Destroying the Future

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Over the last several years, I’ve become aware as a society we’re not just devaluing boys. We’re destroying them and making it impossible for them to grow into productive men. Youth unemployment in general is fairly bad, because honestly not only aren’t preparing kids for work, but older people assume even kids who are prepared aren’t.

We’ve swung from a youth culture, of assuming children were always right, to a culture of assuming anyone younger than, well a little older than me, are mentally slow, stupid and lazy.

Perhaps it’s easier to understand that we never really had a youth culture, we had a huge demographic bump of the boomers (post war to oh, around 58 if you count the actual boom) moving through the culture distorting it. And now they are aged, so anyone younger than them is “stupid and lazy.” I and my generation suffered this, but it was less obvious when it was just us being young adults and striving. And society wasn’t as broken as it is now.

I’ve said before, the only thing I really agree with Pope Francis on (Well, I’d also add basic religious tenets except I’m not sure he’d agree with those) is that the biggest problem facing the world is youth unemployment. Most of the young people — and young is now under 40 — I know are either making do with several gigs, working retail, or working several part time jobs, chained up to make do. There are exceptions, of course, but even the well-trained are treated like garbage by the system as is.

And before you say that you too walked up hill both ways in snow at their age. Well, we did too, my husband and I — He worked crazy hours till his mid to late thirties, just to keep his job. I didn’t break in till my late 30s and yep, worked crazy hours for no pay before then — but there is a difference. We were both working at our avocation, and granted I didn’t know if I’d ever “break in” but then again that’s normal (sort of. It was extended because of that demographic bump.) for artists. We were both gaining experience and ability at our professions. It took a little long for us to break in, because of obvious demographic bump. In that our experience was entirely genX.

It’s far worse for the kids, because most of them are not even working at what they trained for. Or if they are, they are working at a level as though they were never trained.

But there is a bigger problem: most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school. If you’re older than me, you might think I lost my mind. Heck, if you’re younger than me, and never looked closely at what your kids’ school is doing, or you have no kids, you might think I’m nuts.

Well, I might be nuts but not on this. Starting at about middle school, boys are treated as defective girls. Because women are the majority and treated like a protected minority, every school is afraid of not “treating them fairly” which means giving them primacy. Now just your boy’s behavior as a boy will be punished, but assignments are geared for how girls/women think (which means they also annoy the living daylights of atypical females like myself), they are oriented to group work (which by and large punishes males, though again, atypical females ain’t too happy either), and they’re geared to at least external compliance (which again is a female trait.) Most of the teachers are not just women, but they’re women indoctrinated in a system that tells them that male work is superior and that women are unfairly discriminated against for “being kept out of it.”

If at this point you’re puzzled over my referring to male and female characteristics, and to male work, let’s take the gloves off and speak like adults, instead of the mush most of us have been fed our entire lives.

While we’re rational, thinking creatures, and creatures with our own will power, and therefore can work on a lot of our characteristics and change them: there are differences between men and women. Innate, inborn differences, starting in the uterus with the “hormone baths” that guide development of different sexes. Period.

No real scientist would ever deny that, unless of course he/she feared for his/her job.

… and because we live in retarded times, let me explain that though our bodies and brains are completely different and run on two models, yes, how much that difference manifests is a spectrum. First, because development has glitches. I.e. some people don’t get the right hormones at the right time, and might outright have a brain that leans more the way opposite their body. This is very rare. It is also, btw, not covalent with gender dysphoria. It’s mostly 100% living frustrated by the rest of humanity and assumptions made. But there are other issues. Other types of characteristics might emphasize/mitigate/mimic the way of thinking of the opposite sex. Autistic females tend to think more like males (go figure) and ADHD women might appear to (though it’s not necessarily true.)

Also, like every gendered characteristic, there is a spectrum. Gender doesn’t exist on a spectrum (mostly because it’s a grammatical construct and those are very binary/trienary) but GENDER EXPRESSING CHARACTERISTICS do. Every adult knows tall, hairy men with deep voices, and slight, almost hairless males who are tenors. And every combination thereof. This without regard to maleness/fertility/orientation. And every adult knows vavaboom females that look like they should be painted on the nose of WWII planes, and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females and every combination in between. And these women might or might not be straight/fertile without regard to those combinations.

And yes, all of us know strong women and weak males, though testosterone unreasonably favors males from early development.

Humans are an incredibly complex mechanism, and a doctor friend tells me what’s shocking is not that our bodies go wrong/break in a hundred different ways. The amazing thing is that all of us survive the various potentialities or even actual “going very wrong” every day.

So the platonic ideal of male and female might manifest somewhere in this fallen world, but you’re likely to meet him or her face to face.

Each individual should be judged as an individual, and allowed to purse whatever avocation they wish to take on/are capable of. (And they should perhaps be discouraged from avocations they wish to pursue that are impossible. Though go easy on that, okay? Sometimes what you’re looking at is not someone who is very stupid, but someone who is profoundly depressed. Same with every other characteristic. And I’m sick and tired of people who think it’s a kindness to make writers quite because according to the judge “he/she has no talent.” That’s another post though.) Equality under the law, equality of opportunities should always, always, always be our watchword. Because without it, we’re destroying potentially very productive people, and by extension destroying society/the future.

However, that’s not what we have right now. Right now we have completely crazy people who assume that any difference in characteristics between the sexes is the result of discrimination/past oppression.

And mark me very carefully: while the expression of sexual characteristics exists on a spectrum FOR INDIVIDUALS, in aggregate it is no such thing: in aggregate, there are male characteristics and female characteristics.

This is important because we live in a society that looks at large groups, and if they don’t perform exactly the same, as it says on the envelope, assumes malfeasance or problems somewhere.

At some point someone, probably a doctrinaire feminist, infused with Marxism, looked at how certain professions fell mostly female and some professions were mostly male, and made the usual idiotic Marxist assumption of two classes: oppressor and oppressed.

Males were therefore oppressors, and females were oppressed, and looking at history, which mostly was written by the very well off, they assumed the same had to be true, forever. And by gum, they were going to effect REVOLUTION by turning this on its head. Mostly quietly, by subverting everything they had access too, though this means also changing books, both fiction and non-fiction, shows, news, etc.

We have since then be living under their deranged, poisonous, evil regime. And it’s destroying the future for both males and females: though males are suffering more invisibly (because assumed privileged. which is a Marxist idiocy I can’t begin to believe anyone — anyone — falls for.)

Before someone says physical and mental differences are based on how we treat the sexes, pardon me, biologically that’s completely insane. Yes we are people of brain and will, but we are creatures who live in a body, a body affected by hormones BEFORE WE ARE BORN. As any of us — females — priviledged to experience very different hormonal states from pregnancy to menopause, or any of us — most of us — who’ve gone through puberty know, hormones are SCARY substances, that affect everything from our bodies to how we think. Denying that might be comforting, but is also not reality.

we had someone, well intentioned, but obviously having drunk deeply the koolaid last time I broached this subject who was convinced that the only difference was nutrition and socializing. Besides the fact that her stereotypes were out of date by the seventies, when I grew up — boys were NOT encouraged to “eat hearty”, everyone was encouraged to be sylph thin and starve themselves — the statement is ridiculous on its face.

I’ve been privileged — ah — to look after two coveys of quail recently and for another week. And there’s reasons to believe we misexed males and females, which means we culled a lot of females and have five extraneous males. This was related to the fact that the eggs purchased were not the breed that arrived (I think) and some quail breeds are well night unsexable by PHYSICAL characteristics. What is not unsexable, though, is that males are murderous little maniacs (I now have two in isolation, one recovering from wounds, the other an insane rapist/murderer. (In isolation because they’re not mine, so I don’t have the right of high justice.)) And that females lay. Males also crow, though they might not choose to do it around you. Not any amount of preaching Marx at them will make males live peacefully with other males, and no amount of telling them they should be more like females will make them lay eggs, or be more docile.

Okay, humans are not birds. But our cousins, the great apes show sexed characteristics not just in reproduction, but how they behave in groups. No one expects a male to take the care of the young. No one expects a female to be combative with males. (Yes, it happens. very rarely. But not as an aggregate group.)

Hormones have consequences, not just in bodies but in minds.

Testosterone gifts men with the ability to think more directly, in chained thoughts. Women think more in clusters. We make connections between things men don’t make connections. If you think of male thought as a chain, think of female thought as a spider web.

In general this means that women are better at verbal skills, and men better at mathematical skills (in aggregate. There are female mathematical geniuses, and male mathematical morons. But the gendering shows in large groups.) Women are better in …. “uncertain logic” fields, which involve everything and anything working with people. Men are better at anything involving certain, established logic, and they work better with “things” that can’t reason/exhibit anomalous characteristics more often than “normal” ones. (Again as a group. Individuals are individual.)

Even within the same profession/interest group males and females tend to approach the task differently. Women pushed into “male” fields or even those interested in it, unless they’re incredible outliers, tend to gravitate to management and dealing with people.

Rebel against it all you want. Tell me it’s wrong wrong wrong. But why tell me it’s an “injustice”? What makes being male better than being female, inherently? Nothing. What makes “male professions” like, say, engineering “better” or “more prestigious”?

Absolutely nothing.

Males and females are not superior to each other. Each of them have a set of “specializations” that together allowed us to build civilization.

Countries and cultures that discriminate against one or the other mode of humanity are maimed and thwarted and not quite civilized. And regardless of what you heard from your idiot teachers that by and large has not applied to the West/Christendom since the middle ages. “Women were oppressed, always” is largely bullshit. By our lights until about a hundred years ago, everyone was oppressed: Oppressed by their own biology, by the lack of…. well, everything, and by a hierarchical/unyielding order. Yeah, women had more restrictions on public action than men, and if you consider going to and dying in war better than giving birth and raising kids, you’ll think they were oppressed. The question is of course, why — in the name of BOB — would you consider that superior?

No, women have not been chattel and property in the west for a very long time. Yes, terrible things happened due to evil men and inferior body strength. But terrible things happened to men as well. This doesn’t go one way. If you think it does, you were mistaught, missinformed and indoctrinated.

But you can find places where women were de-facto chattel and treated as property. Various periods of Chinese history for instance (China is always complicated) and a lot of the Middle East. While there were geographical and historical reasons for that, the end result is that those civilizations always fall short.

How could they not? They are running on a single mode of thought, and never allowing half of humanity to make an appropriate contribution, even at the level of teaching the young.

There are no examples of civilizations that treated men poorly. Oh, there probably are, to be honest. We have found hints. But they were destroyed. Partly because you can run maimed in a primitive society that mistreats females, and use superior male strength to beat other tribes. But there is no superior female strength. (Also for bizarre reasons every even intended matriarchy we ever heard of sacrifices babies. We’re no different.)

Until now. Technology allows us to survive while blatantly discriminating against males, starting when male physical characteristics assert themselves (might be earlier, if your teachers are exceptionally well indoctrinated.) But it remains unclear how long we can keep civilization and technology going while doing this. Note please that we’re running aground already on a number of areas. And males around 30 and younger are in a world of pain and most of them have been rendered useless.

I realized, recently, while talking to other mothers, that several problems we faced and overcame, sometimes by the skin of out teeth are not abnormal. They are, in fact, how things are these days.

Boys are not only discouraged from excelling. They are discouraged from excelling at anything traditionally male. Because idiot Marxists think that traditional male avocations are “power.” Remember they only think in oppressor and oppressed, and if someone is more represented somewhere, they’re “oppressors.” (Oh, not everything. Traditional dirty, dangerous occupations are not deemed important for women to take over. Rolls eyes. Because most Marxists are upper class and stupid. That’s why.)

And if they manage their way in, they’ll be discriminated against all the way through University (remember, Marxists are classists too) and through the profession itself. Discriminated against in grades (no one wants to discourage female engineers, which means a lot of colleges give the ladies A. But the Ds have to go somewhere, and after all, they don’t need more male engineers.) Discriminated against in hiring. Discriminated against in promotions.

This was already so when I observed my husband’s career, but it didn’t work. I.e. males and females didn’t completely change places. Men still preferred certain occupations. Women still preferred certain occupations. So, it’s been ramped up to completely and totally insane.

Look, to level set: if you have a son, even a relatively high performing one, chances are he’s working under a level of throttling-down. And most boys are checked out. They no longer care. They’ve been told they’re oppressors and evil by reason of being born male from the moment they were conscious of being male. They no longer care. They no longer want to do anything. Burned out before they even start their lives.

And under it, because they’re males, with testosterone, there’s a level of anger that women will never understand, unless they live surrounded by males and really, really work at understanding. This means that this treatment of boys is creating that much ballyhooed “toxic masculinity” which idiots confuse with “being male.”

