According To Hoyt

This blog post is written in haste.  I woke this morning with a raging ear infection which makes me about moron-level for reasoning, so bear with me.  As I put the last punctuation mark on this, I am going to grab my purse and run to the doctor.  (Well, amble.  I’m not really up to running.)

Yesterday pohjalainen  made a comment about lost civilization stories and how much she likes them.  I like them too.

Of course I don’t exactly believe in them.  It’s not that they’re impossible.  The 10,000 year old city temple they found with magnificent carvings of animals (some of which are either imaginary or long-extinct) and which had no middens (something that makes us think of, say, our modern malls) is not fully explained and could not have been anticipated.  And it seems like every other day a discovery pushes the date at which humans did x further back.

I was reading Dave Freer’s blog this morning and it occurred to me that the thing about highs and lows, and an irregular line of evolution applies not just to history but also to human evolution and to pre-history as well.

We start with the fact that further back than a certain time our information is, of necessity, fragmented and scant.  No, we haven’t discovered everything there is to discover about the people alive in those days.  As with the “missing links” in evolution, likely we are missing most of the stuff that is still there to discover.

Then take in account changing coast lines and where our most advanced population centers tend to be.  Then imagine that oh, ten thousand years from now, after a massive civilizational collapse, our descendants find remnants of a “great civilization” – some long lost village in Arabia stuck circa 700 AD.

This revolutionizes their idea of how advanced we were UPWARD.  Then they discover something, say, a turnpike in Podunk Kansas.  Who in hell is going to believe it.  There will be all sorts of papers explaining how it’s natural.

Because humans like our history tidy.  And I suspect it isn’t.  Depending on what you consider advanced civilization, there might have been several in the past.  And yes, they might have been wiped out without a trace (It occurs to me an ice age would do that very handily.)  And meanwhile there are things we’ll discover that are much older/more primitive, because, well, look at the world today.

When genetic markers first came up, people were saying crazy stuff like we only split from the chimps 100k years ago and therefore they know exactly how deep human history is.  Even at the time reading it, it occurred to me those speculations had a lot of baked in assumptions and precious little solid to stand on.  In fact, every time I pick up a book on the evolution of man I feel like I’m back in my literature courses, where people call each other names over minor disagreements, then go on to make up stuff out of whole cloth.

Again, I suspect evolution is not as simple as we see it.  Not that humans aren’t much different from our ancestors, we are.  But … well, guys, we are a randy species.  And in this case species is blurred as a line.  Turns out that you can, every once in a while, not often, for instance, get a fertile horse/zebra hybrid.  In the same way the more we know of our genome, the more we find other “species” in our line.  Which frankly makes reading our genome like reading a book written by a hundred writers and figuring out whose style it is.

So, have we “advanced” towards our modern form?  Or did we sometimes recede towards more primitive forms.  “Yes.” “Maybe” and “Who are you studying for modern?”

So it is possible that there have been higher civilizations than ours, and it’s very possible that there have been civilizations around the level of say the 18^th century several times before.  Perhaps wiped out by the ice age or other natural disasters.

Or perhaps the little things out of place were created by time travelers.

This is the stuff of magic, the stuff stories are built upon.

Unfortunately you can’t read or write good non-fiction speculation about it, because ten pages in, it all falls into mystic New Age or UFO nonsense.  You get the “And then the Earth changes when the goddess returns” and the book goes flying across the room.  And we won’t go into the greys orbiting the Earth, waiting to take us back.  No, we just won’t.

So I don’t believe in it, not because it’s utterly impossible, but because of the company it keepers.  (Which is not only everything for which there is no proof, but everything which has been disproven but is too much fun to let go.)

So, given all that, what is it about lost civilizations that holds such great appeal?

To me personally it is the idea that no matter how badly we screw up, someone of our genes – or our genus, at least – will be here thousands of years from now, and will be “civilized” if very different from us.  It’s the idea that, once kicked from the garden, we don’t wander in mud and darkness forever.

It also puts a fantastic spin on most myths and fairytales.  The Egyptian pyramids?  Totally the result of a muddled memory of cold sleep!  There were giants?  Well, with our food now…

You see what I mean.  It allows me to dream the past as well as the future.

And I like the idea of cyclical and near eternal things, which is why I love the seaside and the tides.

So how do you feel about the idea of lost civilizations (as story fodder, not necessarily as having existed)?  If you find them appealing, what appeals to you about them?

I don’t remember when or where, but the other day – no more than six months ago, and no less than two weeks – I came across an article saying that the US was very bad in comparison to other countries in educating and promoting people of exceptional IQ.

There is a lot to be said for that, in comparison to the sort of daft worship of high IQ that other countries do.  Being a genius doesn’t make you good at anything in particularly (in fact, most geniuses will tend to drift aimlessly through life because they never learn study habits.)  It doesn’t give you empathy for other people or make you socially adept.  In fact, what it does is make you automatically an “odd.”

I know this because I’m raising one (and by some measures two) of them.  The smarter one sometimes needs a cue card to remember how to tie his shoes and becomes obsessed with things till he learns them, which means giving him an interesting puzzle is a bad idea, no matter how much he loves puzzles, because he’ll spend the next two weeks in his room, in his underwear, unable to think of or do anything else.  (It’s particularly inadvisable during the school year, but we sometimes like to see him during Spring break or summer too.)

We could go into what causes the obsessive periods, which are apparently normal in highly gifted people.

There is also saltational learning – which makes gifted children such a pain in class – it basically means that most gifted kids aren’t good at most tasks they’ve never encountered.  Instead, because they develop their skills in highly targeted bursts, they might be lacking some skills normal kids have.

Say that the task in kindergarten is to color inside the lines.  Most kids at three or four can do this (I couldn’t, but that’s a different reason.  Having been born severely premature, I had issues with fine motor until much later.) They can do this because they’ve spent hours – days perhaps – playing, let’s face it, very weird games like pick up sticks, or whatever which refined motor control.

But let’s take your supergenius (super genius to the rescue!)  He found this “play” boring beyond belief.  So he taught himself to read at three, and has been reading his way through Roman history and (in younger son’s case) “How things work” series of engineering books.

Put him in a kindergarten class and tell him to color inside the lines,

He’s never practiced that fine motor skill, and he won’t know how to.

Let alone the fact that these kids tend to be blunt to the point of rudeness and are likely to tell you “this is boring, may I translate the Iliad from the Greek, instead?”   My kids wouldn’t (well, younger one is STILL teaching himself Greek, but that’s something else) because by the time they went to class they had a modicum of social grace.  But even when they applied themselves wholeheartedly to coloring, they were very bad at it.

So, what does your average genius do?  He or she hates coming in last (younger son didn’t care, and until the competitive gene kicked in at puberty was the hardest person in the world to motivate) so then they spend the next two weeks learning coloring, until they can do it with shading, directional light and depth.

