ years; I’ve ridden a lot of horses. Almost without exception, stallions of a particular type will be taller, heavier, and stronger than geldings of that type, and both are taller, heavier, and stronger than mares of that type. Mares are also more prone to injury.

                           There are also behavioral differences. A herd of mares only is very different from a herd of geldings only, which is different from one of stallions, and a mixed herd is another thing altogether. I’ve also worked with prepubescent foals of both sexes; fillies are usually more docile and eager to please; colts are more playful and aggressive, even when they’re fed and trained exactly the same.

                           Chromosomal sex matters. Not just the amount and type of hormones currently active in the body. See above about geldings being larger and stronger than mares. The effect is more pronounced if the colt goes through puberty, then is gelded, but there is still some effect on horses that are gelded before puberty.

                           looks around

                           Huh. Where’d this soapbox come from?

                           1. Since geldings are colts/stallions before they’re gelded, the similarity isn’t surprising. Question: all those herds of horses you’ve seen, were they in the care/control of humans? How many of them were completely wild — mustangs, zebras, Przewalskis?

                           2. Mustangs aren’t wild.

                              They’re barely feral.

                              Before roughly the 80s, they were managed by locals.

                              The local ranchers would go out, shoot the stallions, release their own, and capture the horses.

                              The confiscation of the “wild” herds, and subsequent rotting of the quality of those wild herds, is an outrage on par with the vast amount of knowledge destroyed when they outlawed arrowhead hunting.

                           3. Looks like we’ve hit the comment wall.

                              I’ve only worked with domestic horses, but in this context, it doesn’t matter. They weren’t treated differently according to sex; they get the same feed, same training, etc., which is in line with the experiment you want to inflict on humans.

                              The physical and behavioral differences between the sexes are even more obvious in wild/feral horses.

                              Sexual dimorphism is a real thing, in humans and animals, even if you don’t want it to be.

                           4. I have literally run across leftists who admit that, because monkeys also show preferences for toys by sex, and those match humans, that there’s probably something biological.

                              However, because humans show MORE, that must be cultural. (Nevermind that the two cited monkey species do not show the same preference strength.)

                     2. Gurgle is Your Friend (TM). A search of (derby winner filly) yields pages of hits, one of which would have corrected that error: https://www.infoplease.com/askeds/filly-winners-kentucky-derby

               4. One, you’re assuming massive differences right now,
                  and two
                  YOU ARE LITERALLY SUGGESTING HUMANS AS FODDER FOR YOUR THEORY.

                  This is a really, really bad idea.

                  The kids you’re suggesting using ARE PEOPLE.

                  1. And how will it damage people to be raised in complete equality? Did you ever hear a child complain that he or she was treated just as well as his/her siblings?

                     1. The real question, Leslie, is how you define “complete equality” without taking into the definite and absolutely real differences impose by biological physical characteristics. The current definition, to use an easy example, leads by about three short steps to the whole Lia Thomas situation, which is simply going to eliminate women’s sports.

                        1. One more time; what I propose is raising the male and female children with the same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress and expectations — for six generations. As for sex, don’t even tell the kids about sex; wait until they ask, and then answer them as honestly and simply as possible.

                           For example, if your four-year-old comes toddling up and asks: “Why is my wee-wee different from Sandy’s?” say: “That’s so that when you’re all grown up, and married, and want to have babies of your own, you put two different wee-wees together, and that’s how you make a baby.” Any self-respecting four-year-old will reply indignantly “I’m no baby!” and promptly lose interest in the subject.

                           Now, where’s the problem with this experiment?

                           1. Where’s the problem? Where’s the bloody problem? Are you for real?

                              The same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress, and expectations for SIX GENERATIONS requires six generations of regimented, controlled, disciplined structures implemented by controlled, disciplined people, for starters. Seriously, you ask where’s the problem with that? On a libertarian blog?

                              Do you think that having the same exercise, training, nutrition, etc would magically change the hormonally-caused sex differentiation at adolescence that creates so many follow-on expectations and DESIRES for people? By what causal mechanism?

                              Only 20% of military personnel are women, though women have been able to enlist or get regular commissions for nearly fifty years now (the service Academies were opened to women in 1975). That percentage holds. In the ensuing decades, in a culture that pushes women to be all they can be, to let the journey begin, that explicitly focuses on getting women to pursue careers in traditional male-oriented fields, it hasn’t altered a great deal. The fact is, most women don’t want to serve in the military, and that’s fine. Me, I decided I was going to go to West Point at the age of 13, just before I started high school. I ended up at the Naval Academy instead, but that’s another story.

                              I was a tomboy, out playing war with my brothers and my uncles, hitting each other with foam-wrapped PVC, hiking through the woods, doing everything they did. Speaking of same expectations…

                              You’re aware that the world-class women’s soccer team, women who have been playing competitively since they were children, with proper nutrition, equal or higher expectations and training, etc, got their asses beat by a team of not particularly distinguished high school boys, right?

                              I’m now about to retire from the Navy after twenty years in (with some breaks), and guess what, I make the same amount of money any E-6 with twenty years in makes every month. I don’t get to negotiate my salary. You know what I do get? Shinsplints, back problems, knee problems, feet and ankle problems from TWENTY YEARS of trying to keep up with the boys. And I’m a slightly taller-than-average, chunky, solid girl that used to lift weights fairly regularly, (injuries have kept me from doing so recently) a slow-running tomboy that is perfectly comfortable with physical sports like rugby (I’ve tackled and been tackled by Recon Marines and NSW guys. I know how to deliver a hit.)

                              Now, to address one of your points from a later thread about boys being told to “Eat hearty” while girls are told to watch what they eat. That is because men and women METABOLIZE CALORIES DIFFERENTLY. Ask any woman who has tried to lose weight, which is almost all of us on this blog. It is FRUSTRATING AS HELL. You simply CANNOT give the same amount of calories/food to people with different metabolisms and expect them to have the same outcome. When women were admitted to the service academies, way back in the 70s, they had to RECONFIGURE THE MENU so that the female cadets and midshipmen weren’t gaining too much weight, even though they were participating in the same PT regimen as the males. Even today, large portions of the female student body are anemic or suffer from amenorrhea, or are subject to stress fractures attempting to perform to equal standards.

                              Talk about regimented same dress, training, expectations, nutrition, etc. The service academies would seem to be a goodly portion of that experiment, in operation for nearly fifty years. How’s that working out for you?

                     2. > “And how will it damage people to be raised in complete equality?”

                        Equality is only a desirable goal in the sense of equal rights or equality before the law. Trying to enforce equality in any other sense – talent, desires, opportunity, outcomes – goes against the facts of reality and is destructive. The only people who have the kind of “complete equality” you’re talking about are the dead.

                        What you’re really proposing is to treat people not as equal, but as interchangeable. And reality is simply not set up to permit that.

                        1. Damn it, I keep selecting my old ‘nym by reflex.

                           Anyway, to give just one practical example of the problems with this, take the issue of men being physically much stronger than women. You want to raise everyone the same? Then you have to raise both sexes to think that they’re equally strong. So which do you use as the baseline?

                           If you teach boys that they’re as weak as girls, you’ll get men who don’t know their own strength and will end up accidentally hurting people. If you teach girls that they’re as strong as boys, you’ll get women who think they’re Black Widow and can duke it out with 250-pound male rapists (which will not go well for them).

                        2. They’re actually trying this in the Scandinavian countries. No girl toys, no boy toys, etc etc (which to be fair, we’re doing as well.)
                           They have for about 30 years. What they’re seeing is a BIGGER number of women choosing “girl professions” and an exaggeration of female behaviors. (Not males, because of course, white men are the devil.)

                     3. I think it depends how “raised in complete equality” is defined and implemented. Because these hypothetical children are also individuals (guaranteed) so they will have individual variations in interests, abilities, and temperament. Meaning that if the adults running this are double-checking themselves constantly looking for equality of result – which would mean equality of behavior and achievement on the part of the children – and adjusting as time progresses to try to achieve that equality of result, the adults are going to end up treating each child in actuality differently. Also tormenting the children, inadvertently, in attempting to force the children to achieve exactly the same tasks and milestones as every other child.

                        If the raising of the children is not going to be tested against equality of result then that particular nightmare will be avoided … but still runs into the difficulty of guaranteeing that these children will all be treated “equally” given their individuality. Since we’re talking about sex-related differences, here: Observe some families that have multiple children all of one sex. Note that the parents are attempting to treat their children fairly and equitably. See how that can turn into one-size-fits-all inputs for children who really are individuals, and thus fails to meet the individual needs and desires of these children OR, if the parents are [wisely] trying to help each child achieve her maximum potential, how the different-but-equitable treatment is decried (by each child, at various times) as “So unfair!” (and this will happen, if the children are introduced to the concepts of “fairness” – what seems fair and equitable to the parents will be characterized as Favoritism! by the children themselves). Also factor in the difficulties of treating children “equally” in terms of discipline given their individual temperaments – which, again, can be observed/learned from families with multiple children all of the same sex.

                        1. I was treated EXACTLY like the boys in my family, mostly because there were few girls, but also because being a girl was being indulgent, etc
                           Some day, if I have a couple of hours, I’ll explain how BADLY that screwed me up, in terms of understanding myself.

                           1. I SO need to be there to hear it. I fear there will be…. resonance. No, I CANNOT TRULY KNOW…. but Resonance Happens.

                     4. You haven’t had someone explain how screwed up they were by being treated identical to someone who was not identical?

                        If your “complete equality” and “just as well” are good, then they’re being done now; so why aren’t you getting the results you theorize?

                        The entire setup is backwards; you’re proposing sacrificing the interests of the child for a theory.

                     5. The problem is, treating a person ‘just as well’ as everybody else means something different for each person. People have different priorities, even as children, and what one person thinks is a precious gift, is an intolerable burden to someone else.

                        There’s a delicious irony in your argument that everyone would turn out the same if they were given perfectly equal resources. You’re on a blog full of Odds, in case you hadn’t noticed. Most of us got all the ‘equal treatment’ we could handle via the public school system and other similar institutions. And yet, most of us are still pretty darned Odd.

                        1. Half of what the schools did that actively damaged my kids was “to make them fit in.” Blargh

                  2. Foxfier, looking at Leslie’s proposal, she’s not proposing any experiments involving anything but volunteers, and she doesn’t call for physical mutilation. whether done with knives or drugs.

                     At that point, lacking evidence of actual measurable physical harm, we start getting into a slippery slope. After all, there’s quite a lot of people who have the opinion that raising your children to believe in the “delusion” that any sort of god exists is dangerous and harmful. That’s precisely what we’re fighting now is where the line is drawn on parents raising children “as fodder for their theory”.

                     1. Babies can only be volunteered.

                        1. While this is absolutely true, babies have to be volunteered for ANY upbringing they receive. As long as they’re not doing permanent, irreversible damage to the kids – and I don’t think this qualifies – parents are entitled to decide how their children will be raised.

                           While Leslie’s idea is a terrible one, I don’t think this is a valid argument against it.

                           1. There’s a difference between raising the baby for the interests of child, and raising the baby for the interests of a theory.

                           2. Again, and again, and again: who decides that difference?

                           3. :points above:

                              The argument is literally which one to do.

                              People may be screwy in carrying it out, because human.

                              Doesn’t change that having “sacrifice people to the system” is a really bad thing.

                              People are an ends in themselves. Not a means to an end. ESPECIALLY babies.

                           4. Not if the parents believe the theory is best for the child (and some will). And even if they don’t they can always lie about it.

                              Yes, that will be terrible for the children subjected to it. But the alternative is to give the government the power to say “We’re overruling you as parents and taking your children because we don’t like your ideology.” And that opens the door to many more children getting screwed.

                           5. It’s an experiment. There’s literally no guarantee that it will not do such harm.

                        2. Exactly. Now, when do they move from volunteered to volunteering, and who decides that change of status. Again, we’re arguing RIGHT NOW over whether an 8 year old can decide they are trans and start doing things both physical and otherwise to further that belief.

                     2. It is shifting the goal of raising people from the people, to the theory.

                        This is at best dangerous, and strips all safety measures.

                        People are not fodder for a system.

                     3. Yeah? Steve, what she wants to enforce is EQUALITY. We’ve seen this before. When the kids start diverging from the plan it must be they didn’t enforce equality hard ENOUGH.
                        Yes, some religious sects have done that. The communists, for instance. And it’s always a horror.

                        1. Which is why I responded to Leslie the way I did. There’s no way to have equality the way she seems to be defining it. I really should have pointed her back to her own song “Better than who?”

                           “It’s best to say we’re all born equal and leave the rest to the gods.”

                           All we can do is provide equal opportunity, and equal treatment under the law. And that law has to pause out side the front door to ask “Who decides beyond this point?”

                           1. Because, frankly, yeah, boys develop more strength, and girls have better verbal and social. And you can’t EQUALIZE that. Not without MAJOR brutality.

                           2. What I mean is from a biological perspective. Our muscles and brains are different. There are hormone baths in the WOMB for heaven’s sake.
                              I like her songs, but her idea appalls me.

                           3. I agree. And I’d point out that you can’t actually “equalize” it at all, no m,atter how brutal you make the process. At best it won’t work and will be abandoned when that becomes obvious and before major damage occurs; at worst you’ll have a group of kids, all of which will have fairly severe mental and emotional issues because they didn’t turn out equal, they know it, and will wonder why they’re somehow “defective”.

                           4. ??? What I said was: raise them with the same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress and expectations — for six generations. Can somebody tell me how that will harm children?

                           5. Same nutrition?

                              My husband moved out, and his family’s food budget went to ONE THIRD of what it was, before.

                              Teen boys are The Devourer.

                           6. Oh. Dear LORD. YES. You can’t feed them the same amount. And exercise CAN’T be the same. Boys and girls are drastically different even before puberty. And–

                           7. ??? What I said was: raise them with the same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress and expectations — for six generations. Can somebody tell me how that will harm children?

                              Basically….look, either you’re assuming that people are systematically NOT doing what they objectively are, fitting stuff to the kid to try to match up to similar support.

                              Or you’re saying “ignore the human, and get your Standard Issue Support.”

                              And they’re both horrifying.

                              Game out, what, precisely, in detail, would what you are trying to propose LOOK LIKE?

