Category Archives: Men and Women

Relationships, Sex, Marriage, Love, Hate and Dating

Intended Consequences

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I work in technology. And for the past decade or so, the tech industries and the educational-industrial complex have been fairly begging women to go into “STEM” – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math”. Which is a fine and dandy thing – I work with a lot of exceptional engineers who happen to be women, and it’s not actually a new thing; it’s been true my entire career.

But the appeal has been getting louder, stronger, more strident lately. And I had an idea why.

Turns out I was only half right.

For thirty years now, the education system from kindergarten through the university system has been becoming more and more remorselessly feminized. Boyhood traits – physical play, roughhousing, restless energy – were stigmatized, pathologized and medicated. Being a boy – a young man – was, to the educational-industrial complex that sprang up over the past generation, something to be overcome.

It became, in the parlance of corporate human recourses, a hostile environment.

And as Christine Hoff Summers predicted in The War On Boys, a major result has been higher education becoming largely a female preserve. Currently, about 60% of post-secondary degrees go to women – up from under half forty years ago. Hoff Summers has data predicting it’ll level out around 66% sometime here. That’s two-thirds of all higher education.

“Is this a good thing” is one question – distorting higher ed by making it a hostile environment for one sex is a bad thing – but that’s not the real discussion here.

There’s been an interesting shift as a result of this distortion. Check out this graph, of percentages of bachelors degrees going to women, by year and by degree, over the past five decades:

While the percentage of women in engineering and hard sciences crept slowly up over the past nearly-fifty years – from just about nil in the case of engineering – the share of women in computer science programs actually peaked when I was in college (don’t I know it), has been eroding ever since, and seems to have plunged in the early 2000s. The velocity of the up-curve in engineering slowed around that time, and the percentage of physical science degrees peaked around the same time and is broadly down ever since.

I have absolutely no empirical, objective idea why. But I have a couple of theories.

Solid Ground – if you want to start a fight with a “woke” person with a background in soft science but who is nonetheless an expert at sciencing because they think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the dreamiest sciencer ever, tell ’em there are innate differences between the sexes. But there is actual scientific evidence that a predisposition toward some traits that are well-suited to sciences – three-dimensional spatial visualization, single-track analytical affect and some others – tend to be associated with males (in a bell-curve distribution with exceptions all over the place, like most human traits).

As a result – my theory, here – young men fled the soft sciences, and especially the humanities (which were in the midst of being taken over by even loonier theorists than had run their high schools), as an alternative to four years of ritual self-abnegation for grades. Young men gravitated toward fields that didn’t innately hate them. Which may have both swelled the numbers of degrees going to males and lowered the proportion of women in the field.

Which, tangentially, is why I suspect gender theorists and “woke” administrators are trying to sqeedge gender theory into, and logic out of, engineering programs.

But I think its also…

Built On Sand – Thirty to forty years ago, before the compete feminization of the academy and the education profession, someone in school – male or female – with an interest in science, learned their math and science from people who taught, well, math and science. To both young men and women.

And that as that focus switched from teaching discplines (and discipline) to teaching ephemeral feelings and lessons in the new social rules, they became less capable of nurturing the STEM-oriented traits of young women who might have been interested in the field. Meaning fewer attempted it.

Since the public schools began their terminal dive into PC twaddle about twenty years ago, I’m going to call it a solid correlation.

Little Straw Men

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A few weeks ago, I saw the new film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott “Little Women“. I’m told there are seven different versions on film out there – I’ve only seen parts of the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn, and of course the 1994 version with Winona Ryder (of which the less said, the better).

I liked it. A lot. Yes, it’s a“Chick flick“, and I don’t care, because all I really care about is “is it a good movie“.

Around the same time, I saw a new statistic; a solid majority of doctors under the age of 35 or women.

That’s after a couple of decades in which the share of undergraduate degrees going to women has reached three out of five, on its way to an estimated two out of three in the next decade or two. This, as the education system becomes more and more dogmatically feminized, with the attendant treating of “boyhood“ as a pathology to be medicated into submission , and as the media seems to be incapable of showing males above a certain age as anything but loutish buffoons.