Of course, in the meantime, in your average kindergarten, they failed the rubrics on learning your own address and sorting by colors, but by gum, they’re better at coloring than all their peers and many artists.

That is how geniuses learn and their interaction with the school system if a problem and one that points to the larger point of this article.

In the meanwhile I just want to point out that the lack of sense of proportion, obsessive behavior and cluelessness about things other people don’t even remember learning is why what many countries do, promoting their geniuses immediately to positions of power over others is wrong.

The entire science fiction myth of “you’re a genius, you’ll be the best governor/king/president ever” give me hives (as some people who read my books can probably guess.) because you’re more likely to make a very bad ruler.  The closer you are to your people, the better you understand them and how they see you, and how what you do affects them.

So when the article said something about the US wasting its geniuses, it didn’t worry me a lot.  I mean it worries me in the personal sense.  I think we’re eating our seed corn.  I think that we should have the ability to educate our geniuses in ways that make them better balanced, happier, and more useful members of society.  (At least I hope there’s a way.  I’m trying to make sure younger son doesn’t end up locked in a trash-filled room, muttering to himself.)

But in the macro sense, wasting our geniuses is perhaps smarter than putting our geniuses in charge.

Yes, extraordinarily gifted people can become very good at something, but it takes them a lot of work to “tune” to the level where they interact successfully with other people.

However, the US is wasting ALL its odds.  Our school system is designed, metaphorically, to turn out square pegs.  It’s bad enough to pound cylinders into square pegs, but our system is worse than that: it also pounds star shapes into square pegs.  It flattens circles into square pegs.  And if it can’t do either, then it shatters them.

When my kids were going to school my best friend was the mother of a profoundly mentally disabled child.  Why?  Because the school was failing us both in the same way.

We won’t go into the insanity that’s “mainstreaming” which is pretending that your not-normal child is normal and making everyone feel better, but not teaching the child the things he needs to know and which are within his reach.  So you have a child with an IQ of 48 in a normal 5^th grade class.  His “aide” is doing, oh, sorry, helping him with his homework in fractions, and he “passes”.  BUT HE WON’T be taught to button his shirt, or tie his shoes, or sit quietly or… any of the things that WILL help his caretakers in the future.  This is even worse with kids who are healthy enough they might be able to live independently and who aren’t taught the basics of life and maybe a basic job (counting things, or sweeping, or sorting stuff, or things that people who are impaired still can do and get paid for and feel they’re supporting themselves) because instead the system is so busy pretending they’re “normal.”

They don’t even try with gifted kids.  They tell you that the gifted child will be “all right, anyway” because “he’s so smart.” And so there’s no money to even try to help them.  Which is fine.  They’d probably assign them aides to pretend they’re normal.  Sometimes – and this will tell you the crazy conflation in their heads – they’ll tell you of some special school for gifted children.  (In Marshall’s case, at his level, middle school and higher, the school they found was in CT, boarding, and cost more than we made per year.  They threw that at us as though “Well, if your kid is so smart you must be rich, why do you insist on inflicting him on us.”  Crazy.  As though IQ were bought with money.)

It’s not true that gifted children are okay “anyway.”  I know several Mensans and they’re more likely to work awful, mindless, low pay, and often dangerous jobs than they are to be “captains of industry” or even – and this is the true waste – quietly competent technicians or mathematicians.  The Dilbert comics pegged it exactly when the janitor is the Mensan. More importantly, most Mensans I know are walking wounded, who have trouble forming relationships and always feel marginalized.  (It might be the inevitable result of being odd, but…)

Given this it probably shocks no one that the system is even worse with children who are mentally ill, or handicapped.

I’m fortunate in that neither of the kids are mentally ill.  But for at least a year we feared the younger one was.  We feared it because he has sensory oddities.  (I’ve heard this disparaged as not existing.  Bad news, I probably had the same issues Marshall had.  It’s hard to remember clearly, of course, but I remember complaining that clothes that bothered no one else were ‘prickly” and hearing REALLY low sounds perfectly.  And like him, I had trouble with my eyes working together enough to write on the line, so my handwriting was atrocious AND I wrote really slowly till I was about 10.)  It’s not even unusual.  Something in your brain doesn’t allow the eyes/ears/etc to work together.  In conjunction with this, you might have odd sensory effects.

We knew nothing about this, though as I’ve said above, once they described it I went “oh” – and I know that everyone in the family writes really slowly till the end of high school.  But the system we went through had more “give.”  My teacher in the village might think I was dawdling, but she also knew I knew the subjects and she might complain to my mother about my odd ways, but she wouldn’t send me to detention.

Marshall had always acted “odd” – I had him tested for mid range hearing loss (which I have.) because I noticed that if there was the slightest background noise, he had no idea what you’d said.  He didn’t write or draw until he was much older than his brother who was winning contests at 4. And there was the thing in which he swore to me cotton sweaters were scratchy.  Other minor things, like if you rubbed your fingernails against the car upholstery, he used to get really upset and scream to stop it, because it hurt his ears.  We though he was “eccentric.”

Elementary school his teacher though he was odd but she liked him.  Then he hit the regimentation of Middle School.  Beyond the fact he got heinously bullied by a group of girls in sixth grade, Middle School is when they try to standardize you and give you “standard behaviors.”  The unwritten curriculum is to make the kid behave like every other kid.

We started getting odd reports like that he’d thrown a fit because the girls in front of him were breathing so loudly he couldn’t hear the teacher.  Sounds loony, right?  The teachers thought so.  They wanted to medicate him.

Honestly, if it hadn’t come with the bullying and if he hadn’t got clinically depressed, we might have gone along with it.  We thought he was nuts, too.  And his grades were trawling the depts., and it seemed to us like he wasn’t even trying.

But he was depressed, and well… we took him to a psychologist, who said “uh” and gave us a recommendation to a hearing center that deals with kids like him, and then to a vision center, and then…

He was so horribly disabled (for instance he heard all sounds at the same level) that they couldn’t believe he’d made it through sixth grade with good grades, could read and write and could generally “pass”.  Then they tested his IQ and went “oh” – because he’d been using his IQ to cover his issues.  (And it explained something in kindergarten where his teacher thought he didn’t understand spoken language at all – or at least she didn’t understand why she gave instructions and then he looked at what his classmates were doing to know what to do.)

We started working with him on physical therapy for the senses and now, if he’s not normal he’s so close as makes no difference.  (We need to take him for what we hope will be his final appointment at the hearing center.)

But if we hadn’t had reason to be suspicious of the school, we might have gone along with medication.  I wonder how many parents do.

And then comes “what if your child is really mentally ill?”  My friend Pat Richardson wrote about his family’s issues with this over at PJM.

In the comments people started blaming him and his wife for their child’s problem.