                           8. I think she thinks parents provide boys better nutrition and exercise, which is mind-boggling. It wasn’t true even in Portugal when I was growing up.

                           9. Well, TECHNICALLY my boys get better nutrition, because see prior statement re: see food diet….

                              I have to nag Daughter 2 into eating enough for a sparrow! Her brother? He’ll eat the entire pot of noodles.

                           10. I hope that’s what she thinks. The only obvious alternative seems to be trying to get smaller, less muscular males by starving them during their growing years.

                           11. That occurred to me, but Leslie Fish is not that I know — or heard of — an evil person. So I think this is personal trauma coming out in strange ideas about what others do.

                           12. It’s not the impression I’ve generally gotten either. I’ve been trying to tamp down the hair-on-end suspicion and find a polite way to ask for details on the “same nutrition” thing. I think and hope the idea is “everybody has free access to nutritionally balanced whatnot and equal encouragement to eat up, with monitoring/modification for medical differences, and nobody prioritizing the higher-status kid or making generally approving jokes about teen boys being bottomless pits while warning girls they might get fat.”

                           13. My daughter is an only child. To my knowledge she has never been told not to eat, or that she should lose weight. Since birth she’s consistently been in the 98th percentile or higher of both height and weight until the last year and a half, where she’s still in the 98th percentile for height, but is now in the 85th percentile for weight. We encourage her to eat, but some days she just doesn’t feel hungry and won’t. Her BMI is 19.

                           14. I’ve been fannishly acquainted with Ms Fish for over 20 years, and I’d bet my life that she is working from the “enhancing the girls” perspective.

                           15. I think she is too. The problem is she was never taught biology or what chromosomal and hormonal difference MEANS.
                               TBF women know that even less now.

                           16. Huh? Where are you getting that? I’m for giving equally good nutrition (I’d recommend the high-protein diet) equally to all kids, as much as they want, no differences for different sexes. Likewise, give all of them equal aerobic exercise for an hour a day, or more if they want it; just there will be a certain healthy minimum which nobody is allowed to fall below. Likewise, put them in the same school classes and give them equal attention; kids who start falling behind academically should get that attention paid to bringing their grades up. Where’s the problem with that?

                           17. LESLIE, why do you think girls don’t get the same nutrition as boys in advanced countries.
                               IOW What is wrong with your picture of the world?

                           18. I’ve seen it done; boys are nagged to “eat hearty” while girls are nagged about “gaining weight”. Watch, and you’ll see it, yes, in these “modern industrial” countries — yes, in your own hometown. And never mind the differences in exercise!

                           19. Leslie, because of simple basic biology based differences in height, weight, strength, etc, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad infinitum nauseam, you cannot give them identical training in any physical sense, and in a lot of mental ones. Biology and biochemistry are unique; it’s a basic fallacy of modern medicine. As a prime example, not everyone shares the same reaction to tobacco smoke, which is why my wife and I were willing and able to offer you a spare bed in our hotel room at Worldcon 2001 while others couldn’t.

                           20. Of course there are always individual differences; I’m challenging the idea of “inherent” differences for a whole class of people. We should put it to the test instead of just assuming that the characteristics of the societies we know are set in stone for everyone.

                           21. “I’ve seen it done; boys are nagged to “eat hearty” while girls are nagged about “gaining weight”. Watch, and you’ll see it, yes, in these “modern industrial” countries — yes, in your own hometown. And never mind the differences in exercise!”

                               You probably have seen it, after all, people have all sorts of opinions and all sorts of “programming,” but when you say this it sort of sounds like you are complaining about people not meeting your personal standards for parenting. And, yes, it can be frustrating to see young people that one thinks are being hindered from being their best selves, by the adults aroundg them who should be advancing the best interests of those young people..

                               Given that … you wish you could design and implement a program (six generations, right?) to put your preferred parenting system into operation? But you can’t, you know that. The practical obstacles are insurmountable for you, a person of your time and geopolitical location.

                               So what, if anything, are you going to choose to do? I don’t think that you brought up the idea of the Experiment, here, with the thought that you were going to persuade all of Ms. Hoyt’s readers to follow your (nebulous!) program. What are you going to do now?

                           22. Again, she’s at least 50 years behind the times. By my generation, families nagged both males and females to be fashionably thin.
                               AND by my kids’ generation both the boys and girls in the class were on skim milk, no sugar, and their meat weighed carefully so they wouldn’t be “fat.”
                               Has she never heard of pregnant women starving themselves in the seventies, so their children wouldn’t be “obese”?

                        2. > “Can somebody tell me how that will harm children?”

                           I gave you a concrete example here: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/07/15/two-by-two/#comment-860648

                           1. “Equal” does not mean “Identical”, and I can prove that with simple mathematics. Look: 2 + 2 = 3 + 1. What is this fear of equality that’s suddenly become so fashionable?

                           2. Ms. Fish (we have hit the reply wall). You are arguing equality of results. Everything must equal 4, to use your mathematical analogy, and here’s the thing with humans. Equal input does not have equal output because humans are DIFFERENT. To continue the mathematical analogy. Each human is an algorithmic black box. You put 2 in and one person will give you 7 one person will give you -18 and another will give you fish (flip the first 2 of 2+2 around and you’ll see it.). Because humans.

                              Equality of opportunity? I grew up with that. And the ‘equality’ crowd is so eager to make everyone add up to 4 that they’re destroying it. You got what you’re pretending you want in the 80s and 90s. Bugger off and quit trying to destroy it in the persuit of equality of RESULTS which turns everyone into machines with no soul and no agency,.

                           3. They’ve won the war, but they can’t stop fighting the battles. It’s not about The Cause any more, it’s about The Struggle. Fighting For Equality has become their entire identity; although Equality has been achieved, as far as practical, they must continually fight for Moar Equality!! — in order to become More Equal than everybody else.
                              ———————————
                              Imposing your ideal of “Equality” on people is every bit as evil as somebody else imposing inequality on them. In particular, “Equality” does not mean forcing everybody to be just like you. What a dull and dreary world it would be if everybody was exactly the same.

                           4. No. The problem is that fairy tales were told, starting in the nineteenth century. You see, the women who made it against all of the system were very very good. So they told themselves that if women were free to succeed they’d ALL be like that.
                              But of course, most women are just people. Average. So the reality doesn’t match the fairytale, and there must be invisible sexism. Otherwise we’d all be magical.
                              Racial integration is suffering from the same bullshit.

                           5. I still remember the leftist whose response to “It’s just as well we don’t all like the same things, just think what a haggis shortage there would be” with “You could have mine.”

                           6. ??? What “equality of outcome”? The point of my proposed experiment is to see what will be the effects of long-term — multi-generational — equal treatment of the sexes. What’s the source of this horrified certainty that such treatment will absolutely ruin the children? This sounds eerily like old Victorian predictions that giving women the vote would ruin the species. Where’s your evidence?

                           7. I think we may all be talking past each other – Leslie, do you propose (for example) each kid be given 2 eggs and a slice of toast for breakfast (leaving some stuffed with others hungry), or that they be allowed to eat their fill?

                           8. Leslie, EVERYONE HAS BEEN PART OF THIS EXPERIMENT FOR THE LAST 2 generations or more. MOST NOTABLY IN SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES. What did they find? That women really don’t want to be like men. No, Really.
                              In India where women are discriminated against and have all the disadvantages, they’re more likely to take on male professions. In Scandinavia they’re more “traditional.”
                              The picture you have in your head is from your childhood. People, since then have tried to make things as equal as possible, with a side dish of “let’s beat on the boys so girls have more opportunities.”
                              We have neurotic boys and unhappy women. Except for those who break the new script and go “Bugger this, I’m going home.” Or who trace their own weird path, as I did.
                              You are not aware of biological studies which feminists tend to hide. Given all the encouragement, opportunities, and yes, nutrition, adult soccer players, female champions, lose to middle school boys.
                              The female records in the olympics, some of them obtained by coutnries who did EVERYTHING to make their women be the best are lower than your average high school male.
                              WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK your “experiment” would prove?
                              And while at it, when you scream “just do the experiment” …. okay fine. Where are you going to obtain a thousand kids? Buy them in third world countries?
                              Parents aren’t going to hand over their children to have someone raise them in neo-utopian insanity unless you convert them to a cult first. There aren’t enough marxist feminists who have kids, sorry.
                              And the most bizarre part of all this: You don’t have children. No, cats are not the same. I have both.
                              Kids are notoriously difficult to raise as whatever.
                              Take what Matthew says: if you give every kid two eggs and a slice of toast, the trading will start the minute your back is turned. Some will eat all eggs. Some will eat all toast. Some will refuse to eat. I mean, heck, have you ever attended summer camp?
                              What are you going to do? Stand over them and force them to eat?
                              KIDS ARE NOT WIDGETS. There isn’t a category called boys and a category called girls. And they shouldn’t be exactly the same.
                              From the moment of conception boys and girls get different hormone baths from the mother. This changes brain, nervous system and muscles.
                              After that, no matter how much you torture them, a boy will never be a girl and vice versa.
                              Equal opportunity? Sure. WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DON’T HAVE THAT? They are equal before the law, and the application is female-favorable if anything.
                              Equality? Are you kidding? They’re still people.
                              Statistically female IQ clusters in the average. the men have more morons and geniuses. So, yeah, females can compete with males intellectually. If they want to.
                              Most females choose verbal and social fields, because that’s their strength.
                              NOT ALL, not. But most.
                              Most men choose more competitive and often numeric, dirty or dangerous fields. BECAUSE THAT’S THEIR STRENGTH.
                              There is no default human. But there are also not two groups of widgets.
                              This is a Marxist tic that is profoundly disconnected from reality and when you talk of doing this to children, EVERY WOMAN WHO EVER BORE A CHILD goes berserk.

                           9. ??? Talk about reductio ad absurdam. I’m proposing that the kids get equally good nutrition (I’d recommend the high-protein diet), as much as they want to eat, and nobody gets less than the healthy minimum. This does not mean that anybody gets to pig out on starches and sugars. Likewise, all the kids get a minimum of an hour at the same exercises per day, and those who want to can get more. Same with schooling, etc. And they all wear jeans, T-shirts, sneakers and ballcaps, with the same additions for cold weather. How is this so hard to understand?

                           10. The kids already do. All over the western countries.
                               Done. Now what?

                           11. Not so equally as you think. Have you worked as a teacher’s assistant lately? Even in those Scandinavian countries that everyone seems to assume are egalitarian utopias, there’s wide variation in how male and female children are treated. That’s why I’m calling for a conscious experiment in equality.

                           12. How do you propose to ensure that the people doing the raising are doing it in the equal manner you call for when differences in treatment keep popping up?

                           13. First, everybody interested in joining the experiment gets together and argues out how to do it. Once we’ve got consensus, we all sign a contract. Anybody who changes their mind later can opt out; they just can’t come back afterward without a lot of negotiating.

                           14. So, first, you have to find 1000 people interested in this experiment (which as the response shows may not be as easy as you thought).
                               Then you need to find funding, since you will need a fairly large campus, with multiple houses/dorms/buildings to house everyone. If it is out in the community, then the kids will see how all the other kids are treated, which will invalidate the whole experiment.
                               And continuing funding for the six generations, including feeding them (unless you are planning on them growing their own food, which has its own problems).
                               Then you’ll have to decide what to teach the kids, since history and literature are out, though the sciences and mathematics should be fine (except for biology, of course).
                               I would expect that the experiment, should you be able to start it, would last longer than Fruitlands, though it’ll probably fall apart well before the first kids reached puberty. And if it lasted that long, it’ll explode spectacularly not long after.

                           15. Oh, heck, all this is because she never learned BIOLOGY.
                               Part of it is not her fault. I think she’s some 15 years older than I, and what they didn’t know about genetics right then could fill volumes.
                               On the other hand the other side is ALL HERS. Because she breeds cats. If she hasn’t figured out temperament and disposition are often hereditary, she hasn’t been paying attention.
                               And yeah, cats are less divided by sex. So what? Humans are heavily dimorphic. That’s us. Not the cats.

                           16. Are you under the impression people are saving beef for the boys or something?

                           17. The source? Watching people come in banging the same gong you are and insisting that it’s not equal unless as many (now MORE) girls get into sciences. Not be allowed in. If they aren’t in there, it can’t be because they’re not interested it MUST be they’re being forced out.

                               Your initial scenario: same nutrition, same exercise, etc.

                               There are 2 ways this plays out: The way I was raised which was “set your mind to it, you can do anything, find your own limitations.” (Though there were intrusive things that I’ll mention below, none favoring boys.)

                               Since that was the 80s and 90s and folk like you are still hammering the drum, as well as you ignoring everyone here who has pointed out that that part’s already happened, that can’t be what you mean. Which leaves us with option 2:

                               Every child gets the exact same nutrition. Same exact calories. Same food prepared the same way. No matter the dietary requirements. My son, who is 7 but the size of a 9 year old, would get the same calories as the little girl in his class who is the size of my 5 year old daughter.

                               Same exercise. This would mean the same activity, for the same period, ideally at the same intensity level. The last being the most difficult, especially since the kids aren’t being consulted in any of this.

                               Education: that one I’ve been through. I was bored out of my mind because ‘same’ in education means ‘lowest common denominator.’ And I was no where near that. It’s gotten worse based on what my kids are seeing.

                               Training: This one might actually be good. It would kill the double standards that let female firefighters haul and lift much lower loads in order to stay current on their certs. (of course this means there’d be far fewer females in quite a few different physical professions)

                               Dress: Uniforms for EVERYONE! (If you mean just ‘no one cares’ we were there when I was growing up. Skirt rules applied to Kilts and most of the kids wore jeans and t-shirts. Since you’re still protesting, again, I conclude this isn’t what you mean.)

                               Expectations: Well at least this one would kill the travesty of affirmative action. My brother shouldn’t have to have better test scores to get the same scholarship. (And if I hadn’t met HIS threshold I wouldn’t have accepted it.) Maybe the boys’ll start being taught rather than medicated into compliance.

                               As for what my source is for ‘people are equal’. My specialty in the army was Russia and the Soviet Union. If you’re not an influential party member you take what you get and you like it comrade. Same for everyone. It was a horror show. A horror show that lasted for almost 80 years.

