Tag Archives: Feminism

Drafting Women

It seems that drafting women has come up among the GOP candidates for some reason. So, I’ll give my take on it.

First, women are far too valuable to waste on military activity, with the possible exception of a truly existential threat (such as both the Russians and Germans each faced from the other in WW2). Doug Wilson gets the right of it:

Once you have signed off on the nation/state conscripting your daughters to go serve in combat roles, whatever it was you thought you were conserving — thus allowing you to call yourself a conservative — has had a fork stuck in it and is done. Nothing really to conserve any more.

A nation that conscripts its daughters for its defense is a nation that no longer deserves a defense. We may have to fight later as a practical matter, but this is a matter of rudimentary allegiance.

In a civilized society, anybody proposing sending women to war would be sent to a penal battalion himself to die honourably for the motherland.

On the other hand though, Wilson is right. Our society is no longer civilized and no longer worth defending or supporting. There is nothing to conserve and we should stop acting like there’s anything left.

Most “military age” women voluntarily render themselves infertile, so it’s not like we’re taking them away child creation and rearing. They’ve willingly and enthusiastically removed their own civilizational value and made themselves as expendable as men. There’s no civilizational reason to protect expendable self-sterilized young women.

Rationally we should be drafting women. Women claim to be men’s equals, and equals don’t get defended. Equals have to carry their own weight, and in this case carrying their own weight means being drafted and sent to die in case of war. If we’re going to do this liberalism, we should do it right. Allowing women into the military but not drafting them is one of those unprincipled exceptions that Zippy likes to talk about. If women are allowed in the military like men, then they should drafted like men.

(And no, to unseeing tradcons, this is not men cowering behind women, women enthusiastically pursue equality).

On Wilson’s biblical argument, the case Wilson makes does not support the idea that women at war is objectively sinful, just imprudent. So, I will talk in practical terms, not moral ones.

As for the combat effectiveness, it is obvious to anybody who’s not ideologically blinded that women will lower the military’s combat effectiveness and that’s a positive thing (I hesitate to use the word good). America’s hard military effectiveness doesn’t matter. America has had few just wars, hasn’t had a truly defensive war in a long time, possibly ever (the Pacific front of WW2 and the confederate defence in the War of the States may have been defensive, although, the US did provoke Japan and the CSA was not the USA) and has never fought a necessary war at all as far as I can recall at the moment. There’s certainly not going to be a defensive foreign war any time soon, and definitely not an existential one.

As for foreign conquests, America also has the gear and numbers to utterly destroy any possible foreign enemy that it gets serious on. The only reason America loses wars is because America (purposely?) tries to fail. A loss of combat effectiveness simply doesn’t matter against foreign enemies.

On the other hand, the happening could occur in the next couple of decades, and where the military falls during this times will matter a lot. The red tribe (ie. the tribe I support and the one not wholly given to degeneracy) has the absolute advantage when it comes to capacity for violence, but if the military falls on the side of the blue tribe, things could get rough. So, a less effective military helps neutralize a potential threat to the red tribe.

As for the purpose of women in the military being to destroy masculine virtue and manly pride, that’s also a positive. The military is the enemy. It is a part of USG and is controlled at the top by the same people destroying the rest of our civilization. Even worse, it is an enemy filled with good people who should be the allies of us and civilization. Because of its association with masculine virtue and red tribe values, the red tribe disproportionately volunteers to support the institution controlled by those who hate them. As well, it is the most trusted institution in the US, acting as a bulwark of trust for the otherwise (rightfully) mistrusted fedgov.

We need to disillusion young white men of their allegiance to the military. White men shouldn’t be fighting the wars of those who hate them. The more we can destroy  the (undeserved) trust the military has among young white men and the less we white men think they can get manly pride from joining up, the fewer white men will volunteer to die in a on the other side of the world while forcing liberalism, sodomy, corporate rape, and democracy upon foreigners.

The same argument holds for lowering military standards. It is a foregone conclusion that military standards will be lowered so that women look equal on paper. This is not something to fear, it is a positive as it will further lower combat effectiveness and eat at trust in the military.

Finally, and more morbidly, having CNN and the NYT showing hundreds of body bags from whatever foreign sandpit we’ll lodge ourselves in next beside the pictures of formerly cute (now dead) young women may end up being a wake-up call for the country (or not, it’s hard to tell where our depravity ends). A little bit of accelerationism in this area could lead to awakening.

So, it’s horrific (but not objectively sinful) that we’re wasting valuable women in the military, but those women were wasting their value themselves, so corporately and civilizationally we’re not really losing anything. If we’re going to let them into the military, we should follow through on the base principles and draft them. The practical effects of this will be positive for those concerned with eventual restoration.