So I could see, perhaps, men staying home from yet another film that shows men as expendable cads (which, by the way, “Little Women“ doesn’t); It’s not like men don’t get a steady diet of that anyway.

But here’s an experiment for you: read this article – not a review – from the utterly underwhelming Kristy Eldridge  whom the Times helpfully notes, is “a writer”, entitled “Men are Dismissing “Little Women““. The article points out that the movie finished third in its opening week, behind two tent post blockbusters (Star Wars and the new Jumanji), and throws in a lot of pro forma “men just don’t care about female writers/artists/films“ whingeing.

One thing it doesn’t do is quote any men who don’t actually like the movie, or show any demographic evidence that men are shunning it any more (or less) than any other “chick flick“. Given that the film would seem to be at least a modest success (especially compared to the boat anchor 1994 version, which played like a high school production), that’d seem to be a little impossible if all those female viewers weren’t hauling their boyfriends/husbands along with.

The article promises male rage. It delivers Little Straw Men.

I have to suspect the article was written long before the movie opened

Unserious

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Articles like these are the reason women in the sciences are not taken seriously.  
Carmen and Leonie have PhDs in computer science.   Divya is a student of geology on other planets.  They’re probably brilliant people in their fields but when they write stuff like this, they remind everyone of the shirt incident, which reinforces the reason nobody wants women in the sciences.
There is a silver lining.  I can’t wait for President Trump to issue an Executive Order directing all federal agencies to stop using the Supremacy Clause as Constitutional justification for federal laws over-riding state laws.  Power to the People, baby!
Joe Doakes

From the article:

We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.

Read: A tsunami of stupid, driven by an ignorant, incurious media, might cause idiots – invariably idiots on the left – to think “quantum supremacy” is a racist dog whistle.

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.

Let’s be honest – it’s not just women who publish this twaddle.  Bowderiing science like this, if it jumps the banks of Moron Creek, will harm everyone, matter their pigment or genitalia.  

Other Than Bring One Of The World’s Great Countries Back From The Brink Of Suicide, I Mean…

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The Smartest Woman Ever and her daughter, Chelsea “The Ryan Winkler Of New York” Clinton, wrote a book about great women.  

And of course – you could see this coming – they left out “arguably” the greatest woman of the 20th Century. 

Just going to take a moment to remind you that Berg’s Eighth Law is not called “Berg’s Eighth Tactful Hint”:

American liberalism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder

Come for the Berg’s Eighth Law.  Stay for the thrashing around seeking relevance.  Margaret Thatcher made a positive difference.   Hillary Clinton made only a negative one – being an awful and tone-deaf enough candidate to get even Donald Trump elected president.  

#MeThree

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This is from a few years ago – but the sentiment is growing, at least among our self-appointed idiot elite. It’s from Roxane Gay, a feminist professor who, for some reason, got a writeup in the NYTimes:

Men can start putting in some of the work women have long done in offering testimony. They can come forward and say “me too” while sharing how they have hurt women in ways great and small.

OK, here goes.

My Testimony: I have hurt women in one small – almost infinitesimal – way; I mock and taunt the likes of Roxane Gay for being the Robespierrian ninnies they truly are. I do the mocking and taunting because bellowing “you people are nothing but pseudointellectual brownshirts, peddling a form of groupthink that can only lead inexorably to totalitarianism” gets tiring.

I mock and taunt them because the world they want – where the “wrong” people are guilty until proven innocent, and innocence can never be proven because guilt is a matter of identity more than action – is worth fighting against. And fighting with mocking and taunting is better than doing it with guns and bombs and tanks, although I doubt the likes of Professor Gay’s followers know how or why.

This mocking and taunting no doubt infuriates Professor Gay – and I no doubt hurt her and her like among the weaker sex (“progressive” “feminist” “woke” “men” and their various female accomplices) in saying so. But much as they all may wish to bully me into acquiescence, I just won’t do it.