Yes, some boys are finding their way into professions the feminists have no interest in, and bless Mike Rowe, whatever his issues, for showing the way to a bunch of males.

But that’s not going to solve our problems as a society in general. Because, sure, we need machinists and HVAC technicians. But we also need engineers who are more fascinated with the “thing” that is the main part of their job, than with office politics. We need researchers who will work hard at figuring the problem, and not spend most of their time figuring out on whom to step to get higher. We need doctors who are gruff and not particularly good at “customer service” but view disease as an enemy to be conquered. (I could go for days about medicine. I’m not going to. But part of our favoring women in medical school is that we are importing most of the people involved in actual day to day doctoring — a dirty, unpalatable position educated women tend to disdain — from countries without the same standards of training. This is one of the idiotic consequences of denying biology in favor of bizarre Marxist social engineering. And not that, yes, I have several female doctors among the regulars. Yes, females can be good and passionate doctors. And several of them are. But those who read here are old enough they were admitted on an equal footing with males. No one was trying to make it 80% female, which is what I’m complaining about. That level of discrimination distorts everything down the line.)

We are INTENTIONALLY blocking males from pursuing their interests and talents, while pushing women to pursue what are traditionally male interests and talents.

This extends from professions to modes of behavior. Women are encouraged to join the hook up culture, with no emotional attachments and behave like BAD and IRRESPONSIBLE men of the 50s (or at least the popular image of those. None of us lived them. Wait. Some of you did. But I didn’t. And those who did as adults are, at this point, a minority.)

The only possible conclusion is that our culture has gone insane and thinks that male modes of work, and male modes of social behavior are VASTLY superior to females. And that females would normally behave like males, unless they were prevented. So, women must have been prevented for MILLENNIA. MILLENNIA. And now, we’re taking revenge for all those oppressed women, by making men behave like women and women like men. Ah. See how they like being oppressed!

Stated like this, openly, it sounds completely insane. It’s like these people are bizarrely misogynistic aliens, who never met a human. Which is largely true. They’re Marxists, for whom every human is a widget, interchangeable with every other human.

Sexual characteristics, both physical and mental, are a spectrum. But in aggregate real differences reveal themselves. By and large male work is more “thing” oriented. Female work is more “Person” oriented. And most male occupations are outdoor and dangerous. Most female occupations are indoor and boring. NEITHER IS SUPERIOR TO THE OTHER. BOTH ARE NEEDED FOR CIVILIZATION.

Both are needed for reproduction, too. Pretending otherwise is having some insane — literally — effects.

But at the root of our society are people so insane that saying “Males and females are different” is a bizarrely transgressive statement. (I got hit on this last time I said it. My courage rises with every attempt to depress it. No, it doesn’t mean I’m transphobic. The few people so body-dysphoric that living under the appearance of the other sex helps them are not a problem with this. The idiots trying to make every kid who isn’t a perfect stereotype believe he/she is the other sex are.)

They are trying to make the roosters lay eggs and the hens crow and think they’re building a more equitable society.

This is destroying both boys and girls, but it is killing boys silently.

Again and again, when I talk to mothers of boys, they think their kid is falling individually. “He just doesn’t want to do anything.” “Nothing interests him.”

Those whose parents make them might be working the bare minimum to survive, with a million roommates. Or in very small lodgings. But they’re not going anywhere. Just stitting there, spinning wheels.

Those in the middle class, are often just wasting their lives on games, and other palliatives.

They are not alone. They are not wrong. They didn’t get broken without a reason. This is the state of the puppy that gets beaten for existing, not just for biting or pooping out of place.

Most of them are scared, isolated, and see no way out.

And many of the guys doing better than that are laboring against the same feeling/the same anger, often self directed.

I’m going to ask you, each and everyone of you, to reach out. Reach out to young people. Yes, a lot of them will respond badly. Don’t reach from a position of patronizing. Reach out as a friend and an equal. Be aware of what they’ve been put through. Meet them where they are. Try to help them find a place where they’re happy and productive.

Treat them as individuals, not as oppressor and oppressed. Tell them it’s all right to be themselves even if who they are is “traditional” expression of their sex.

Snatch brands from the fire. We’re not eating the seed corn. We’re burning it.

We’re not just throwing the future away. We’re destroying it.

And we’re doing it to appease the mysoginistic aliens who think biology is optional and male everything is inherently superior and should be done by females.

Western Civ has become a madhouse with borders. It’s time to reach for sanity.

The life you save might be your own.

245 thoughts on “Destroying the Future”

  1. You know… in those groups that practice polygamy, one of the ways you can identify it without direct evidence is that the older males drive out or otherwise destroy the younger males.

    Which puts an even creepier twist to the “70 year old guy, late 20s female” starring roles thing that has been laughed at for most of my life, now.

    It’s not the culture in general, but some of the folks who get into influence? Ooof, yes, same way that the “must do the same stupid stuff I did or get shunned” nonsense in women just happens to destroy the younger competition.

    Of which, as you point out with the “youth culture”/baby boom lump, is more of a population surge culture.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I went to the census data and looked at births. There was a small surge in births, but nothing like the “boom” I’d heard about all my life.

      The Boom was primarily from relocation. Most Americans were still rural in the 1940s. When soldiers returned after WWII they were mustered out in large cities. A great number of them stayed there rather than going back to Hooterville.

      Meanwhile, the economy took off in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and a lot more people moved to more-urban areas to grab one of those relatively high paying jobs.

      So, locally in larger cities, there was a population boom, and then a baby boom. But it came primarily at the expense of the smaller communities, many of which simply vanished. Just because NYC and LA and Chicago saw a “baby boom”, doesn’t mean the rest of the country did.

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      1. ???

        https://www.statista.com/statistics/1037156/crude-birth-rate-us-1800-2020/

        Now, granted, it’s somewhat less impressive just from the number of people not dying (an ongoing “issue”), but you can even look at things like school enrollement.

        My dad IS quite salty that he gets included with the baby boom, though. He was born in 1950, and was in just over half full classrooms because of it.

        The nonsense of rolling the next decade and change into the actual baby boom is pretty nuts though, yes.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I’m quite salty in 62. We had nothing to do with that lot. In the “Summer of Love” I was admittedly writing my first novel. In pencil. On an exercise book…. good Lord. I was five, going on six, people.

          Liked by 1 person

            2. Which tallies with my brother believing he was one of the youngest boomers, in 54. (okay, technically we’re closer to nine years apart, since he was born the earliest possible in the year, and I was born very late in mine.)

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        2. ’64 here, and I have actively argued with people trying to say that I am part of the “boomer” generation.

          No. I am not.

          That’s not to disparage those who are. It is just a simple statement. When I was growing up, the “Baby Boomers” were the group born between 1945 and 1955. Ten years, not twenty. snort (which is why I tend to associate “boomers” with the hippy generation)

          Sorry, I need to lose that soapbox.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Generation Jones. the cohort as those born from 1954 to 1965 in the U.S.,who were children during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation rather than during the 1950s, but slightly before Gen X.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. I refuse to call us that. Call us what my brother called us “Reagan’s kids.”
              Generation Jones presumed we Jonesed for “what the boomers had.”
              Most of us skipped the sit in, cut our hair, got jobs. (Or let our hair grow, if we were girls.)

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  2. A dangerous thing I do is tell fathers of young boys they must teach them to be dangerous. I have made several fathers think. I explain it is power under control, using the lone ranger’s horse, Silver, as an example of power under control.

    I warn people, I will make them think. I am very dangerous, as old wise man.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Kind of like how my Sensei taught several young men to control their anger such that they broke jaws instead of killing people in their teens? Yeah, there are several respectable upstanding men in this valley who would most likely have ended up in jail had he not been teaching karate – and with it, self-control. I strongly believe that boys and young men need a safe outlet for their aggression, and participation in sports or martial arts are great for that. Martial arts are also useful for women, for different reasons.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. A friend and I have always wondered how many young guys in my currently-home town turned into good people because of the long-time martial arts sensei. There are several kinds of martial arts taught here now, but Mr. Kim started in the 1970s and probably shepherded two generations., if not a few more.

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  3. I saw a lot of this ramping up when I did my first trip through college. Lots of “men need to check themselves,” men are “problematic,” and the “potential rapist” posters that showed up on far too many occasions. Second trip wasn’t so bad, but I suspect that was because I was doing evening classes and many of us were more dedicated to getting our s(YAY!)t done than this insanity.

    When I went back last year…it was worse.

    I’m surprised that there are any “hard science” classes at the college I went to. Class ratios went from 1:1.1 male/female to 1:3 male/female. Every female I encountered…okay, lemme explain. Back when I did my first attempt at college, we knew a lot of the girls were there to get their MRS degree-find a guy that was going to Go Somewhere and get hooked up with him ASAP. Either that or use the college as a way to get out of the house while hunting for Mr. Perfect.

    Second attempt, you still had the girls going for the MRS degree, but there were a lot more girls that were working on the slut certification. They’d find someone, get what they wanted, and have him pay for it. All according to plan.

    The last time I was around…there wasn’t even the slut certificate. There was a very uncomfortable aspect that I can only describe as “give me what I want, or else” with a straight-razor placed against your gonads.

    (And I ran into more creepy males than I care to think about. The sort of creepy that you want to check to see if they’re getting kiddy, sorry, “non-adult-person” porn. Including some males that were clearly transitioning or were involved in hard-core chastity play of some sort.)

    I’m not sure what can be done at this point, but to offer the best example possible. That, and endure.

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    1. Orientation the summer before my Freshman year of college (’93) included all males being herded into a room and harangued for an hour about how we were all rapists. (The only possible difference between some of us and others, a difference declared to be utterly insignificant, was that some of us “might” not have committed any rapes “yet.”)

      By rights, I ought to have dropped out that moment. But I was young and stupid then, and thought I could weather the shitstorm.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Never had it THAT bad, but I heard stories of some of the orientations. Including an “unofficial” orientation for women-only on campus that could basically be summed up as “don’t trust any men on campus, they will drug you/rape you/trick you.”

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          2. Wow!

            I was in college Fall ’74 (first time). There had been a rape in the dorms where a co-ed was killed Spring ’74 (the rapist was not a student). The result? I had escorts back to the dorm after my 8 – 10 PM class. Even though at least the first class, it was out of the way for my escorts (the off campus ones started parking near my dorm). Professor absolutely insisted. About passed out when he learned I was only 17 (only for the first 6 weeks of the term). Besides if I had to be afraid of all the males in my study, I would have had a very lonely 4+ years.

            When I went back to school again (’88), I sure was not putting myself on campus at night. Not because of the male students. Hell no. It is not safe at night for anyone walking across campus which is what one has to do if riding the bus or parking a car; you end up walking across campus. (Worse now. Not the students, the homeless.)

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          1. It couldn’t possibly have helped, that’s for sure.

            When we were first dating att college Freeman talked about how men were framed as responsible for all the evil in the world in… ’86 and ’87? It upset him a lot. As it should have done.

            And that was certainly before social media and everything now making it so the message was 24/7. Feminists were already annoying. NOW was a thing, and you’d see Gloria Steinem on the news. It was never only about equal legal rights or being considered for a job. There was always an element of “all good things are feminist” and “all bad things are masculine.” You know, like war.

            And elementary and high school was already, before 1980, changing to try to accommodate female learning styles. I might not have been paying attention or noticed all of the negatives being told about men, but I did notice the beginnings of changes in education and that it was supposed to be “for girls” because everything in school I was good at, they took away, and I was supposed to be thankful for it.

            A whole lot of boys dove into computers, likely to escape.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. U of M is the home of Catherine MacKinnon. She got tenure in 1990. Which explains a lot, too.

              (And yes, viewing educated American females as hostile, likely to interpret everything as rape, and having a system avowedly biased to believe them, was no help at all. It’s amazing I ever dated any American women at all.)

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      2. Yeah, I started college in 1995 and within two years they had something along those lines (as I heard from a male friend of mine, who rightfully objected.)

        Private Catholic school, no less. The rot was there.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. “But I was young and stupid then, and thought I could weather the shitstorm.”

        And you’d been told all your life that we were “a nation of laws” and “innocent until proven guilty” and “due process” and “evidence”.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. We all were. Seriously. VDH has a post on American greatness listing the “unprecedented attack” our institutions are under…. things like Universities.
          And I go “Dude. It was always like that. it was just hidden. They took over almost a hundred years ago. The strife now is us — finally — fighting back. G-d with us, and help the kids. Stop moaning.”