The Wages of Aspiration

Trawling the advice columnists again, I found this gem, which I’ll quote in full:

Dear Amy: My sister lives across the country. She has been married for 33 years. They’ve raised two daughters who are now adults, but she’s been living the most boring life ever!

I don’t know how she could be happy doing nothing but cooking and cleaning for all these years. And then she has the nerve to criticize me for not having enough time in my day, when she has no clue what it’s like to work full time.

Well, OK, she did work full time once — years ago before her daughters were born. She also had a little job when her kids were in school, but it wasn’t a “real job,” just a little part-time lunch-lady position.

I can’t understand why she doesn’t want to work more and help her poor husband with their finances. Then they could travel and see the world! They hardly ever go anywhere. I want so much more for her!

She has never had to live through things like illness, job loss or divorce, as I have. She has been supportive sometimes, but not all the time. I guess I’m a bit jealous because she has so much free time.

I’ve asked her to write me a list of what she does all day. I’ve sent her lists of what I manage to accomplish in the three hours I have in my home, but she has declined to provide her list.

It’s so sad that she has never had any aspirations!

It makes me so sad to feel like she’s wasted her life; she’s only in her 50s! I told her all this in an e-mail, but now she’s mad at me for just being honest. She expects an apology, but I’m hurt now, too. How do we get past this? Do you have any advice on getting her to see my view? — Frustrated Sister in PA

Amy rightfully smacks her down.

The ressentiment here is hidden worse than a toddler’s lies. This women is alone, hurting, and busy-working herself to death, and you can tell she hates it, however much she protests otherwise. She has so little going on in her life, she spends the”three hours I have in my home” on hectoring her contented sister who lives on the other side of the country. She’s looking for validation for her misery, but her sister refuses to provide it by buying into her lies, so instead she tries to destroy her sister’s life because she wants “so much more for her!”

She has refused to tend her own garden, she has leaned in, and now she seethes with resentment towards her sister who is “wasting her life” on creating a loving family. Instead of a family, she chose divorce and a job, and you can feel the pain and betrayal she experienced with her job loss. You can also feel it from her mention of illness; I do not think many people were there to care for her.

Notice how in her miserable ressentiment, she frames her choices as compared to her sisters. “Aspirations!” “So much more!” “Boring”

Having a quiet, happy family life is not an aspiration, but working for a job which would abandon you any time the profit margins were right is? Working your ass off, so you only have 3 hours of free time a day, so that you can go on a vacation once a year is more? Having a contented home life is less? Having a happy family is boring, but working in a cubicle for 13 hours a day is not?

What kind of mutilated soul thinks that way?

This women is in her 50’s, or thereabouts. Retirement looms in a decade. What will her life be when she doesn’t even have her job to distract her from her loneliness? How much of this rage towards her sister is because she knows that horror awaits her soon and she needs to justify the dear she feels to herself?

Dear young lady who may read this, reread that letter and decide carefully which of these sisters you want to be.

Nakedly Corrupt

Here’s a NYT article about the quest to legalize a women’s libido pill. I don’t really care much either way on the issue, other than a general dislike of the FDA, but the view into this fight is a fascinating just how nakedly corrupt the process is.

To summarize some firm has developed flibanserin, a ‘female viagra’, and the “women’s health community” (ie. the people dedicated to sterilizing women and murdering babies) is in a minor civil war over the drug, with the FDA approval process as the battleground. The pro-pill side is arguing SEXISM!, the anti-pill side is arguing SCIENCE!

The drug was rejected once in 2009 because “it was not very effective and had side effects,” which in reality means that “women taking the drug had about one more satisfying sexual event per month than women receiving a placebo” at the cost of “fatigue, fainting, dizziness and nausea”. Is one more sexy time a month worth it, not mine but to, but I will note that these are women, so if they just said yes to their husbands a bit more, they could probably have one more sexy time a month without a pill. But I digress.

After the rejection our main player, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, bought the drug, which was again rejected in 2013. In response, Sprout rallied. They put a women in charge, solely due to merit I’m sure.

Some critics speculate that the company wanted a woman as the face of the brand.

It seems that you can reject affirmative action without being sexist if you are also a feminist.

This is where the fun begins.They then started to rally feminists to to fight for their barely effective pill. Some saw the ploy for the blatant commerical hijacking it is:

From my perspective, that was a really inappropriate strategy, and I really didn’t like it,” said Susan F. Wood, director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health at George Washington University. She said the company had “made the rounds,” asking for the support of women’s health organizations, including hers. “There are some very important issues around ensuring that women get studied and women’s health needs are addressed,” she said. “This trivializes that work.”

