Category Archives: Men and Women

Relationships, Sex, Marriage, Love, Hate and Dating

School Dazed

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Over the past few weeks, the news that young men are rapidly heading toward being a superminority – 1/3 of the population – at America’s colleges and universities has seemed to come as a surprise to the bits and pieces of the media that have reported on it at all – like, for instance, this piece in The Atlantic,

Of course, this has been anticipated literally for decades. I first read the prediction in 2000, in Christina Hoff-Summers’ The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Young Men

And it’s been a significant subject on this blog since the beginning, no less than when I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with modern education’s treatment of boys, most notably my son and stepson. . The Atlantic piece all but dismisses the notion that modern adademia (and its product and farm club, K-12 education) pathologizes boyhood, and that systematic discrimination sours boys on education even before modern post-secondary academia takes over and treats “maleness” like a mental illness. I think the article is wrong, and I’d welcome a serious, frank (read “no holds barred”) debate on the subject.

But I come here not to recap views of the disease, about which I have few doubts, but to ask questions about the treatment.

Boys are opting out of school – post-secondary education, in this case, but it applies across non-vocational higher education and non-engineering and hard-science spaces (which continue to be fairly male-dominated, despite decades of effort) . And it’s causing…

…well, “concern” may be an overstatement.

My pullquote from the Atlantic piece:

The implications of the college gender gap for individual men are troubling but uncertain. “My biggest immediate worry is that men are making the wrong decision,” Goldin said. “I worry they’ll come to severely regret their choice if they realize the best jobs require a degree they never got.” There is also the issue of dating. College grads typically marry college grads. But this trend of associative mating will hit some turbulence, at least among heterosexual people; if present trends continue, the dating pool of college grads could include two women for every guy. As women spend more time in school and their male peers dwindle as a share of the college population, further delays in marriage and childbirth may ensue. That would further reduce U.S. fertility rates, which worries some commentators, albeit not all.

Background

I not only went to college, I got a BA in English. And, perhaps unexpectedly given the state of modern higher ed, I went in a fairly “progressive” but not very well-read Democrat, and came out four years later a Reagan conservative – because of my English major adviser.

I’m sure he’d have been cashiered from academia, or at least the humanities academy, these days.

I got, in short, the sort of humanities education that today trips a whole lot of social and political triggers, but set me up for not only the life I have today but system of beliefs by which I live (and about which I write on this blog and talk on my radio show) pretty darn well, conservatism and all.

Of course, higher ed has changed a lot in the past 35 years. The academy, which tended to lean left when I was in college, has toppled over to the left today. Conservative thought is not only scarce, in some cases it is actively hunted down, intellectually speaking (so far).

A Pox?

The response from a lot of my conservative and libertarian friends has been along the lines of “Good! Get our young guys to go to tech school or do apprenticeships and become mechanics and plumbers and HVAC techs!”

There’s a practical side to that; the modern secondary education seems to consider high school grads who don’t go to college as defeats, personal slights to them as teachers. But, obviously, not everyone wants, or is suited, to be a teacher, an administrator, a professional. Destigmatizing the trades would be a wonderful thing.

But there’s a social and political side as well; some say it’s high time for young conservatives to secede from academia, go into the trades. A pox on the whole house of academia.

I get it.

But thinking back on 17 year old me? The closest thing I had to an interest in the trades was working in radio, which I’d most definitely learned on the job (then as now) – and which, to be fair, turned out to be a career, albeit not a lucrative one. Beyond that? 17 year old Mitch, just as *&^% year old Mitch, lived in his head, not with his hands, for better or worse. Even with hindsight, I can’t think of a trade I would have been happy with. (Happy with learning to a basic level of competence is another story; I’d love to have retained some of the electricity or carpentry knowledge I picked up along the way, but that’s purely avocational, not a career goal).

But it was a moot point, because when I was 17, college was not only moderately affordable, it was presented as a place to learn the tools to think critically about the smorgasbord of ideas pelting one about one’s head.

And the first 13 years of school hadn’t beaten all love of learning out of most of us guys.

Eating The Seed Corn

So I completely support destigmatizing the vocational education track.

And I understand the impetus to chuck the whole thing.

But as the masculine half of this nation’s collective brain gets pushed out of the “Brain” half of this nation’s public life, what does it get replaced with?

The feminine half?

Forget for a moment that it’s a “Feminine” half trained by, well, modern academia, with all of its current adjectives (post-structural, proto-Marxist, anti-Western-Civilization, and I could probably go on from there). Leave that out of it completely for a moment.