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        2. Oh, they very clearly told us that none of those applied on the campus of University of Michigan. And it was not-quite-said that objecting during the struggle session would cause an expulsion before classes even started.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I took a look at University of Michigan when I was college hunting. I wanted to do aeroplanes and Kelly Johnson came from there.

            But all their engineering department wanted to talk about was diversity, not engineering. Really did get a “your kind isn’t welcome here” vibe and ended up looking elsewhere.

            Liked by 2 people

      4. God what a mess. The Reader is old enough that the Dean of Engineering at Ye Olde Landgrant University gave the freshman engineering class the ‘look to the right and look to the left – only one of you will be here in 4 years lecture’. That was pretty well it for freshman orientation. The Dean was right by the way. Almost exactly one third finished.

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            1. We got the same in the Forestry school. When we got to the junior level degree classes, every single Forestry professor and TA started the class with “Now that we’ve gotten rid of the D and C students, the grading is on a straight curve.” Me? Silently: “Oh, no you didn’t. Some of us were too stubborn to quit!” Also started pulling B’s and A’s. I wasn’t the only one too stubborn to quit.

              Later Computer Science did the same only they handle it differently. Can’t get into the Computer Science school until Junior year and then must have a B+ average across the board. Different levels of B+ average for general, computer science prerequisites, and math. Which means being too stubborn to quit didn’t enter into the calculations. Unless someone like me who came in through a different route (being female wasn’t it, didn’t hurt, probably. Working for a software employer who wanted me to get the CS 4 year degree, plus already having a two year programming degree, a smidge short of a perfect GPA there, and a prior 4 year degree, even with less than stellar GPA, did. By the time it came for the computer science department to cash in on the employer favor, I had more than earned my place, and the employer was gone from town. Fully aware I did not take the “required” route. It’s not like I wanted to go back to college again for the second 4 year degree; at least until I was almost done anyway. If I’d wanted that I’d have done that instead of the 2 year programming degree.)

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              1. At my school, we had an Electrical Engineering Prof who taught EE101, which was the prerequisite for all courses that followed. At the first session, he told the class that he only gave out 3 grades: A, B, and F; because if you could not understand the material on at least an A or B level, you would be lost in the courses that followed. This was in 1962, before everything went totally to S$&#.

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              2. We didn’t get the 1/3rd lecture, but CS 101 (sophomore year) was the weedout course. Most of it was programming in Fortran IV, with the IBM Not-Fortran variant (PL-1?) for the last exercise. All this was on the engineering IBM mainframe and punchcards. I did well, but decidedly not fun. We had a limited amount of time, and in one case I had to use leftover machine time from the earlier (much easier) problem to finish the example. Seems the more difficult problem had an assumption buried in it that took a while to catch on. Arggh. I believe there was an option to buy extra machine time, but it was expensive enough that undergrads usually shied away from such.

                A year or two later, one of the EE courses had us do a computer based calculation. It wasn’t necessarily intended to be a weedout project, but there were a lot of hoops. The computer this was on was a almost-but-not-entirely obsolete mainframe belonging to the EE department. It was odd in a few ways. The tape drives used an old standard size (1″ vs 1/2″), it only spoke Fortran II (F-IV’s brain damaged ancestor. IIRC, it had only one comparison, and they would have gotos for <, =, and > for each compare.) Even more fun was the fact that it needed an older keypunch than the then-ubiquitous 029 keypunch. It needed a 026, of which maybe a half dozen were around the engineering campus. For reasons best known to God and IBM, non-alphanumeric characters were encoded differently between the 026 and 029.

                I finished the project, even though my card deck disappeared briefly near the end. Typed up a fresh copy, only for the original to show when I went to submit. Got extremely annoyed at that. (I might have walled the replacement deck…) I kind of wondered if somebody decided to copy my deck, or if it was just a SNAFU.

                The masters program didn’t have any official weedout courses, though one tough course was required and the text was written by the full professor who taught one section. I drew the other guy. Hearing problems made those years of college a grind, especially in big rooms.

                The MSEE CS course was less nerve-wracking (I programmed at home on a not-quite IBM compatible, circa 1989), even though the only session available taught Pascal, a language I learned to hate quite quickly. (They said they’d teach C, but never had a session for it in the 4 years I was taking classes. Finally got C through a UC-Berkeley extension. Hey! I got an A in C!)

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                1. I had an early CS class that used the teletypes on a (heck if I know what type mainframe), basic language for the Forestry degree (hubby’s class a few years earlier was cards). Mainframe was always going down. I learned to hate, despise, loath, computers. Just the one class then.

                  By the time I was back into full CS classes VS programming classes, I had a solid 2 years of just programming with different languages. Sure we were taught the basic programming design, but not the larger picture. Plus a solid 5 years of tutoring or working. The CS bachelor program I partly skipped the weeding process. Their CS101 was Schema on Apple Macs Lab (mid-80’s). The other part of the weeding process was changing of programming tools for different concept classes without teaching how to use those programming tools, also on Apple Macs. The professors/TAs did not provide anytime to figure out the tools before the first assignment either. Figure it out, or drop out. Other than C++ (new ’89), I don’t remember the tools. For me? By then I already had learned almost a dozen other based language tools (if not Schema). So, changing tools not a problem other than I had to find a copy (“shared”) for Apple IIe (home) or an IBM (what I had at work). Working full time, or even half time, left little room for getting on campus to the computer lab. (graduated ’89).

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                2. Finally got C through a UC-Berkeley extension. Hey! I got an A in C!
                  ………………

                  Never saw C code until my job in ’90, seven months after graduating (son was born a week after my last final, I took some time off). Had seen C++, not that someone can learn all there is to learn about C++ in 3 months. Top level concepts, yes. Well it was a class on the up and coming OOP using C++ more than a C++ class (winter ’89).

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        2. We had 4,000 freshman Engineering students at Virginia Tech in 1980. Five years later, we graduated 1,400 Engineers. 50% loss rate freshman year, another 30% sophomore year.

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          1. School of Journalism offered a degree in, “Technical Communications,” but had no idea what to put in it. So I took classes in magazine layout, editing, photography, PR, law of the press, and news reporting. News Reporting was the cull class: it was taught by a guy who’d written for The Detroit Free Press, and in a class of 40 or 50, 1, maybe 2 people would make an A. Small handful of Bs. The rest were Cs, Ds, Fs, and dropouts.
            I was one of the Cs, and thought I did that well mostly because I had a 98 average in the “theory,” part of the class, taught by a professor. The lab was the killer. Things like, “There’s a story somewhere on campus. Go out and find it.” And write it up in a single lab. Or the puff piece feature, where I accidentally picked a “controversial,” Dean and got quotes from professors like, “I’m not talking to you. That man has spies everywhere.” The instructor actually apologized to me for that one but I still got a C-minus.
            After I graduated I ran into him on a trip back to campus. To my surprise he told me he remembered me, and that he believed I could make a competent reporter…because his C stood for, “basic competence.”

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          2. At RPI, the other majors were what you took when you realized you couldn’t hack engineering.

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        3. I heard that one too… Nice to know that a professor who doesn’t understand distributions in statistics, has no respect for his students, and can only manage to succeed in teaching a third of them has job security and can count on contnued employment. I guess 33% is a passing grade for teachers but not students. Maybe it’s like baseball where a .333 batting average makes you a great player.
          The marine corps washes out fewer recruits than STEM subject programs do — why? Because they are in the business of making Marines, not feeding their own egos.

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          1. These days, too they preferentially graduate girls. At least in some schools. If they can’t graduate girls, they don’t graduate boys either.
            ME graduation rates, 7? years ago was 40 in the whole country. FORTY.

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          2. At Ye Olde Landgrant University long ago in a galaxy far far away, very strong admissions preference was given to instate students (the Reader was out of state – getting in was much harder). The Reader’s observation was that many of the instate students that started in engineering were ill prepared or ill suited for the engineering curriculum. The Reader doesn’t have statistics for the class, but observed that all of the top 10 in the Reader’s graduating EE class were out of state students. Many of the students that washed out of engineering did graduate from other programs.

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      6. Did you go to MIT?

        That was the year MIT went full into All Men Are Rapists mode. It was, incidentally, the year that the Dean in charge of all the sexual harassment cases was found to be stalking his ex (who was married to someone else while they’d had their affair.)

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Nope, UMich, as I mention elsewhere in the thread. I may be a pretty smart guy, but MIT was never a possibility for me. :)

          Glad to know the looniness was as national as it felt, given that was also the year of Antioch’s idiotic “explicitly ask permission at every step of the date, or you’re a rapist” brou-ha-ha.

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    2. When I went through starting in 1979 at an engineering school that was NOT an issue. Ratio of male to female was 7-1 at the school I went to. It had only been admitting women for 7 years. Freshman failure rate was on the order of 25%. There was a gentle talk to the young ladies to NOT travel alone to the Fraternity parties (wife was class of ’80), nor to go in certain directions away from campus (couple guys I knew could have used that warning there were some rough sections in Worcester MA in the late seventies and some were 4-5 blocks away from campus). Honestly some of the fraternity brothers at one or two of the fraternities had nasty reputations.

      Younger daughter attended same school starting in 2014. Ratio was now 3-1 Men to women. Some of the young men seemed fine others were very odd (even for engineers and that’s saying something). Certain Majors (Computer Science) were some of the worst likely because instead of being forced to be communal to get terminals and card punches they could do everything on their laptops. There were notoriously hermits leaving rooms only for food and classes. I think most of the pure engineering schools were last to start going woke but even they’re far into the DEI world as of 10 years ago. Part of the slow uptake was that the Humanities folks at an engineering school are support types they’re there to crank out engineers so the engineering professors ignored or ridiculed them. Thing is that the engineering PhD’s have been getting the same indoctrination as the Humanities folks at the big Universities for the last 20-30 years so that has slowly been creeping into the Engineering only schools via that route.

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      1. My school had only two “fraternities” (they actually had quite a few, but those were all academic/achievement instead of social, and the latter is what people think of with the word “fraternity/sorority”.) They were sophomore year only, Knights and Setons, and the Knights had a safety escort service. “Need to get home? Call a Knight.”

        I never did, but I was in college, therefore Immortal. (Also on the taller side and in winter clothes, indistinguishable from male. With a stalk.)

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        1. I was in college, therefore Immortal.
          …………………….

          Same. See prior comment at starting college at 17. (My birthday is in October. October 31 was the cutoff date when I started first grade.)

          Also on the taller side and in winter clothes, indistinguishable from male.
          ……………….

          I so am not. Not at 5’4″. Back then I only weighed 130#s. Even bundled in winter clothing (which I did do after we started work, especially night in December on the shipping *docks). Very clearly small and vulnerable. Might not have presented as female because everything hidden in the bundle. Could not disguise my lack of height. The guys I worked with were great. After all I could have been their spouse (since hubby did the same job), sister, or daughter.

          Also showed working in the woods. Everyone taller stepped over stuff I had to parkour or go around.

          (*) Pulling barcode tickets off of export logs just before loaded onto ships.

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          1. You want to know the fun part? I did a lot of walking home at night from my first post-college job right through a corridor where a serial killer was working. (I wasn’t his target demographic, but oh, the stupid things we did when we were young. Even though I didn’t particularly have an alternative.)

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            1. the stupid things we did when we were young. Even though I didn’t particularly have an alternative.
              ………………….

              For sure. Look back. “Why am I even alive?” Seriously. One thing that sticks out, not school related, but ’76 crew. One of the crew members started hanging out around me. Fine. Not like I had a lot of friends in the area, just co-workers. Should have listened to my German Shepard. She about took his head off one day (he did walk into the tiny bungalow my roommate and I shared, uninvited). I caught her in time and shouted “Get! Out! Now!” (Should have told one of the crew supervisors, but was more afraid of how they’d take the German Shepard’s reaction than his. Because German Shepard. Ain’t 20/20 hindsight grand?) Less than a month latter he came by and asked me to take time off to go with home with him because his dad had had a major heart attack. I said not only “No.” but “Not happening, No.” Next thing I know I’m getting a call from his mother asking why I told him his dad was having a heart attack, and why did I convince him to buy a brand new 4×4 truck he couldn’t afford. Me “What the hell?” Any bets if I’d had gone with him, either I or the dog would have made it “home”? He had most the rest of the rest of the crew, including supervisors, fooled too. At least I wasn’t “too stupid”. (To be clear, about two years later, I did take time off to help a friend bury his dog at his parents place. 1) Had known him for 4 years by then through school, not the district. Not the reason I changed districts that was head hunting by a classmate. Didn’t hurt. 2) We’d been dating for about 4 months. 3) Been married to him now for 45 years come December.)