But a bunch of other feminists were more gullible and signed up to fight for this pill.

Advocates who support the libido drug, flibanserin, say they believe it has the potential to improve the lives of millions of American women and strongly reject the charge that they were in any way co-opted by the company. They say passionate supporters are needed to move impassive federal agencies to action, and cite Act Up, which pushed the F.D.A. on AIDS drugs in the 1980s.
…
It was not clear what role, if any, the company had in the trip. Ms. Scanlan, who was among the participants, said they “went out there under our own steam.” Ms. Greenberg said her nonprofit group had paid for the bus. Dr. Anita Clayton, a paid consultant for Sprout who helped in the drug’s testing and who is a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, said she had accompanied the participants as a medical expert.

A “medical expert”. Here’s a nice HuffPo piece by her where she advocates against the FDA’s “discrimination” while neither mentioning neither the drug nor her getting paid as a consultant, although, her HP bio has a nice list of paid consultancies.

To help in their fight Sprout enlisted PR firm Blue Engine Message and Media, which if you check their source-watch is pretty much an independent PR arm of the Democratic Party.

Audrey Sheppard is one of the spearheads of the campaign and the one who approached Blue Engine. She was the director of the FDA Office of Women’s Health appointed by Clinton and has been deeply involved in Democratic politics for decades. She is also a paid advocate for Sprout.

Together they created a campaign called Even the Score. Take a look at the site; it’s all vague pablum about equality for women. Not one specific mention I could find of the drug they are actually campaigning to support, and the only mention of Sprout is on the supporters page, which is itself amusing. It contains a bunch of random medical-sounding organizations nobody has ever heard of such as the International Society for The Study of Women’s Sexual Health (Dr. Anita Clayton is a director), two pharmaceutical companies (Sprout and Trimel, who are creating their own ‘pink viagra’), and, for some reason, Jewish Women International.

Susan Scanlan is chairing Even the Score and is the other leader of the campaign. She’s neck-deep in the Democrat Party and the bureaucracy, as well as having been a lobbyist for the defence industry in the past. Her husband (who I mention primarily because I could not pass up linking to his insane website) has a work history that reads like a typical Cathedral worker.

The Blue Engine spokeperson for Even the Score is Jaime Horne, who’s also worked the Democrat machine, as well as progressive Air America Radio and some progressive non-profits.

So those are a few of the players in this campaign, I have no time or will to go more in-depth, maybe someone paid to can do so, but here’s how the players describe fighting for the pink pill:

“I’ve been accused of bullying the F.D.A., and I say, ‘No, it’s called advocacy,’ ”

They barely conceal that they’re nakedly mau-mauing the flak-catchers. I like that quote though as it sums it up quite clearly: there is no difference between bullying and advocacy other than if the cause if righteous or not.

Continuing on, here’s what Scanlan has to say about her pay:

She said she believed in the drug’s potential, and was not doing it for the money, which she described as an “extremely modest stipend.”

“I’m not going to be taking any vacation to the Riviera on it,” she said.

Maybe it’s just my blue-collar roots but to me the term “modest stipend” conjures up the thought of ‘not quite covering your gas expenses‘, not ‘not quite covering a fancy vacation to France.’ Maybe I have different definitions of modest from the denizens of the iron triangle.

Beyond the luncheon, which took place at the restaurant Ris, Even the Score paid for dozens of people, including patients, to get to a public workshop on female sexual dysfunction at the F.D.A. last fall. It also gave them teal scarves.

At this point I’m surprised, Ris is more expensive than where I usually eat, but is less ritzy than I thought, cheeseburgers are only $13, $20 with a side and entrees cost $25-50. But Even the Score seems to have deep pockets coming from somewhere (Sprout?) to feed, transport, and house that many people.

Daniel Carpenter, a scholar of regulatory policy at Harvard University, called the campaign for the drug’s approval “the most extreme case of companies using social lobbying to get a drug approved in years.”

He disputed the advocates’ analogy to the AIDS movement, saying Act Up was as suspicious of the drug companies as it was of the F.D.A. “How independent are these groups?” he asked. “Would they turn their backs on the company if the price was really high or if there were safety issues? If all they are doing is greasing the wheels to approval, it’s kind of one-sided.”

Heh. If you want more, here’s a sexologist and a psychiatrist on the claims of Even the Score from last year.

Ms. Horn of Even the Score strongly disputes the contention that the campaign put pressure on the agency.