Let me say right away MAYBE some parents are responsible for their kids’ neurosis.  BUT it’s physically impossible for parents to make a child seriously mentally ill.  You might manage an approach to it if you lock him in the closet and feed him through the lock, but the facile Freudian nonsense which is ruining your education, which (mostly through movies and popular entertainment) projects the idea that if you thwart your child’s interest in eating his socks at two he’ll become Jack the Ripper at 30 is nonsense.  I hope all of you knew that, because it’s pernicious nonsense.

As I said, my child was never mentally ill – but he did have problems we didn’t understand, and which made him act very oddly.  The school’s response to it was to treat it as though it were a moral failing on his part and ours.

Society does it one better.  It couples that with treating them as though they’re “perfectly normal.”  It’s mainstreaming all over again.  Pat’s child might do fine in an institution which medicates him regularly.  He’s not going to get that, because while mentally ill he refuses it, and they pretend he’s a fully responsible adult.

Could the school have trained him to take his meds.  Maybe.  My guess is the attempt was never made to explain why or train him.  And now he’s an adult and our laws don’t allow us to do anything.

Peter Grant talked about what we DO do with the mentally ill – we jail them, by and large.  Which is another pounding of pegs into shapes they aren’t.

Do I want a place where society can say “you are crazy” and lock you up?  Not particularly. The problem is that medical illness is not QUANTIFIABLE and things like sensory issues can masquerade as mental illness.  Then, you get the same effect you get in the school where if you’re a little odd, they proclaim you learning disabled or a “problem”.  Or you get the Soviet medicalization of dissent.  (We might get that anyway.)

BUT at the same time there should be an objective “caused arm to self and others” standard that just gets you sent to a quiet place and medicated for the rest of your life.

Perhaps the answer is a delivery system like depo-provera.  Under the skin capsules that dispense your dosage over six months, and if you don’t come in for your shot, they check to see how you’re doing and whether you still do need it. (Do these even exist?  Or is contraception a higher priority than sanity?)

Or perhaps there is no easy answer.  There probably is no easy answer.

No one ever asks you to choose between 100 lashes and a bowl of chocolate ice cream.  Usually the best choice you have is the “best of a broken world”

But what we’re doing, starting with school, is pretending the odd don’t exist, and not only letting them drop, but actively shoving them down through the cracks, so we can have our tidy and “rational” world.

The standardization of human beings is a bad policy.  One designed for an industrialized, one size fits all world, which by and large never came to pass.

And we should be able to do better.

I won’t say the measure of a civilized society is how it deals with its odd members — who knows how to measure civilization, when we only have our race to go off of?

But I’ll say we’re wasting good people and causing suffering that could be avoided, by pretending that all the pegs should be square.

UPDATE: New chapter up at Mad Genius Club

So I just woke up from this dream in which I was watching TV (the unlikelihood starts there) and it was a fashion show centered on these “green clothes designers” who were making brides’ dresses out of people’s trash.  I sort of endured the woman in a wedding dress made of “dried thrown away spaghetti” (Sounds awfully scratchy.)  And the dress of freeze-dried potato peels was kind of cute (you had to be there) but I woke up with a “right, that’s enough” at the wedding dress made of boil-in-the-bag-vegetables bags.  They hadn’t even turned it inside out.  Her veil, starting right at her forehead, was packages of boil-in-the-bag-snap peas, and the announcer was talking about the shadow and light of the design and the symbol of renewal and life from the pea pictures.

I say this as a way of pointing out that you probably shouldn’t listen to anything else I am about to say today, which is fine, since I think it’s one of those days when I’m going to get myself in trouble.

No, not politics. Or even society or aesthetics.

Well, maybe society and aesthetics, but only as a side blow.

The problem I see with trying to promote and sell our books, in a world gone mad.  (Maaaad.  Maaaad I tell you. They make veils out of peas packages!)

All of us saw a dramatic drop in sales this summer, and there’s unaccountable stuff too.  As in, no one knows how to account for what sells and what doesn’t.

So, how are we Human Wave and indie and mid list authors to promote our stuff? (In a world gone Maaaaaad.  Maaaaaaad.)

I don’t know.  I just took a promo workshop with Dean Wesley Smith, and I can see some things that will help… but they help by making the books more like traditional, which involves some expense on my part.  I can do that for some of the books (and am still debating whether to do it for Witchfinder.”  Yes, I know there are authors I can compare it too, like Diana Wynne Jones Crestomancy series, but guys, I’m talking about selling to the distributors, so it’s the old rules.  Is this a “big enough” book in the old terms for bookstores to order?  Now mind you, their ordering even a tenth of what I sell in traditional would be a lot of money (we’d never go hungry again!)

But it means, too, that my laydown is set at that level, and that might affect the Baen books.  And then my publisher kills me.  (Even if I don’t kill my career.)

Are stores still ordering to the net?  Indie stores?

Who the heck knows?

So, that’s not something I’m doing that for all the books (and I’m still teetering on the Witchfinder one.  I will 100% sure do it for Musketeer’s Confessor, because that series has fans.)

So – what to do, what to do?

Stand back.  The libertarian is going to suggest… banding together!

Honestly, I don’t know why I do this.  It’s sort of like half my books end up being about groups.  It worries me.  Maybe that early Marxist indoctrination twisted me beyond reclaiming?  What is wrong with me?

The idea goes something like this “There’s a bunch of human wave writers who read my blog.  If we could have a group site and then make brochures and split the cost of printing, and then whoever is going to a convention can take 100 brochures or so, and everyone gets advertising.”  The follow up “We can call ourselves The Human Wave Surfers.” is totally up to you to consider or not, when you realize that it comes from my mind and that I dreamed about dresses made of pea packages.

No, the problem is not web hosting.  Yes, we do own the human wave site.  We have more hosting capacity than we’re using.  The problem is ALWAYS time.

See right now I need to put up my back list as fast as humanly possible.  It SHOULD already be done and would be if it weren’t for the combination of illness and depression (and you know when you start in one, you don’t know which is driving the other.  No, it’s not clinical depression.  Yes, I know what that feels like and trust me, I’d run for treatment so fast I’d leave a trail.  It’s more this tired, beaten down “oh, what’s the use feeling.”  Which could be caused by real tiredness – I still do a lot, the issue is it becomes uncoordinated and a bit pointless and doesn’t drive towards an objective – or it could be caused by a series of upper respiratory infections.  Or yes.  Until I break one, I can’t tell you where the other is coming from.  I’m working on getting stuff done because that’s doable.)  And I need to do books for Baen.  That’s the priorities.  My own website needs to be redone, and then this blog needs to be moved – an endeavor interrupted by younger spawn being in classes and with a heavy load this semester.

But I could totally design a brochure.  One of my “my brain is dead” is designing stuff.  And if we use Human Wave Surfers, someone (note not pointing at self) could put up a site with snippets and pictures, and stuff.

And we could also, well, more pointedly help each other.  Cross links at the back of appropriate books.  “If you liked this book, you might also like other Human Wave Surfers.”