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            2. I was stopped 4 or 5 times as a suspected serial rapist. Two of them were most unpleasant (3 stops in one day, within a few miles no less.) First cop was just an insulting asshole, with a bug crawling in and out of his mouth. Last one, had me handcuffed and bent over the hood waiting for backup, and first back-up (my second stopper of the day) “enlightened” the jackboot, so I got the cuffs off, a totally disingenuous “sorry” from Jackboot, and several heartfelt “Sorry” from the 2nd stopper who also thanked me for help snagging some burglars, his then primary call, but I sorta fit the rapist . . . tall thin white guy with thick curly hair, riding a “10 Speed”. I was already thinning, fine straight hair, was on a BMX bike and was 5’7″ 170. As soon as I doffed my cap “Oh, sorry, but I am also looking for someone with a black shirt, yellow writing” (I had a yellow shirt with a silk-screened Black bike shop logo panel and writing) “If he’s carrying a boom-box, he walked down Berwick” he had called it in before handing my ID back and another deputy found him still standing in the street with the stolen goods on him.

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          2. “My birthday is in October. October 31 was the cutoff date when I started first grade.”

            I’m the opposite. Cut off was 31, Oct. My birthday is early November. I was, quite literally, days too young. So I was one of the oldest in my class. I learned by the 3rd grade to spell that out to anyone who questioned.

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            1. Two of my sisters girls. By the time our kids were in school the cutoff date was Sept 1. Not 5 by the Sept 1, don’t get to start kindergarten. No *exceptions. Two of hers are Sept 6 and Sept 10. Now nephew, youngest sister’s youngest, they held him back (August birthday). Given that at age 5 he pasted for 7 or 8. He is the toddler acting like a toddler that people scorned to his parents he needed to act his age. Imagine the surprise they got. He is quite a bit younger than his two older sisters. So, not two people stating emphatically “He is! He’s 2!” but four rounding on them, in chorus, more often than not (I think they practiced).

              (*) Neighbor had a 5 year old already doing 1st grade work, let alone kindergarten. They wanted to put her in 1st grade. District emphatically no. Later, the school district wanted to jump her two grades. Parents came back emphatically “no”. Already established connections with her grade peers. Deal with the situation you made. Don’t know how it turned out as he was transferred out of the area. Suspect wherever they landed she got enrolled where she needed to be.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. My mom’s favorite niece had the same problem. She’s a gorgeous Valkyrie now– who could pass as two or three years older when she was tiny and adorable.

                Had a cousin a year and change older than her who was the opposite, could pass as two years younger than his real age, easily.

                Much outrage was generated by her acting amazingly mature for her age, while he was being an indulged little brat.

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            2. I have two cousins my age. One birthday September, the other December. September was held back a year after 1st grade (class of ’75 instead of ’74). December birthday graduated a year early (class of ’74 with me). We weren’t at the same school or even school districts. Then there were my classmates that were not quite Irish Twins. One born November ’55, the other born October ’56, started first grade together in ’61.

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        2. The Greek Scene (and it was ONLY fraternities at that time, there was one nascent sorority) was critical to upper class housing providing like 1/3 of the upper class housing. There was one service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega. By 2014 there were 13 Fraternities, 3 Sororities (2 with houses, but the greek houses now provided less than 20% of housing). APO the service fraternity was still around and was Co-ed (I think it was in 1979 being national and not unique to my Alma Mater). Younger Daughter was a member and got some excellent friends of both sexes through that.

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  4. “We’ve swung from a youth culture, of assuming children were always right, to a culture of assuming anyone younger than, well a little older than me, are mentally slow, stupid and lazy.”

    TELL me about it. I’m the youngest of four. I was the only one born after 1965. My older siblings–yeesh.

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      1. That makes sense; because that age cohort has a very strong preference for its own “in-group”, I should not find it surprising that the phenomenon applies within it as well. Denigrating those who came after them, as well as those who came before, is a logical extension of the behavior.

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          1. I’ve seen a few charts that dragged Gen X into the Boomers until 1973. Yes, Gen X started in 1974, according to one article I read.

            Um, no, 1973 [my year] was NOT the same as 1945-60!

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              1. The Reader notes that some of the ‘they’ are present. The Reader’s 70th birthday is Saturday. And he has no expectation of being young forever. The last 10 years have made that clear. OTOH, the Reader never did fit in with his peers.

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                    1. I know ex-hippies who are fine. They were the “leave me alone” party.
                      It’s the media people….. Oh and education and….. the usual.
                      Not all, even there. I mean, not even there. But a significant number.

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                    1. I know former hippies who are fine, granola isn’t evil; I know hippies of various ages who are still practicing and thus really not fine.
                      (Pretty sure a lot of the nasty got pushed by the USSR, it has that philosophical flavor.)

                      Liked by 1 person

                2. The “they” that are present are not the ones massaging the boomer image in the media and influencing the weak minded, sir.
                  I know a lot of my readers are boomers. But they’re not entertainment boomers.
                  …. and btw education boomers are possibly worse.

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                  1. Born in 1952, so I’m a boomer by age. Beyond that, not really. Yeah, I was able to ride the real estate booms and managed to go from a $1500 investment in my first townhouse to owning our current place outright, but that did take a fair number of years. And a lot of work. Remodeled two houses that I lived in, and am working on the current one. Pass the ibuprofen, please.

                    Certain people (looks at Blogger Who Shall Remain Unnamed) rail at boomers not passing their wealth onto their kids. I have nieces and nephews, no children of my own. I get to pick who inherits. Deal.

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                    1. You got some advantages. Having done the same thing you did, house still not fully paid off (but …. other decisions made and have kids.)
                      The “pass us your wealth” is profoundly unlovely. Fortunately neither of our kids demands that. Or hints at it. In fact, we have trouble getting them to ACCEPT gifts.

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                    2. I have no family, so my will leaves everything to a friend of mine. Either he or one of his stepsons are listed as executor. I would love to leave everything to family, but I haven’t been allowed to have one.

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          2. We’re the Baby Buster decade group. As opposed to the Brat Boomers. And the chief attribute of the Busters is that we got stuck with the bills and the mess the Brats made.

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  5. The Reader sees K-12 education being replaced by homeschooling / pods / private schools. This will address a lot of the twisting of boys into unnatural mental shapes. (It will also bring some other benefits, including the defunding of a source of leftist resources, namely the teacher’s unions.) What to do for higher education in professions like engineering is a larger challenge. If things get bad enough, companies needing engineers may have to build their own apprentice and training programs but that will leave the profession at the mercy of the corporations in a way it never has been. The professional engineering societies such as the IEEE have swallowed the woke koolaid and will not be any help. The Reader thinks that engineering as a profession will be one of the last things to recover from the oncoming unpleasantness and we will all be poorer for it.

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    1. “a source of leftist resources”

      Be careful with this one, A lot of private schools pull from the same teacher pool (prior experience and colleges) as the public schools do. In addition, they certify through accreditation bodies which are subject to left capture, and that doesn’t even consider that they are under a number of legal requirements. Caveat emptor.

      Liked by 2 people

      3. Yep. We sent Nublet to a charter school for a few years. It ended up being not that much different than a regular public school, except less violence. That, and a reputation in the local therapist community for literally causing students PTSD. At least, those who didn’t fit into their very narrow definition of the perfect college-bound student.

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    2. The homeschoolers are hitting this hard. They have no clue why their bright, inquisitive boys suddenly don’t want to do anything. Yeah, it will change but not early.
      Before they build programs, I’m afraid they’ll import from the third world, like medicine does.

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      2. Not sure I parsed your comment right.

        The homeschooling parents I know fully understand what is going on with their boys — the boys see an uncertain future dissolving into sand as fast as they reach for it, the teen boys are denied work opportunities at places that swear they’re desperate to hire, the forward motivation that naturally came from the men in the community–adults at church or Rotary or Elks or Vets or Scouts–are gone as those men are gone from those social outlets.

        The homeschooling parents are building over under around the “programs” that exist, which are now absolutely artahed against them, to find mentorship and peers and direction for their sons.

        And it’s now that boys are second class citizens by kindergarten. Make no mistake, every boy in traditional school by age 7 is medicated, usually on 2-4 prescriptions. This is the biggest separation between homeschooling parents and traditional schooling parents. If you want your kid allowed to grow without pharma intervention, you must leave the school system.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. I will tell you something.

            High school here in the lovely Southern Ontario town of Cayuga has largely been shielded from the worst excesses that one sees in the Toronto school board. It’s a farming town. The kids pretty well know what’s up by the time they pass Grade 8 and get to high school. Plus a lot of people still go to church, so there’s a concrete post that the CRT steamroller can’t get past.

            However. Things have gotten interesting in the last five years.

            In addition to the bloody foolishness perpetrated against the boys from kindergarten onward (home school your small children, my friends) we now have new and exciting stupidity perpetrated against the -girls-.

            Now they’re all gay/trans/bi/nonconforming. Suddenly the female half of the school is gender-confused. By design. But there is one thing they’re not confused about, they all hate the boys. Boys are scum. Girls are where it’s at.

            The male half of the school has reacted… badly. They are rebelling -hard- in all the ways that boys always do. Lots and lots of fights, constant uncouth behavior towards the girls and the teachers, the works. It’s a friggin’ zoo.

            And to repeat, this is a -rural- school in a -conservative- backwater town.

            So if you think you’re sending your kid to get a diploma these days, dream on. Your kid is getting his or her ass kicked every day. From the teachers -and- from the other kids. This is not like it was when we were kids. (I was a kid in the 1960s, they’re doing sh1t in school now that would have gotten you a life term in jail when I was a kid.)

            If you want to have even halfway functional 20 year old kids, keep them out of the public schools. And as someone else noted, private schools will be worse for indoctrination in some cases, so you must be cautious.

            Liked by 2 people

    3. I was an engineer (retired early in ’01 during the Dot-com bust) and have some relatives who are/were engineers or industrial science types. SIL and BIL were working for a smallish company that got acquired by Huge Industrial Outfit. SIL quit due to management’s attitude. BIL went to a startup, but elected for early retirement after a couple of years. (Part of it was site inspections for the equipment, located in places that could trigger a phobia or three. I know of at least two that hit him.)

      Niece got an ME and was working for Large Building Materials outfit, but TPTB decided she had to travel as part of the job. Destinations included one place that used to be acceptable, but now ranks high on the “I want to leave. Now!” scale. She’s decided that raising children is a far more productive effort. (Hell yes!)

      Nephew-in-law is a chemist for Another Large Company, but after his manager committed suicide (red flag, right there), his bosses decided that a) he had to do some things that would take considerably longer than an 8 hour shift, and b) he still had to show up at the normal starting time. Word is that the 19 hour day with a demand to show up “On Time, or Else” was the killer. (Comp time? Surely you jest.) He’s still working for that company, but the management at the new plant has a better connection to reality.

      TL;DR: If the companies keep treating employees like crap, they’ll crap out.

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      1. Not just big corporations. Local family owned cabinet building company keeps losing supervisors and managers. Supervisors because crews are under staffed, and guess who get blamed if production isn’t met, production is based off of a full crew. At least supervisors are still on the hourly not exempt pay structure. Managers aren’t, and they get secondary blame for shift that doesn’t meet production requirements, when shift is short staff. As far as pay structure. While managers get a bigger percentage of any bonuses than supervisors, supervisor can make more money if overtime happens. If working 6, 10 hour days/week, week after week, supervisors made more money. (Son was one of the supervisors they lost. There were at least 4 managers after he made supervisor. Was approached to apply for manager, after last manager left Unfortunately for company he can do math. Then he was head hunted away to where he is now. Makes more per hour, but less per month, no overtime. Current company believes in work to live, not live to work.)

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        1. Our favorite cabinet maker didn’t survive Covidiocy (not sure if it was the virus or the vax; he had to do work for the state, so likely had to get the shots), but his company was bought by a local contractor who seems to have a good reputation.

          So far, the new owners decided to keep B’s name on the shop, and I’m hoping that’s a good sign. We’re going to be in the market for another cabinet in a year or so. I can build cabinets; I don’t like to build them and don’t have all the cool equipment to do what $SPOUSE wants.

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          1. 34 years ago the same cabinet company son used to work for made cabinets for residential, both developers, and custom replacements. Our cabinets replaced in ’90, were done by them. Somewhere between then and when son went to work for them (’14) they stop doing the latter.