Yes, there’s absolutely no impropriety here. None at all. But the next quote clinches it:

“People who claim that the F.D.A. advisory committee’s decision was based solely on a public-relations campaign are giving us too much credit,” she said in an email. “If the science didn’t support approval, the F.D.A.-appointed advisory committee of doctors, clinicians and other safety experts wouldn’t have approved it.”

“Too much credit.” She doesn’t even dispute the charges of pressuring the FDA, in fact she seems almost flattered by it, she just says that they helped but not as much as you might think.

Painting the F.D.A. as sexist did not sit well with some potential supporters. Stephen T. Wills, the chief financial officer of Palatin Technologies, which is also developing a drug to increase women’s libido, said the company asked this month that its name be removed from Even the Score’s website.

When even other pharmaceutical companies think you’ve gone too far…

Palatin had declined several requests to contribute to Even the Score, including one for $5,000 or $10,000 to pay for patients to travel to the F.D.A. workshop last October.
…
Many people wanted to testify, the vast majority in favor of the drug.

Absolutely nothing untoward here.

There was loud applause when some people spoke in favor of the drug, and when the vote was announced at the end. There was less applause for people testifying against approval.

That last line just kills me. That has to be intentional dry humour.

So, to summarize the situation, a pharmaceutical company has rallied the Democratic political machine, the feminist community, the women’s sexual health community (which somehow exists), and a Jewish Woman’s organization for some unknown reason, to bully the FDA into approving an ineffective form of female viagra. The separation between these bureaucracy, the lobby groups, the Democratic Party, industry, the feminists, the media, and the women’s health groups is practically non-existent; almost everybody involved has worked for most of them.

The major players pretty much define the iron triangle. It’s almost astounding how openly corrupt of the process is.

How often does this sort of stop go on that the NYT doesn’t write about because it isn’t as sexy as ‘libido pills’?

Women are Achieving

The Guardian has an article on how boys are a mess (h/t: TRP), there’s nothing all that new there other than its the Guardian acknowledging the problem and its somewhat RP’d. But it has this little bit that comes up with all these articles:

“Men are opting out and women are opting in. Women are working harder at jobs, they’re working harder in school, and they are achieving – last year women had more of every single category of degree, even engineering. This is data from around the world. Now in many colleges there’s a big gap as boys are dropping out of school and college.”

Zimbardo estimates that there are, in Britain and the US, 5-10% more women than men at many colleges and universities. “So they’re going to have to have affirmative action for guys because obviously one reason you go to college is to find a guy.”

Everytime the crisis of boys/men comes to the fore, there’s always the section on how women are achieving. The triumphalism varies, this one tones it down quite a bit compared to, for example, this but there’s always this note of woman are doing better.

Except, are they?

Women are going to school more, getting more education, and outnumber men in the workforce. So, they are achieving more, at least for the mediocre positions, men still dominate the elite positions.

But are they really better off? What exactly are they achieving?

To most men, work is/has been something they had to do so to obtain a wife, then provide for the resulting family. Most men probably took pride in a job well done or in creating, but the purpose of going in to work was to earn to provide for his family. He could have gotten the pride of creation elsewhere, not to mention in today’s white-collar, paperwork world, satisfaction from creating something tangible is rapidly disappearing. Likewise, since the growth of mass post-secondary education, getting a degree for men has primarily been about avoiding a job doing physical labour, getting a better job to hopefully attract a prettier wife, and provide a more materially rich life for his family. The main purpose of post-secondary education was to get a family and provide for it, while making provision easier.

Men did this work, not for its intrinsic own sake, but for the extrinsic good of the family.

To repeat, as an aggregate woman are achieving more, but what are they achieving?

Women are now doing the work men did to support their families, without having families to support, barring (the usually poor) single mothers, who are not the kinds of women-in-the-workplace these articles are happily pointing to as signs of success. In fact, statistically speaking, these women are less likely to have families and when they do these families are smaller.

So, what are they achieving?

The only thing they seem to be achieving is more consumption and more money to be spent on the consumptive treadmill. Is that something we should be proud of? Is that kind of achievement really something we as a society should be pursuing and pushing our boys and girls to pursue?

The other question then becomes, are men really being left behind?

If a young man has no need to support a family, because he doesn’t have a wife, he might not get a wife, and when he does his wife will work and IF they have children, there will only be one, maybe two, why does he need to work?

Is he really falling behind if his part-time McD’s gig pays for his quarter of the bachelor pad’s rent, beer, and the new XBox?

Is a man really worse off spending his hours playing video games and chilling with his bros rather than spending them working hard to get a bigger (but still empty) house and a (nominally) better car?