That sort of thing.  And I’m sure others of you (you’re even sicker than I am.  Sick, sick, sick) can come up with other group cross promotion endeavors at a low, low price.

Or I could be completely insane.  I mean, if I told my dreams to a psychiatrist the poor man would end up spending the rest of his life in therapy.

So, what do you think?  And do any of you have spare time to contribute to the cause?  The end of this is all of us crossing the country in a bus on the Human Wave Surfers Signing tours, wearing t-shirts that say “I’m in the Band.”

Watch and see – all that collectivism when I was young twisted me beyond belief, I tell you!

*I know, I know, I owe you a chapter of Rogue Magic.  I’m actually going to take a two week hiatus.  This week because we have a friend in town and we’re having a party a day, pretty much, next weekend because I’ll be in TX teaching a workshop at the Bedford Library.  After that, Rogue Magic will resume.  No, I’m not doing guest posts for two weeks, though I might do them every day next weekend.  (Not this.) Because I’ll be really busy (the workshop beats the stuffing out of you.)  I had to cancel Fencon due to family stuff that requires I be in town.  (That too is a long story.)  So I’ll be away Wednesday through Monday, next week, and that might be mostly guest posts.  Not right now.  I just am not in the head space to do Rogue Magic.  Part of this is that the book finally TURNED — I figured out what I was doing wrong, so I think I can finish it.  IF I weren’t going to TX next week, I’d say I could finish it by next Friday.  As is it might be the Friday after, but it will be done soon.  Which is good, because we rather need the cash and also because I want to do Darkship Revenge (which broke open at the same time.  They’re linked, though not as closely as DSR and AFGM. ) Okay.  I’ve babbled long enough.  I’ll let Peter have his say, and I’ll go clean the house.*

Writing from the heart and soul

I’d like to thank Sarah very much for inviting me to contribute a guest blog post about my new book, and how writing it affected me.  She’s a good friend and faithful supporter.

One reads a great deal about how, when writing fiction, characters develop wills of their own.  They drag the author off at a tangent from the ‘scripted’ plot, insist on growing into people very different from those originally in the eye of their creator, and interact in ways that can change their planned relationship altogether.  I’ve had some limited experience of this, having published two SF novels so far and being busy with a third.  The latter, in particular, has surprised me – the relationship between my two leading protagonists has developed very differently from what I first envisaged.  Who knows where it – and they – will end up?  (You’ll be able to find out in December!)

However, I don’t experience that sort of writing as involving my heart and soul.  It’s fun, it’s creative, it’s enjoyable – and sometimes very frustrating! – but it’s something I’m basically observing from outside.  One can remain dispassionate if one chooses, allowing one’s characters to dominate the story as far as one wishes, but always ready to reassert control, delete a few thousand words, and take the plot in a different direction.  (Other authors’ experience may be different, of course.)

That hasn’t been the case in my latest book, which is a non-fiction memoir of service as a prison chaplain.  ‘Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls’ was very difficult to write, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually.  Some of my memories of prison work are very amusing – for example, I’ve written previously about Sam The Sex God – while others are soul-searing in their utter evil.  Close encounters with murderers, drug cartel bosses, terrorists, religious and other fanatics, sexual predators and the like are often so difficult that one simply can’t describe them in clinical, dispassionate terms.

I’d deliberately blocked many of those recollections, not wanting them to be a constant burden.  To relive them in writing this book was sometimes very difficult.  I haven’t included all the gory details, because if the memories are nauseating to me, what will they do to readers who’ve never been exposed to the reality of the sewers of life?  Words on paper can’t adequately convey such moral filth… but even so, I’ve had to try to describe some of the truly evil people who are locked away behind bars.

I doubt very much whether most of those so steeped in darkness of soul and character will ever reform.  Nevertheless, if we write them off, aren’t we writing off all humanity with them?  If there’s hope for reformation and renewal in a single soul, isn’t there at least some hope for every soul?  Many will argue that there isn’t, that some people are so far gone that there’s no way back for them:  but if so, doesn’t that deny any possibility for divine grace to move in them?  (Of course, if one denies the divine in the first place, that isn’t a factor for consideration, but I’m not of that opinion – otherwise I wouldn’t have been a chaplain in the first place, would I?)  I provide some examples of how what I consider to be divine grace can, indeed, change souls and lives.

I’ve long been unhappy about the very poor, biased and inaccurate portrayals in books and other media of life behind bars.  Those by current and former inmates tend to dramatize and glorify their side of the story, and demonize prison authorities (mostly unfairly).  Those by former guards or executives go to the opposite extreme, while the entertainment industry debases the truth on both sides in favor of sensationalism and whatever sells best (usually sex and violence).  I haven’t yet found a book that struck me as fully balanced;  so that’s what I tried to write.  It’s as fair, honest and even-handed as I know how to make it.

I wrote the first draft of this book in 2007, three years after a serious on-the-job injury led to my enforced medical retirement from prison chaplaincy.  It was raw then, too much so to be ready for publication.  I put it aside for three years, letting time heal some of the scars in my memories even as I learned anew to walk properly and adjust to the physical limitations imposed by my injury.  In 2010 I rewrote major sections of it, making it more objective, adding facts and figures and statistics;  then I put it aside once more, because (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) I didn’t think my writing skills were yet ready for publication.  Finally, I took it up again last year and this year, polishing it and getting it ready for prime time.

I hope and pray my book succeeds in getting more people involved with and interested in one of the largest social problems confronting the USA today.  We’re spending as much, if not more, on the criminal justice system as we are on national defense – and much of it is wasted or unnecessary expenditure.  We incarcerate proportionally more of our population than any other nation on earth.  If we don’t reform the system soon, it’s going to grow into an unmanageable, self-perpetuating monstrosity.  Some maintain it already has.

I hope ‘Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls’ will contribute to finding a solution.  I’d be grateful if those of you who read it will join in the discussion on my Amazon.com author forum, or here, or on my blog.  There’s a lot to talk about.

I meant to write a post about something else – three something elses.  They came to me one after the other in the pre-dawn hours, when blog posts usually attack.

The problem is by nine am when I actually could sit down and write, I couldn’t remember what in heck I was going to write about.

We’ll start with an announcement – clears throat: A Few Good Men has been nominated for the Prometheus Award.  Keep in mind, it’s not yet a finalist much less a winner.

Maybe I should talk about books and stories that are heart’s blood and favorite children.

This is something I’ve never fully understood – nor will I ever, I suspect.

I like everything I write – of course, I do.  Okay, not strictly true.  There was stuff I wrote that I can’t remember.  Plain Jane is one of those.  I wrote it in three days, and I can’t for the life of me remember what I wrote in it.  I was very shocked going back to find out that it’s divided in sections.

BUT for the normal, not written in a rush because I need the cash, books, I sort of like all of them, more or less.  At least, they do, as it were.  I might not like the edits done to them, or the cover, or whatever, but I like the books.

And of course, I’m going to rise to the defense of any of my books, if you should diss them.