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    4. Or people like my engineering student brother will give other engineers hands-on experience covertly, as he does in my dad’s garage/welding shop in all his spare time (ha!), and they’ll build things despite the corporations. Things like his homebrew jet engine, or the truly impressive trebuchet his team won the local pumpkin toss with last year, or the dune buggy he welded up for the university team, or the targeted sprinkler system to deter deer (or HOA presidents) – that last one requiring coding skills as well. Those like my brother aren’t deterred by wokeness. They’ll build up, over, and around.
      Said brother interned at Autoliv a few summers back, and impressed several of the mentors because he knew his stuff, unlike most of the others from his school, because my dad – shop foreman, machinist, and welder for 45 years – had taught him practical engineering as well as the conceptual stuff they teach him in school. He’s passing on his knowledge to others in his cohort. Those who want to learn will find a way.

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      1. Hey all you Lefty feminists out there. Somebody show me the great mass of young girls building a jet engine in Dad’s garage for a laugh. Or a trebuchet. Or a dune buggy. Or a robot. Or even working on their own car.

        It doesn’t exist. The girl making a jet engine for a laugh is a UNICORN. There might be five in the entire USA.

        Every high school in the country has groups of boys making some kind of crazy thing because they want to. In fact you can’t stop them from making it, they’ll go behind your back and do it secretly.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. This!!!! Oldest son and his friends were buildingrocket launchers as sophomores on weekends.

          I am a hs science teacher and is so bad. I now see myself as a secret agent. I subvert the crazy in little ways every chance I get. Most of the other teachers lap up the woke and regurgitate it, but I do everything I can to teach in a classical manner and engage both girls AND boys. I also love teaching reproduction as I teach FACTS, and by that time most of all the girls IDing as boys respect me so much that they don’t make a peep. It can be done in a way that teaches truth while offering kindness to those with true dysphoria.

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  6. I’ve told the boys (homeschooling, thank God for the privilege),”Boy brain” is real, and it’s ok – God made them that way. Without the self-loathing they’ll do much better than most. I wonder about their little friends in private schools, how they’ll turn out.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. I can’t phrase it quite like that, but when boys in my classes act like boys, I try not to thump them unless it is causing problems. And I remind myself that boys are not girls, especially at age 12-14. Things seem to settle down a little around 14.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. My son is in a BSA scout troop. My daughter is in a different BSA scout troop. They are totally different groups. (And there’s a reason they are in separate troops, and my daughter’s troop, at least, intends to keep it that way. Some people want that option, even if it’s only so that the kids aren’t poking at each other.)

        Honestly, watching the boys, they’re all right. As long as you have proper adult leadership (which consists of training them and then leaving them alone, just light watching to make sure they don’t set the forest on fire), it’s great.

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        1. my daughter’s troop, at least, intends to keep it that way.
          ………………

          I thought separate troops was the only option. I know Venturing can go co-ed units. But not the new scouting troop rules. (Cubs is “co-ed” but the dens have to be separate into boy dens and girl dens.)

          While we are out of scouting, and were well before the change (my attitude is “it was 60 years too late”, for me, dang it). The joke in our troop was the boys asking how the male scouters knew what the male scouts were going to get up to (given a smidgen of a free second or two, which is the trick, no free second) before the male scouts did. Answer: The male scouters were once 11 – 18 year old male scouts. (There is a reason why hubby and the scoutmaster of the troop were not allowed to tell tales from their scouting days (or a least had to be vetted first.)

          I am sure you and your co-scout female leaders have the same advantage over the female scouts. You were once 11 – 18 year old females, GSA scouts (if not BSA scouts). Motherhood helps at the cub level. But less at the scout level. Those of you who have brothers might have some extra advantage. That I wouldn’t know, don’t have any brothers.

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          1. I thought separate troops was the only option. I know Venturing can go co-ed units. But not the new scouting troop rules. (Cubs is “co-ed” but the dens have to be separate into boy dens and girl dens.)

            They’ve just allowed co-ed dens for Cubs, because it isn’t going to matter at that age (and from a numbers perspective, most packs were doing that anyway. Recruitment has been difficult after the pandemic shutdowns.)

            And while girl and boy troops are supposed to be separate, linked troops (same charter, same meeting time and location, separate leadership chains and financials) often function as a single troop, particularly with the large established troops. It wouldn’t surprise me if they allow fully-blended troops within the next five years, so as to align with the rest of the world in Scouting.

            But I agree with the guy who had a linked troop and who had worked in Venturing since the 70s. Scouting is a leadership program (as opposed to Venturing), and the problem with that particular age bracket is that the girls take a leadership position and do a streamlined job of it, and as he said, “then the boys don’t have chances to be leaders and screw it up.”

            They need to have a chance to screw it up. it’s important, because that’s the best learning process.

            Not to mention that there are people who want a separate troop for their daughters for whatever reason. We haven’t had a trauma case yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we get one in the future. And to be honest, they want to do different things.

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            1. GS troops partnering with BSA troops isn’t new. Was happening in the ’60s. The one time I went snow camping, ’69, was through such a partnering. (Just couldn’t earn Eagle.) Didn’t work for the high adventure camps like Philomont. But everything else. 100%

              (Seriously. I did not go snow camping with son’s troop. The one type of campout I did not go on. If the troop had needed me, then I’d had sucked it up and gone. But wasn’t. There were other campouts and *backpacking hubby couldn’t go on and I did instead. Otherwise we generally both went.)

              (*) Backpacking has a body count limit. $100/person fine over that limit. Now that there is a pre permit application with cost and per-person cost. Depending on the wilderness area involved there is a 6 or a 12 person limit. The new permit process is recent new.

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              1. Actually, at this point GS troops partnering with BSA troops would be new, because the leadership of the GSUSA are very anti-BSA at this point. When they decided to make Scouting open to girls, they had first reached out to the GSUSA, who reacted with revulsion, and then when they opened the program, the Girl Scouts said they were “poaching.”

                Very different programs now, far more than when I was a kid, and very different from when they started and Lord Baden-Powell couldn’t get people to understand that girls could benefit from scouting, so he encouraged women to make parallel programs.

                Anyway. You want to know the obnoxious thing? You can’t have two BSA troops at the same campsite without it being a district event, with all attendant paperwork. (At least, not unless they’re linked troops or otherwise through the same chartering organization.) So when a local troop offered to have us along on a campout (they have a girl’s troop too), we had to decline.

                (Mind you, there are ways, but I’m not going to spell them out lest the paperwork people find out and specifically target them.)

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                1. Very different programs now, far more than when I was a kid, and very different from when they started
                  ………………

                  Not the specifics. But, yes, I knew that.

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          2. Projecting like 96FPS 70mm IMax, and pathological liars. Oh and rather unself-aware, but not about criminal whitehouses in particular.

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      1. Not if it is Trump they are after. There are no statute of limitations for crimes against Trump committed fictional crimes.

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  8. Sarah, I know for certain that you’re wrong about one thing. The “treating boys as defective girls” doesn’t start around age 12 — it starts in kindergarten. I saw it clearly in my son’s elementary school. In one case I witnessed a boy (not mine) get punished for doing something while a girl doing exactly the same thing was gently reprimanded.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. It can be horrendously uneven within a gender, too. I know a kid who got his head bounced off the concrete a couple of times this spring—he had a concussion so bad that he spent four months in physical therapy, and the perpetrators (male) were unpunished, because they weren’t being supervised, despite the knowledge that these kids were, ahem, “physical.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. That just means that the teachers are afraid they’ll get their heads bounced off the concrete a few times if they do anything about them.

        They are not as strong as teenage boys and they know it, which means any boy they can’t cow through social pressure or call the cops on, they just avoid.

        Which also teaches boys that violence is the most effective path, so, fun times ahead for everyone, I expect.

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        1. Look at teachers in your grandparents time. They were mostly male. Today, male teachers are often looked at with suspicion, as if they are predators. Given the amount of statutory rape that female teachers commit, that’s a bad way to look at things, but women can get away with far more than men can and even when they get caught are punished much less severely.

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          1. Small issue, a lot of the teachers got there because they were dodging the wars. Being in college to be a teacher was an option to avoid the draft, and not even a sneaky one– half of my mom’s male teachers weren’t even shy about how they’d gone into teaching ONLY because they didn’t want to fight, and they hated the job. That’s besides the known tactic for marxist activists to get into teaching for access to new victims.

            Careful when you look at stats, too, they frequently forget to look at school houses for their numbers, instead looking at advanced education only– you might have luck looking to see if someone has scanned census records?

            Liked by 1 person

          2. I have little recollection of K-2 teachers in the late ’50s, but for grades 3-6, I had one male. (Later on, he ran off with another man’s wife, so not a shining example of moral rectitude.) FWIW, Miss G, the third grade teacher in 1960 probably hired on during the Depression or so. I gather that women teachers in that era were expected to leave when they got married.

            The balanced changed in Junior High and HS, with the women usually carrying the English classes, and with some exceptions, social studies. (JHS lumped civics and history together. Mr S was pretty cool, too.)

            Post HS, with a couple of exceptions, it was all male instructors, though I was EE. The full prof for Chem 102 was a woman, as was the TA for the freshman Rhetoric course. The required soft sciences, all men. (Circa 1970-74). Grad school, all male instructors, though with more women students then (1987-91) compared to the ’70s.

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        2. Self corrects– at great cost– if they don’t stick to well policed areas of liberal controlled cities.

          There are a lot of news stories that can be summarized as “guy who was protected by school from all repercussions for physical assault pulled the thing he’d always gotten away with before in an area where the victim was allowed to fight back.”

          [insert Kenosha clip here]
          [would insert clip of similar riots in small towns but, somehow, they kept driving when they saw the victims were armed]

          The worst bully in my grade school– he was a repeatedly held back middle schooler assaulting gradeschoolers, for an idea of how bad– made it three or four years before he got killed, although he was actually trying to do something useful with his life, he was working as a bouncer.

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          1. Yes, the St. George Floyd Mostly Peaceful Protest in Flyover Falls was quite peaceful when the BLM crowd came to town and were greated by an abundance of people with scary black rifles.

            Liked by 1 person

        4. Grade school. Fifth grade, specifically.

          I’m pretty sure I know the kid at sight from the descriptions, and we’re talking typical 11-year-old-hasn’t-hit-the-growth-spurt size.

          IOW, fear is no excuse. Just dodging of responsibility. Needless to say, concussed kid’s mom, a friend of mine, is livid about the incident and the lack of communication from the school. As in, they didn’t contact her to say he’d been injured. Or anything. She just got to find out when she picked him up at the end of the day.

          Oh yeah, this is my youngest’s school. Which has been great for my kids. But apparently there are a few holes…

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            1. Partly because your “Third graders” may be two years behind third grade. My mom taught 4th graders who were mature enough that one or more between the two sections had “sprouted” and could get pregnant. And this was in the 80s and 90s.

              The other “secret” is that if they can be held back at all, they are only held back once per grade as a policy.

              Finally, this isn’t just a “boy” thing any more. Female students attacking other students is on the rise.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. They weren’t, but the whole situation was rather messy all around.

                I suspect it was more a case of children doing what they see other people do, and their home situation was not good.

                I’m sure someone with moral courage could have stood up to the kid, but it would not have been cost free. And I doubt there was anyone involved on the school districts part who had any drop of moral backbone at all.

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              2. THIS!!! Elder daughter teaches 8Th grade math in a school that is a mix of low income and wealthier students (It’s a university town north of Boston). She will try to verbally intervene in Boy on Boy if she knows one or both of the participants and usually like 75-80% of the time the boys stop for her. The girls on the other hand she won’t even approach, that’s a call the principal and/or the security guard (essentially an embedded police officer) situation, once started that stuff doesn’t stop and they fight very dirty (nails, biting, bashing heads against floor). And it is NOT always the poorer girls starting it, it is clear dominance stuff.

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              3. The school younger son attended was known for knife fights in the hallways. Between females.
                (He was in an advanced program that was almost entirely separate, so he only saw/heard of it.)

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    3. That’s usually “just” the teacher liking one more.

      Slightly different problem of failure to do the job they’re paid for.

      <= got classified as illiterate basically because of this same effect; amazingly, screaming in the kid’s ear doesn’t improve matters, especially when they already don’t like having someone standing behind them and breathing in their face.

      Take a wild guess what happened when I was put in special education and the teacher acted like a professional instead of a psychopath….

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      1. (Subject came up because they had one or two vets who’d become teachers– guys with an actual vocation. Guuuueesssssss how that went over with the guys who stayed in college so they didn’t have to fight.)

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  9. I remember reading about the Kzinti cat like warriors and how the female was “dumb” and was just around for procreation and taking care of babies. There was a story about a smart female and what she had to do to hide it to avoid upsetting the social structure and getting herself killed. I will have to dig around and see if I can find the story again.