Which, no doubt, hurts them even more.

I’m sorry I’m not sorry.

The New Victorians

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140 years ago, VIctorian manners were deferential to women, as befits behavior toward a weaker sex that needed to be protected.

Apparently, we’ve regressed: a Kansas woman charged with falsely accusing an ex-boyfriend of rape won’t be prosecuted, because…

…well…

The woman was arrested for making a false accusation, even though she told police she did not want to press charges. Police investigated anyway due to the seriousness of her allegations. Her legal fees have been paid for by a legal defense fund created during the #MeToo movement.
The Chicago Tribune reported that prosecutors are dropping the charges against the woman because of the “cost to our community and the negative impact on survivors of sexual violence cannot be ignored.”
“We are concerned this case, and the significant amount of misinformation surrounding it, could discourage other survivors from reporting their attack,” [Douglas County District Attorney Charles] Branson said in a new statement. “That is unacceptable.”
Branson failed to address what dropping the case meant for victims of false accusations. As it stood, the woman only faced up to 23 months in jail for a felony false reporting charge. Had the male student been arrested, he faced decades in prison.

Is there a term for this, other than “infantlizing women?”

And in what other area do we refrain from prosecuting liars for fear of deterring the righteous?

Other than voting fraud in Minnesota, I mean?

What’s With All The Rhetorical Questions Lately?

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why isn’t Trump getting credit for this?


Joe Doakes

Heh. 

Along those lines:  while I’m the Twin Cities’ best feminist, I am actually 104% male, so I have to wonder; do women ever feel patronized by all the “First Female…” <fill in the event> hype?  Especially given that the event took place on the shoulders of a lot of brilliant men who built the space program from its inception?

Also – am I the only one who feels like his teeth are being filed with a cheese grater at the term “HERstory?”

Unintended-Yet-Inevitable Consequences

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When I was in high school, it was generally (although not universally) known that making gay kids “act straight” – in other words, forcing them to be what they aren’t – could cause long-lasting irreparable damage.

This was decades ago.

Society spends thirty years treating “boyhood” as a pathology, often treatable (i.e. suppressible) with medication.

The school system actively suppresses “normal” boyhood traits; aggressive play, restless physical activity and physical rather than verbal socialization are treated as conditions to be eradicated, rather than evolutionary male traits that are socially adapted and productively channeled.

School was turned into a training camp for young-girl-style socialization; not merely teaching young boys to take the roughest of edges off their masculinity, but teaching them that approaching the world the way evolution taught boys and men to approach the world will earn you castigation, denigration, medication and remediation.

Soon, people who were “woke” enough to know 30 years ago that making a gay child act straight would cause immense, irreparable psychological damage, were mildly alarmed to see that boys were lagging at school – or, put another way, checking out of an oppressive, misandrist system that actively suppressed who they really were.

Boys stopped going to college – and, increasingly, the ones that did were the ones that could stick with the ever-more-accelerated demand to turn in their evolutionary “male” card. There’s demographic evidence that before long, after decades of turning education at all levels into 12-16 years of counter-evolutionary indoctrination and browbeating over what they are, girls will outnumber boys 2:1 in higher education

And today, those same people are wondering why women are having a hard time finding husbands who earn what they do.

“Play Like A Girl”

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As the Twin Cities’ best feminist, I have to ask my fellow, if lesser, feminists – do you all get tired of being pandered to in the guise of “equity”?

New Monopoly game gives women a “head start” in the name of “equal pay”:

Hasbro wants to take the conversation over the gender pay gap out of the board room and into the living room with its new Ms. Monopoly game, launching this month.
Dubbed “the first game where women make more than men,” the updated version of the classic board-game introduces new women-centric elements, starting with its titular character. Ms. Monopoly is the niece of the elder Mr. Monopoly and a “self-made investment guru,” according to the product listing on Walmart.com.
In the game, women get a head start: Female players receive $1,900 in Monopoly money at the beginning of the game, compared to $1,500 for each male player, USA Today reports. Women also receive $240 each time they pass ‘Go’ on the board, while men get $200.