What happens to a nation that cedes its public intellectual life entirely to its feminine half?

Men and women lead differently, process threats and stress differently, appraise situations very differently.

And that difference can be a good thing.

But what happens when the doors that do get opened to college grads – the thinking, rather than doing jobs – have nothing but women going through them?

It’s been de rigeur since the late seventies to reflexively bark “a society and world run by women would be perfect! No war, no hunger – it’d be like having Mom run everything!”

Which, like all “progressive” fever dreams, is reductionist baked wind. A society whose entire intellectual direction is run by women – especially a society which has become as centralized, bureaucratized, credentialized and driven by increasingly stratified institutions as ours is becoming – would have different dysfunctions than a completely masculine society, but dysfunctional it would remain.

And beyond that – quick: someone show me a matriarchal society throughout all of human history that has survived prolonged conflict with an aggressive patriarchal one? History bids us to look at sub-Saharan Africa, where indigenous culture is highly matriarchal…

…and was easily steamrollered by the aggressive, patriarchal, militaristic Bantu, Swahili, and other masculine mega-tribes.

Families, across all of society, need male and female influences to thrive and survive.

So do the societies themselves.

And we’ve known for a generation, now, that we’re slowly losing that, on an intellectual level. Some of the dumber among us are celebrating it.

It’s going to be a big problem in the future.

A Small Victory

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Half of our society is figuring it out:

Lots of ground to make up.

But it’s a start.

Urban Progressive Privilege: My Scientific Research Project

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Title: Analyzing the Propensity of Modern Feminists, Progressives and the Media to Overstate Accrued Virtue.

Aim of the Experiment: The aim of the experiment is to test whether there is any activity approved of by “Big Left” that a woman can do, that will not be turned into a example of supreme personal moral virtue.

Hypothesis: It is predicted that, provided the activity is one promoted by “Big Left”, that there is no activity a woman can carry out that will not be referred to as “Brave”, “Courageous”, “Fierce” or other such superlatives.

Background Theory: It is believed that the rhetorical “Bar” for an action to be considered an act of personal moral courage, when the action is:

  • Congruent with the values of modern political and social “progressives”, and
  • Performed by a woman

…has dropped to the point of nearly being indistinguishable from any normal activity.

Methodology: The research team:

  1. Observed an extensive list of actions
  2. We specifically looked for examples of morally unremarkable, mundane, even counterproductive activities not being referred to in morally superlative terms
  3. We documented the results.

Results: We found no examples.

Discussion of Results: In comment section

Conclusion: There is literally nothing a woman can do (provided it’s congruent with the values of Big Left) too unremarkable, mundane or even destructive that won’t be called ‘Brave’.

So Let Me Get This…Er, For Lack Of A Better Term, “Straight”

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Let me try to fomulate the logic, here.

:If it biological man says she identifies as a woman, that decision must be treated as sacred.

Ditto a biological woman claiming to now be, or identify, as a male.

Naturally, someone of any gender declaring an affectional orientation for their own gender is to be supported.

Industries and entire areas of academic disciplines have sprung up to support all of those decisions. Institutions, up through and including academia, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a fair chunk of corporate America, deem that decision to be absolute, inviolate and ironclad. Naturally, there’s a branch of medical science devoted to helping people transition physically as well as psychologically, to support that identity.

But a gay person deciding they want to identify as straight, and making efforts to do so, must be squashed with the full power of the state?

Why the special treatment?

What side effects affect “gay conversion therapy”, that don’t affect any other change in identity?

I’m not judging, one way or the other; I’m just trying to figure out the moral logic.

When The World Is Insane, Satire Is Pointless: Part CXXXIV

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Remember earlier in this week, when I ran the video of Seth Dillon of Babylon Bee echoing my complaint that when the world is insane, satire is impossible?

I had one of those moments at something like 2AM, when the cat woke me up and I checked thje news.

I read a news story that I thought was either a weird dream at best, or a not-especially-deft bit of satire by some Babylon Bee knockoff at worst. I went back to bed.

And woke up to find it was neither:

Victoria’s Secret is replacing its supermodel angels with seven high-profile women known for their accomplishments rather than their figures in its evolving brand to help “inspire women.”

The lingerie company announced on Wednesday that its new VS Collective campaign aims to “positively impact the lives of women” with its products, experiences and initiatives.

The campaign also includes new partnerships with professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe, actor and producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas, world champion free skier Eileen Gu, model, refugee and mental wellness supporter Adut Akech, body advocate and model  Paloma Elsesser, journalist Amanda de Cadenet and LGBTQIA+ activist Valentina Sampaio.