                               This is what it seems to use you are wanting us to inflict on our children. If you have something else in mind then actually outline the details of your experiment. It’s your experiment, it’s up to you to actually provide the set up, which you have steadfastly refused to do. (You have been asked more than once for clarification and have not provided it.)

                           18. Snort The reason there aren’t more girls (or Blacks, or Latinos) in STEM courses in the pubic schools is that they’re so badly taught! Too much book and too little lab, too much abstraction and too little real-world application, plenty of facts but not enough putting them together. Hell, I learned more about Logic from puzzle-books than I ever did in class.

                               No, nobody wants lowest-common-denominator education; we’d want teachers who can figure out each kid’s best learning strategies, expose each kid to as much knowledge as possible, and help each kid reach his/her individual potential. Don’t tell me the public schools are doing this now! The volunteers for this experiment might have to found their own charter-school and vet prospective teachers themselves — which isn’t a bad idea, really.

                               On nutrition: remember the Amish — who started their own “ideological” experiment centuries ago, and are still doing well; they grow their own food, which means a wide range of plants and livestock, but all pretty much the same general diet. The volunteers for this project would have to sit down with some serious nutritionists and hammer out just what kind of diet they’d want for themselves and their kids; the point is, any differences would be individual, not class. Parents whose kids need special diets might want to opt out, and that’s all right too.

                               Same with exercise: simple basics, and everybody does an hour a day; having a flat wee-wee is no excuse for laziness. Once that’s out of the way, the kids can play as they wish, so long as everybody gets an equal chance at bat. As they get older, put them into equal body-building and martial-arts courses. Families of crippled kids can opt out. Hmmm, the Amish make a good example here, too; they lose a small number of members with every generation, but not so much that they can’t keep operating.

                               On dress: the little kids can stay in bluejeans, T-shirts, sneakers and ball-caps — plus I’d add nude swimming, so they don’t get hung up on body-shame. When they get older they can choose — or make — their own clothes, within an agreed-on dress code. Again, variations must be individual, not class, and don’t let fashions get out of hand; i.e., kids running around with feathers sticking out of their butts is a no-no.

                               On training and expectations, I see we agree — although kids raised from birth with equal nutrition and exercise might surprise you with their parity in the “physical professions”. Sometime look up a businesswoman called Carriejune Anne Bowlby — and some of her associates.

                               In any case, nobody is an “influential Party member” who gets the lion’s share of the goodies. And don’t tell me that all this is being done in the mainstream schools or communities! We might indeed have to create our own mini-village to house the experiment — much like the Amish, the Mennonites, the Mormons, the early Quakers, and everybody else who came up with ideas for social experiments — and asked for volunteers. Hmmm, should we call ourselves the “Nommish”?

                               The fine details will have to be hammered out by the members of the experiment, and agreed to in the contract. There, is that detail enough for you?

                           19. No, Leslie. Your picture is OUTDATED. If that were the reason, there would be few boys, too.
                               The reason is that girls are treated like little princesses in STEM, told they’re special, and get the ladies A.
                               In my son’s engineering catered to girls.
                               So, they girls got full rides to college. The boys didn’t. Within a year, all the girls were in something else. They hadn’t been TAUGHT TO MAKE AN EFFORT and their sloppy work got As. Until it was real.
                               This bullshit “We don’t want to discourage the girls” and all just results in traumatized boys and overconfident girls. It sucks for everyone. Let them be what they want, regardless of sex. They’re not your toys to enact an imaginary vengeance on those who “wronged” you.
                               And here I speak to your generation of women, who frankly are and have been pissing me off, as I came from a real SEXIST country and didn’t let it bother me, and understand my kids’ generation had NOTHING to do with it.
                               Look at the disparity between Swedish female engineers and Indian female engineers. You have the thing upside down.
                               And read my other posts. YOU prompted them.
                               You are breaking my heart, being unable to break the time capsule someone put in your head (full of wrong “facts.”)
                               Please try to reason yourself out of this, okay?

                           20. And that isn’t bad teaching?! The public school system is in shambles.

                           21. You’re not going to get an argument from me on that. BUT it is a shambles, because they thought girls were being “discouraged.”
                               There is always a smaller number of girls interested in STEM. They prefer social occupations. Probably because being a gatherer and minding the kids, let alone all the other occupations through history that were indoors and social and all female selected for that.
                               BUT the ones capable and interested are being destroyed.
                               As, btw, are the boys.
                               All because they must ALL be made into what they aren’t to please some grand scheme.
                               Kindly read the other posts, particularly today’s.

                           22. What you’ve just described as doing in education, nutrition, and exercise pretty much invalidates you’re stated premise.

                               “what I propose is raising the male and female children with the same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress and expectations” =/= “figure out each kid’s best learning strategies, expose each kid to as much knowledge as possible, and help each kid reach his/her individual potential…” etc.

                           23. It means treating children as individuals, not as members of a class — “girl”, “boy” — and giving them all the same basic nutrition, exercise, etc. After a few generations let’s see how they divide up naturally.

                           24. Oh, dear lord. Head desk.
                               That’s crazy cakes. “Basic nutrition” IS different depending on hormones, which yes are there from birth.
                               PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE forget what they taught you in school and do some research.

                           25. The effects of estrogen and testosterone on things like muscle gain, growth, strength, and stamina are largely known. Dozens of studies. Look at what weightlifters, distance runners, and exercise nuts have done in the last few decades. Have you even talked to them? Those guys and gals live for every edge they can get.

                               If you want to have a go at treating children- heck, ALL human beings as individuals, good. That’d be a fine thing, no argument whatsoever with just that very thing. But this whole experiment business smacks to me of some very dark stuff, just as other commenters have mentioned.

                               Seriously though. Look into the literature that thousands of athletes and doctors have built up. Men and women are different. Individuals will vary based on a lot of factors, and the sexes are more alike than they are different.

                               But.

                               There are sex specific differences that are clear and uncontroversial. This is fact. This is known. This is not something that anyone with a clear understanding of the science involved has any problem with. Women don’t get testicular cancer. Men don’t get pregnant.

                               And specific hormones like testosterone will make gaining muscle mass easier. Not can. Will. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t women who can out lift, out work, or out run some men. Not because of better nutrition, or because they weren’t cautioned to eat less and stay skinny.

                               Because they have they right genes for it and worked their asses off. Same applies to men. Some dudes have the right genes to be freakin’ monsters when it comes to any physical activity, and work their asses off to get ripped. Not because they were encouraged to eat more protein and weren’t held back. Because they did the work and had good enough genes.

                               Again. Fully support treating folks as individuals. Treating folks with respect and dignity. All good, that. But Lawd ha’ mercy woman, get a meathead or a sports doctor to sit down with you and get some facts straight. You’re missing some important info.

                           26. Precisely this. This is all a fantasy of “if only women were fed like men” and it’s shit.

                           27. I’m beginning to think that she doesn’t really know what the details of this “experiment” would entail. As you noted, several requests for clarification have been ignored.

                           28. Obviously, the people volunteering for the experiment would have to talk over the details of “equal” treatment. It’s their kids, after all. They’ll also be the ones involved in the long-term planning.

                           29. So your proposed experiment is only a vague concept, not an actual proposal for an experiment? If that’s the case, I’d point out that the objections raised, mine and others, are also conceptual, based on the perceived pitfalls and problems of such an experiment if it were ever implemented. As such, you need to address those objections directly; saying that they can be “worked out” does essentially nothing.

                               And note that this is not a flame; I simply think that you’ve gotten hold of an idea about “equity” and failed to examine it in the detail required. Thomas Sowell remarked (paraphrased) that it’s unrealistic to expect equality of outcome between any two people when a single person isn’t equal on successive days.

                           30. She also failed to learn biology, which is terrifying for someone as smart as she is.

                           31. There are a whole lot of jobs in which women are almost unheard-of. Not because they’re ‘Oppressed!’ or ‘Excluded!’ but because, for whatever reason, women just don’t choose to do those jobs.

                               When you call a plumber, do you expect a woman to show up with a pipe wrench and a snake? 99.8% of the time, the plumber will be a man. Same for electricians, roofers, and a lot of other good-paying jobs. Mining and oil drilling. Heavy equipment repair. How many ‘lumberjills’ have you heard of? Boiler and steam system workers? Machinists?

                               There are a lot of hard. sweaty, dirty, dangerous jobs that don’t seem to appeal to women at all. Is that because of ‘Systemic Sexism!’ or maybe, just maybe, because women are not men? They don’t think like men, or make the same choices. Nor should they be pressured to do so.

                               Now if a woman wants to be a plumber, or an electrician, or a heavy equipment mechanic, let her have at it — as long as she does a good job. Don’t coddle her if she does lousy work; that’s doing no favors for her or anybody else.

                               Women are not men, and men are not women. Let them be different. Treating them like identical widgets won’t make them identical. 3X + 6 and 3Y + 6 can only produce the same result if X == Y.
                               ———————————
                               Imposing your ideal of “equality” on people is every bit as evil as somebody else imposing inequality on them.

                           32. I recall when women weren’t allowed to be cowhands, because only men could be “cowboys”. I also recall when nobody would hire a female auto-mechanic, let alone female race-car driver. The way the ice usually gets broken is by some bold young girl wanting to go into her daddy’s business, and sticking to it. This could also be an effect of social class, since I’ve seen a lot of working-class daughters being practical about skilled-trade jobs that no white-collar daughter would think of taking.

                           33. Well stated. I suspect that many of those who claim to want “equality” haven’t considered what that entails; what it doesn’t entail is “reduce the requirements”.

                           34. I’m certainly not planning to “lower the requirements” — not for gender, or race, or any other excuse. Meritocracy only.

                           35. Speaking of why cowboy was a “man’s job”, The “rope, throw, and brand ’em” parts go a bit easier with male advantages of reach and strength, as do things like slinging bales of hay, post-hole digging and wire stretching. It’s not to say that women couldn’t do the job or shouldn’t try, because on occasion they could and did. It’s just that generally speaking, men were better at it. The same goes for jobs that involved wielding shovels, axes, pickaxes, or block and tackle. Given how curious and feckless human children can be, it usually fell to the women to keep the little monkeys well out from underfoot so they didn’t get trampled or have heavy things dropped on them. There were usually Reasons for the sex-based division of labor, back in the day, and they weren’t all the Evil Patriarchy.

                           36. As a general rule men have greater upper-body strength and speed, while women have greater lower-body strength and endurance. Women can do the heavy physical jobs, if not with as much strength then with more endurance. Note that throughout history women have often had to take up the men’s jobs while the men were away — at hunting, or at war, or wherever — and have managed to survive, with their children. It’s easier if they have extended support-networks of friends or relatives, who need not necessarily be male. And many a farmer or rancher with land way out in the boondocks, who hoped to have sons that would help with the family business, has had to make do with a passel of daughters instead. Ask why Aussie ranchers invented the word “jillaroo”.

                           37. SOME have managed to survive.
                               The fact they’re commemorated in legend and history might tell you something.
                               And the ones who were most effective didn’t try to be garcons manque, but were wholly feminine in their attack.
                               Kindly look up Baker from Aljubarrota.

                           38. Men have stronger legs than women, too, else all that upper body strength wouldn’t be of much use. The difference is not as pronounced, but it is undeniable. As shown by athletic world records, men run faster, jump farther and higher, and lift heavier weights than women. Men’s advantage at running gets larger over longer distances, too, which means greater endurance.

                               Why are you so determined to deny basic biological facts?
                               ———————————
                               When reality fails to conform to your theories, it’s not the universe that’s wrong.

                           39. The problem is the inconsistency of the “biological facts”, depending on where they come from. That’s why I want to encourage this experiment, to learn what the basic facts really are.

                           40. Leslie, come off it. That’s not an experiment that can, and probably not one that SHOULD be made. You’re thinking like a Marxist. People aren’t and will never be widgets.
                               Yes, people vary widely. But the strongest woman is weaker than the medium-strong male. That being the point. Why do you want women to break themselves doing things men do easily.
                               BESIDES most women don’t want to. Yes, there are outliers. But the VAST majority of woman would prefer jobs that are social, indoor and boring.
                               I REALLY REALLY REALLY enjoin you to read the other posts after this.

                           41. Leslie is a little confused: WOMEN HAVE GREATER ENDURANCE FOR TWO THINGS: Boredom and pain.

                           42. Alas and alack, when it comes to wielding hammer, tongs, saws, wrenches, and assorted other hand tools, it’s that upper body strength that matters most. What can be done out of necessity, and what is optimal if you are paying someone to do it for you are quite frequently two different things. Speaking as one of the chicken-winged who is somewhere in the bottom 10% of masculine physical strength and dexterity, I will skip over all my tales of woe and humiliation and just pass on my findings that railing about the injustice of biology is not helpful. Neither is trying to ignore or deny that what is, is. Vive la difference, as they say.

                           43. I was well on the top 99% of female upper body strength. Dan and I moved every five years, and the movers were always shocked at how much I could lift (and run with.)
                               Then menopause hit. 😦

                           44. I guess I’ll have to spend a lot of time writing and pay people to do the heavy.

                        3. Oy vey.
                           Ox skull THICK.
                           Ox SLOW.
                           Even OX know… XX and XY differ

                           Now, give unlimited free-access to same things… sure, run THAT experiment.
                           To force ‘equality’ is to inflict a whipping only without the physical whip.
                           The physically whipped can at least SHOW YOU THE WOUNDS.
                           Those afflicted by Other Means get told to “suck it up.” by MORONS (ox being generous about IQ points.)
                           Now, see Result.
                           There might well be SOME convergence – there ARE some unfair differences, even in the fairest Place in All the World.
                           BUT… differences that are INHERENT will still be, for they ARE inherent.

                           1. Then let’s do that experiment and prove it, shall we?

                           2. While my inclination is to agree that this is a Bad Idea (TM), as I noted in an earlier post, I haven’t seen a description of exactly what the proposed experiment will consist of. So how about it? As with any valid scientific experiment, and with our gracious hostess’s permission, list the initial conditions, subject(s), variables and process, all in detail, and we can discuss how it might play out in the real world using real people. Note that this is a thought experiment only, actually attempting it would probably, and rightly, be perceived as child abuse (yes, I have preconceptions about it, but I’m open to persuasion. Sort of…). Well?

                           3. getting the permission of not-yet-born generations is gonna be problematic. I suspect many would drop out if given an option with honest evaluations of the choices involved, which would necessarily entail a much larger initial cohort.