    The line in a song: “…Anything you can do, I can do better!” From the 1946 Broadway show Annie Get Your Gun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0) is also something that this brings to mind.

    For a very brief time I was a school teacher in the early 80’s and saw then that the boys were being treated as ‘slow’ and the girls were automatically ‘better’ in all things from social to academic. The football team captain had to have the smart cheerleader girlfriend or he wouldn’t be able to be effective and do well. The issue today is much more intense and has been warped into an insane viewpoint on how people (boys and girls) actually work. Also, in the last few decades there has been the takeover of a lot of school boards and administrative posts by women who believe in the nonsense and/or men who bend over backwards to honor this nonsense. It is slowly being addressed here and there but I fear it’s to little to late – thus it is up to society members (us folks…) to work on fixing the problems. Eh, then again, I’m just an old, white, toxic traditional male.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I believe you’re referring to “Cathouse”, by Dean Ing, expanded/combined from a pair of novellas that were in the first two Man-Kzin Wars anthologies into a novel. Captured human gets left on a “zoo” world, which had several ‘rrets from before the “breed them dumb” campaign really got started in earnest.

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    2. Female Kzinti are not ‘dumb’, they are nonsentient. About the intelligence of a Terran cow. Which is why the Kzin males were so freaked out when they encountered human females flying combat spacecraft and toting guns. “Are those monkeys totally insane? Teaching females to kill?”

      “Uhhh, we didn’t have to teach ’em, bub.”

      Even after they got it through their fluffy heads that human females could be dangerous, they still underestimated them most of the time.
      ———————————
      Mollari: “Do you know what the last Xon said, just before he died? AAAGHKK!”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Also (warning!!! potential spoiler for Ringworld Engineer’s and later) the Ringworld’s copy of Kzin has fully sentient females, Something Chmee (the kzin formerly known as Speaker To Animals) finds interesting.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Maybe those are the original Tnuctip? Or at least, a different line of descent from them.

          Because I remember something Larry Niven wrote about Greenberg, the human telepath with Kzanol’s memories, seeing a Kzin and calling him a Tnuctip.
          ———————————
          He’d lain in stasis while oceans of food yeast mutated and went bad and mutated again, until now it walked on two legs like a Thrint. A billion years wouldn’t be enough. Two billion might.

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          1. There are now later books beyond what I read (I had stopped at Ringworld Thrones) such as Fleet of Worlds. And there is of course the 1977 essay “Down In Flames” which was to tie up ALL of known space (https://larryniven.net/stories/downinflames.shtml) this (now clearly alternate history) does have Kzin as the descendants of the actual ancient evil Empire the Tnuctipin. Some of the ideas of that essay/bull session were embodied in Ringworld Engineers and later. It is possible that Niven wants the Kzin descended from Tnuctip. However in the story “The Soft Weapon” the Slaver (actually Tnuctip) weapon does not accept Chuft-Captain or his crew as Tnuctip so they have certainly diverged. Also the ringworld seemed to have copies of other species worlds (Bandersnatch, Kdatlyno, perhaps even the Trinocs?) and we do find items from those species (There’s mention of a bandersnatch skeleton being in the floating house they find). Sounds like I need to go back and revisit Known Space as I suspect the Fleet of Worlds (with (spoiler) the Puppeteer worlds flying by the Ringworld) may ultimately resolve this.

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  10. I don’t want to smother the kids by helicopter parenting, but it sure seems like the only boys that have any success are the ones whose moms do.

    Eh. Gonna tell them to go weedwhack the range.

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    1. In the 1980-1990 range (we had 5 boys in school then), one of the Texas legislators could already see were things were going with the schools, exactly as Sarah described, and suggested that the school system institute “middle school on the range or farm” for boys whose parents approved the “diversionary curriculum” (and any girls interested), teaching enough traditional subjects along the way so they could be re-integrated into the high school system after their pubescent hormones were “tamed” by training them how to be “dangerous,” as Presbypoet explained.

      We were all for it (my grandads were farmers and ranchers, and so was most of our local community), but he got shot down in the press & by educators and the proposal died.
      Would have done wonders for the guys growing up, although ours did fairly well in the local schools anyway.

      (With the caveat of substantial safeguards against the type of physical and emotional abuse we associate with boarding schools, orphanages, and other institutions lacking sufficient oversight of the staff and boys.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. That was when the PTB (aka unions) started the push to require all teachers to pass X classes or lose their jobs, then have at least a BA and education hours to teach, then have … It cost the state a lot of shop and vo-tech teachers. Then the “all go to college – we don’t need no vo-tech” fad hit.

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        1. I suspect that was the whole idea.

          Back in 1992, there was a keruffle in Texas. A school had hired a retired Engineer to teach science classes. The school district was pleased to have someone who knew the material, the students were happy to have someone who understood what it was all FOR, and the parents were delighted that their kids were learning.

          The union went ballistic. Because this was THE threat to their grift – people who actually knew what they were doing, people who taught as a capstone to a successful career.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Yep. Do NOT ask a family member about teachers’ unions. A thriving volunteer literacy group was torpedoed when a union rep threatened the principal because of “non-certified tutors.” The program was disbanded an hour later.

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    3. I have three sons. Give them responsibility. They like to build and fix things. Get them a broken go kart and have them fix it. Build a shed together. Give them loads of physical work they can visibly see. Even very cerebral boys benefit from this. Sense of accomplishment and purpose.

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      1. Yup. That’s the secret. Boys are makers. Building cool stuff is deeply satisfying.

        How many girls build model kits? Cars, airplanes, ships, rockets, and now giant robots, I’d bet those are 99% built by boys. None of my (girl) cousins were ever interested in models.

        How many girls got into building computers back in the 70s and 80s? A whole geek culture of computer and electronics development sprung up in just a few years, again more than 90% male.

        Look at other stereotypical ‘boy toys’ — miniature construction equipment, erector sets, electric trains, model airplanes, cars, and so on. Boys have a drive to build things, and do things. Most girls don’t.

        Our industrial-technological civilization was almost entirely built by boys and men, just to see what cool stuff they could come up with. Most women weren’t interested, or not interested enough to put in the years of work just to build some widget that does something new and exciting. Look! Set some wood on fire, heat up this boiler, all these parts start moving and the drive shaft turns! Isn’t that great?

        Which may be part of the reason Leftroids are so against technology and industry. Male Privilege!

        Men restore old, abandoned steam trains just for fun, putting years of work and money into the job. Women look at them funny, other men nod solemnly and think ‘Good job!’
        ———————————
        “You had forgotten the worker caste, hadn’t you? When our two sides fight, they are the ones caught in the middle, forgotten until it is their time to serve, to build, and to die. They build the temples we pray in, the ships you fight in. They look to us to guide their hands. But prayers are fleeting, and wars forgotten. What is built endures. They do not wish to conquer or convert, only to build the future. And now, they will have that chance. The religious caste and the warrior caste will advise and counsel. We will serve, as is proper. Religion and war must act in the service of the people, not the other way around. This place…this place is reserved in memory of Neroon, until the day it is taken by the One who is to come. You are the heart, the hands, and the voice of our people. Judge wisely, and well.”

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        1. I always liked to play with furniture. BUT I’ll admit I’m not a standard issue girl.
          (Mostly restoring furniture.) And when I was young I’d build electronic stuff I couldn’t afford. But again, not typical.
          And unlike my sons, I never built complex rube goldberg machines and/or explosives…. :-P
          Well, not on purpose.

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        2. I dunno, I always loved playing with Legos, and now I build raised beds and arbors and fences and such as needed around the property. What I don’t build is the kind of stuff that requires higher math. I leave that to my dad and brother. I was not blessed with a mathematical bent.

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      2. We just have the one son. 100% have him physically do something to learn the concepts. In scouts the process is “learn, do, teach”. The hardest part to get son to finish for merit badges was the “talk about”, whatever. What we ended up doing was making sure he wrote down what he was going to talk about to the merit badge councilor. Not the requirement, but at least he had something he could use to actually talk to the merit badge counciler. Even getting him to write stuff down was a challenge. (Science merit badge, perform and redo the experiments multiple ways. “Hm. Did this. What happens if I change it this way?” But write up or discuss results? Pulling hens teeth was easier.)

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  11. The entire culture has been bent on destroying boys and masculinity in the most insidious ways for at least forty years, and indoctrinated schoolteachers have always been the worst about adhering to it.

    This is why Jordan Peterson is so hated. He tells boys “you are not defective, you are noble, and nothing noble is easy. Find the largest burden you can bear and bear it!” This must not be permitted.

    Liked by 2 people

  12. “and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females”

    So for the latest craziness, the comments on an article on Katie Ledecky having the most championship medals for a US swimmer had a number of crazies claiming she was trans, simply because she’s tall and broad-shouldered (as swimming competitively since before puberty will make you.)

    Seriously, she’s been competing at an Olympic level since she was 15. This craziness is from the last couple of weeks or so.

    (She’s honestly an awesome person, from everything I’ve seen, so that’s kind of upsetting that people can’t believe that she can be that statistical outlier + hard worker.)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It’s tactical. The next thing will be to claim that she’s trans and “getting away with it”, or demand that she disclose her hormone test results.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. She is practically the portrait of “The Irish Agricultural Girl” of song, except she swims and she’s not Irish.

        “The full of your arms of Irish love…” is a very good way to put it.

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        1. Anyway… Another example of the stereotype getting treated as fact, as soon as it is convenient for a weapon — while also messing with any women who are short, less strong, and more on the tiny cute side, to make them shave their heads and attempt to look like schoolboys.

          Everybody must be made to be something else, besides themselves.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. That’s another problem with the trans issue, just as, “affirmative action,” hits talented minorities. The system gives bigots a excuse to dismiss real women’s accomplishments.

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        1. Feminists have been screaming for equality since before I was born. Now that they have more than gotten it, they are screaming for special privileges and protections. I’m beginning to understand why some countries don’t allow then to leave their homes without a male relative to protect them. Women are going to have to decide which way they want things to work.

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          1. The Reader thinks that there is no path forward until WE (women and men) decide which way WE want things to work.

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          2. Your issue is that you’re confusing the feminist screamers with women.

            Don’t blame me if you’re listening to an idiot who says she’s talking for me. YOU are the one listening to her.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Seriously, what am I supposed to do?

              Travel back in time and forcibly prevent people from deciding to listen to idiots?

              For my next trick, I will also time travel and FORCE guys not to make bad dating and/or marriage choices, thus removing that reason that I need to be punished for being female.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Ha, there’s a lot of that going around eh? ~:D

                I suspect a large number of Gen X men had -really- bad mothers, the way I hear them going on about how bad women are.

                This reminds me of the one bad review of my book. MC gets turned into a giant troll by nanotech, the reviewer got angry when MC’s girlfriend -didn’t- leave him. Then when the nerd gets his robot girlfriend? That was the thing that broke him.

                Guy turned to giant monster by nanotech, no problem. Girlfriend sticks by him? Unpossible, suspension of disbelief broken. Nerd gets girl? REEEEE!!!! throws book!

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                1. Hey, maybe she was secretly into trolls all along! Wouldn’t be the first… :-P

                  And, Fox, force guys not to make bad choices? Settin’ yerself up for lotsa disappointment there. :-D
                  ———————————
                  The Once-Ler: “If a boy does something dumb, well, he’s a boy. If a boy does something dumb twice, it’s to impress a girl.”

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                  1. And, Fox, force guys not to make bad choices? Settin’ yerself up for lotsa disappointment there

                    Nah, that’s the sucker hook.

                    So when someone has enough of a head of steam that they insist I break the currently recognized laws of physics AND force men not to be stupid about women, I can tell them “you, first.”

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                2. Nerd gets girl? REEEEE!!!! throws book!

                  :sniffs: Some guys are just upset that nerds who act like decent guys instead of being “manly” by using women like tissues are amazing catches. Of course, they tend to get caught and thus be off market, so little rough for a gal to find one, and I’m sure not sharing MINE!

                  I suspect a large number of Gen X men had -really- bad mothers, the way I hear them going on about how bad women are.

                  Some of the guys who rant at me may as well have a picture of their ex-wife tattooed on their foreheads.
                  (it would definitely have hurt them less)

                  I spent a lot of years listening to it…until I realized that they had kids older than me, so it was very much nothing to do with me.

                  Followed by realizing that quite a few folks were going out, finding self-proclaimed Speaker For All [whatever], listening to them, and then lecturing members of the group for not aligning with the activist. Excuse me? How is your malfunction my obligation?