Look – I kind of got Viotoria’s Secret’s 2019 decision to ditch the “Angels” and their annual cheeseca; not being a marketer, I’m not sure what the net pros and cons of “pelting your target demographic with images of women that were mostly fantasy objects for men” versus “selling the idea that you kind of are that fantasy, for that special someone, if you buy our unmentionables”.

I suppose it’d be more or less like having Wilt Chamberlain endorse an Erectils Dysfunction remedy; half of the audience might think “THAT’LL HELP ME BANG 20,000 WOMEN TOO!”, and the other half could get…inteimidated?

I guess I’ll let the marketeers market.

So while I can intellectually understand the idea that Victoria’s Secret might shy away from their harem of supermodel “Angels” (complete with some of the more Hefner-y aspects of that image), and simultaneously the idea of feminists wanting companies to use more examples of female empowerment in marketing…

…I guess I’m struggling to see where or why a business and industry that produces lingerie, a milieu which ostensibly exists to make women feel sexy for their significant others, sees itself as a vehicle for that sort of empowerment.

Especially given the role models they’ve selected. The linked article lists :

…actor and producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas, world champion free skier Eileen Gu, model, refugee and mental wellness supporter Adut Akech, body advocate and model  Paloma Elsesser, journalist Amanda de Cadenet and LGBTQIA+ activist Valentina Sampaio

…most of whom fit fairly squarely into the modern current western notion of “beauty”…

…and probably the most “controversial” of the picks…

…Megan Rapinoe, a woman whose entire claim to fame is successfully chasing a ball around a field and stridently proclaiming the dominant social narrative on cue in front of cameras, and who also matches the current western notion of beauty, if you have a secret thing for Reinhard Heydrich.

Beiing neither a lingerie buyer, a second-wave feminist nor a Heydrophile, I am probably not the one to comment.

I’m still trying to figure out if Victoria’s Secret, the brand, is…:

  • terminally beset by executives under the spell of “woke” culture
  • trying to “shock” its way out of a market doldrum

Either way, I think I’m gonna buy stock in whatever VS’s more traditional competitors might be. It just seems…market-prudent.

Neologism

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Chickification: the process by which a formerly male activity is ruined for the men who enjoyed it.

I subscribe to a couple of airplane magazines.  In the past, the articles mostly covered maintenance and repairs, flying safety practices, and heads-up notices of regulatory changes.  There was endless encouragement to take kids flying to develop a love of aviation to keep the sport alive.  The phrase “$100 hamburger” was tongue-in-cheek (it refers to the practice of flying your airplane to another airport for no real purpose, just eat lunch and come home.  Adding up all the costs of owning and operating an airplane, that hamburger cost you $100, at least. But hey, considering the boat, motor and trailer, what did that walleye cost you? It’s not about the money, it’s about the sport).  Flying apparel was logo ball caps.  Flying club meetings were sitting on folding chairs in a hangar shooting the breeze with other pilots.

Lately, I’ve noticed a change in the magazines.  Now that the editors are women journalism majors hired to make the headquarters office acceptably diverse, the content of the magazines has shifted.  They’re all about getting more women flying, more girls interested in aviation.  Flying articles emphasize mothers juggling flying careers and family. Glossy photos show foodie destinations. Flying apparel is fashionable.  It’s a noticeable shift in emphasis away from old men in favor of 30-ish women.  I fully expect Standards of Conduct and Speech Codes for flying club meetings within the next year.   Nobody is allowed to say it, but adding women to a club changes the club and seldom for the better.

Women don’t need special programs or rules or encouragement to be accepted at a male activity such as flying (or shooting at the firing range).  Just show up and the guys will fall all over themselves welcoming you.  Forcing your way in is a sure way to force the guys out and after that, it’s just one big cat-fight which nobody ever wins until everyone stomps off in a huff and the club closes.

Joe Doakes

Which may be the goal, at least for some.

Truth = Sexist

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The women weren’t really trying, that’s the only reason they lost. Otherwise, they’d totes have dominated the field.  For sure.

Because if the professional women athletes really were trying but still got beaten this badly by a bunch of high school boys, we’d have to admit there truly is a physical difference between the sexes and that’s simply Unacceptable.

Joe Doakes

2+2=Women Can Literally Do Anything As Well As Men, Winston.

We’ve Seen This Before

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Lauren Boebert, 34 year old business owner and freshman Congresswoman from Colorado, is to the 2020s what Michele Bachmann was to the 2000s – further proof of Berg’s Eighth Law.