                           4. Which would completely skew the results

                           5. Then let’s do that experiment and prove it, shall we?

                              As long as you are fine with the surviving descendants of the kids you want to torture hunting down and torturing your descendants in revenge.

                              Pray tell; what age for the surgery on the infants in the study to convert the externally visible parts into $GENERIC_IDENTICAL_CROTCH_ORGAN?

                           6. Then let’s find out just what those “inherent” differences really are. I’m looking for “equality” here, not “equity”, and I think I’ve explained the difference between them.

                     4. I’ll point out the 19th century experimenters also thought they were giving the kids a gift, not harming them.

                        1. Not to mention the infamous French linguistics experiment, when they raised kids without language exposure, in order to find out what language was “natural” to humans.

                           Yeah, turned out that neglecting kids “For Science!” is a great way to neglect kids.

                     5. Ancient Creature here…

                        There are some things I would GLADLY volunteer for, risks be DAMNED.
                        And there are things anyone even thinking of asking can “kiss me under my tail.”

                        But if I had “been volunteered” (VolunTOLD, aka FORCED)…. WHERE’S MY BEEG AXE?!?!!! NO, THE BEEEG ONE! ANY SURVIVORS MIGHT TRY IT AGAIN!! THEY. DIE. NOW!

                  3. Exhibit A for how the notion of raising children to believe in something classified as “theory” gets weaponized.

                     https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/07/ny-state-proposed-regulations-threaten-orthodox-jewish-schools/

               5. Leslie, your commentary is beyond stupid. Your suggested multi-generational experiment is utterly useless, pig ignorant of human physiology, and to some degree, has already been tested. Women still could not compete, nor attain the same degree of fitness and physical activity in the same way as men. It does not work that way. Not even close. Your attempting to force the matter still will not change the end result.

                  1. What’s your evidence? Such an experiment hasn’t been tried in millennia, so how would you know?

               6. It’s one thing to suggest that a society raise its children identically, usually suggested for reasons of “fairness” or some such. It’s quite another thing to propose this as an experiment, and let’s see what the results are.

                  Since one cannot ethically run this experiment, and since even given a mad scientist dictator who runs the experiment the results would not be known in your lifetime, your hypothesis is effectively non-falsifiable. The closest we can come to guessing whether you’re right or wrong is seeing the results of imperfect attempts, or in the raising of bonobos & chimps, and carefully extrapolating.

                  The available evidence does not disprove your ideas (as I pointed out, they are not amenable to disproof) but is sufficient to persuade me that raising boys & girls identically, without taking into account that some are boys and some girls, is a Bad Idea.

         2. Ok, I searched a bit and read the beginning of the first chapter. It describes ancient Egypt and Sparta as “female dominant.” I also read through the table of contents.

            Please, I grew up with feminism and none of what they wrote about looks like it’s new, although it may very well have been new or new-ish a century ago. BTW, it’s not all that suppressed if you can read it free on the Internet. And it looks right in line with almost all of the history and anthropology I grew up with in the sixties and seventies, which was feminist by my own choice. Honestly, maybe you should read “Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family” from 1975. There are loads of books that say this stuff. And that’s only one among many.

            No, matrilineal doesn’t mean “female dominant.” No, women courting men by writing poems doesn’t mean “female dominant,” even if the poems are about them chasing the men. It just means very high status Egyptian women, who were so wealthy and high status that their poems got saved, courted men by writing poems. Normal women probably just sang songs. Women are almost always involved in courtship rituals. It does sound like some of the authors’ contemporaries took it badly that the Egyptian women’s form of participation in courtship rituals didn’t look like the European standard of the time. (Some rituals require the women to act more shy than others.)

            No, the fact that a culture has a “bride price” rather than a “dowry” doesn’t mean that women are dominant. No, the fact that women inherit doesn’t mean they’re dominant. No, the fact that a culture is matrilocal rather than patrilocal doesn’t mean they’re dominant. No, the fact that there is a form of marriage that “allows” a woman to get divorced doesn’t mean “female dominant.” Sheesh. Do we really need to go over all this again!

            And guess what, if you look at “The Secret of our Success” by Joseph Henrich (a great book, BTW, I read it all), he even finds a culture in modern China that (if it hasn’t been wiped out by the Chinese govt by now) doesn’t acknowledge any father right at all — the dominant male is the mother’s brother. So no, they’re not “female dominant” either.

            The most ridiculous assertion in the first chapter is that in “female dominant” societies, the men stay home and the women go out in the world. Well, that only works among the richest women who have other women to do the nursing — you know, that pesky lactation stuff, which for millennia until practically yesterday was the most important indicator of whether a baby born alive would survive infancy and usually continued for two to three years.

            All this is showing is that rich, elite woman in every society can do more than the average woman. Imagine that. And news flash — rich, elite men in every society can do more than the average man.

            And that there have been a lot of cultures throughout history that have had a place for some women to take on male roles and vice versa. Doesn’t make them female dominant either. Just normal.

            And that there can be women who are so high status that they outrank all the other high status males. That even happened in that bastion of female dominance called feudal China in 624 AD, when a former concubine called Wu Zetian became the only female emperor in feudal Chinese history.

            Whether the average man is freer than the average woman at any given time depends on a lot of things, one of which is culture, and one of which is the resources in the environment. Sometimes resources are so poor that women have all they can do just to live through pregnancy, childbirth and lactation. Sometimes, there are enough resources that they can do that plus contribute leadership roles and other economic roles to the tribe.

            I’m not sure what the real point even is in talking about “male dominant” or “female dominant.” I think I’ll at least go on to read the chapters on how a “female dominant” culture is different from a “male dominant” culture, although I’m pretty sure I can guess how that turns out.

            1. And the online source I found only has half of the book, so I can’t look at the difference in female and male dominant cultures in regard to war and peace. So I apologize. Apparently, at least so far, I haven’t found an online source of the whole book.

            2. sparta and Egypt weren’t female dominant. Crete wasn’t here. That was just bad scholarship and wishful thinking of females in the US.
               Why in the US? BECAUSE IN EUROPE WE UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF.
               For the love of bob, in the early middle ages in Portugal, women wrote poems about an ideal lover.
               They were also practically chattel, unless… well, very rich and noble.
               SHEEEEESH. Rolls eyes.
               Also, bulls heads aren’t uteri and Maria Gimbutas was an idiot with an agenda.

               1. It sounds plausible if you want to believe it, and the objections to some of the bad theories in the book were just as bad as the theories the authors came up with. Something like, “our women would never be so shameless.” I wonder if you’re right about it being an American thing.

                  I don’t know whether real scholars didn’t take the time to answer the arguments, or whether the authors just chose the the scholars who were easier to answer. It does take a lot more time and energy to answer an error.

                  1. TRUST me on this. The things I let go.

            3. It describes ancient Egypt and Sparta as “female dominant.”

               {completely bluescrenes}

               What? The what what WHAT?!

               1. Pretty much my thought on that, but mine wasn’t as polite (“WTF, over?!?”)

         3. Possibly, if all human societies are male dominate, then the issue is that humans tend to male dominate societies.

            1. But “all of them” aren’t, and never have been. That’s the point.

               1. For which you have provided no evidence other than a ridiculously suspect book.

                  1. Sigh I suppose I can go chase down all the examples mentioned in the bibliography, but that’ll take weeks. There was an episode about ten years ago on The History Channel’s series “Secrets of the Dead”, about archeology, that studied a dig on a mound-grave in western Mongolia, which turned out to be the grave of a genuine Amazon queen who had died at least 2000 years ago. The grave-goods included several antlered stag skulls, sacrificed horses, weapons of hunting and warfare. The scientists studying the remains determined that she’d been Caucasian, about 40 when she died, and she’d had at least one child. They went hunting through modern western Mongolia looking for her possible descendants — and they found one; a blond teenaged girl, and her mother, in a small nomadic herding tribe whose social customs were ambiarchal-to-matriarchal, and — according to their own legends — always had. I’ve been trying to find that episode, with no luck so far, but I notice that other Internet articles about the Amazons nowadays admit that they were real people, not a myth. The truth is out there.

   2. “If they’re going to get stabbed in the back regardless, why not play the fake and get theirs first?”

      See also: self-fulfilling prophecy.

      “If you’re going to treat me like I’m a racist / insurrectionist / whatever, why shouldn’t I be one in reality?”

      1. Yep. Sheep vs. goat. It’s never changed, and it never will. And G-d help the ones who are just play-acting at any of this; they’ll never know what hit them.

         1. most of them are playacting, which is …. human.

            1. I’m sure it is indeed the vast majority of them; the “run with the herd” instinct. But it’s still not in their best interest when push comes to shove. If they weren’t trying to destroy the best society the world has ever seen I’d almost feel sorry for them.

2. When I listen to people talking about “teenagers are Going To Do It”, I wonder if they think girls act like “cats in heat” and boys can’t control themselves when the “girls are in heat”. 😦

   1. SOME teens are going to do it. That too is always with us, but it’s a fairly low percentage, if you don’t push them into it.

      1. “We’re not doing anything!” As they are busily not doing anything in a dim, quiet corner of a currently-empty classroom where they are not supposed to be. SIGH.

         1. Of course, the way some of those idiots talk about it, the teens would be “doing nothing” in front of God and everybody. [Sarcastic Grin]

         2. See, that why it is the parent’s job to make sure sure opportunities are unavailable until the part of the brain responsible for understanding why that’s a bad idea has developed enough to do fewer such stupid things.

      2. Probably some of the driving force behind the transgender trend in adolescent girls is that it makes it an acceptable way to turn down being coerced into sex.

         1. There are reports of trans “women,” still equipped with male gonads, coercing lesbians into sex. “I’m a woman! If you don’t have sex with me you aren’t really gay!”

         2. So does the multiplicity of sexual identities: demisexual, asexual, aromantic, etc. Without having to transform yourself. That trend is mostly based in the body-loathing that happens around adolescence. You used to be able to run around and wrestle with the boys and keep up, and now you can’t but you still want to. It must be because you ARE a boy, just in the wrong body. Or just general disliking the changes that come with puberty.

            1. I’ve read the “official” definition of asexual on the website promoting it (excuse me, promoting its awareness). They say asexuals may have no desire for sex, less than typical desire for sex, normal desire for sex, or increased desire for sex. That just about covers it I would say. We are all asexuals now.

               1. Sounds like Climate Change™.

                  1. Good call! 🙂

            2. I’m pretty sure that my daughter doesn’t particularly want to be a boy per se, she wants to be nottagirl.

               Having had a bunch of Mean Girls in her pre-puberty friends group, and a mother who is always banging on about patriarchy and oppression, probably has a lot to do with that.

               1. In other words, she doesn’t want to be a boy, just to be treated like one — as a default-setting human being, not an artificially hyped decorated weakling. I can understand that perfectly.

                  1. Bull. She’s being told girls are defective boys, and must, therefore, become idealized boys (not real boys, real boys are treated like they’re demons that have to be contained with arcane magic known as ‘drugs’ of which Ritalin is one of the best known). Where I grew up it was actually socially acceptable for girls to you know, like different things than boys. It was a much healthier attitude. People were treated like human beings. It was messy but overall it worked. I missed the worst of ‘Girls can do anything and boys suck and must be held back so girls can be as awesome as they SHOULD be.’

                     Why do you assume the boys are being treated like default human beings? From what I’ve seen in a lot of places (thankfully much less so where I’m raising my kids). Boys are treated like they’re monsters, and girls are treated like gold, and this breaks both of them when they encounter reality. Quit living in the 1820s.

                     1. Because not only is she old, but this is the story boomer chicks told themselves, to explain why women weren’t super-beings.
                        I’m sorry. I don’t want to insult her. She’s a good filker, a decent writer and to an extent very red pilled. BUT I’m so tired of that trope.
                        Girls are told they’re perfect and can do anything and boys are the enemy and holding them back. AND HAVE BEEN SINCE I WAS A KID IN THE SIXTIES. Not in Portugal, but even there we were told we SHOULD be wives, mothers and have brilliant careers.

                        1. I got a lighter hand here in the 80s. The default was ‘what do you want to be? Go do that. Success or failure is on you.’ But we were a relatively rural community Rural enough to ground the ‘you can do it all’ into something more feasible.

                        2. ??? ‘Scuse me? “Feminism” used to mean “equal treatment for women” and implied meritocracy. I don’t know where this modern Woke version came from, but it wasn’t us.

                           1. Yes, it did. Back when. My grandmother was a feminist. She believed widows should be able to live independently. Also unmarried women.
                              BUT the corrupted version has got into your head. (Sorry.)
                              Women and men can’t be equal. We shouldn’t want them to. Female workplaces are hell because women aren’t taught to overcome the mess in their heads that comes from instinct. (Men are. They don’t — much — punch each other out at work.) Because they are special and important, and should never be curtailed.
                              Hence we cultivate toxic femininity.
                              Let the girls be. If they don’t want to be scientists, let them be what they want to be. If they want to be scientists, teach them to care more about the science than the infighting.
                              (The social mode might be inate in women or close to. But the men are better/worse at it. And they’ve picked it up. It really makes work hell.)
                              Stop trying to create utopia. You’re in the grip of the idea ALL women want STEM because some like us like it. Most women don’t. I’ve learned to accept this. I have no social points to score.
                              I just want kids left alone, unbothered by grand utopian schemes.
                              I’d object as hard to sending them all to be oblates at the nearest religious house.

                        3. WTF?! I was a “kid in the 60s”, and the only time I ever saw/heard anything remotely like that was from a handful of loons led by Andrea Dworkin — about whom I wrote a song so obscene that I can only sing it at small private parties. How the hell has Dworkin’s ghost risen from the grave on such short notice?

                           1. ….. I kind of want to hear the Dworkin song

                           2. Uh, unfortunately, that song is SO obscene that I can’t even quote the whole title. I call it “Gimme Tongue, B**h”, and that’s all I’m going to say on an open board. Suffice it to say, I really *hated that woman.