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                3. I suspect a large number of Gen X men had -really- bad mothers, the way I hear them going on about how bad women are.

                  They did. And are quite rightly suspicious of American women in general because of it, and the fact that every system is rigged toward those women (who take absolute, unashamed delight in abusing it) and against them.

                  What happened to the Duke Lacrosse team in 2006 was an outlier only because it was exposed and stopped. Eventually. And with minimal consequences to the institutions that lined up against the innocent men.

                  Liked by 1 person

              2. OMG So much this.

                In the past I’ve done my share of backing up not only my men (husband and son), but the men I’ve worked with throughout both my careers. Granted for the latter both times that stand out were quick and short.

                (1) Kind of self serving: “Hell no! I’m the one who will have to work with her all season!” Out of a crew of 20 that summer. As it turned out there was another woman on the crew, and since she was permanent temporary (VS seasonal) she would have had to take her turn, eventually, but she was also new. The men on the crew regardless of which status didn’t dare work the the woman in question (which is why she was trying to change crews). Obviously when I complained I wasn’t being sexist. This was ’76.

                (2) “Don’t look up.” Truck scaling shack. I’d already fought the inappropriate pictures on the walls quietly. Didn’t whine to hubby (who also worked the same type of job). Didn’t complain to the management. Didn’t complain to other women on the job (there weren’t any) or the women in the office. Instead I put up my own pictures – Baby’s, human and animals, over theirs. It became a joking battle. They’d put more pictures over mine. I’d repeat. FYI them complaining to my husband resulted in “Leave me out of it.” Then there was a get together with some co-workers and their wives and the battle came up. Wives kind off bopped husbands heads, universally. Solutions. 1) They took down all the pictures on the walls. Not so bad pictures went up on the ceiling (inappropriate by any standards for the last 30 years). 2) I didn’t look up. The complainer was a log truck woman driver (also rare). This was ’80.

                All other problems I had at work for being a woman had nothing to do with the guys, but other women. Answer phone: “Sigh. Not the secretary. What do you need?” Hilarious when it was the scaling shack. Why would anyone expect the guys to have a secretary? Either the phone was answered because someone was in there, or it just rang. Once I moved to the office programming the confusion made more sense. Still irritating.

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                1. Obviously when I complained I wasn’t being sexist. This was ’76.

                  One of the grand services that women do…and which the “but a feminist activist said X, so reeeee you don’t count” completely ignores. >.>

                  Simply removing one of the angles of attack that malicious opposition can use.

                  (One of the gals at my first command did a similar thing. The complainer accused her fiance of rape. Thank God, she declared a time and place when he was out of state, being physically observed by most of the chain of command, for over a week. She, sadly, did not get discharged for that.)

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            2. I do not disagree with your observation. Living in The People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Austin has given me a somewhat warped view of the world, even when I try to avoid it. I’ve also taken up politics as a hobby and I am disgusted by how most Republican leaders are losers and cowards as well as how few Republicans are America First.

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          3. Real email from UCCS about… I think chemical engineering (I’m in their mailing list for inexplicable reasons): “women are 70% of graduates, so we’ve almost achieved equality.” Yes, it was written from the female side. They fail math, for one. Right off the bat. Idiots.

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  13. I should have saved that BG3 character customization video for this post. Oh, well.

    “Technology allows us to survive while blatantly discriminating against males, starting when male physical characteristics assert themselves ”

    Only in the short-term, and only so long as things stay peaceful. In theory, a woman can use high-tech military equipment just as well as a man. In practice, I’m reminded of an Army base a few years back that had to keep giving many of the female soldiers a pass on things like basic marksmanship. IIRC, the female base commander lost her job when she complained about it, and upset the narrative. Even with high-tech, you’ll get wrecked in combat if you don’t have any men in combat positions.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The Dirty Little Secret is that warfighting often involves a lot of hard physical work. Like toting 80-lb packs plus a rifle. Or dragging that 75-lb pump into the compartment the torpedo hit.

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      1. Or hefting 100-pound artillery shells and loading them into the gun — every 8 seconds. Couldn’t find a weight for the powder charge with a quick search, but probably 50-60 pounds. Hoisting 32-pound mortar rounds over your head every 10-12 seconds is also quite the workout.

        Automatic powered loading systems are considered undesirable due to their tendency to break down or misfeed just when you need fire support most desperately.

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        1. “Baseplate” -that- is the heavy SOB.

          Once helped some 11-C types move one.

          So glad I was “B”.

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      2. .50 caliber rifle= 30lbs empty. So does a box of linked 7.62 NATO ammo. So does a GPMG. Etc.

        Stuff is heavy. Your 5’4″ girlie ain’t going to heft it for long.

        Sure, she can drive the truck. But can she change the tires? Truck tires are BIG. Can she move the jack? The jack weighs 30lbs.

        Can she break the wheelnuts loose? Sometimes even I, the Big Dude, need a six foot cheater on the 1″ drive breaker bar to break those wheelnuts loose. Oh, and the 1″ air gun weighs 50 lbs, before some feminist starts yammering about automation. The air hose is heavy too.

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      1. This video –

        Quick summary – Baldur’s Gate 3 has minimal character physical customization. The elf body creation screen that’s shown has four preset bodies (muscular vs slender, breasts vs no breasts; note that the latter is not linked to the gender that you pick). There are eight preset faces available if you take a body with breasts, and seven if you don’t. And there are no sliders to adjust the physical dimensions of your protagonist’s body or face (what there are sliders for is “maturity”, freckles, and the unfortunate skin disease that causes the body to attack melanin and makes your skin look splotchy). And it has eight choices of genitals that you can pick (three “innies”, and five “outies”). In short, you have twice as many choices of genitals to pick from as you do body options.

        There are a very large number of hairstyles available, and you can pick from a wide variety of hair colors. But aside from that, and the handful of items I mentioned above, there is no other body appearance customization available.

        Apparently the skin disease I mentioned has been showing up in video games as a customization option a lot within the last year (I haven’t encountered that myself, but the comments on another video mentions this detail). But in this case, the reason for it appearing might be because one of the Larian employees reportedly has a relative with it.

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        1. Vitiligo. More visible on dark skin (at least until it either takes over or the rest of the skin is bleached to match, which is apparently the deal with Michael Jackson), but present in all racial demographics. Had an interesting challenge at the photography studio where I was asked to make a kid’s vitiligo “less in-your-face”—they didn’t want it gone, but they didn’t want it to be the first thing you noticed. What I ended up doing was changing the color on his unaffected skin a bit to get the two types with the same undertones, and I guess they liked it because I got no instructions to redo.

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          1. That’s the name. The comments I mentioned claimed that it’s popular with the diversity crowd because someone who has it is both a brown person and a white person at the same time. I don’t know whether that’s true, as I haven’t seen it discussed until now (I was aware of it, but hadn’t heard it was getting a surge in depictions). This is the first time I’ve seen it in a game, though a quick search online seems to indicate that it’s been showing up as a customization option recently in video games (Animal Crossing and Call of Duty apparently both have it, for example).

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            1. Yes, that showed up on Ya Boy Zack’s channel. MLP comics from IDW now have… a black pony with vitiligo!

              It was then pointed out that horses do get vitiligo, and it’s usually Arabs, and it’s no big deal and practically invisible, unless it’s really parasites instead of vitiligo.

              It was also pointed out that the writer and artist had pictured a pinto pony, not a black pony with vitiligo.

              The comics writer then sulked and coped, because how very dare people care about facts.

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        2. That’s nice, but all I want to do is slay monsters and steal their loot to buy better weapons to slay bigger monsters and get more loot.

          Liked by 1 person

  14. I think that one of the biggest problems is actually the lack of family formation. Living alone is expensive. Having much less motivation to excel is very expensive for society and not having any hope of having a family is very demotivating. The isolation is also driving suicide rates up even higher than they were. The West is completely screwed and it was self inflicted.

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  15. They won’t win, and everything they do from now on destroys more and more of their twisted ideology. Some are starting to wake up, others never will, but most of those live in cities were we have seen the feral; animals they have created are starting to run amuck. Those feral animals are now starting to feed on those Marxists/liberals who created them. Just the other day a female medical doctor was beaten and robbed in that liberal mecca of Portland Or. Her response, “We created this ourselves” . They see their idea’s are losing, but that only makes them more crazy. Buckle up, rides going to be a bitch before it gets better. Look for for your neighbors and friends, that’s how we survive.

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  16. Just remember that the same Democrats who denigrate young boys as being born “stupid and evil” also want to lower the voting age so that they can vote.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Except for criminals, where they want to raise the age for juvenile court to 25.
      No one ever said progressives were consistent.

      Liked by 2 people

  17. The treatment of boys as defective girls begins much earlier, when they are expected to sit quietly and listen and ‘study’ without question or serious exploration … and denied recess, then drugged with Ritalin to shut down thwir urge for play.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That was one of the things that convinced my mom to pull us out of school. She didn’t feel that my energetic, boisterous, normal little brother should be drugged up in order to sit still and ‘be good’ in class. He played hard, learned welding and machining from my dad, read all the Star Wars books our library owned, went on from there to the science section, and is about to graduate in mechanical engineering with 3 minors. I think he did okay, and I’m SO glad my mother followed her instincts.
      His stated desire is to learn what he needs to make his own actual Iron Man suit, with jetpacks.

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    2. One of my nephews got specific permission to do a lap around the playground every time he finished a task or test early. Not ADHD, just very active—and a teacher who understood.

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  18. This column really hits hard for us, because one of our grandsons struggled very hard in middle school, although elementary school was reasonably okay. The teachers didn’t give him the attention he needed, as he was a classic smart-but-not-academic boy, although he was very happy when we gave him old and broken appliances to take apart and put back together.
    His parents pulled him out into a quasi-homeschool/internet course, and he was okay so long as he could be with his former school buddies and church youth cohort.

    Then covid shut everything down, including simple personal relationships as well as groups.
    For an extravert, that was very painful — we always figured he would be the activities director on a cruise ship or something similar.

    In April last year, he killed himself.
    Sorry to be so blunt, but there isn’t any easy way to say it, and he was not the only boy among our friends who decided to check out early. Girls are also at risk, and we have an active prevention program in our church curriculum.
    It doesn’t always work.

    Because of our faith, we are confident that he really is in a better place, and making use of all his skills and talents, but we miss him very much.

    Marxism and it’s current western iteration are Satanic, and those who know that and inflict it anyway are evil. There will be judgements exacted for those who are intentionally pushing it to its inevitable conclusion.

    Liked by 2 people

      2. You did screen out your worry mostly. Not entirely. But then you started giving out hints that your youngest has a significant other and I took the vibes as really hoping things worked out for him with her. Maybe one morphed into the other.

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        1. Well he kind of got better once they started talking. I think she did too. And he found a new interest and a lease on life.
          Though if you’d told me the job that would make him happy would be comics editor, I’d think you were messing with me. Even last year. But there it is.

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      1. There seems to be something about spring — so glad you and Sarah (and many others who were able to back away from the cliff) didn’t have to go through that pain.
        I have talked one of our sons “off the ledge” before, but he was in college and could appreciate the finality of suicide.
        Talking to some of my friends similarly situated, we think the younger kids have at least partially internalized the game norm, where death is always just followed by reset and a new game.
        Which isn’t altogether untrue, but it’s not an unlimited number of reboots — just one.

        Liked by 1 person

  19. Having this rot spread to any STEM field is extremely dangerous.

    First, there’s a shortage of STEM-quality minds. If you want to be an Engineer, you had better come in with an IQ of 120 or more. Preferably 130+. It’s a VERY hard row to hoe. There’s a shortage of these people, we can’t afford to waste any.

    Second, it’s a field where the consequences of error are large-scale catastrophes. Mass casualty events.

    My advice: Under no circumstances whatsoever agree to drug the kids. Homeschool if possible. Give the kids recess time. For boys in particular, make things competitive.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I got a call from a vice-principal today, apologizing that my son couldn’t be in AP Calculus BC because they didn’t have enough students to run a class, so he’d have to take AB. But, she said, the teacher has taught both versions before, so they would look into offering the BC test at the end of the year.

      I said, He can probably handle it. After all, he taught himself pre-calc out of a textbook in the two months before he took the challenge test last week.

      She sounded a little stunned. After all, my son is a sophomore.

      (Yes, engineering is a potential career path for him. Grand family tradition and a couple fo the leaders of his scout troop are engineers, so plenty of people to help him plan a career path.)