Why is empty, high-work, high-stress consumerism somehow assumed to be better than empty, low-work, low-stress consumerism?

Either way it’s empty, but the latter is a lot easier and more enjoyable.

Maybe this ‘high achievement‘ is not some victory for women, maybe it’s simply that men know the score: Work sucks, but is (was) necessary to get a wife, regular sex, and a family. Now that men can get sex without a wife and aren’t getting a wife or family anyway, why work?

On the other hand, women seem to have been tricked into thinking that grinding away at a white-collar job is its own reward. They’re doing the shit men were forced to do and mostly disliked, while not even having the reward of a wife having supper ready for them when they get home.

Is it just the boys that are mess? Are the women really achieving?

The Rape Gulag

The great and good hold that 1 in 4 (or 1 in 5) women will be raped at college. The Soviet gulags had an average mortality rate of 1 in 10.

So, sending your daughter for a 2-3-year college degree has similar odds of rape as 2-3 years in the gulag had of death. It would be fair to say that the great and the good believe that college is a rape gulag. Yet, these people also believe that college should be co-ed and that women should attend college.

Is it just me, or does this strike people as evil? What kind of person would advocate sending young women away to be raped?

Not to mention the young women who believe this? How self-destructive would a person have to be to voluntarily go someplace where the odds of rape were so high?

I think we should prevent women from going to these rape gulags; end co-ed post-secondary education. I’m sure given how horrible rape is and how much they campaign against rape, the great and the good should fully support this measure. How could one not oppose rape gulags?

Or are they being disingenuous with their numbers?

Feminism is About Equality…

Feminism is about equality or feminism is about equal rights is a common motte used by feminists. I’ve already shown how that is not true and shown the ideological reasons feminists like to push this bit of drivel, so go read that if that’s what your looking for.

Instead, today I’m going to show that anybody using this phrase inherently recognizes that equality is meaningless conceptual nonsense, or possibly that they simply grossly ignorant of that of which they speak.

Feminism has gone through a number of evolutions. There have been three major evolutions of feminism: the first focusing on suffrage and prohibition, a second focusing on domesticity, patriarchy, and access to the workplace, and the third is more diffuse but tends to focus on empowerment and abolishing gender roles.

Just in these very broad outlines we can see the contradictions of various form of feminism. First wave feminism and prohibition were virtually indistinguishable, yet one of today’s large post-feminist empowerment crusades is the “right” of women to get as irresponsibly drunk as they want without having to take responsibility for any actions taken while drunk. The need to dress sexily for men was on of the shackles of patriarchy the second-wave tried to throw off, while self-proclaimed feminist sluts of the third-wave are arguing for their right to dress as whores without being judged for it.

When you add in all the various permutations of feminism the contradictions abound even more: Sex-positive feminists and anti-porn feminists, TERFs and queer theory feminists, liberal feminists and radical feminists, equity and gender feminists, choice feminists and actual feminists, etc.

Given the vast array of what feminists desire, we can now see why equality is meaningles nonsense. If feminism is about equality that means equality is simultaneously defined as banning alcohol, getting irresponsibly drunk, dressing like a slut, not dressing like a slut, having lots of heterosexual sex, making pronography, avoiding non-lesbian sex, people with penises are men, those same people with penises are women, being economically independent, not being economically independent, being given equal access to the workforce, and being given preferential access to the workforce.

To anybody with two brain cells to rub together, this mess of contradictions means equality is simply a nonsense phrase with no real meaning besides some vague Orwellian exo-semantic feelings of ‘good’.

Anybody saying feminism is about equality either believes assumes equality is a meaningless word, has not actually thought of what they’re saying, is ignorant of even the basics of feminist thought and history, or is dishonest.

Rape Accusation Default

By now you’ve heard of Rolling stone’s UVA rape article, it’s retraction, and all the debate around it.

One of the interesting parts of the debate is this:

That was later downgraded to generally and most feminists haven’t gone quite that far, but the general trend from feminists has been that we should “believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says.”. The general tenor from the manosphere is that the default should be skeptism of rape claims given the amount of false rape claims. Both default belief and default skepticism have their proper time and place, it is situational. False rape claims do happen often enough to be worth considering them, but most rape claims are not false.

Generally default belief is best in the context of friendship, sympathy, support, and personal relationship. If a friend tells you of being raped, immediately believing and supporting her if she’s lying is low-cost, a few wasted hours at most, while not immediately doing so if she is not lying can be very damaging to her and to the relationship.

On the other hand, default skepticism is generally best in the context of law, informal punishment, or the impersonal. In these situations, immediately believing a lie will have immense negative effects on innocent parties, while not immediately believing the truth will be fairly low-cost as there will still be time to find the truth .