But in the end, most of them…

Okay, this is best explained by going back to when I was doing submissions on paper and to magazines more or less indiscriminately.  Stuff would go out, stuff would come back, I’d send it out again, it was just what it was, no big.

And then…

And then I wrote Thirst.  When Thirst came out it felt like an insult to the system, and I was crushed for a week, before I sent it out again.

Other stories have had the same effect.  Ariadne’s Skein, which I never sold traditionally, and all of space operas, ditto, and then Darkship Thieves.  These stories, somehow, were “Heart’s Blood” and “Favorite Children” and seeing them rejected felt like I’d disintegrate.

When Darkship Thieves was nominated, I held my breath, afraid it would not get it, and I tried to console myself in advance.

With Darkship Renegades, while I loved the book, I didn’t get that feeling of “I’ll disintegrate now if it doesn’t get it.”

Which, btw, is a stupid feeling to get.  It might never have been nominated at all.

But Darkship Thieves having been nominated, I felt I’d be CRUSHED if A Few Good Men wasn’t, and now I’m holding my breath again – because that book is Heart’s Blood and Favorite Child.

Why?  Who the heck knows.  I’m donating my mind to science, but not till I die.  So for now, it’s a big breath of relief that AFGM is nominated, then breath-holding for almost a year.  (Unless it gets kicked out earlier.)  And it’s not impugning the process or the people doing it, btw.  They of course select what they think best.  This is internal, a feeling of protectiveness and tenderness for the book.  Which is also stupid, since books have no feelings.

I’m a writer and I’m stupid.

On that – we’ve just paid tuition for the boys, and we’re about to crash land.  This is worsened by the fact I’m late on delivery for Baen.  The reason I’m late is that I’ve been obsessing over … tight money.  Makes no sense, does it.

I don’t want anyone to denude him or herself.  I KNOW – good Lord, do I know – most of us are holding on by the edge of bleeding fingernails, and I haven’t even put up anything new in my subscriber page for a while, mostly because I’ve been stuck in a novel.  HOWEVER, if you can hit the donate button, it is much appreciated.  As I said, we have tuition to pay.  There are things that need to be done, including moving – but right now we’re stuck because we don’t have the extra money to rent somewhere for the year or so needed to sell the house.  (No, trust me.  It’s impossible to sell a house with four cats in it.  Particularly these four cats.  And then there’s the guys.  Even if they’re being good, messes pile up and you can’t show a house that’s a mess and not sell it at a huge loss, which we can’t afford. Or rather, it’s not impossible, but it takes ALL my time until it sells.  Which comes to the same loss.)  But until we can move, we’re operating at a loss, because… everything has gone up.  And my income is delayed because of stress over income.  Which, yes, yes, is mind boggling but I have already confessed to being stupid.

At least the indie sales are picking up, which means I MUST get off my duff and put more stuff up.  That also has been affected by worry.  But it will get one.  It has to.

And I’ll resume putting things up in the subscriber area as soon as I resume processing stuff for indie.

For now I’m going to do battle with Through Fire.  Just on the effort it’s taking, it should end up being Heart’s Blood, but weirdly that’s not how these things work.

Two days ago I ignited a fire storm by mentioning that men and women were different: shaped differently by evolution, shaped differently by gestation.

The funny part there is that this wasn’t even the main point of my post.  The main point of my post is that men and women had different wellsprings of strength and gentleness and trying to turn men into women would only break them, not improve them.

I thought the part about men and women not being the same was self evident.  Ask any biologist.  Yes, there are outliers.  Yes, some women are stronger than some men.  Some cats are bigger than some dogs, too, but that’s not the way to bet.

Even the most tomboyish of  girls is more feminine than 99% of men.  Again, statistical distributions – it’s the way it breaks.

But apparently saying this makes me bigoted and a “hater” – I’m rather puzzled at how stating a fact that any biologist will know makes one “bigoted” or who I’m supposed to hate when the fact is rather that I don’t hate men and I do grant them the right to be different.

I find that it’s mostly a lot of reading stuff I did not say that drives people insane – like I’m supposed to be homophobic, because you know, people who are gay think the genders are indistinguishable, and that’s why they are only attracted to one of … Oh, wait, that makes no sense!

Or the gentleman who objected on my facebook that there was sexism against women (of course) and therefore we should stop considering adjectives feminine and masculine.  The example he gave was sensitive, which was a bit of a puzzler for me.  He says we shouldn’t consider it feminine and since I never have (how many characters have I described with sensitive features or sensitive hands?  Go and check how many are female.  Probably none.)

And this is going to lead me to tell you something that is probably a real shocker.

I’d almost guarantee if you’re the average person everything you think you know about the relationship between men and women is wrong and most of it comes out of movies, and a lot of it comes from the sixties obsession with rebelling against the fifties.

What am I talking about?  Well, about twenty years ago, a friend who was very well educated and also genuinely intelligent was talking about men and women and said men had ways of doing things “because men couldn’t cry in public.”

She was talking about the middle ages…

Now there have been times and places where men couldn’t cry in public (the Romans had issues with certain kinds of crying for males…) but it was not universal and certainly not forbidden in all situations.

In the same way, she was convinced that women never worked except at domestic tasks.  This is true, of course, for societies wealthy enough to keep their women immured indoors and busy only about the comfort of the house.  I think if you look at the totally of the human experience that might account for oh, 1% of the times and places.

Even in Victorian England most women HAD to work outside the home.  It wasn’t a choice or empowerment.

Throughout most of history women and men worked side by side – they had to.  There wasn’t enough surplus in the system.

Yes, there were professions reserved for one or the other, usually because it fit the normal man or woman better.  Mostly the men did the brutal, dangerous stuff.  (Not that housework wasn’t brutal or dangerous by our view.  All of it was.  But home stuff was COMPARATIVELY less brutal and dangerous.  And yeah, most of it was deadly dull.)

But it wasn’t unusual for men or women to take on the other gender’s tasks.  I mean, it wasn’t unusual over history.  It was unusual – but existed – at any given time. The outliers – all 1% of them – often crossed over.  Thus we get a lot of women soldiers, though most of them would inspire no one’s romantic fancy (which was the fly in the ointment of the maiden who goes to war tales.  But ah, that makes a better story, and therefore the troubadours do that.  Mind you, not being able to inspire anyone’s romantic fancy didn’t mean they didn’t reproduce.  Witness how many pirate queens and mercenaries pled the belly.)  I don’t know any legends about men who did the equivalent, besides one or two about princess’s maids who… weren’t.

There were certain facts of biology – which science has all but abolished – that dictated treatment of women throughout history.  I.e. a man wanted to make sure the children he was rearing were his.  What is curious is that in most cases this didn’t lead to systems as restrictive as sharia.  Yes, women had to mind whom they talked to and whom they were alone with.  Yes, in many societies they were treated as property.  In many others, though, they were considered equal with restrictions.  Of course men had restrictions, too, but not the same.