      However, there are cases where “drug the kids” is the appropriate course, speaking as someone who just had to re-up the meds for the ADHD daughter. It should, however, only be on the advice of a medical professional, and California actually did something right when they made it illegal for a teacher to suggest medication as an appropriate option. Technically, they aren’t even allowed to suggest ADHD. Someone at one point noticed the overdone inappropriate diagnoses…

      Liked by 1 person

    2. My very ADHD older son was fine so long as he was taken for long walks, and I could kick him out back to run like a crazy person.
      School made that very difficult. We didn’t let him be drugged but it was still difficult.

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  20. This one hit me really hard, because I am one of those boys you are talking about. I count myself lucky to have avoided the worst of it, with my good family and religion guarding me during my upbringing.

    Still, I have bumped into it as an adult. My first wife had feminist rats in her head really bad, though I think some of the problem was that I ended up trying to be a teacher after I found myself profoundly unhappy in graduate school; she did complain about me not being the smart, rich scientist she expected me to become when we got married as I was starting graduate school.

    And teaching was very stressful, but rewarding so I kept at it. Unfortunately the system really grinds down people like me, who love the material and just want to share the joy of knowledge. They expect every teacher to be a master of managing problem students, which I am really, really bad at.

    I have ended up in a decent job now, in manufacturing, at a good company (though they still have some issues on the corporate scale, my specific place has good people). But this means I am basically starting over career wise, which has its own issues for making enough money and putting up with my wife comparing me to her siblings, who are all much more established.

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  21. Quail are so little and cute, but they’re also psychopathic cannibals. They make the chickens seem positively civilized.

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    1. They’re deranged mini dinos. But one of them likes me, and is Fren Quail. I suspect he’s a male that was missidentified but if future DIL says she’s culling him, I’m going to take him and find him a harem somehow. Fren Quail doesn’t get the chop. Neither does the deposed king, who is skittish and a spaz but very non-aggressive.

      Liked by 1 person

  22. Related to the “boys are worse” thing – https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/hostile-sexism-is-live-and-well-but

    Hostile sexism is live and well, but mostly in favor of women
    …
    Clearly, the net social view of the sexes is that women are more intelligent, competent (since about 1965), and higher in ‘communion’ (e.g., affectionate, emotional), while men still retain some shrinking advantage in agency. The matter of intelligence and competence is the most important, which is of course why the study of intelligence is so fraught with emotions for egalitarians.

    (Worth reading the whole article)

    Liked by 1 person

  23. My sons, and the set of family cousins who are all about the same age, are doing pretty well. The problem is not the boys, who are accumulating experience and wealth and will be ready to look for a wife and start a family soon. (The oldest of the cousins, my son, is already married with three kids.)

    The problem is the girls. There are six of them, all approaching thirty, and only one of them is married. The fertility of women drops off a cliff after thirty, and thirty-something women have a hard time finding a husband. They are rapidly heading towards a lonely sad life. I’m so sad for them.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Even when the family has a history of late fertility (like both mine and my husband’s), it’s significantly harder on the body to have a late pregnancy. I speak from the difference between kid at 31 and kid at 37, even though the latter one went smoothly from a medical standpoint. (None of my kids were at all difficult to come by, and my family has fertility into their 50s, joy.)

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    2. Yeah, living alone sucks, being lonely sucks, everything in your life depending on your efforts alone sucks, having to be extra careful because you have no backup sucks.

      But you get used to it.

      And it’s not actually that terrible, as long as you have something constructive to do with your time, and family (or friends) that you can assist.

      Probably the worst part is that you have to plan ahead to move heavy stuff, because there’s no way you can do it by yourself without risking being crushed to death.

      And maybe they’ll be luckier (and more sociable) than I ever was. Part of being able to get a husband is leaving the house occasionally such that available men know you exist.

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      1. Kinda have to want one first. If you want one, you’ll be able to go get one. But it is difficult to get out of the house to go get something you’re “supposed to have”.

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        1. “If you want one, you’ll be able to go get one.”

          Really.

          Ha. Okay, I’ll bite. How? Just tell me first if this too is going to involve inventing time travel.

          How do I find a guy in whom I could be interested, who could also be interested in me, who meets the basic criteria (i.e. single, Christian, not an intellectual or moral moron, responsible, not completely repulsive in appearance and habits – all of that read “compatible”, all of it understood as “non-negotiable”), and whom I will not accidentally drive away by my social ineptitude?

          … Honestly I don’t even know why I ask. It’s not like I can just go to the store and pick one off the shelf. “Marriage market” is a metaphor, not an actual shop.

          Hell, I don’t even know how to find the places to go to make the social connections that might be able to introduce me to people, period. See “Social ineptitude” above.

          And no, letting a guy f*ck me first to see if “we have chemistry” is not an option.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. “And no, letting a guy f*ck me first to see if “we have chemistry” is not an option.”

            It’s pretty depressing that our culture sees that as the natural default now.

            I’m also the sort of person who is very very glad that I met my guy in college, because I have no idea how I would have met one otherwise. So from one social weirdo to another, I say, figure out what hobby you can take into public, and that’s your best bet for making friends. (We need more quilting bees, don’t we.)

            Liked by 1 person

            1. also the sort of person who is very very glad that I met my guy in college, because I have no idea how I would have met one otherwise
              ………………

              Amen to that. And I worked with guys.

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          2. My best friend forever, who was in her late fifties and single, told me once that she just wanted to have a husband who would sit and drink coffee with her, and do some hiking. She didn’t want much.

            She finally gave up and connected with a hiking group in her area. And there he was, one of the hikers in the group. He loved opera. He loved sitting in the morning and drinking coffee. He loved to hike. He was a few years older and had given up on finding love, too.

            She married at 60 years old and they are ridiculously adorably in love. They won’t have children together, and maybe not as much time as a couple as most, but they’re happy. And this makes me filled with joy.

            Liked by 1 person

          3. How true. And I seriously wonder whether I’m not so set in my ways that marriage would be impossible to negotiate.

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        2. And no, I’m not actually asking for advice.
          None of it would help me, and I’ve already given up hope.

          I’m just venting.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. I know. It’s okay. Didn’t mean to imply any fault of yours, just that sometimes things require persistence. I’m old, I lived through it a few times.

            It’s like the geezer said to me, if you want a black belt go do a thousand leg-sweeps. Then when you’re done, do a thousand more. Because that’s how it is. The work doesn’t change. -You- change.

            It took me 10 years of single-minded effort and kissing a -huge- number of frogs. Being a dude I didn’t really mind, but it does get depressing after so many years of nothing but frogs. Eventually the Great Sorting Hat turned up a winner, a frog willing to put up with my crap.

            Kiss a thousand frogs. When you’re done, kiss a thousand more. That’s how it is.

            Liked by 1 person

    3. If you research it, there are graphs showing the Sexual Market Value (SMV) and the Marriage Market Value (MMV) of men and women over time. Women overall really lose out on the MMV chart very young for the simple biological reason of fertility. Guys may be willing to spend the night with a woman who is older, but they won’t commit to them. Another rapidly escalating problem is the number of single mothers, a minority of guys are willing to take on the task of raising someone else’s child.

      And something to pass along to your single female relatives who are approaching 30: https://youtu.be/H-gfxjAaZg0

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  24. I find myself thinking of Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”, where three astronauts fall into a future world where male humans are extinct. It was a striking story as a work of imagination, but it seems a lot grimmer as a projection of the actual future we inhabit.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Grim enough to be “ripped from the headlines” —
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_Houston,_Do_You_Read%3F

      “Fun” fact, given the commentary on this post (but you probably knew this):
      Wikipedia – “Alice Bradley Sheldon (born Alice Hastings Bradley; August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 until her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. From 1974 to 1985 she also used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Tiptree was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.”

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  25. If you want something more cheerful about a man in a terrible situation, read “Memoir of Pierre Toussaint, Born a Slave.”

    It was written from things remembered by people who knew him, as well as public documents, so it is more immediate than other secondary sources.

    The man was a polite, humble, charitable, businessman bulldozer. Being a slave barely slowed him down. (Albeit he was in a better situation than most slaves to start out with, it is impressive stuff for a normal person today.) And when he was freed, he did even more.

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  27. I’ve puzzled over exactly this issue for some time, and How and Why it happened. It wasn’t Marxism; Marxism latched on to something already in progress. I wrote a bloggish piece about it that I thought was one of my best pieces ever. I’ll do you the courtesy of not posting it here, but I will take the liberty of posting a link and asking you to read, if you have a mind to do so. The Obsolesence of Women: https://www.facebook.com/dave.cell.1/posts/pfbid02SuVYhnC2fnVdpbJr8W6eCxjpzcfN8xtj5ukkjT8jrfWUtiEAD9UfuGVtAEkFNqZTl

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    1. No. It is communism. Applied to the sexes. There must be an oppressor and an oppressed and the solution is to reverse it. it’s dictatorship of the proletariat with sexes. (or races or whatever they latch onto.)

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  28. Very well-put and I do feel a lot of that in a lot of areas. It doesn’t help that the pressure to succeed professionally for a lot of reasons is still there even with opportunities being increasingly limited and we’ve been over what a nightmare dating and marriage is elsewhere plenty of times, as well as my main worries (being seen as boring or a loser – the professional thing – or a creep and predator, especially given how behaving decently gets you marked as an especially vile one in some circles). But what can I do? Just keep going and enjoy having the cats around while I can I suppose.

    Liked by 1 person

  29. }}} But you can find places where women were de-facto chattel and treated as property.

    And even there, it was often done to protect women from a hostile environment. Does not fully excuse many things done under that aegis, but it does clarify that it wasn’t even needfully and inherently evil in and of itself.

    The fact that women “have something valuable” and that they are therefore subject to “theft” (which rape is, in an extreme sense) and largely unable to prevent said “theft” means they need protection — they need someone to put THEIR body and wellbeing in defense of their body and wellbeing. And, if you expect someone to do that, then there has to be a REASON for doing so — which is at least part of what the “marriage is property” BS argument comes from.

    THEN there’s the dowry. It is singularly amusing that some feminists fail to grasp how a dowry works… The husband doesn’t give the dowry to the parents — the parents give it to the husband. They do this because the male is being — effectively — paid to take the burden of the female off the hands of the parents.

    Number one, if it was a financial transaction as suggested, then the money would go the other way. Secondly, the reason it goes the way it goes is that, as I said, the caring for, feeding, and protection of the female is a burden in a pre-industrial society. You have to feed and protect her, and she is generally not capable of doing much of the work required to survive at above a hunter-gatherer existence level.

    That burden — as well as that of feeding the resulting children — falls onto the male.

    And this is necessary for the propagation of the species, so it’s not like there’s a real choice.

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    1. Sure. The middle east and china, it started as a way to protect women. Absolutely. Which is why the most …. um…. patriarchal in the negative sense in the West were the frontier with war with middle eastern invaders for the longest time. (I know whence I speak.)

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    2. There are serious reasons why stable and productive civilizations “enforced” marriage with their religious and social customs and laws.
      We are seeing what happens when men don’t have any incentive to marry their “baby mama” (of any race or ethnicity) or care for their own children.

      Somewhat addressed earlier this year; commentary on Marxism follows this excerpt:

      No Blame


      Or take the “women have been oppressed throughout history.” I agree. Women have. But the problem here is that men were oppressed too.

      Most of the things they point to as female oppression came from the fact that there was no way to stop a woman of fertile age from getting pregnant — by rape even — except by circumscribing her to a small circle of people who knew and cared for her. Women didn’t go to war (yes, a few did under cover, and yes, there were always camp followers, and yes, those sometimes fought in ancient and medieval battles, but it’s not the same thing) because a battalion of women if captured became breeders for the enemy, something that people didn’t want happening to their wives and daughters. Women didn’t go to war, because pregnant women are not as functional as men. Women didn’t go to war because our upper body strength is smaller. Etc. Etc. Etc. Women could command in war, and often did, if born to a position that enabled them to do so. But they were profoundly unsuited to the scrum.

      Women didn’t learn in general. There were exceptions. But yeah, the vast majority of women weren’t educated.

      Here’s the secret: neither were the vast majority of men.

      Liked by 1 person

  30. I’ve been unable to find a meme that seems applicable here, because they get lost in the internet ether so easily.
    The “opening tweet” was something like this: Rad-Lib-Feminist, huffing about dead-beat dads, says “If only there were some way to force men to take care of the women they get pregnant” — followed by a barrage of replies making the obvious remark, “We used to call that marriage.”

    Liked by 1 person

  31. Roman Catholic friends have mourned the loss of the old one liner, “Is the Pope Catholic?” Alas, the current seat warmer has made the answer “NO!”

    Liked by 1 person

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