I’m not sure about all you lesser feminists, but it seems like this is a return to the days of victorian deference, not equity.

Maybe that’s what “feminism” actually wants?

Negotiation

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If women’s soccer players don’t get equal pay, they’ll quit playing.  Then people who don’t watch womens soccer won’t be able to watch womens soccer.  That will show them!!

Joe Doakes

It’s fascinating, to me, watching people who clearly have no idea how the free market works, trying to engage in the free market.

This is a battle the women should be winning – or, perhaps, already are.

I’m starting to think it’s not about money,

An Intellectual 0-0 Tie

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It’s the aftermath of the Independence Day weekend. It’s July, and the Twins are seriously in contention.

We shouldn’t HAVE to think about Soccer. I’d hope that we are better, as a society, than that. Our forefathers fought and died so that we’d be *free* of things like Eurovision, parliamentary government, and soccer. And this time of year, I like to honor and respect their sacrifice.
But I’m genuinely curious about something, and would love to find some genuine answers.
With the US Women’s Soccer team winning their fourth World Cup, they’ve proven themselves to be the most successful soccer team in the US. Which is a little like being “the best funk band in Sweden”, but certainly deserves respect.

But now, the news is full of their next story – going to court for “equal pay”. The US Men’s soccer team – which qualifies for the World Cup about as often as Swedish funk groups got on Soul Train – gets paid more, for fewer games, and enjoys much less success than the women. They enjoy other benefits – like better hotels, better facilities, better travel arrangements, and not being identifiable as “soccer players” by most Americans. The women play more, are more successful – and, some say, should be paid much better for their time.
I don’t have a problem with that, as far as it goes; also, I don’t care ,because again, it’s only soccer.

Men’s World Cup soccer is, of course, the most popular athletic spectacle in the world. There’s an insane amount of money changing hands due to that Godforsaken sport.
Does anyone know if the US women generate more money than the men do? Or that women’s World Cup, worldwide, generates as much / more money than the men’s sport?
I’ve heard various reporters and opinion-mongers say it’s only be “Fair” for the women to get paid more – but on economic matters, most journos are…well, we’re back to “Swedish Funk Band” analogies again.

Does anyone know how the numbers – all of ’em, not just the cherrypicked ones – break out?

Mistakes

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Women decry absent fathers, deadbeat dads, lack of male role models in modern families. Liberals don’t acknowledge that’s the cause of crime because a woman is just as good a man at everything, right?
They forget that the massive rise in broken homes is due to no fault divorce, which feminists demanded so they could escape unfulfilling marriages. It wasn’t men using their patriarchal male-dominated muscle who pushed that through in 1975. We had Women’s Lib then. I remember when it was invented. It was women who wanted to be able to get out, no strings attached, no excuses required.  They pushed through no-fault divorce.  And it’s been a disaster, the shape of which we’re only now realizing.
In the olden days, women knew that you didn’t get things ready made, you had to work them into shape. That went from food you grew, to clothes you made, to a man you would turn into a husband. A Marriage Prospect was someone you thought you could work on to become a finished product you could live with.
But modern women expect things to come prepackaged and disposable. Women say “I married a man that I wanted to be Prince Charming but he turned out to be Prince Charming’s stable hand, so I want to dump him and try something else.”  They’re not willing to put in the effort. Maybe don’t even have the skills to put in the effort. And all of society has changed from telling them to put in the effort, to telling them to walk away.
Walking away from an unfulfilling marriage might make a woman feel better about herself, but it tells us nothing about how the kids will turn out.  Not worth the effort?  What does that say to a kid? How does it affect the kids outlook on relationships, willing to trust, commitment to long-term effort?  Read Judith Wallerstein.  She’s eye opening, sobering, depressing.
Which politician will speak Truth to Power and tell feminists “You were wrong and you made things worse.  We’re leaving what sounds good and going back to what works.”
Joe Doakes

Which politicians?