To interpret this as men oppressing women is a big piece of folly.  Given how much stronger than us they are, they could have made our lives unremitting living hell ALWAYS.  (And if you’re going to say it was, keep in mind that the life of the average peasant until two hundred years ago was living h-ll to us, whether the peasant was male or female.

Yes, women were restricted, but if you read even regency romances (and keep in mind that’s the upper class) so were men.  At least if the romances are accurate.  You could get a bad reputation for very little.

And yet… Read the beginning of Our Bones Are Scattered about the Kanpur massacre.  Just at the opening it relates the career of a Victorian lady.  Three marriages, children from each marriage, and a thoroughly modern life.

Individuals were still individuals and rebellion ain’t nothing new.  I would almost bet you none of even the most restricted Victorian maids fit the pattern – quite.

And now?  Now the pill and the ability to genetically test offspring has changed everything.  To keep hitting men and screaming “help, help, I’m being oppressed” is not only wrong, it’s a very ungentleman-like trick for people who want to be considered “equal.”And if you want to be equal you should be a gentleman, because those are the virtues for public life.

No good will come of this.

And no good will come of telling those of us who chose to stay home and raise our own kids that we’re gender traitors or – worse – that we’re oppressed.

The funny thing, you know, is that – I was thinking of this yesterday – when we got married we sat down and evaluated our chances for surviving and for one of us, at least, being able to make it in the arts (I wrote.  Dan wrote and composed.)

We judged that because he had a much higher earning potential (if we lived here, something we decided for reasons having nothing to do with money and complex enough they’re not worth putting here) I’d stay home with the kids (because what’s the point of having kids for strangers to raise) and pursue writing. (He tried to convince me to do it before kids, and if I knew what I know now I’d have done it. I’d have gotten in before publishing because completely non-functional and we MIGHT have been able to have him quit and pursue his stuff too.

I considered this a gift – He was sacrificing his artistic aspirations, so that we would have three squares, a roof over head, and enough to raise the kids on.

Was it easy?  Well, no.  I was often – still am – more housekeeper than writer.  Days can slide by when I get only an hour or two a day to write.  But then his path isn’t easier.

I’m completely puzzled by the dogma that man’s work is better than women’s work. It is different, of course, but I’ve done both: skilled office work and housekeeping and for me, for the way my mind works, I’ll take housekeeping.

You see, it’s brutal but I set my own times, and can approach tasks the way I want.  And I can save a few hours to write in.  Dan has had jobs where he worked eighteen hours, came home to a colicky baby and volunteered to take over, while I got a couple of hours of sleep.  Then he got a couple hours, shaved and went back to work.  And even now, he manages the money side of my business, and he works, and he’s rarely “alive” enough to come home and work.

So I thought of being able to stay home and try my hand at making a living from writing as a gift.  In fact, I have male friends who were given the same opportunity by their wives, and they too consider it a gift.

Why should I consider it as oppression just because it fits tradition?  Why should all “tradition” – and this one very recent – be tossed over?  I value questioning everything – I’m American — but surely there is a baby in that bath water.  Why should I consider it as oppression because someone else’s doctrine demands it?

Why should I take in account the opinions of people so wholly unconnected with myself?  People who think all of history was the Victorian ages and the Fifties?

People who think saying men and women are DIFFERENT and each has different approaches to the world is “hateful” and “bigoted”?  People who think adjectives apply only to one gender?

Pfui.

It’s not elegant, and it’s not eloquent, but that’s all I have to say: Pfui.

UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club.

There will be a real post later today and one at Mad Genius Club too.  Right now, I’m running to an appointment… however, I want to make this very clear:

If I find out one of you jokers sent my characters to wake me this morning, that joker will be DEAD.  That’s dead with a capital Malice.

I should have wakened up at six thirty, so I could do the posts before the appointment but I thought “another ten minutes” which probably would be another ten minutes, except that I swear I kept dreaming I was waking.  WORSE I dreamed I was awakened by my space opera characters, one after the other.

If you men think you’d love to be awakened by Athena, revise your dreams.  No, seriously.  She stands at the foot of the bed and glares.  And taps her foot.

Lucius is worse.  I’d forgotten he was raised as a nobleman.  I got the raised eyebrow and the “you’re falling down on the job” “Now, Sarah, really!”

And Nat…  People who train recruits should not wake me.

So, due to the fact that I was “awakened” every five minutes, I got up an hour late.

It’s the characters’ fault.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Even if I can feel Athena glaring at the back of my head.

Let me start this by saying I approve of sex.  It’s a great concept by and large, and it forces even hermits like me who would otherwise live entirely in books into relationships, which in the end make us better persons.  Besides, it’s the most fun you can have with someone you’re not collaborating on a book with.  (Or vice versa.)

And when you’re in love with someone and particularly if you’re married, sex can make an otherwise oh hum day into a full holiday with fireworks and stuff.  I understand it also has health benefits.

I need this disclaimer up there, because I’m about to sound like Mrs. Grundy.

I’m not biblio-sexual.  Sex between the pages of a book – besides giving you paper cuts and who the heck has a book that big? – does nothing for me.

Note I didn’t say sexual tension does nothing for me.  I am human.  I’m also woman, which means a prurient interest in other people’s sex life comes baked in the cake and is frankly most salutarily exerted on fictional characters.

I’ve wanted characters to get together and do it already, and not only most of Heyer’s and a good number of Heinlein’s.  The main characters in The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie SIZZLE even if the girl is very much a geek chick.

No, the sex that does nothing for me between the pages of a book comes in two varieties.  First, the almost exhaustively clinical “And then he put it in five times, stimulating…”  Second, the highly improbable “His kiss made fireworks go on inside her head and a choir of angels sing Halleluiah”  (Both of these are exaggerated for comic effect, but not by much. All the women who know, just know, on the first kiss that they’ll bear any hardship to have HIS babies might exist, but they’re certainly not very plausible.  As for choirs of angels and fireworks, if you’re having a stroke while kissing, it might be a good idea to kiss a doctor.  Or something.)

When my husband stumbled onto romances – hey, they’re free on Amazon and I can’t always look over his shoulder and go “I don’t care if that says science fiction, that’s really a romance” – I spent more time telling him “no, that is physiologically impossible” than I spent laughing at the passages he read, and TRUST me that’s saying a lot.)

I realize I’m not “normal” in this – or at least I presume I’m not, though I’ll go into that in a moment – because I still remember, with a slight puzzled frown and the look of “wha?” that I also get while reading the news these days when a co-worker of mine (this was back when I had honest work as a multinlingual translator and the book will date how long ago that was) pressed Clan of the Cave Bear on me because “there’s this scene where he plays with her breasts and it’s just… oooooh.”

I read the book, made rude noises at the plot, and passed that scene (which was all of two paragraphs.  Oh, how we’ve come along.) with “okay, he touches her breasts.  Wheee.”