                           3. I have only encountered her via her writing – that lady was nuts

                           4. Literally. She was very mentally ill.

                           5. Indeed. As one of the more printable of my lines in that song goes: “You don’t just want to castrate men; You want to kill them all.” That was obvious from her writings and to anyone who talked to her for five minutes. And yet the various feminist journals and literary magazines just adored her, published everything she wrote, invited her to all the big feminist gatherings, and generally made her the queen of NOW. I often wondered how in hell that happened, but she always seemed to have a gang of admirers ready to advertize her. …That is, right up until the ERA failed. When that died, it took most of NOW down with it. And all of a sudden, the magazines that had published and praised and lionized Dworkin stopped publishing and disappeared. Suddenly she couldn’t get published anywhere, and nobody invited her to talk anywhere. Her fame dried up and her income did too. She sank into poverty and anonymity, and IIRC died of pneumonia in Paris. I always suspected that the groups and magazines that had talked her up in the first place were secret FBI plants, who used her to discredit NOW and sabotage the ERA. In fact, I have to wonder if the FBI isn’t doing the same thing right now by pumping up the “transgender” movement. The pattern, and the craziness, is the same.

                           6. The FBI is on no one’s side of itself and the side of power. That place needs salted.
                              As for Dvokin, you’re ignoring a large number of boomer-feminists WANTED men to die. I spent year reading their manuscripts of revenge fantasy where all of a sudden all men died or disappeared.
                              Sorry about the generational identification, but it was so.
                              And I KNOW the psychological mechanism for it, and the whole problem was part of what you’re doing of “Women could be super beings if we just let them.” Which is bullshit. Women and men are humans. Radically different type of humans, and individuals at that.
                              Which reminds me I meant to write that post.
                              Don’t misunderstand me, I was once a feminist, before the word got tainted beyond redemption. I was for equal rights REGARDLESS of sex. I had reason for it, because in Portugal women didn’t have that right. When I was born, you needed permission from your husband or father to work outside the home. (In Portugal’s defense, it was yes patriarchal, but the problem was that it was more “the family is the unit.” (Actually the clan) than individualist. And that bit everyone sooner or later.)
                              BUT in the US we have equal rights under the law. After that all continued pushing, including ERA was just bullshit and attempts at reverse discrimination. As such it attracted bitter women and loons. So Dvorkin didn’t need the FBI to push.
                              Just like women who want to castrate their toddlers don’t need the FBI to make them look crazy. (And my MIL was there before it was fashionable, and that I know she was not FBI.)

                     2. Really Wyrdbard? The 1820s? Kids these days.

                        But other than that, you’re absolutely right, and I couldn’t have said it better myself. But yes, growing up in the sixties and seventies, girls were very restricted, not so much in what they were and weren’t allowed to do as in the social pressure to be one way or the other. Someone like me, who didn’t match what the social pressure wanted me to be, had a tough time of it, but not insurmountable. It certainly was worse for some than others.

                        I actually did believe that most of the preference differences between boys and girls were socially determined. And if I’d had a daughter like myself, I might have gone on believing that. But I didn’t. Of course, the answer to that is that she’d be only the second (or maybe the first?) generation of the six generations. But having been told over and over that I wasn’t doing “woman” right (as Leslie very rightly describes) I had a tendency to actually believe what I saw instead of what I was told. Even when the people telling me were now feminists.

                        1. Hey, we’re about the same age. People were restricted IN CERTAIN COMMUNITIES, but not culture-wide.
                           Culture wide, even in Portugal — and Portugal is FOR REAL SEXIST in many ways still — most families already treated boys and girls alike. And there was no push for “you must be a nurse or a teacher or something else feminine.”
                           EXCEPT from my mother, but my mother is not a good example of anything, and no one thought it was bad when I said “Uh, no.”

                           1. Maybe it’s just because I said very restricted? Maybe I should have said “inhibited.” Because, of course, you’re right. No one told me I couldn’t be an astronaut or study physics. My parents were actually proud of me. Not so proud of the “joined the military” part, though.

                              But the point was, that you were going against the approved narrative. And girls have trouble with that. Which is actually something they have to learn to fight against without turning mean. Just as boys have to learn the appropriate boundaries of their strength and sexual drive. And yes, of course, that goes the other way, as well.

                           2. Now it’s horrifying. Trust me. I raised boys in the nineties. No matter how good they were (and they’re both brilliant) the honors went to girls I knew for a fact couldn’t carry a thought in a bucket.
                              (I’m not that kind of mom. I am always honest with them. They are both brilliant. Particularly in writing.)
                              And this is not good for the girls either. There’s now a “Lady’s A” and all it does is send them to school unprepared, so most of them drop engineering for art or social studies. Because they actually can’t hold their own. No one ever made them do the work.
                              All of that is ridiculous. More social engineering is not the answer. Just let the kids BE.

                        2. There is a lot of “innate.” Dan and I do “boy” and “girl” wrong. So, we’re perfect for each other. I refinish pianos, he plays them, for instance.
                           BUT there was this moment when our four year old screamed “I want a normal mom and dad.” and went on to explain we were doing it wrong, and why.
                           We lived rather isolated and all our friends were weird. But he had an — instinctive — sense we were wrong

                           1. Our first daughter was quite the screamer initially. The doctors said it was colic. We however believed she was saying “Oh my heavens these are my parents? They’re rank amateurs, AND they’re nerds!!! I’m doomed, I’ll be lucky if I make it to 6 months old”

                           2. Yeah. Older son started trying to parent us at three, because SOMEONE had to do it.

                     3. If that’s how children get treated in those towns, then I”d advise getting the hell out of there.

                        1. That’s the dominant state of education in a large number of cities these days. Which is one reason my kids are in a small town and I’m STILL considering homeschooling because I see aspects creeping in. My kids are school age. I wouldn’t put them near any city school, especially any coastal city school, for any price. For the record, the gentlemen that started this subthread lives in Seattle, as does his daughter.

         3. I’ve seen evidence that today’s youth have some highly rigid, stereotyped, and wrong notions about what is “gay” and what is “straight”. It’s no wonder that they get confused. It doesn’t help that there are people who help create and exploit the confusion.

            1. “Queer” is the new all-purpose word. And any exploratory actions put you ever and always in that camp. So you can’t experiment and try new things and cast them off or construct your identity out of little bits and pieces of all the things anymore. “This is your box. You will stay in it evermore and never stray out of it. And you will be isolated and alone because NO ONE ELSE is as unique and special in a particular way as you.”

               That’s where the metaphor of “snowflake” came in, by the way, people, not having anything to do with fragility. That’s just a happy bonus.

               1. “This is your box. You will stay in it evermore and never stray out of it”

                  IOW, it’s the way leftists have been treating blacks, hispanics and the sexually confused for decades. Always with the Brandon-type warning “If you don’t vote for me you ain’t [X]!”

               2. “Queer” is at least a more inclusive (!) term than trans, cis, demi, etc. etc. If it’s a box, it’s at least a much bigger box.

            2. I think you are right. And the profit-from-the-pain-you-cause-others business should not be underestimated.

               1. Al Sharpton, anyone? Or the entire SPLC?

3. “Go read any of the polygamous families in the Bible and history”

   Or go watch almost any Chinese or Korean period piece drama. They’re all but guaranteed to be set in an aristocratic household (often that of the king or emperor), and maneuvering for whose son will take the throne is an important element of the more scheming wives and concubines. The male lead’s mother, of course, is a pure woman who would never engage in such vile behavior (though she might help her son defend himself, of course). But the mother(s) of the other potential heirs is almost always a ruthless w****h (in the non-super-natural sense).

4. LibertyCon 2023 tickets go on sale TOMORROW.

   Be There.

   1. What’s the link?

      1. https://www.libertycon.org/

         They go on sale Noon Eastern time. They typically are sold out in less than half an hour, hence the repeated reminders over the last couple weeks.

      2. They’re doing it through a third-party, so make sure you have an account setup with that third party vendor in advance. This is the vendor: https://www.eventeny.com. Registration is quick and easy.

         1. I have one, but the site isn’t showing LC yet.

5. I’ve never understood social status games. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Which is just a sign of being Odd, even when I was a child, I guess.

   Also probably explains how I ended up with someone who is probably on the autism spectrum, and with a kid who is certainly ASD. Heh. (They are just fine, BTW.)

   1. This. Which explains why I didn’t have any problems working in a heavily-male field, except with the guy who acted more like a girl (undercut, demean, play head-games with subordinates he didn’t like). I learned a LOT about how not to manage people from him.

      1. I also don’t get games.

         1. Neither do my daughter and I; b*tchy female toxicity we have always found to be a bit baffling. We were both in our time perfectly amenable to working almost entirely with men. My daughter as a teen was more comfortable with the boys in the church youth group, than with the other girls at her all-female high school. She didn’t feel like she had to pull her punches, with the guys. She could be frank and open, and the guys were fine with that, but the girls would take offence, even if none was intended.
            I’ve always understood guys a bit better – I suppose it comes with having grown up with brothers, and with parents who had the same expectations for all of us.

            1. “…the girls would take offence, even if none was intended.”

               I believe you’ve just described nearly all of the current crop of “victims”…

      2. Me either, which explains why I had a bunch of female-on-female hassles until high school and had very few troubles in a male-dominated field. (When I started my first non-intern position I was the second female technical writer in the command). By the time I retired, there were a lot more women.

   2. All the best people I know are “Odd”. And I don’t think I have ever understood the social status games, especially as played by the mean girls. And that’s probably why I prefer to spend time with our critters.

      1. Social status games control access to tribally held cool things.

         I suspect one of the traits of odds is we tend towards socially flat structures.

   3. Me neither.

   4. Same for me and it’s irritating when they end up supplanting a good thing.

6. Honor codes, code of the West, got me remembering the code of the North.

   When I came up to Alaska the code of the miners and trappers weakening but still was in effect.

   Hungry, cold, short of supplies, in the bush any cabin, occupied at the time or not was open to you but you replaced what your used if possible.

   Never kill a porcupine seems strange to a newcomer however the sourdough knew if one lost everything that porcupine easy to catch beat with a stick, might just be the food difference between life and death.

   One show of soft emotion a man could comfortably make was to look to the west, or the north, wherever it was at, and say/pray, “God, what a beautiful sunset.”

   The Code contained many other items, such as respect for another’s trap line, etc., not a bad way to get by.

   1. All valid, and all worth remembering in any wilderness area and many rural ones; they’re how you stay alive and allow others to do the same. But…am I the only one who saw “code of the North” first, and immendiately thought “Don’t eat the yellow snow”? 😉

7. Hmmm. Of the approximately 500,000 males I’ve probably seen close enough, none of them were ever considered to even possibly be a sexual partner, So that pretty much rules out my being a homosexual. Assuming an equal number of women seen close enough over the same period of time, I’d venture to say that I at least thought about it for over half of them. Which probably means I’m hopelessly hetero. And I’m spared ever being a billionaire, or multi-millionaire, so I’m unlikely to the extreme of ever having a drop dead gorgeous, young, barely-clad woman ever climb into my lap in a bar. Multiple women? ROTFLMAO! And if I did, then I’m either sleeping, or reading fantasy.

   I’m a builder at heart. I like to make things. I like things that have practical utility and value. But building relationships is hard; because you never know going in whether it will work, you come up craps, or you end up being victimized. But the ones that work, yeah, it’s worth it.

   1. Eh. I also lack interest in my own sex. But it’s a spectrum. We anchor the ends.

8. I don’t know if the ‘gay percentage’ is quite the 10% that many claim, but I also strongly suspect it has always been higher than 2%. 2% might be the percentage that are SO driven they just can’t ‘hide’ it no matter what. I figure at least 5% happily go that way,
   but most do their best to ‘fit in’ as necessary. Another 5% are just mixed up enough that they can now claim ‘gay’ as a group, even though they could enjoy either one if needed. But, yeah, like sickle cell anemia, it is tied to OTHER survival worthy traits, including non violent negotiation as well as arts and acting. And the acting comes in really handy when trying to avoid getting killed by those who want to ‘kill all the weirdos’.
   Kinda rough for us ‘Odd Bods’ who don’t fit in well and DIDN’T get a ‘good acting gene’. Plenty of gay guys can be just as ‘macho’ as necessary when it comes to war or survival.
   I knew some of those type in the military. Stories of the Spartan legions abound ( though those are likely a bit exaggerated, as well. ). But I suppose my own experience may be influenced by my own ‘non-standard’ tendencies. Even if I wasn’t gay, I didn’t fit in well with ‘standard’ macho groups, but got on well with other intellectually gifted types who were also a ‘bit odd’ in some way, as well as the artists, actors, and no doubt some of the ‘closeted’ gays in my teenage years. There were NO open gays in my high school. Didn’t find out about any until later in life. One had been a football star who went into modeling and acting.

   And to think I ended up being happy at SF cons for years ! Who woulda thunk it.

   1. I honestly think it’s closer to about 2 percent, but it’s obviously hard to make sure. But yeah, I know many gay guys who are almost too macho. It has nothing to do with the bastardization of maleness which is the point I was trying to make. I’m getting a little tired of the new push on the right to blame everything on gay marriage.

      1. I haven’t seen that particular argument for probably ten years.

         A friend of mine many years ago was all excited about the legalization of gay marriage, got married to her partner ASAP, then freaked out that a conservative court might reverse the ruling.

         She didn’t seem to understand that the ruling wasn’t constitutional in the first place (the decision should have been handed to the states), and if she hadn’t been so all-fired excited to hand her marriage status over to a corrupt bureaucracy she wouldn’t have had to worry about it being reversed. Giving the federal government control over a personal decision is never the right answer. (Speaking here of personal decisions that don’t negatively affect anyone else or impinge on their rights).

         1. The basic problem is that almost no one today, at either end of the political spectrum, truly understands or appreciates Federalism. The usual belief seems to be that if it’s not universal throughout the US someone’s rights are being violated, even if those “rights” appear nowhere. And if you show them the 10th Amendment you get a blank look, often followed by some comment to the effect that it’s “not fair” or that it “isn’t democratic”. The latest from AOC is typical; she wants to “fix democracy” by removing jurisdiction over abortion from the Supreme Court, which is EXACTLY WHAT THE COURT JUST DID. Dumb as a bag of rocks…

      2. I never really had a problem with the concept of 2 homosexuals living in a committed, long-term, if not ’til death relationship. To me, the sin has always been promiscuity and pedophilia (grooming), both of which were fairly common and open in the ancient pagan world. My only problem with gay marriage is language confusion. Just come up with a new word for it! Don’t extend terms with definite meanings into ambiguous drivel! You offend the ontologist in me.