Among today’s “progressives”? Expect the “men are just sperm donors” line to just get worse until it can’t be sustained any more .

Damned If The U Of M Does, Doesn’t

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Program at the U of M helps transgender women…sound like women…:

“Every time [“Alice”, the transgender woman who is one of this story’s subjects] called [her grandmother] in high school, she would say, ‘Oh, your voice is getting deeper, you sound like you’re growing into such a nice man, you’re going to be like your dad,'” Alice said.
Those were painful words to hear [of course they were – Ed]. Alice remembers artificially raising the pitch of her voice to thwart her grandmother’s comments.
It wasn’t until years later that Alice realized she was transgender. She started to publicly transition during her senior year in college. She’s 23 now and recently graduated from a speech therapy program that helps transgender people safely adjust how they speak, so they can sound more like themselves.
“I’m at a point where for like 90 plus percent of the time, I’m happy with how I sound and how I’m perceived by other people,” Alice said. “This is something I never expected to be in a position of. And it’s really exciting.”

…but only the kind of women they approve of:

Alice did adopt some behaviors, such as using her hands differently when she spoke. But she refused to fall in line with gender norms she thought were antiquated or offensive.
“I am a feminist. I’m going to act like it. Just because this is a typical feminine behavior, if it is just a very patriarchal, like trying to silence and subdue women, I’m not going to do that,” Alice said. “It’s not worth it.”

Wait’ll the Progressive Powers that Be learn that people think they can turn their intesectional triggers on and off.

She’ll never do lunch in the Warehouse District again.

Sprinting To Confusion

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I’m a User Experience Architect.

If for some reason I decided to take two years to become an abstract sculptor – well, Mazel Tov for me, but barring some pretty significant Contract-Fu on my part, I’m not going to get paid to be a User Experience Architect.  Or sculptor, to be honest, but that’s skirting the point.

If you’re not doing the thing that you’re supposedly getting paid for, unless your potential services are so valuable that the client is willing to pay to keep that potential on tap, you might need another source of income.

National Public Radio seems to have taken up the “cause” of female athletes – Olympians, mind you – whose athletic sponsorships are jeopardized by taking time off from their sports to have kids.   NPR’s Michel Martin talked with runner Alysia Montano about the way she was thrown out on the street after becoming pregnant:

And so in that off-year, I’d hoped that we would conceive and be able to have our daughter and return to the sport. And I did conceive. I did have my daughter. And my daughter was two months old. And I got a phone call that said, I want to talk about your contracts in regard to your performance this year – which means – you mean the year that I’ve been with child? And then I was – my payment was reduced.

Wait.

Back up.

Her payment – for running – was reduced, not eliminated, during a year in which her running was eliminated?

OK, surely she suffered grievously in other ways:

MARTIN: And what about your health benefits? I mean, that was another thing that emerged in the reporting on this is that there are athletes whose health insurance was terminated. And I can’t think a very thing – many things more frightening than either being pregnant or having a child or having a newborn with no health insurance – summarily terminated. So what about you? Did you at least have health insurance to cover the delivery or the postpartum period?

MONTANO: Yes. So the way that it works is a tier system. The luck that I did have with my daughter was I fell within the tier system because I made the Olympic team in 2012, and the protection was there for me. Now, if I didn’t make the Olympic team in 2012 and I became pregnant, I would lose my health insurance.

So let me get this straight – Nike is paying you to…run.  Something that, all due respect, is the nich-iest of niche sports – a sport that literally nobody ever in history has gone into thinking of making a living at.  And when you’re running, albeit not an Olympic level for a year, due to a personal (albeit blessed) choice that biology has pretty much limited to you, you still got paid.

Could there be a more first world problem?

Well, I suppose when you’re talking about “elite” athletes…:

My point and my stance is this should not be because I am an Olympian. This needs to be something that is in place for women athletes regardless.