The tricky part is when the friendship and informal punishment overlap, ie. when you have friendships with both the accuser and the accused. In those cases, your best judgment on the characters of both parties combined with how close you are to each party is probably the best way to determine who you should default to believing.

****

This brings me to another thought. Reading through the RS article there are a number of things that don’t pass the sniff test, but of all of them this one passage takes the cake:

Disoriented, Jackie burst out a side door, realized she was lost, and dialed a friend, screaming, “Something bad happened. I need you to come and find me!” Minutes later, her three best friends on campus – two boys and a girl (whose names are changed) – arrived to find Jackie on a nearby street corner, shaking. “What did they do to you? What did they make you do?” Jackie recalls her friend Randall demanding. Jackie shook her head and began to cry. The group looked at one another in a panic. They all knew about Jackie’s date; the Phi Kappa Psi house loomed behind them. “We have to get her to the hospital,” Randall said.

Their other two friends, however, weren’t convinced. “Is that such a good idea?” she recalls Cindy asking. “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.”

The friends in question have since responded and have said that the night did not occur like that, because of course it didn’t because that kind of response is just absurd. But the absurdity of it is magnified by the fact that it was so widely believed, which is bewildering to me. It makes me wonder about the social lives of feminists though. How could someone possibly believe that three people called by a friend in trauma and wearing bloody clothing  would have their first thought be “but what about the keggers?”

I can not think of a single person I know whose first response to finding a friend who had been gang-raped wouldn’t be to provide comfort and aid the person (or possibly rage against the perpetrators). It’s hard to imagine anybody would respond like this, yet feminists and liberals all bought this incident as perfectly believable.

Is this how liberals, feminists, and their friends behave? Is this how people in their social circles act? Is this really a believable course of action to them? When they read this did they really think to themselves, ‘yeah, that’s how my friends would act‘?

If feminists really surround themselves with people like those in Jackie’s story, it’s no wonder they’re so screwed up. I’d feel pity for them if they weren’t so evil.

Maybe feminists should stop trying to dismantle the patriarchy and instead work on finding some better friends.

Or are they just so hatefully bitter that even if they know their friends wouldn’t act like that, they’d think everyone outside their bubble would?

Are Slate and Amanda Hess Arguing for Lynching?

Feminists complain about street harassment all the time. I’ve never actually seen someone harass a woman on the street, I’ve never done it, and none of my friends have done it.  So, I’ve always been a bit skeptical, because if something is so common, why haven’t I ever even seen it occur before. A few women have told me a story or two of a random crazy person on the bus doing something harassing (ie. one man on a bus just sat himself in the lap of a girl I dated), so I knew harassment did occur, but were usually isolated events done by crazy people. I never believed it happened as omnipresently as feminists claim.

Slate has tried to prove that harassment exists omnipresently by a woman filming herself walking for 10 hours. Here’s a two-minute highlight video of the harassment. Watch it.

First, that’s 2 minutes from 10 hours, so unless a lot of harassment was cut out, that’s not as much as feminists complain about. The video claims 100+ incidents, so that’s about one incident per every six minutes, that’s more, but still not much.

Second, if we assume the video included the worst of the harassment, a safe assumption give the point of the video, the “harassment” seem rather insignificant. this “harassment” included people doing nothing but saying “Have a nice evening”, “God bless”, and “how are you this morning?”. So in other words, to acknowledge a woman’s existence is harassment. What did the 80 incidences not bad enough to appear in the video include, people saying ‘hello’?

If this is the best evidence of harassment feminists can dredge up, I still do not buy the feminist argument. In fact, this video is a strike against it.

****

The more interesting part of this video though is race. I counted the incidences in the video, and by my count there were 21 harassers (two incidences had two perpetrators). Of those, 10 of the harassers looked black, 5 looked white, 2 looked Hispanic, and in 4 incidences I could not identify the race (although, two sounded stereotypically black to me).

So, of the incidences where the race was known, black committed 10 of the 17 of the cases of harassment, about 60%. Also, the the most egregious harassments (she was followed twice and some yelled passed a first comment) were by blacks.

From this, it seems the major problem is not harassment from men in general, but harassment from urban black men in particular. This would explain why I’ve never witnessed it; there are very few urban blacks where I live. That the harassers are largely black is reinforced by the stereotypical ebonics name of the campaign the video is in support of, “Hollaback!”.

Also of interest is that only a couple harassers looked even remotely middle-class, the rest looked either working-class or welfare-class.