         I’m a very conservative Christian, but I don’t care. Introduce me to your spouse, and I’ll gladly shake his or her hand or exchange hugs. I won’t go “icky, ick”. Just don’t tell me about your sexcapades. I don’t want to hear about that from heterosexual couples either.

         1. Just don’t tell me about your sexcapades. I don’t want to hear about that from heterosexual couples either.

            –
            100% this.

            College years. My (quickly ex) roommate screamed at me for calling her a slut. No I did not. I just said her boyfriend could not stay the night in our dorm room (he had his own room to go to), if I was there. Since I didn’t have anywhere else to go, he couldn’t stay the night. The fact his roommate didn’t mind her staying with the boyfriend in their room had nothing to do with me. (Mind? Or didn’t say so? I didn’t know. I didn’t care to ask.)

            Didn’t have the proposition problem while in school, well I did, just it wasn’t related to the school of forestry, just other male students, in general. Had the same problem where I worked at the district (one of them anyway) with the male members of the crew. What? They’d never heard “No!” before. Repeatably? (sarcasm off jic) I don’t know about anyone else, but I was perfectly able to say, “No!” repeatably. (Unless someone tried to act on it, despite the firm No, and a few “drop dead”, doubt I’d complain even now.)

            I can’t control what others may or may not do. Not even our son, passed a certain age. Or really my husband. I can only control what I say and do. And I really, really, don’t want to know what my widowed mother may be up to. Ewww. 😉 Perfectly happy to believe she is still true to dad.

            1. dang it. click the box.

            2. I went to a college that had dissociated itself from the Southern Baptist Convention about five years previously. Strictly single-sex dorms, TYVM.

               My next-door neighbor saw no reason to follow the “no men on the floor after 7” rule that we’d all signed on to. She didn’t follow it regularly, enthusiastically, and…um, squeakily. But the boyfriend was an unimaginative sort, the squeaks were eminently predictable, and my roommate and I soon perfected the art of flinging a precisely timed textbook against the connecting wall. Turns out that a college textbook, flung with a twist of the wrist to land flat-on, resonates.

               Then we got bored and taught her other next-door neighbors the trick.

               It took a couple of weeks to get the point across, but it was worth it.

               1. “…no men on the floor after 7…”

                  But from your description they weren’t on the floor, unless the floorboards were loose… 😉

                  [Runs and hides]

         2. Neither did I, really, Just live with the one that you love, get some kind of legal protection for your relationship … just don’t be consumating it in the road and frightening the horses. Yeah, had gay couples as neighbors, and friends. Just be civil about it, that’s all we ask.

         3. Aye, what CONSENTING ADULTS do is they’re business. It’s when that is NOT the case that there is Trouble. There can still be Trouble with consenting adults (EVEN if ALL agree with it all… “Open Marriage”
            [etc.] CAN work, but it is NOT the way to bet.) It’s kinda quantum.. or anti-quantum? It doesn’t take much brain (even ox figure it out, eventually…) to know which way NOT to bet….

            1. Yep. I really don’t want to know what my friends do in the bedroom. I like to know who their significant other is, ONLY to include in invitations and cards.

               1. Agreed, with all. But the problem seems to be that, for what I suspect is a tiny but loud fraction of what is already a small minority, if you fail to vocally and enthusiastically celebrate their lifestyle choices you’re being “hateful” and “homophobic”.

                  1. To which I’d say, you have a right to equal treatment; you don’t have a right to be celebrated. You have a right to free speech, but you don’t have a right to a guaranteed audience. You have a right to have sex; you don’t have a right to other people’s bodies. You’d think that would be obvious, but I guess not.

                     1. I agree. And if you say it, you’ll be labeled “hateful”, “homophobic” and (probably; isn’t everything?) “racist”.

                        I even saw a recent video in which the claim was made that “abortion doesn’t kill people”. Everything is being redefined to suit The Narrative. (At least, that’s the apparent aim; refusal to go along with the redefinitions is one of the best ways to resist; simply ignore them.)

                     2. “You have a right to have sex; you don’t have a right to other people’s bodies.”

                        So… how does it make the first a right, if the second is also true?

                        How does one accomplish the first, without assuming the second?

                        1. Well, for one thing, it means you can’t demand the use of somebody else’s body as your right; you have to negotiate, as always. Besides, there are, ahem, ways to get sex without using somebody else’s body. Think.

                           1. If you want to get technical about it, no, sexual intercourse is not something you can do alone.

                              Doing it alone is just masturbation.

                              (If you want to get really technical and linguistic about it, sexual intercourse is something you can only accomplish in the company of a member of the opposite sex. Everything else is just… masturbation in company.)

                              The problem with “You have a right to have sex” is that no one ever puts caveats on it.

                              Same with “You have the right to marry whoever you want”. There are no limits whatsoever on the statement or even inherent to it. Not “if they are willing”, not “if they are capable of understanding and agreeing to it”, not “If they are free to agree to it”. Not even “if they are of appropriate age to agree to it.”

                              No one who uses those phrases ever admits that “with someone who is willing to do it with you” is a necessary part of the concept*.

                              Because requiring the agreement of another party turns it from a right that you are owed (which is the definition of a right), to a privilege that you can be denied.

                              *Unless someone who is not on the Left of the political spectrum calls them on it. Only then do they reluctantly admit that there might be limits on the concept, because not even they want to publicly endorse rape. Except when a Democrat politician does it.

                           2. Well, if you want to get really-really technical bout it, I didn’t say “sexual intercourse” — I said “sex”: the excitation and satisfaction of the sexual organs. And yes, there usually is a lot more masturbation than completed mating, even in nature. I’ve seen humans and other mammals get it on and get it off in an amazing variety of ways. This falls under the “pursuit of happiness” category; you’re guaranteed the right to “pursue” — not a guaranteed catch.

                           3. That’s only brings up another problem with Leftist statements.

                              You guys never define your terms.

                              Here I am thinking that the verb phrase “have sex” and the noun phrase “sexual intercourse” (used colloquially, not technically as in my post above) described basically the same group of actions, and you’re telling me that they don’t.

                           4. I was detailing the difference between “gender” and “sex”. To make it simpler, “gender” is the arrangement of your chromosomes and the physical results thereof; “sex” is both gender and what you do with it. The one is the specific case, and the other is the general class.

                           5. Then I think I see part of the problem:

                              The usual definition I learned is 180 from that. Sex is biology; gender is only loosely (and getting looser) tied to biology. Note that the version I learned is the one our opponents use based on what they are saying and doing.

                           6. Getting very, very, very loose.

   2. A CDC study during the Obama administration put the percentage of the population with same sex attraction at roughly 1.5%, with roughly the same percentage across both genders.

      Also keep in mind that it appears that environment can play a role in at least some cases. For example, Milo Yannoupolis has recently “come out” as straight. And assuming he’s being honest (and not just engaging in attention seeking), it’s likely that his earlier belief that he was gay was due to an environmental thing – possibly his being molested by a man when he was a teenager.

      1. I believe he was intending to live chastely, not as straight.

         1. I thought I’d heard he had a girlfriend. I could be mistaken, though.

            1. May have more recent news than mine, too.

   3. I don’t know what you did, but your formatting is messed up.

      1. I fixed it, because it annoyed me.

   4. It’s probably 4-5% for males. For females, it’s wildly variably depending on circumstances.

      1. Because females are more responsive to social pressure. And also frankly “lesbianism” might not be sexual at all, only romantic. (I will admit women are more inclined to romantic friendship, with everything but.)

         1. When folks count freaking cuddling as lesbian, the percent goes way the heck up!

9. The usual Democratic Party propaganda outlets are trying to ramp up CCP Virus hysteria, claiming “the latest variant” is “the most dangerous yet”, because apparently it is easy to catch. Buried in their alarmist articles, if mentioned at all, is that the symptoms for the vast majority of people are mild, to the point where only 1/3rd even run a fever, and the rest of the symptoms are no different than the common cold.

   The reason of course is obvious-there is a national election coming up and the Democrats once again are going to try to use the CCP Virus to impose illegal and unconstitutional election law changes through decree and “sue and settle” so as to facilitate stealing the elections in enough key districts and states to retain and expand control in the House and Senate. They have a “fundamental transformation of America” to impose” by any means necessary.

   If that doesn’t work, would it surprise anyone of the encouraged Putin or Iran to outright attack us directly so they can declare a national war emergency and impose their election and other changes that way. After all, they have already declared the entirety of their opposition to be radical extremists and terrorists who are the equivalent of the Nazis. In their own feeble minds they think they are doing a public service.

   1. They’re still pushing Monkeypox. The TV in our lunchroom is blaring news about difficulties in distributing the vaccine right now.

      1. and as “Everybody is homosexual”™ and it seems to be only spreading among those who do such . . .

      2. They just don’t get the concept of ‘funny-once’, do they? Anything that ever worked will work again, and again, as many times as they need it. The suckers will never get wise to the scam. They wouldn’t, after all.
         ———————————
         ‘Progressives’ believe everybody else is even stupider than they are. This explains a lot.

      3. But… I do not HAVE any monkeys!
         I do have a few humans I must deal with.
         And, admittedly, a couple seem a bit sketchy – even for humans.

         1. I told a friend yesterday that this site is sketch and the owner is an extremist. (He had the blog up when I came into house.)
            He told me “Nah. It’s just a rumor. I know the owner. She’s okay.”
            Yes, why do you ask? My friends ARE indeed nuts. Well, as nuts as I am.

            1. I heard the owner likes to barbeque and has a great rack.

               1. Shame about the Mormonism, though.

               2. LOL

               3. Fluffy is warming up and the sea serpent in the minion pool is providing shrimp.

                  The aardvark has bonbons while we wait

   2. Oregon Health Authority (two lies in three words, sigh) is still pushing the skeer factor for the Xi-flu. We noticed the release carefully said the hospitalizations were up for people “with COVID”, trying to make people think it’s “for COVID”.

      It doesn’t help that the so-called leadership in the state government is populated by the not so shining mean girls. (OTOH, for Despicable Kate Brown, I’d like to see a DNA test to determine species…)

10. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Two by Two

11. Biologically speaking, it’s a lot easier to get women to act like men than it is for men to act like women. Yea, I know, wouldn’t it be wunnerful if guys took a turn watching the littles and doing the dishes…or even took over those jobs entirely,…but the monthlies and going into labor parts are something guys simply cannot do even if they wanted to. Which most of them don’t. (Never mind our expert biologists who scream that it’s transphobic hate speech to observe a difference between innies and outies) Not that it’s all that much fun for women either…but for one, women are physically built for the job whether they want to be or not. and for two, somebody’s got to do it or we all die out. Which the Voluntary Human Extinction crowd want to do anyway, but most of us aren’t that suicidally depressed.
    And sometimes the traditional male side isn’t all that much fun either: For instance there is doing hot, dangerous, dirty jobs and giving the bulk of what they earn to feed, clothe, and house partners and dependents who show their gratitude by asking “Why don’t you give me more?” Well,,,again, if Og can huck a spear, or tote that bale, or wrestle the livestock better than Wilma, then it only makes sense to give him the job, whether he really wants it or not. Again, somebody’s got to do it, or we all go a-starving in the freezing wind, rain, and snow.
    Not that there isn’t considerable room for overlap, and technology do make a difference. The ability to lactate isn’t so important as it used to be, and electric motors do most of the heavy lifting anymore…but to totally disregard the physical factors that shaped the culture of our ancestors and and blame all the woes of women on the evil patriarchy is just as much folly as blaming all the woes of man on Eve.
    As it turns out, the women that want to act like men tend to act like the worst of men, not the best (e.g, coupling with anything that moves and to hell with the consequences). I suppose it goes the other way around, too.

    1. I’ve seen examples where the husband is just as likely to be the one doing the dishes. She cooked. He and the kids cleaned up. He cooks, she and the kids clean up.

       As far as feeding the kids? BIL has stated multiple times he felt he missed out on being able to feed their three youngest when they were tiny infants. He was able to take part in the early feedings with their oldest because she was a bottle baby (adopted), where the other 3 weren’t.

       Hubby, and now nephew-in-law more recently, expressed job in being able to participating holding and feed their younger infant because for reasons our son and great niece had to be supplemental feed with a bottle to continue to thrive.

       I may have been in traditional male fields (forestry, then computers), but never ever felt I had to act like a male to do either job. In fact being less odd than my male counterparts in the software arena often was beneficial. Was that because I was female? I thought it was because I was me. What do I know?

       1. I grew up in a household of 8 males, 2 females. Of course we boys did “women’s work”. The dishes didn’t care who washed them, the broom and mop didn’t care who drove them, the clothes didn’t care who folded them, and even the babies didn’t much care who changed their diapers or held the bottle, as long as they got changed and fed.

          1. There are household jobs that need to get done regardless, and especially nowadays, when people spend years living alone between becoming an adult and getting married, everyone needs to learn how to do them. Dishes, laundry, cooking, etc, are “everybody needs to know how to do these.” So are pumping gas, changing a tire (which I’ve never actually had to do), jumping a car, or even mowing a yard (though less likely to have to do that unless one owns a home).

             The thing that IRKS ME about modern issues with gender roles “men’s work” and “women’s work” is the way that moderns just ASSUME that those divisions meant one was valued more than the other and it’s always men’s work they think is more valued, because they’ve got their grand feminist Theory of Everything. They never think that a man refusing to do “women’s work” might possibly be HONORING the woman and her role/position. It always has to be him disdaining such work. They never consider any other possible explanation, nor do they bother asking. And if they DO ask, they don’t really hear or understand the answer.

             1. Also that they are constant.

                I read a gender-flip setting. The flip had good reasons, but it annoyed me a bit that the flip of roles was perfect. With a steam tech level, everyone did what members of the opposite sex did in 1950s America.

             2. I end up doing most of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry simply because my wife tends to be occupied with her work when at home and I don’t bring my work home with me.

       2. The Reader and significant other have a rule that has worked for 40 years. If one person cooks, the other cleans up. We both cook and we both clean depending on moods (and the Reader going out in cold rain for takeout counts as cooking).

    2. “Male privilege” consists of putting the women and children in the lifeboats…and going down with the ship.

12. Sarah, I think you must be hearing the same voices I do. Like Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” or something.