Now, the same scene might have got me interested (it was brief enough, mind you) if I’d been interested in the characters and rooting for them to get together, but THEN I wouldn’t pass it on with “he plays with her breasts” – I’d pass it on with “They have this great chemistry and you just want them to get together.”

For those of you who are in science fiction/fantasy and who think I’m being unusually prude – and you might if you are the sort of person who thinks Heinlein had too much sex in his books – let me point out that Heinlein has NO sex in his books.  He has allusions to sex, talk of sex, pillow talk after sex.

The modern iteration of books – and not just romance, urban fantasy is rife with this – has actual sex in books.  How it felt when it went in, what it did when it was in there, how many times it went in, and which orifices it disported in.

The sad thing, the truly sad thing is that it doesn’t even upset me – not really – it just makes me go “oh, yawn” and go past those pages.

But here’s the thing – the books often have nothing else to hold them together and THAT is what upsets me.

It seems the proportion at which sex is being put in books is the same proportion at which books are becoming politically correct pap and “emotions” signifying nothing. This includes Romance, where even the “bodice rippers” of the seventies and eighties had sex like Heinlein had sex, but they did have plots and were often interesting or experimental (no, I didn’t read romance then, but I’ve read old ones now.)

And I think there is a co-relation.  I think there is a very strong correlation.

Look, I first noticed this not with sex but with what I call “precious posturing.”

I confess to being guilty of that myself.

What do I mean by that?

Well, when I was under political cover, and therefore neither my novels, my plots nor my characters could be about stuff I cared PASSIONATELY about, I had to make the books interesting enough for me to write.  Hence, the Shakespeare trilogy, where I tried to combine high flung Shakespeare with “easy enough to read” and historical accuracy.  It was a stretch, and it kept me interested.  Then there was the Magical British Empire, where I had to figure out how things were in three continents at the close of the British Empire (without traveling there because us poor fiction writers don’t get that kind of advance.)

It was challenging.  I see a lot of this being done in science fiction and fantasy, not all by people who are under cover, but clearly by people smart enough to know that what they’re saying has been said a thousand times before and is – objectively – boring.  So, they put in all the historical details plus some, and try to marry reality and fantasy seamlessly.

These… exercises can be lots of fun but they have limited appeal.  For one, they require a public literate enough in history to know how much fun you’re having.

Other writers admire this greatly, but I suspect overall it doesn’t sell very well.  (My numbers on MBE aren’t exciting, though weirdly it’s still on shelves many places.  Go figure.  Of course, the relation of the numbers to the sales is mostly an imaginary one.)  At any rate, I don’t think the publishers see much point in it.

Which brings us to what the publishers see point in.  The one thing.  Somewhere in the lizard brain there is a cell that says “Sex cells.” And therefore the reptilian lords of NYC publishing say “More sex.”

I’ve actually had that imperative shouted at me.  (No, not by Baen, which is sane.) And to get push these days, you need to have sex in the book (again, not with Baen)

I’ve also had the length dictated “We need a page and a half of sex here.”  (This led to the famous “I’ve done two paragraphs.  You want more write it yourself.” Probably the reason I don’t work for that house anymore.  Well, that and there’s only so much I can take.)

I’m not saying, mind you, I totally object to writing sex, or that I wouldn’t totally put a scene in, if it flowed naturally out of what I was writing AND were necessary to advance the plot.  It probably wouldn’t be done to length.  As is, I’ve never had need to do it.  I can suggest a lot with a line about a touch or a look, and I think it’s more powerful if the reader imagines it.  BUT I’m not saying it won’t happen in the future.

What I’m saying is this: Sex shouldn’t be used to distract from the fact that there is no there there.

This is a mistake often committed by very new writers.  It often indulges the peculiar kink or fascination they have.  And because it interests and gives them a rush, it blinds them to the fact their characters are really only going shopping and talking a lot and nothing is happening.

I’ve redirected any number of young writers to “cut all the s &m” out or “cut all the fetish clothing out.”  Now, look at what you have and figure out how to make it interesting.  Then you can add that stuff back in, if you think it’s needed.

It almost never is, or only in small amounts.

Except most of what is on the shelves these days IS that stuff.  “No plot, no problem, have them screw NOW.”  “No tension?  Throw in an illicit love affair.”

It’s not the abundance of sex I’m objecting to (Though I do object to plumbing-level, uninteresting sex) but the fact that it’s there to cover the lack of anything else.

So, why do people still buy it?  I don’t know.  I think very young people buy it because they have this misguided frisson of the forbidden, and because it makes them feel grown up.  “Oh, look, ma, I’m reading dirty books, I really am.”

BUT overall, people aren’t buying.  As in, reading for pleasure falls ever lower.

Of course that is the fault of TV and video games and–  It’s like, in the hey day of cinema it totally killed reading for pleasure, which is why the pulps never happened, right?

Or perhaps we should give people books that mean something?  That pose interesting ideas? That challenge and interest and, yes, have plots?  Sex optional and well written sex that means something welcome?

It’s a crazy idea.  But it JUST might work.

I have bad news.  Men and women are different.  Oh, I don’t mean that – vive la difference, right? – I mean men and women are different in the way they relate to others, the way they relate to society, the way they present.

Is some of that culturally set?  Well, no sh*t Sherlock.  The “revolutionaries” and “daring innovators” of the sixties kept coming up with ridiculous things like you know, in some cultures wearing pants would make you non-womanly, and in Scottland men wore kilts.  Well, again, no sh*t Sherlock.  A lot of the external signaling of gender and the way people er… for lack of a better phrase, strut their stuff for the opposite gender (or the same) is different depending where you are.  (I had the d*mndest time convincing my parents that no, Dan wasn’t gay, because he doesn’t drink alcohol, or not a lot of it.)

Do these differences in the way gender is expressed invalidate the concept of gender and make us all tabula rasa? Can we raise boys to behave as women and women as boys and nothing at all will be different?

I’d ask how stupid you have to be to believe that except that I know most psychologists and sociologists practicing today were TAUGHT that – whether they believe it or not depends, I guess on how much exposure they’ve had to the real world.  And I know places like Sweden and Holland and Germany and other “enlightened” locations have swallowed this hook line and sinker, which is why we have “gender neutral” toys and the idea that kids get to choose their gender as adults, kind of like some “enlightened” parents let kids choose their own names “when they’re old enough”.  As though it were just some accoutrement, and not an essential part of who you are, formed and molded into muscle and thought and hormonal load from the time you were in the womb, and formed before that over millennia of evolution.

Yes, men and women had different evolutionary pressures.  There is a pattern to humanity.

Yes, yes, I know.  If you look hard enough you’ll find a tribe in Africa where, if you squint kind of sideways, the women hunt and the men look after the children.  Humans are very plastic and in unusual circumstances or do to some external reason, that pattern can emerge.  Yes, yes, there have always been women warriors, and I’m sure there have always been men who spun and sewed and looked after the kids, too, though those aren’t nearly as celebrated as the “warrior women.” Because in these enlightened feminist times, women who act like men are celebrated, but never men who act like women.  There is no worst chauvinist than a “feminist” for devaluing traditional female roles and valuing male ones.