The target audience of Slate is middle-class white liberals with humanities degrees. These are not the type of people harassing the woman in the video. There is no point lecturing Slate readers on stopping harassment because Slate readers are not the ones harassing.

So, there seems to be no point to this article. Slate readers aren’t the ones doing the harassing and it’s not likely lower-class blacks will care about the moral protestations of middle-class white feminists.

The only reason I can think of to write this is to encourage white males to forcibly stop black men from harassing them. something which reminds me of the days when looking wrongly at a white woman was a lynching offence. It seems to me that Amanda Hess and Slate just inadvertently argued for society to resume lynching uppity blacks, or at least segregation to keep them off the streets white women might use. I think everybody involved needs to check their privilege.

Anyway, if you wish to donate to a campaign to stop uppity blacks from talking to white women, you can donate to Hollaback here.

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It looks like between writing this and posting it, the implications of this video have become clear and Slate is doing damage control.

Amanda Hess, College Rape, & Good2Go

Every media source of goodthink has been hammering on about the college rape crisis over the last while. California’s Yes Means Yes law was the feminist triumph of inserting the state into college bedrooms.

But one app, and the feminist response to it, shows that feminists do not actually care about consent or preventing rape in the least. All the rage over the last few years has been nothing but expanding the power of the feminist bureaucracies.

One naive woman, Lee Ann Allman,  actually thought the college rape crisis was a real problem that needed addressing, so she developed a real, practical solution to this problem. She created  an app called Good2Go. It was fairly simple: when hooking-up, the two partners both logged onto the app, stated whether they were consenting to sex, and noted their level of intoxication. It gave each partner a moment to think about if they really wanted to have sex, initiated a conversation about consent, clearly defined consent, tracked and ensured the identity of each individual involved in the hook-up, ensured the age of the participants, and then kept a log of whether consent was established or not. The mass adoption of said app for college hook-ups would virtually eliminate date rape.

So, with a practical solution to the problem of campus rape at hand, feminists, of course, rejoiced lifting their hands in praise and showering Allman with praises. Right? Because feminists really do want a solution to the campus rape epidemic, don’t they?

Nope, instead they protested so hard that the Apple store actually removed the app for being objectionable. ‘How dare anyone try to actually solve the campus rape crisis!‘

Amanda Hess at Slate, one of the leaders in the attack on Good2Go, demonstrates fully the depths of depravity of the feminists on this issue. In her first attack she (self-contradictorily) argues it’s both inconvenient and doesn’t define exactly define every sex act being consented to in explicit detail and logging consent for each individual act. Also, the evil company logs the information so that it can be found by law enforcement if an accusation of rape is made. (How dare those assholes help law enforcement ascertain the truth of an accusation!)

To put the cherry on the top of her attack she writes this:

That record may help the falsely accused, but it’s unlikely to aid a real victim.

Remember, if you are falsely accused of rape you are not a real victim. You can suffer slander, have your reputation ruined, be booted out of university, have your life-plan destroyed, and  even go to jail, but that doesn’t make you a real victim. Aren’t feminists lovely?

In her article announcing the shutdown of Good2Go Hess concisely summarizes why the app is so horrible:

When Good2Go launched last month, I tested it out and concluded that it was impractical (who wants to fill out a four-minute horniness/sobriety quiz before having sex?) and insecure (the app kept a database with sexual consent records that could be accessible by law enforcement)… one college student interviewed on Today said it was “a buzzkill.”

So, according to Amanda Hess, rape is bad, but inconveniencing a horny woman is even worse. The horrors of rape can not compare to the horrors of a small quiz and being “a buzzkill”.

Also, according to Amanda Hess, law enforcement should not be allowed to investigate accusations of rape. In fact, she states that law enforcement doing so is an invasion of privacy.

It’s obvious that Amanda Hess doesn’t think college rape or accusations thereof are in any way serious.

It is possible that the app may not be the platonic ideal of a perfect consent mechanism which exists solely in the imaginary world of feminist forms but it was a serious, practical attempt to tackle the problem. But feminists rather than accepting this attempted solution and trying to help improve it so it came closer to their ideals of consent, instead jumped on it and quashed it.

What the Good2Go episode clearly demonstrates is that no one, not even feminists (other than maybe Allman), actually believes there is a campus rape epidemic occurring and that it is a serious matter that requires a real, practical solution.

Anybody paying attention can tell from this incident that the college rape epidemic is not an issue anyone thinks actually exists, nor is it an issue that actually needs to be solved. Rather it is just another talking point for feminists so they can expand feminist bureaucracy further into the university system.