    1. Don’t imagine you’re alone; they run through my head constantly, along with much else from Kipling.

13. My kids played soccer. A lot. Into college.

    The boys teams had parents who encouraged good sportsmanship, fair play and playing hard but fair. If you fouled someone accidentally an apology was very much in order and welcomed. I only saw a player hit another player once and he was tossed from the game. Handshakes after the game were usually sincere unless it was a very hard fought game, and even then there was grudging respect.

    The girl’s teams parents encouraged their girls to be tough and mean and sportsmanship was for losers. There were no accidental fouls. They were all targeted and as mean as possible.
    Girls were pinched, slapped, scratched and had hair pulled and tripped constantly. Some fouls were called but girls are very sneaky often did not get caught. Handshakes after the game were often accompanied by sneering comments, stuck out tongues or other faces toward the losing team.

    It was quite bizarre to watch parents of boys act one way at a boy’s league game and then act a completely different way at their daughter’s games.

    The same people are encouraging their daughters to be horrendous at work too if they want to get ahead.

    1. Number two son played town soccer, which is not really competitive unlike “travel” which is very competitive. I overheard two idiots talking about how one of their fathers had told them to play badly in the “try-out” since they balanced the teams by ability and if they thought he wasn’t a good player he would go in the general pool rather than the “good” pool and his team would be better. They were six years old. It made me rather Ill.

       Apple trees produce apples

    2. There’s another way women’s sports can go, besides “mean girls.”

       Back in the early 80’s, as a young adult, I played soccer on a women’s team and practiced with a men’s team. The practices between the two were night and day.

       When the guys came to practice, they wanted to play soccer. There was some stretching, maybe a little bit of drilling, put then, out on the field, playing.

       When the women were practicing, first you had to say hi to everyone (which could be tricky, since I have always had trouble remembering names), and then you’re supposed to say something you remember about each person outside of soccer, or at least pretend to remember when they talked. And then we would get in line for drills with our coach, but we weren’t intensely focused on the drills. It was important to make sure everyone knew that treating everyone well was more important than getting better at soccer or playing soccer well. Then, finally, maybe we’d play soccer for half of the practice, but it was very clear that you absolutely didn’t risk hurting anyone. Ever. To any degree.

       With the men’s team, I don’t think I even ever heard all of their names. And no, they didn’t play all out either. It was a practice, not a competition, and they did have a woman practicing with them. Even so, once they found out I got right back up when I was knocked down, I think they were in practice mode. When guys play, it’s certainly okay to risk hurting the other players, within limits. But you don’t play dirty.

       It’s like women either play like nice girls or mean girls, but not like people who put the game (not even winning) first. Which is probably an overgeneralization. If you actually want to win, though, it’s easy to see why you would pick mean girls over nice girls, if those are your only two choices.

       1. My mom ran the softball team for several years– she enforced the Don’t Be A B rule, and had “practice starts at X time” rule to avoid those failure modes

          That let the butterflies do their social thing, and she got to escape a lot of the mouth-noises because the practice field was next to the grade school playground, so all the ladies with kids would bring them early, too, and moms who didn’t want to chat could go hide over there, or “help” with the equipment.

          How you can have six people packing one seabag full of bats, balls and mitts, I do not really know. ^.^

14. The way I see it, men play games, but they’re all around competence in the thing. Competence in the thing is what gets you what you want. Including laid. There’s a physical/force aspect of it, but I don’t think that’s important in most environments. Force/violence is just one area out of many where a man may demonstrate competence. Which is why, by the way, it is possible for women to compete successfully with men in many areas, so long as they follow the competence rules.

    I do see how this causes trouble for men who are not competent in a physical area, or who are not able to demonstrate competence in a non-physical area when they are young. Or who end up developing competence in a thing that society turns out not to value. But I do still think that male dominance games, while they have their roots in physical dominance, doesn’t remain there in men. In human beings, it has been extended into competence in the thing.

    Here’s how I see it:

    The primary job of men is to protect the women and children, including by the use of force / violence at a distance from them. The appropriate use of force and violence is not something innate to either men or women but is learned. It is taught to men through games and contests, that stress obtaining goals using the lowest necessary use of force. In killing prey, excessive force would be that which damages the food value of the prey. In killing predators, excessive force would be that which expends more energy than necessary. In determining rank in the dominance hierarchy, excessive force is that which reduces the ability of the down-hierarchy men to work for the group.

    Dominance games should only identify the “strongest” [which also eventually becomes interpreted as “most capable”] man. Dominance games which reduce the ability of the other men are less productive for the group. Note: the ability of even the most dominant man to reproduce successfully is tied to group cooperation.

    Therefore, men participate in games that build strength and skill – and their contests can be quite violent, even to the point of death. However, successful games should not normally result in death or reduction in the man’s strength or capability. The goal is precisely to learn to gauge how far but no further. Also, no matter the level of physical violence, it should still lead to men being able to contest against each other on one day, and still work together as a team on the next. This also is part of gauging how far is “too far.”

    It’s very clear that a great many of the people in charge of our society no longer play by male competence rules. And we’re not teaching boys, let alone girls, how to play by male competence rules. And yes, I agree that you have to play by male competence rules on the public level, or society falls apart.

    Female rules on violence seem to be based on last ditch survival, anything goes, not on sustainable social interaction.

    1. Many years ago my writers group had a young lady who objected strongly to my critiques. You see, she was writing a YA fantasy based at a girl’s school, in which the “mean girls” were competing for the attention of the only boy around–the son of the school’s owner.

       I said “Do girls actually act like that?” She turned her back and never spoke to me again. Two weeks later she was gone from the group, in part because I was “mean.”

       Male dominance games are just as baffling. I can’t even say I’m somewhere in between. More like outside the group watching. Maybe I’m one of the aliens.

       1. Oops. Wrong string.

       2. So you didn’t position her for success?

          How very mean of you to expect her to explain herself 🤣

       3. Girls really are like that

       4. Some of it’s cultural, I’m pretty sure.

          They behave “like that” when it’s socially acceptable. When behaving poorly gets them shunned in some form, they don’t do it.

    2. I come from a rugby playing family, number two son has an outside chance of playing pro. The point of the game is to get everyone out running around expending energy and aggression in a controlled way. Its roots are at English public schools and the game has roles for most everyone from the fat boys — front row, tall boys — second row — through the athletes — back row and half backs — to the skinny guys — wings and full backs. Not a lot of places for physical cowards though.

       One interferes with boys games at one’s quite considerable peril. All the energy and aggression and the competitiveness — boys will compete on who can pee the farthest — has to go somewhere and if doesn’t get absorbed by games it will get absorbed by something else.

       My daughter played field hockey and I had hoped that the expansion of girls playing games would have positive effects, but it seems that girls play games like, well, girls. My sister once made the claim that all wars would end were women in charge, I retorted that war would end because there’d be one more war, and then no one alive to fight another. The women present all seemed to agree, ruefully. the men already knew.

15. “I very much doubt there has been an increase in homosexuality.”

    Oh, you’re totally right. A lot of the young people claiming to be some flavor of gay actually engage in exclusively heterosexual behavior. On a related note, a gay guy got suspended from Twitter for saying how much he loved it back in the ’90s when the gay community was actually gay and not just a bunch of heterosexuals with personality disorders.

    It’s cosplay. Everything is cosplay.

    1. It’s become a positional good. Having a gay child ticks a prestige box among the wine mums.

    2. Search for the Catherine Tate gay son sketch on the tubes of u. She absolutely nails it.

    3. “Queer” has become the new all-purpose word where you can engage in completely conventional, even vanilla, sexual and personal relationships, but if you admit that a person of the opposite sex is attractive, or just want to be flamboyant and outre and tease folks whom you would never actually consummate a relationship with, then you’re good and part of the “in-crowd”. All while complaining of marginalization, of course.

16. My wife was always very female and happy and proud of it. You should see all the jewelry, and all of it beautiful and flattering. She was also someone much more comfortable in the company of men. Of course she never had to use feminine wiles to make up for incompetence. She was brilliant at everything she tried. She did occasionally express annoyance at how easily men in her field were manipulated by women.

    Early in our relationship, she told me that in elementary school some kids called her an Amazon because she had reached her full 5’9″ by 6th grade. I smiled and said, “When someone says Amazon, I think of Wonder Woman, strong, brilliant, and beautiful.” I didn’t have to add that I thought it was a good description of her.

17. Looked at the title and immediately thought: “Hands of Blue.”

    1. You’re not the only one. Then my mind jumped to the kids’ song, “The Ants go Marching Two by Two . . .” (to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”)

18. May I offer a concise (I think) way of summarizing your thoughts on this subject, Sarah? A handful of basic rules that govern 90+% of human behavior:

    Rule One is a basic rule of evolution, applied to behavior: Behavior which is rewarded will thereafter be encouraged. Behavior which is punished will thereafter be avoided. Anything that triggers the pleasure centers of the brain qualifies as a reward – even if it’s just the little thrill you get from knowing you just did The Right Thing. Likewise, anything that triggers the fear/pain centers qualifies as a punishment, even if no one will ever know it but you.

    Rule Two is a little more subtle: Absence of an expected reward is itself a punishment. Absence of an expected punishment is itself a reward. Think about it: when you do something and you expect to get punished for it – and then you don’t – don’t you feel like you got away with something, at least a little bit? When you do something really great and you expect to get rewarded for it – and then you don’t – don’t you feel let down, at least a little?

    Rule Three: Humans are a tribal species. We live for the Tribe, we die for the Tribe. We are programmed at a bone-deep level to value the well-being of the Tribe over our own well-being. (Well, most of us are, sociopaths and other mental aberrations aside.) We can select the Tribe(s) we belong to and the one(s) we value most, but we can’t ever get away from being tribe-oriented. Because the stronger the Tribe is, the more likely it is that Tribe members – and their genes and memes – will survive.

    Rule Four: We’re also programmed at a bone-deep level to believe that the higher our status is within the Tribe, the better off we’ll be. More food, better food, more chances to breed, etc. So we measure our own value partly by how much we are respected/feared/valued by our fellow Tribe members. And every one of us is always looking for ways to improve our social standing within the Tribe. Maybe not obviously, maybe not consciously, but that impulse is always there. Because the higher we rank within the Tribe, the more likely it is that our genes and memes will be among the ones that get to survive.

    Put all four rules together, allow for chaotic interaction between ’em, and I think you have a pretty good general description of human behavior, and why we do what we do.

    Oh, and the basic mistake that Marxism makes is that Marxists believe they can overwrite the above instinctive behaviors and thought patterns with new ones. Human intelligence (such as it is, and what there is of it) versus four billion years of evolution. I know which way I’m betting…

    1. Pretty good summation (IMHO), and seems to accurately reflect almost all the human interactions I’ve seen for 60+ years.

19. Well.. the bloop.

    Got two lines in, went “I need to link to DarwinCatholic’s advice on how to say that section of Shakespeare.”

    …can’t find it.

    Even with other search engines.

    This is Bad.

    1. Just as a possibility… is this it? https://darwincatholic.blogspot.com/2009/06/intensive.html

       It’s not the same line, but it occurred to me that it might have been close enough to come to mind, and far enough not to come to search results.

       1. Same advice I was trying to think of, yes! Thank you. 😀

20. I have to wonder if open homosexuality ISN’T part of the problem. Under normal conditions, men have some female traits, and women have some male traits. Steely-eyed test pilots can be struck by the beauty of a cloud. Feminine women can be flinty war leaders (Margaret Thatcher comes to mind). The Chinese Yin/Yang symbol comes to mind…Yang within Yin, Yin within Yang.

    Open homosexuals tend to drive heterosexuals to the extremes, force them to expel any trait that isn’t exclusively male or female. So you get men who have difficulty forming relationships on a more-than-sexual level…and women who are pathetically neurotic and hysterically fearful.

    Perhaps our forefathers were not as stupid as we like to think they were.

    1. That still doesn’t even acknowledge let alone deal with the homo-macho side of things.

       A rather significant issue given that is requires expelling entire major civilizations from the historical record.

21. I’m trying really hard to teach both of my kids to be gentlemen.

    I’m having an easier time of it with my daughter than I am with my son.

22. My personal, cynical POV is that we’re seeing a massive increase of MTF transgenderism because a lot of the Weird males have given up. There’s no way they can win under the current rules, so you might as well join the apparent “winning” side. And, I know full well that there is no way I’d survive in any current “woke” workplace, especially under the current Diversity and Inclusion standards. I’m all the wrong things-unrepentant heterosexual white male who has many things he’s ashamed of, but not any of those.

    It’s weird being in a small office with people that you don’t have to worry are going to sell you out for a cookie. Uncomfortable in ways that I’m still getting used to…but weird.

    1. Over the last ten years, all the Flamingly Gay!!!!! men I’m aware of are now Flamingly Trans!!!!!

       Because it seems when your identity is grounded on shocking the normies, it’s the Flamingly!!!! part that’s the most important and not the subsequent adjective.

       1. I suspect that’s part of it. But, if I can make some interpretation of some of the reasons why we’ve got an increase in transgender people, it’s a proof of commitment to Big Mother and Her New Regime.

          It could definitely be a part of “shocking the normies” as well. Which has gotten a lot more extreme due to YouTube and TikTok.

       2. It gets ugly when the normies don’t shock so easily.

23. I think there is another, physical factor contributing to this insanity. Since the introduction of hormonal birth control, the environment has become saturated with the excess artificial hormones in the water and the environment generally. Dosages are such that the body dumps excess hormones into the waste stream where it is passed on into water supplies. I saw studies years ago (early 90s) on the significant levels of these chemicals in drinking water sources and that neither potable water treatment nor sewage treatment was clearing them properly.

    What effect does bathing a child in these hormones during the prime development years have on their maturation?

    1. Sure. But the hormones also change women. I completely get that.

24. Sarah, In my experience (79 years old), I believe that the percentage of what I will call predatory men, is much lower than you seem to suggest. Thinking of the thousands of men I have known over my lifetime, I would guess that only about 10% of them are actively attacking/seducing as many women as possible. The incidence of such behavior seems greater than it is because such men are very active so the number of men involved seems greater than it is.

    1. I have no idea what you think the percentage is.
       NOTE I DIDN’T SAY ATTACKING. I said looking at a woman appreciatively, which is what the lefty insane people consider “toxic masculinity.”

       1. “Hey, Mister, you’re looking at a GUY. GAY!”