Boebert actually is what Big Left has been trying to teach the world AOC is; a young woman who actually accomplished something.

Dumb And Dumber And Dumber And Dumber…

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Policy is downstream of politics.

Politics is downstream from culture.

Culture is shaped, to a disturbing extent, by people who want to try to influence it.

And it’s been a cultural cliché for generation that television in its many forms has an overwhelming influence on society.

And as someone who spent way more time in Ramsey County family court, and dealing with culture’s assumptions about fathers and children, the subject of how media treats fatherhood has been of far more than casual interest to me for a long time.

I’ve observed since the early days of this blog that much of modern culture’s perception of fathers seems to be derived from Fred Flintstone (if you’re lucky – the cartoon rendering of Jackie Gleason was much preferable to the neutered George Jetson, albeit similar in every other way).

The good news – sociological reasarch [1] shows I’m right.

The bad news – Flintstone is a throwback to the “good old days”. Modern media, more and more, is treating fathers like incompetent, mock-worthy, if in the end lovable buffoons:

…we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.

Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.

At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.

Thing is, as more children are raised in single-parent housholds (a majority, in many communities), and given that the vast majority of those households are female-led, popular entertainment is going to have a disproportional role in shaping how children feel about what fathers are supposed to be.

I don’t watch a lot of current network TV, so it’s fairly academic to me at the moment.

But I’ve also noticed, again for over the past twenty-plus years, that the way fathers are portrayed in commercial is equally condescending [2] – but that there’s a pattern to this.

Remember – nothing in major media advertising, least of all on network or cable TV, is accidental. Every ad, down to the lowliest 10-second sweeper spot, is focus-grouped to a fine sheen before it goes near a broadcaster. The subtext of every ad is as carefully tuned as the messages themselves.

And I’ve noticed [3] that there’s a pattern:

  • Spots aimed at products most commonly aimed at guys (the social group, as opposed to “men”, the sex), products like beer and athletic gear, tools, blue-collar workers’ tools, vehicles bought for work (as opposed to lifestyle accessories), tend to portray women (if at all) as improbably attractive, but not as the focus of the spot/s.
  • Products aimed at women (by inference, women who lead or co-lead households, especially with children) are the ones that tend to show husbands as bumbling, dubiously competent, and very frequently not in their wives leagues, if you catch my drift.

Remembering that nothing in big-dollar advertising is accidental, what other conclusion is there than “Evidence tells advertisers that men see their women as ideal and attractive [which is sort of an evolutionary tautology], and women who spend money want to think that men – in general, and maybe their own – are hapless buffoons who’d be lying in their parents basements in a puddle of their own waste without them.”

Not sure that’s a great message for the young women or the young men of tomorrow.

[1] And yes, I now – sociology, like all soft sciences, is not a science. Soft science produces soft data, at best. And soft data is good enough for the point I’m making.

[2] Although somewhat less so if the fathers in the ads are black or Latino. And it seems that the fathers in mixed-race couples, who seem to make up a disproportionate number of couples in TV advertising these days, get portrayed pretty neutrally-to-favorably, although both of those observation are just that – impressions from a guy who doesn’t watch a whole lot of TV. Now, that would be an interesting study. And one ad that stuck out at me – the morning-TV spot for Hi-Vee supermarkets featuring the 1983 song “Our House” – indicates, albeit with a sample size of one, that even being a stay-at-home caretaker while the improbably gorgeous mom runs off to her office job doesn’t protect dad from that same level of condescension.

[3] Yep, anecdotally, not a controlled experiment bla bla bla.

2+2=Road Salt

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Got any questions?

Don’t bring ’em to Erin Maye Quade, former MN state representative, 2018 Lieutenant Governor candidate, and (along with former commenter Dog Gone and William Davis) one of the Minnesota DFL’s most imortant intellectual thought leaders.

Because, being a thought leader, she’s got the answers:

So a trans woman, having experienced none of growing up as a bio-female, can not only appropriate a lifetime of bio-female experience, but in so doing scoop up all the scholarships – which, I hasten to add, are what put a lot of working-class bio-girls a shot at a higher education (for what little that seems to be worth these days)?

Seems a little…misogynistic?

My daughter grew up playing basketball in elementary school and junior high with, and against, a bunch of very talented, largely black girls from Frogtown, the Midway and the North End.

Some of these girls, even at 10-13 years old, were already working hard on their games, in hopes of getting scholarships.