“Regardless” of what?  Level?  Sport?

If I’m a company selling – let me stress this – sneakers, and I’m paying someone to…run, am I bound to support them unto death, regardless?

And am I the only one frantically and vainly combing their memory right now looking for a male athlete with an endorsement contract that included years of…well, not using the product?

Apparently when I call this a First World Problem, I’m only off by magnitude:

MARTIN: There are other women in this fight with you. We saw Alysia Montano and Kara Goucher share similar stories. What does it mean to have them alongside you?

Montano later notes the real problem:

She says she wants to make sure Nike writes this protection into the contracts of new and current female athletes because, she says, track and field athletes tend to sign contracts before they are the age in which women typically start thinking about having families, and by the time they do, they are locked into contracts without protections for maternity leave.

So it’s a matter of business education, as opposed to rampant sexism.

Stomping Their Impeccably-Shod Feet

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As I’ve noted in the past in this blog, I am Minnesota’s best feminist.

Now, let’s be honest – I did it, back in blogging’s heyday (from about 2004 throug about 2009) mostly to troll lesser feminists; watching commenters at shriekblogs like “Mercury Rising” rage and thunder against a conservative guy declaring himself the “best feminist” made my heart well with joy.

But at the core, it’s still true. I do believe in the things first-wave feminist sought; things like my daughter and granddaughter being treated equally in the eyes of the law, and accorinding to their actual merits in society and the workplace.

And not only has that battle been largely won, but in some areas of society – the treatment of boys in schools and universities, the effects of family court and the “Violence Against Women Act”, the pendulum has swung a little too far.

But that’s “first-wave” feminism – the part that started with the right to vote, and continues with beating on Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK and Al Franken.

Then, there’s the kind of “Feminism” that seeks to turn women into an identity class and political bloc (progressive, natch). Some call it “Toxic Feminism”, but the technical term is “Second Wave Feminism”. Books could be written on the subject (indeed, they have been – scads of them, mostly garbage).

And in reading the bleatings of the “Feminist Identity” movement over the years, I got the same feeling I used to get when I was beset by angry junior high kids; the solipsistic grasp of the world, the same echo-chamber logic, the same grounding in a world that exists only in fantasy, the same bottomless entitlement.

Camille Paglia noticed the same thing:

My favorite period in feminism has always been the 1920s and 1930s, when American women energized by winning the vote gained worldwide prominence for their professional achievements. My early role models, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, were fierce individualists and competitors who liked and admired men and who never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists. I am an equal opportunity feminist who opposes special protections for women. What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again – the biggest problem with Ilhan Omar isn’t that she’s Muslim. It’s that she’s a progressive who’s serving as a role model for other immigrants to suck them into the world of intersectional, dysfunctional, identity-obsessed modern progressivism.

Question Authority

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The one question people never ask about transgender athletic competition is why.  Why do we have separate Boys’ and Girls’ sports?  If boys and girls are identical in every way that matters, with lifestyle differences simply a matter of personal choice that can be changed at whim, why don’t we have one competition for all?
Minnesota State High School record holders:
Boys’ 100-yard dash: 9.6
Girls’ 100-yard dash: 10.8
Boy’s Shot Put: 65 feet 6 inches
Girls’ Shot Put: 54 feet 8.5 inches.
It’s not about personal choice, it’s about biology.  The fastest girl is slower than every one of the top 10 boys.  The strongest girl’s throw is 11 feet shorter.  At the margin where champions are determined, girls cannot compete against boys.  It sucks.  It’s unfair.  But it’s reality.
People who deny reality are delusional.  We should not allow delusional people to make decisions affecting our children.

And if you ask the the question, the subject gets changed.

Every. Single. Time.

Affirmative Consent

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota’s New Puritans trying to make college sex “safe” might destroy it, instead.  