In fact, feminists will attempt to destroy any real solution (and saying ‘please don’t rape’ is not a real solution) solving the issue of campus consent because that would eliminate the supposed ‘need’ for kangaroo courts, rape crisis centres, safe spaces, and other feminist bureaucracies on campus leaving otherwise unemployable feminists unemployed. Solving the issue would also rob feminists of a talking point. This is why feminists must destroy any real attempt at a practical solution and why Good2Go had to go.

Digging Deeper on Power

We come to a third edition of the topic of women and power. Both Donal and Chad have responded with criticisms, so I’ll respond.

Donal’s response is, as he admits, somewhat unordered and incoherent, but essentially he denies that men act as a class and states that modern weaponry has lowered the power differentials between men and women.

Chad’s response is wrapped in parable. I’ve never been too good with allegory and as of my writing this I don’t think he’s done yet, but from my understanding he’s likening men to land and women to water. The land shapes the environment and guides and controls the water, but the water flows where it flows within the framework the land has shaped and has the power to either destroy the land or make it bountiful.

From these, I don’t think we disagree as much as my critics think we do.

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First, on the nature of power:

The female, and indirect method, is to make the world desire to change and help it do so.

I think many of my critics are missing or misunderstanding a critical piece:

any power [women] may display is simply proxy power given them by men.

They can not, as a class, have power in the public sphere that is not given them by men.

So maybe I should restate a little: women as a class do not have any inherent public/political power.

Women do have political/public power but only that given them or supported by men. Indirect power, the power the make the world desire to change and to help change is only effective when men give them men’s power to effect that change.

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Second, we will go more into the nature of the public and private realms:

Oh, and another thing: the personal is the political, at least in the sense that political power is heavily influence by personal and private spheres of power. As anyone who has worked in the political field knows, politics is largely about managing personal connections and networks of like-minded people.

Donal seems to be misunderstanding what I meant, which is understandable as I didn’t explicitly state or link to some background assumptions:

In the public realm, where personal relationships are superseded by hierarchical and organizational ones, physical violence is power and power is physical violence,

The Way of Men has more on this, but men exist in a world of function-based, hierarchical organizations, ie. public organizations, while women exist in a world of one-on-one personal relationships. The former does not eliminate personal connections or friendships, but rather changes the nature of them: the personal relationships and networks exist in a framework where function, shared virtue, and ability towards a shared goal are the measures of judgment rather than emotional closeness, non-judgmentalism, and acceptance.

To explain what I mean, think of the playground. Boys generally self-organize into large group activities, such as soccer, where most other boys are allowed to join as they will (except maybe the occasional incompetent or nerd). Girls generally break up into pairs. This doesn’t mean the boys playing soccer don’t have personal relationships, but that the relationships exist in a public, hierarchical, function-based environment, the soccer team, and are superseded by a higher value, winning the game. Politics is playground soccer on a grand scale. The management of personal relationships and networks in such a public system is different than that in a private system, such as the family.

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Finally, on women and men as a class.

Speaking of unified displays of male strength, I think that it should be noted that men rarely act together as a “class.” It isn’t how we are wired. There isn’t really a Team Man counterpart to Team Woman. So any argument founded on a notion that men can overcome women “as a class” fails as a foundational matter.

This misses the entire point of my argument. There is no ‘overcoming women’. There is no war between men and women, to think there is a class war based on sex is to fully adopt the neo-marxist foundations of feminism. To think there is a power conflict between men and women is to lose the ideological war entirely before it even begins. If we accept a sexual class struggle exists, we might as well give up now and enjoy the decline because we’ve already accepted the enemy’s frame and joined him.

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Here we get to the main point I’m trying to make:

Men and women are not enemies and are not in competition, they are naturally made to complement each other. Women are naturally creatures of the private sphere, men are naturally creatures of the public sphere and the social arrangement of men and women, often referred to as patriarchy, of each tending to own their sphere works fantastically well for both men and women. Women have no inherent public political power because their inherent power rests in the private sphere, the sphere in which they are comfortable.

We do not have a competition between male power and female power, because the nature of their power is different. Rather we have a competition between one group of civilization-hating men and other groups of men, particularly white conservative males, in which women are but one group being used as weapons. Women are involved because the former group, using their control of cultural institutions, have managed to take the concerns of a small group of hurting, betrayed, broken, self-destructive, and/or high-testosterone women and elevate them to a class struggle in which most of the class does not share the small groups concerns and does not want to fight and most of those that do want to are primarily doing so because they have been lied to and the struggle is just the accepted environment in which they live.

The war is against that group of civilization-hating men. Feminists are the symptom of entropy not the disease. If we want to start winning we have to avoid mistaking the leaves for the roots.