I’m dying to see how Ms. Maye Quade would explain to those working-class girls how not only were their scholarships going to bio-boys, but they’d best shut up about it if they ever wanted to do lunch at the Saint Paul Grill again.

I’m just waiting for a bunch of bio-guys who couldn’t quite make the NBA, and are tired of playing in Italy and Poland, to “transition” and dominate the living s**t out of the WNBA and Women’s Soccer.

Zellen/iot Zage

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Background: “Cultural appropriation” is one of the few sins actually recognized by the Wokemob. One can not, it seems, be white and wear african jewelry or cook mexican food, at the risk of inciting the Wokemob.

They seem to be more tolerant of people of non-Western descent using things invented in the west, like free speech and respect for the individual (as long as they are that individual), but let’s not get carried away in technicalities, here.

Foreground: The actress formerly known as Ellen Page – most famous for starring in Juno, the inescapable and insufferable indy sensation that put former Minneapolitan “Diablo Cody” on the map way back when – is now Elliot Page, and has asked to be referred to by the pronouns “he” and “they”.

And the media – mainstream and social – have complied with that demand at a clip that would have terrified Orwell, and probably Emmanuel Goldstein as well.

Elliot Page was never a woman, Winston.

Appropriated: Brendan O’Neil has an excellent piece at Spiked on the subject, focusing on three subjects – the Orwellian completeness of the “transformation”, the deleterious effect of the Transgender mafia on gay kids…

…and the bit that caught my attention: Page’s cultural appropriation. I’ll add some emphasis.

The disappearing of Ellen Page, and the demonisation of anyone who dares to mention that woman’s name, matters because it tells us a great deal about the increasing instability and elitism of identity politics. There are many reasons we should have a frank, legitimate discussion about Ellen Page rather than robotically repeating that she is now a he and that anyone who says otherwise is a moral reprobate. First, is it really the case that Page is male? A he? How can someone who doesn’t have male biology and who has had no male experiences – boyhood, male puberty, masculine impulses, being a brother, an uncle, a father – be a ‘he’? How does that work? Is it magic? Or have words like male, he, brother and father been so denuded of meaning thanks to the cult of genderfluidity that anyone can adopt them as their preferred identity? It is not prejudiced to ask these questions; it is reasonable, and important.

And the same goes the other way, for “women” who grew up male as well. If eating a burrito made by a white woman is genocide, what is being an insta-male or female?

It’s not you. It’s not even your identity. It’s the costume of the day.

Swirling

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When Conservatives say American culture is swirling the bowl, this is
what they mean.

The statement of facts given by the Court of Appeals:

***

The Minnesota Vixens were a women’s tackle-football team.  From 2012
through 2017, they were part of the Independent Women’s Football
League.  Christina Ginther applied to play but was told she could not
join the team because league policy requires that all players be “born
female.”  Ginther is a transgender woman.

***

The issue in the case is a technical point about whether the team
tendered a claim to the league to pay for the lawyers to defend it. 
Ignore that, doesn’t matter.  The important part is the Minnesota Human
Rights Act protects the rights of a man dressed up as a woman to sue a
woman’s organization for refusing to allow him to play tackle football
against women.

Swirling.

Joe Doakes

Swirling notwitstanding, I can’t wait until a transgender female tries to break into roller derby – which is in my observation an activity packed to the gills with virtue-signaling enthusiastic progressives.

The court case would be more fun than the skating.

Generation Plath

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Consider the possibility that humans evolved over millions of years. Consider the possibility that survival traits selected for evolutionary value are different for women than men. Consider the possibility that the most evolutionary successful survival traits for women include the herd instinct, and maternal instincts.

College teaches women to be strong, independent, career-oriented people who have children late in life, if at all. Everything about modern feminist education directly contradicts the millennia of hardwired evolutionary instincts. The endless mental conflict between what society tells you to do and what your instincts tell you to do, is exhausting and depressing.

But that’s all silly, isn’t it? That’s just white privilege and mansplaining and patriarchal oppression. 

Isn’t it?

Joe Doakes

To answer your observation of the contradictions, shut up.

You May Ask Yourself…

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… how many mulligans does a democrat get before people start actually calling them on there, well, “inconsistencies”?

The answer, of course, provided they are progressive enough, is “as many as they want”

“Authenticity”.

This is not the Babylon Bee. 

The article itself is a moderately interesting read, if only to (try to help sort of maybe kinda) understand the minds of those whose entire frame of reference begins and ends with progressivism filtered through the lens of identity feminism.

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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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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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.