The proposed legislation says consent to a sexual act must be given by words or actions that create mutually understandable, unambiguous permission regarding willingness to engage in, and the conditions of, sexual activity.   It goes on to say that consent may be withdrawn at any time.  

Does “at any time” mean “after the fact?”  Can a person regret having agreed to have sex and retroactively withdraw consent?  Do second-thoughts convert consensual activity into sexual assault? 

If a person is accused of engaging in sexual activity without obtaining express consent, at trial, how does the accused prove s/he did obtain explicit consent?  He-said-she-said testimony?  A witness who watched the sex act?  Sex video?  Who curates the library of sex videos? 

It would be much easier to enforce if they’d cut to the chase and say: “Students shall not engage in sexual activity while enrolled in college.”
Joe Doakes

My alma mater – at least while I was in school (I have no idea today) went through at least the formality of saying “nobody of the opposite sex in your room after 11PM – 1AM on weekends”. Everyone knew the rules were getting flouted – but the institution had the wisdom to imply “look, all you late-adolescents – we know you’re going to do it, because for all the academic jabbering you are all still governed by hormones. But we know you’re neither thinking clearly, nor ready for the consequences, and we’re at least going to nag you about it long enough that the consequences don’t happen on our watch”.

I’m pretty sure it was a better idea.

The Black And Pink Cloud

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Is it just me, or are people getting worse?

I worked at a job once upon a time – decades before #MeToo – where the boss took a lot of indecent liberties, verbally if not physically, with the women at work. This was in the 1980s.

And he wound up as the subject of seven sexual harassment lawsuits, and lost his job after about a year.

Again – 1988.

And as I’ve slogged through three decades in the working world since then, I’ve listened to a lot of pundits bemoaning that there just aren’t enough female managers, and enough respect for women. I’ve also worked for a lot of women; my first field after radio, technical writing, was pretty much dominated by women. My current field, perhaps less so.

I’ve also heard few stories from women about predatory bosses and coworkers. A few, to be sure – I’ve had a few good female friends who’ve related some shocking stories of coworkers and sexual predation on at least a rhetorical level…

…all pretty much followed up by a visit to HR, and some sort of consequence for the guy, commensurate with the severity of the indiscretion.

Let me sum up; over thirty years in the workforce, and a generalized knowledge that there are consequences, at least in the civilized world (forget about ad agencies and showbiz) for guys acting like neanderthals.

And so since then, as I have watched the #MeToo “movement” make sexual harassment a part of the “national conversation” yet again (that’s right, kids – it’s not the first time), and read stories like this…”

All woman live on a spectrum of misery because, we can only assume, we are women. I have endured attempted rape, and sexual assault on public transport. I have been fired from jobs for not being demure or flirtatious enough (because only two female archetypes are acceptable, and both have terrible pitfalls.) On my first day of work at a famous newspaper, a famous male journalist invited me to place a cigar in a place from which no words come. I giggled, and that giggle – it was a tragic giggle – tells you everything.

via, ironically, “Unherd“

I’ve had to wonder – am I (or, really, the decades of female friends I’ve had in the work force) been unshakeable pollyannas? Have I managed, at random, to steer a course through the working world without encountering my share of predatory guys? Have I – who spent most of the past 20 years neck-deep in raising kids – just been too buried to notice?

It’s possible.

Or is it the industries that’ve spawned “#MeToo” – the “elite” reaches of showbiz, the media, academia and politics, where power is one of the perks (for men and women), and the sense of entitlement that comes with the career for people who’ve never really known anything else?

Or is it the current generation, the millennials who as adults collect grievances and diagnoses the way they used to collect Pokemon cards? And for whom, like the raft of fake hate-crime hoaxers that’ve plagued our campuses, the perception of grievance is the same as an offense?

It’s not a rhetorical question.

Somewhere, Bobby Riggs Is Smiling

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I’m not the only one that figures that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is setting back feminism half a decade or more:

In mere minutes, Ocasio-Cortez managed to affirm nearly every negative stereotype about the female sex, from the trope that we’re no good at math to the notion that you shouldn’t trust us with a credit card. If all you saw was her example, you’d think we’re all just emotional dreamers who need to be reined in by reality

Ocasio-Cortez is not the feminist hero most media coverage has made her out to be. If anything, her time in the spotlight has set women in politics back.