HOWEVER those are outliers, whether tribes or individuals.  Throughout most of human history and pre-history, men did the outdoor/dangerous/difficult work and women the boring/annoying/indoor work.

It all comes down to men hunted and women gathered.  Neither work was – before I get jumped – easy or what we’d call safe, but they presented different kinds of danger and different kinds of overcoming it, which in turn led to very different group mechanics.

Men needed to trust each other absolutely; needed to know their place in the hierarchy; and allowed for innovation in the service of group success.  Women, on the other hand needed to have a cohesive group, meaning you had to behave like the rest of the group.  Sticking out was bad because it didn’t materially help the group – you didn’t have to corner berries together, or … And striking out on your own was bad because, if we see the patterns in the rainforest today, for instance, the berry-gathering group is also the child watching group.  Mothers like me, who rather preferred not to be submerged in a ‘mommy group’ would either have to be beyond very good, or they’d lose the vast majority of their kids, and thereby not pass on their genes.

More than that, when it comes to the relationship between men and women, it is marked by the fact that they outweigh us, out-lift us and out-run us.  We can outlast them both in effort and in longevity, for what consolation that’s worth.  BUT physically they’re stronger than us, even at the same size.  (I had a moment of shock when my then 11 year old son, who was still shorter and slimmer than I, could easily lift 100 pounds in a dead lift which I couldn’t do.)

This means in interactions between men and women – as adults and partners – men must modulate their strength and women must find non-physical ways of projecting theirs.  We see women doing this as far back as pre-history.  The wise counselor.  The advisor.  It’s in all our legends and quite a few of our histories.  The man goes home and consults with his wife.

I’d say our “civilization” – our road to being human – started when hominid males decided to court women rather than simply overpowering them.

Is it evolutionarily favored?  It would seem to be.  Women are more likely to raise to adulthood children willingly conceived.

Not to say that rape isn’t good reproductive strategy – if it weren’t, the Vikings wouldn’t have left swathes of blue eyed people all across the shores of Europe.  I’m just saying it’s not EFFICIENT.  Unless you’re going to make rape a way of life, and have a way to spread the damage across the world, then I wouldn’t recommend it, because I’d guess a lot fewer children conceived of rape reach healthy reproductive maturity.

So overall the men who courted won out over the men who raped.  Regardless of the whole culture of rape thing, very few men want to pursue rape as a reproductive choice.

But… women don’t understand this.

Heinlein had something in Stranger about men and women each being locked in his own way of being in the world and unable to understand the other gender.  This is not true at least for some of us who grew up with mostly members of the opposite sex, and who still have members of the opposite sex as close and trusted friends.

A while back there was a book about a woman who dressed up and passed as a man – I think it’s called Self Made Man – and the revelations she got this way.  The things that “wives can’t know about husbands” type of revelations.  By and large, she got me to blink and go “you didn’t know that?” or “You mean most women don’t know that?”  Because I already did.  But I might be a different case.  As I said I grew up around my brother and his friends, and they tended to think it didn’t matter what they said in front of me.  And my husband and I talk about just about everything.

BUT that said, there is a group of women, we’ll call them “the sob sisters” who are really really dumb about this.  They either view men as a sort of hairier woman with a penis, or they wish he were so.  These are the women who fight you tooth and nail on things like “Men are truly different” and “No, gender is not all ‘social construction’.

I never understood their psychology, though I’ve been interacting with them since Kindergarten.  They were the little girls who wanted to boys to admire their pretty frocks, but didn’t want to play rough lest they tore the frills, and therefore demanded that boys not be “rough” around them.  (Which largely amounted to their not being boys.)

They don’t understand that the decision to court rather than rape is built in very deeply in a man’s psyche, layered by thousands of years of evolution and – yes – sexual conditioning.  It is a gentleness born of strength.  Men who know themselves to be stronger than any woman they want, discipline themselves to go slowly, to court her.

Even in the most primitive tribes, rituals are instituted to bend men into this civilized mold.  Because when the mold is broken, the result is that men abuse women, women abuse children, and the world goes to hell.

The sob sisters don’t get this.  They are gentle because they’re weak and this forces them into being gentle.  Hell hath no fury and ability to oppress as one of these weak, die-away sisters given some power, but every woman here will know what I’m talking about, because sooner or later you find yourself fin a group where one of these has got the bit between their teeth.  Their power is mostly gossip and back stabbing and unbelievable psychological abuse, but they use it to the hilt.

Which is why they think that if men aren’t using their superior strength, it must be because they’re weak, and the “solution” to society (they nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones.  It’s nuttiness) is to raise men to be weak and not to know their own strength.  Hence the entire “rise of the sensitive male.”

The problem is this – you don’t reverse evolution in two generations.  Even if you could, it would be stupid, mind, since there are muscular and hormonal reasons for men’s strength, but the point is you can’t do it, anyway.

So when you educate children to believe it’s all a social construction and there’s no difference, you run up against the fact that there’s differences.

Yes, girls can sleep around as much as men, but since our endocrine system predisposes us to attachment after sex, this means the majority of women CAN’T do that and be happy… Even when they tell themselves they are.

And yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters.  The problem is they aren’t.  Not even when they’re raised to act that way.

The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.

Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag.

Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible.  Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.

I often think that the people now controlling education were women who went through this, and therefore want to stop boys from being… well boys.  But what they’re doing in fact is creating more sociopathic males who will act as you want them to, but will take as much advantage as possible.

If they’re going to be considered criminals for being males; if none of their good qualities (their superior strength, their loyalty, their protectiveness) are appreciated; if they’re told they can only be this sort of inferior ersatz female… what is there for them to control themselves for?  Why not present the face the world wants and take advantage of women behind it?

Chivalry and the code thereof was the laying down of those good reproductive (and civilizational) rules that make for a functioning society that passes on its values to its young: men who put their strength at the service of the weaker; women who praised them and admired them for it; and children who were raised to do the same.

Tearing it down might seem like freedom, but you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.

This has nothing to do with women working (women always worked, at least in the lower classes.  And in the upper classes they often helped administer domains) though working outside the house is a new thing for both men and women, frankly.  What it has to do with is the relationship between men and women.

Men and women are not the same.  They are different at the sinew level, at the hormonal level, and yes, at the brain level.  Different signals of dominance and submission are baked into each of them by thousands of years of evolution.

You can’t upend it quickly or efficiently and the attempt is likely to reduce to rubble everything built since the first proto-human gave a girl a flower instead of throwing her to the ground and having his way with her.  You’ve been warned.  Disregard it at your own risk.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers and thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link.

Rage Against The Darkness

Cedar Sanderson