          “There is a difference between ‘I wish I shared a bed with $PERSON’ and ‘DAMN, it’d be nice to look even half as good as $PERSON’. How bad was the accident that caused your obvious brain damage? Or is congenital?”

          “Why, I never!”

          “Obviously.”

          1. Oh, heck, yes. When I started taking art lessons I started seeing beauty everywhere. And some women are for real breathtakingly beautiful. Some guys too. But I’m Dansexual, so I don’t want to go to bed with anyone else.

25. c4c

26. Business and science and public life are enterprises that come about to achieve something other than personal safety and power. Therefore women venturing into it should go carefully, and behave like gentlemen. And so should men (Most of them at this point are behaving like mean girls.)

    Kind of like how men in a family, if they’re healthy, are going to behave more like women in that sphere?

    The sexes complement eachother, and have some aspects of eachother in themselves, when functioning at their best.

    1. Yes.

27. Interesting essay!

    A few quibbles.

    First, about men thinking women are sweet.

    There’s an old joke that boys are supposed to go through a phase of disliking females, and then grow out of it.

    The punchline is that they don’t, they just start getting horny.

    Men would -like- to think women are sweet, and often think the ones they’re in relationships with or are successfully courting are.

    A large proportion of men also think that women are manipulative gold-diggers who are always trying to game the sexual marketplace, and resent the constant sexual frustration they felt as adolescents and young adults.

    They try their best to hide such feelings/opinions, because it makes it much harder to get laid.

    Incels are an exaggeration of this common sentiment, who’ve been tipped over into actual desire to kill and/or assault.

    In point of fact, women are just -more variable- about sex than men are.

    Some, a majority, are more picky than men and more interested in commitment, as you noted.

    A smaller number are just as promiscuous as men – – or as men would be if they could get women to go along with it.

    Back in my single days, I once discovered that my supposed girlfriend was having sex on the QT with -three- other individuals at the same time (two males and a female, all friends of mine). A complete mink. Serious drama/comedy followed. There are men who manage that sort of thing, but it’s much rarer and much harder.

    And a much higher percentage of women than men are just not interested in sex as such, or have very low libidos. “Asexual” to use the trendy term; not that this historically kept them from reproducing, because women don’t -have- to be interested to get pregnant.

    Second, about homosexuality: my observation is that the etiology of sexual orientation is radically different in males and females, and there’s a fair bit of research to back that up.

    For example, as you note there’s a fair amount of ‘situational homosexuality’ in jails and other single-sex male spaces. I went to all-male boarding schools as a teenager, which is rather like being locked in the baboon enclosure at the zoo, but it does give you perspective on this. It was also the only place I’ve been where guys would actually have fistfights about getting into the chorus for performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, because we put those on with a ‘paired’ all-girl school.

    (God, was university a pleasant change. Though having been isolated in adolescence and not having any sisters, I had to study women as if they were an alien species — which had its advantages, though; my take after a little while was that men who’d grown up around them were often totally clueless about what women found attractive, instead projecting their fantasies.)

    But there’s -much more- situational homosexuality in the female equivalents. Including, in the old days, institutions like the Ottoman Sultan’s seraglio.

    A large percentage of men in prisons have sex with other inmates (often involuntarily) but in women’s prisons it’s the next thing to universal.

    Also, research has shown that women actually respond very differently to “visual sexual stimuli” (images or sights of sexual activity) than men do.

    Men are stimulated by the sight of things they know they want to do; anything involving women, in the case of het men, anything involving men together, for gay ones. And they’re almost always fully conscious of it. Even those who have moral objections to it know it’s a temptation.

    This is confirmed by tests which measure the physical signs of sexual arousal — flow of blood to the genitals and so forth. It corresponds very closely to what the men -say- they feel.

    But women are -more uniformly- stimulated by visual sexual stuff than men, if you use the physiological monitor type of testing.

    They’re just often not -consciously aware- that they are.

    Women who report no arousal or active repulsion by the images usually show the same -physiological- response to it. They’re not lying, they’re just not as “in touch” with what’s going on in their own bodies.

    And women respond (in terms of physical arousal measured by blood-flow, etc.) equally to -all types- of images; het, female-female, and male-male, whatever their own self-defined sexual orientation is. That’s not their -conscious- reaction I’m talking about, of course, just the physical stuff.

    My take on this is that women are much more behaviorally flexible — more responsive to expectations, situation, cultural conditioning, etc. — with respect to sex than men are. There’s an extra layer of learned-response stuff involved in what they do and want.

    Men are much more… ah, ‘mechanical’ about it.

    1. Okay, first, no, it’s not universal. You see, I was four years in a female school, and no. It’s NOWHERE near universal. The one “couple” weirdly also the ones to get married. To men. So I think it was just they liked sex more.
       Second, you have men and women reversed. My first major was psychology. Women are stimulated by story/narrative, men by visual. (Women LIE a lot, so there might have been some falsified studies, too.)
       This is born out by the fact that visual porn sells almost exclusively to males, while story porn (some but not all flying under the flag of romance) sells mostly to women.

       1. Didn’t say it was universal in boarding schools, though my friends at them said it was quite common. It -is- universal in female prisons, or near enough for government work.

          Next, I’m not talking about what women are -aware- of being stimulated by; I was talking about what the -physiological testing- showed them to be stimulated by — as indicated by increased blood flow, engorgement of certain tissues, etc.

          And that’s been tested repeatedly and always shows the same results.

          1. Like F*CK it’s universal in female prisons, pardon my FRENCH.
             Yeah, there’s a lot of sex in female prisons. WITH GUARDS.
             I think your observers confused female attachments with female sex.
             Kindly read up on Lesbian bed death before you embarrass yourself further.
             What you’re spouting are male fantasies, and frankly a bit … tiring.

          2. Didn’t say it was universal in boarding schools, though my friends at them said it was quite common. It -is- universal in female prisons, or near enough for government work.

             Literally the only person I had try to shove that on me was the (female dog) trying to assault me in the Navy.

             No, no and o HECK NO.

    2. Women who report no arousal or active repulsion by the images usually show the same -physiological- response to it. They’re not lying, they’re just not as “in touch” with what’s going on in their own bodies.

       This kind of points to the question of if the tests are measuring what they think they are measuring.

       I remember multiple studies that found women were sexually stimulated by seeing babies, based off of the metrics they’d chose to identify sexual stimulation.

       (folks who frequent mommy blogs may be familiar with the “makes my ovaries hurt” response to fertile women who don’t have a baby holding someone’s baby; I’ve been inducing this for the last half year or so. 😀 )

       I know, first hand, that a lot of stuff that supposedly objective scientists identify as sexual is nothing of the sort– there is a LOT of interpersonal interaction that is just no sexual at all, and the very idea of making it sexual would cause one or both to be violently ill.
       But the metrics they chose as “really” meaning sexual interest says it is, so….
       /eyeroll

       1. strong reaction/lights up brain might BE repulsion and “ew”

          1. Or a lot of other strong emergency responses.

             The whole “nearly dying and then if there’s someone who is around they get Strongly Affectionate” thing is kind of well established for both sexes, possibly they just didn’t check the stuff that makes guys think they’re going to die.

          2. Good point, the “everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask” book (based on data from that guy who monitored and reported the pre-teen rape victims as good data, kinsley? Kingsley?) had folks getting the same reaction from being shown spiders and dire injuries as from stuff-they-were-turned-on-by, from my memory. (IT’s decades ago, I can’t do much!)

             1. “Billion Wicked Thoughts” is a good book on sexuality and what men and women want, based on their searches. It’s a “revealed preference via behavior” book, not a “survey” book.

                1. Oooh, more likely to be good information– although you still have the WTF issue to deal with, yes, is better than “choose a biological response and say that means hot and bothered, and nothing else.”

                2. For folks interested:

                   1. 

                      1. Hm, just echoed the link but blank?

                         1. Ain’t nothin’ there.

                         2. I wonder if there’s something in the metadata of the file that blocks the display if it isn’t displayed from the approved site.

          3. As I said above: Basically, the metrics the researchers are using involve physical alterations to the genitals; blood flow, lubricity, etc. These are somewhat less visually obvious than with males, but they’re there, and they’re not multipurpose as increases in heartbeat and such are. That’s a specific part of the body getting ready to ‘do its thing’.

             The only worry I’d have (and it’s not a major one) is that being hooked up to electrodes and such in, ah, sensitive places might alter responses.

             1. So the researchers were straight up mentally impaired and had never met humans?
                Look, all of this is on the assumption that women will lie about being sexually excited.
                WHY?
                Before you go on about puritanism, I don’t know about you (tovarish) but I was raised in Europe in the seventies. We wanted to pretend to more interest and more sex, because that’s what was approved of. Being repressed was bad, and meant you’d be a serial killer someday.
                I know the US is slightly more puritanical, but at this point you’re in the same place or past it.
                These are not your grandmother’s women. These are girls who pretend to be Lesbian to catch a GUY’s eyes. And because it’s what they’re told they should be.
                If they tell you they’re not interested? Chances are really high, they really don’t like visual porn.
                The physical response, at that level, is for A LOT OF THINGS, not just sexual stimulus.
                As you’d know, if you had a minimum of respect for how women’s bodies work.
                I’m really tired of the straight up sexism of “progressive” sex researchers.
                For people who are about “science” you wouldn’t know it if it took a big chunk out of your buttocks.

             2. Bodies doing things that are useless/counter to will is basically human 101.

                Which is the whole point of “is what they’re measuring actually what they’re looking for?”

       2. Basically, the metrics they’re using involve physical alterations to the genitals; blood flow, lubricity, etc. These are somewhat less visually obvious than with males, but they’re there.

          1. Sure. And just like males get erections from fear or shock, so do women have those responses.
             If you are a woman, you’re singularly unobservant. Or dead.

          2. Which is what I said, the issue of what they’re measuring maybe not aligning with what they want to measure.

28. While you make some valid points, I would point out that there’s a great deal of individual variation, and that people do change over time. A lot of men who’re unrepentant horndogs in their teens and early twenties are perfectly willing to settle down after that. And a lot of young women, once free of the threat of unwanted pregnancy, are just as adventurous as their male counterparts.

    Personally, I’m so disgusted with relationships and romance that, if I could, I’d just go pay for sex and let all the “Romeo-and-Juliet” stuff be for people who like stress in their lives. I gave romance and relationships chance after chance, and I’ve never had one that I’d rate above “marginally acceptable, at best.”

    1. Of course. I was talking about the “average” male and female, obviously. Not all of us (though more women than men) clump in the middle of the distribution curve.

29. On a tangent, it seems to me there are a lot of books/movies that teach/show ‘how to become a man’. (E.g. Secondhand Lions, Shane, etc) What about ‘how to become a woman’? And I’m Not talking about ‘sexual awakening’, etc. Little Women, Anne (both books)are as close as I can come.

    What others are there? Why the derth?

    1. Because “feminists” think being a woman is being a neurotic queen bee.

    2. I might suggest works by Gene Stratton-Porter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, although they both have books about ‘how to become a man” as well. I would guess that they are considered “Too virtuous” for today’s audience.

30. Thanks for this. It helps me make sense in the worlds madness.

31. c4c

32. The ‘all behavior is learned, we just need to not teach kids bad stuff’ hypothesis can lean an awful lot on the ancient super conspiracy idea.

    Where some decisions made in pre history by an ancient super conspiracy are having a hidden effect on current day human behavior.

    Issue is, present day evidence speaks against the possibility of super conspiracies.

    One, failure modes of moderns attempts at super conspiracy.

    Two, if the ancient super conspiracies are so powerful, why couldn’t they get a modern super conspiracy to self organize, if super conspiracies can even exist? There is an obvious use for a super conspiracy to quietly murder all of the communists. Living communists argue against the existence of such a super conspiracy, and the absence of such super conspiracy argues against the possibility of super conspiracy.

    That your ruling class women, or your noble women have some sort of fancy right on paper, does not necessarily mean anything.

    Look at how recently we have had deaths of high social class folks from infected blisters, due to lack of antibiotics.

    Life in a historic or prehistoric society can be horrible, not matter how high your social status.

    Agricultural population, pre mechanical farming, is a pretty significant fraction of total.

    Like, if you have a noble class that ‘owns all the land’, the folks outside of that may be above 90% or 95%.

    Suppose that such a class officially assigns all land ownership to the females of the class. Well, one, the older women may hold onto the land title as long as possible, so the young women of the class may nothing. Two, the men of the class may be accustomed to raping the 90% to 95% percent of women who are not of that class. How likely is that those men treat the young women in the class incredibly decently?

    But pretty much nobody writes that into fiction, because the type of stories that world building is most helpful for telling is grim derp torture porn. (See ‘redo of healer’ etc., if this is the sort of story that you would be interested in.)

    So, most historic and pre-historic fiction sugar coats things, and we have people writing pre-historic ‘non-fiction’ that basically is based in zero real contact with actual human beings.

    I’ve most been salty a lot recently about this dude pushing a book called Dawn of Everything. His summary makes it sound obviously false. Summary says that is shows that humans had non-heirarchical behavior up till 40,000 YA. Thing is, which ever definition you use, the biological prehistory makes such idea incredibly unlikely.

    If they are saying that there were not have priests before 40 kya, and priests existed later, this claim seems very unlikely. Basically, humans seem to invent very rapidly religious behavior, magical behavior, and social behavior. A lot of mentally healthy people match their religious, magical, and social behavior to those around them, but if you look at ‘atheists’, or at certain types of mentally ill people, you see that modern humans can rapidly reinvent religious theory, or magical theory. Certainly, you can see the capability of such invention in everyone mentally competent enough to successfully raise children to adulthood. A type of human that could be capable of not inventing this stuff, and at the same time raise infants to maturity would seem to likely predate the biological definition of modern human. This would be many more years ago than 40kya.

    If they were saying that no one took instructions from anyone else, this would also be quite improbable. I know that moderns may fail to realize this, but most plants are a bit poisonous, and children are actually more sensitive to poison. And, human maturation process has a great deal of ‘neotony’, to support those large brain case sizes in adults. In short, there is not a chance that a biologically modern human type species can survive without the behavior of someone who watches children and tells them “don’t put that in your mouth!” Which means that those children have to capable of listening, and obeying. Of having the basic behavior of social hierarchy.

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