Not just women. I have a hunch after a few years of her (and Reps. Omar and Tlaib), millennials outside the safest of coastal loonie bins are going to have a harder sell to get into office as well.

Disparity Of Power

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Feminists have spent the last forty years convincing men thatn “no means no”.

So far so good.

They’ve spent a chunk of the last fifteen convincing first universities, then courts, that a “no”, even one applied retroactively and contradictorily, hours or days or months after the fact, really meant “no” even if it was an explicit “Yes” in the first place.

Feminist dogma has it than men are stupid – but some have developed a sense of self-preservation, and are starting to get affirmative consent on video immediately before, er, doing something that needs consent.

And, predictdably, feminists are bunged about that, too:

[Feminists] are not pleased with the idea of consent videos and their “problematic” ramifications.

In the case with [a woman complaining about the videos, idiot Brit feminist writer Rachel King] complains that the “implication” of a consent video “is that those in a position of power are the ones who need protection, and that’s just not true.”

I try to be polite.  I really do.  And I try to treat people they way I’d like to be treated.

Which is how I rationalize the following – because if I were being a complete dumbass like Rachel King, I’d hope someone pointed it out to me.

Rachel.  Dumbass.  Men don’t have the power.   When a woman has the ability to ruin a man’s life over a false, flighty or stretchy accusation, the idea of “male power” is as quaint as an episode of “Leave It To Beaver”.

King, who mocked that “it’s apparently ‘a scary time for young men,'”

(Love the patrohization, Rachel.  Also – eat s**t and die a painful death)

also emphasized that false accusations just don’t happen,

Duke.  Virginia Tech.  Every f****ng word out of Lena Dunham’s mouth.

pointing to a popularized hashtag on Twitter as evidence. “In reality, the vitriol that victims of rape and sexual assault are subject to is enough to put anyone off making a false report. If you don’t believe me, check out the #WhyIDidntReport tag on Twitter,” she wrote.

I’m done playing nice with these morons.

”

 

Fet Ish

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British “socialist dominatrix” claims to turn “white, right wing” men into socialists.

For many of her clientele, who are almost exclusively white right-wing men because she finds herself unable “to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man,”

Of course they are, and of course she does.

that fetish is serving a powerful woman. Maybury derives her pleasure comes from forcing those men to see the contradiction between their love of powerful women and their support for political parties that actively work to limit women’s rights and empowerment. In her book, Dining with Humpty Dumpty, she detailed conversations with a man she said exhibited the “disgusting contradiction” of claiming to be both “a ‘female supremacist’ and a Tory.’”

A cursory Google search of Ms. Maybury shows no indication that she’s actually successfully “converted” anyone, but that she is the sort of D-list pseudo-academic (but increasingly, academic) “celebrity” that does pop up on NPR “arts and culture” programming often enough to get talked about…

…and this post would indicate it worked.

Some of my “progressive” friends over the weekend were chortling over this one, naturally, the way they usually do over this sort of pseudo-story.

My first reaction:  it says more about the nature of socialist men than about “right wing white” guys; they make Pajama Boy look like Chuck Norris.

The second?   This is such a complement to Berg’s Seventh Law that I am inaugurating a new one:  The Maybury Corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.  To wit:  When a “progressive” makes a mocking or defamatory pronoucement about the deviance, depravity, deceit, dissipation or lack of a conservative’s sexuality, it is invariably a combination of their own insecurities and what they desperately want to believe about those who believe differently than them.

Progs want to believe that all it takes to convert a conservative male into a socialist…er, being is a little highly-stylized pseudo-sex from a modern pseudo-academic phrenologist.

And perception is reality, among the “evidence-based” set.

But it’s called Berg’s Law for a reason.