The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Psychology of Female Objectification’

Posted on | October 7, 2015 | 53 Comments

Harvard University sophomore Lily Calcagnini.

“Each time a woman is catcalled, publicly humiliated, and forced to ignore it, the psychology of female objectification becomes evermore seared into the brains of all actors and bystanders involved. We’re already conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components before we consider her brain. The more we reinforce this subconscious thought process, the more ingrained it becomes in our psychology.”
Lily Calcagnini, Harvard Crimson, Oct. 6, 2015

“In contrast to young women, whose empowerment can be seen as a process of resistance to male dominated heterosexuality, young, able-bodied, heterosexual men can access power through the language, structures and identities of hegemonic masculinity.”
Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (1998)

“The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”
Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 1978

The “discourses of heterosexuality” described by French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig are probably not the catcalls described by Lily Calcagnini, but the underlying idea is the same: Male sexual attraction to women is inherently oppressive. The “empowerment” of women requires “resistance to male dominated heterosexuality,” as Professor Holland and her colleagues explained in a book based on feminist gender theory, which regards heterosexuality and male domination as synonymous, two ways of saying the same thing. Heterosexuality reduces a woman to “the raw sum of her physical components,” as Ms. Calcagnini phrases it, and any man who would impose this condition upon her can do so only through the “power . . . of hegemonic masculinity.”

When a college sophomore asserts that we are psychologically “conditioned” to take for granted the “objectification” of women, she thereby invokes a feminist theoretical understanding of sexual behavior that extends far beyond the subject of catcalling. Consider first that Ms. Calcagnini wrote this column in the Harvard Crimson, whose readers are enrolled at arguably the world’s most prestigious institution of higher education. Next consider the sort of behavior she describes:

To the candid man who approached me, rubbing your crotch and murmuring that you could make love to me all day and night, Baby: I could probably call the cops on you at any hour, Buddy.
To the two sirs who, from the safety of your car, hurled cries of Chica, Beautiful Lady, Sexy, Mami, Honey, and Pretty One out of your windows: You made me want to cry.
As you pounded the center of your steering wheel with the palm of your hand, commanding the attention of additional passers-by with each honk of your horn, you encouraged others to join in your objectification game. Powerless, I waited for your traffic light to change, so you would speed away towards the next corner and the next girl.

Are we to believe that these lecherous brutes are Harvard students, so that by writing about their uncouth behavior in the Crimson, Ms. Calcagnini thinks she is addressing the perpetrators directly? Of course not. There might be men at Harvard who occasionally get a bit rowdy, but they are not honking their horns while yelling chica at girls.

In 2015, no man smart enough to go college would ever dare express sexual interest in a female classmate for fear of being accused of “harassment.” Feminists have made university life in the 21st-century a Danger Zone for heterosexual males, who are at risk of expulsion if they even attempt to become intimate with a woman on campus.

She does not need any evidence in order to accuse him of sexual assault. Once accused, a male student will discover he has no due-process rights in the Title IX hearings where accused males are automatically presumed guilty. These accusations may be made long after an alleged incident. A male student may find himself accused of sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend whom he continued dating (and having consensual sex with) for many months after whatever incident she may claim was non-consensual whenever a desire for post-breakup revenge strikes her. In other words, your freshman-year girlfriend could wait until your senior year to accuse you of having raped her three years earlier, and thereby quite possibly prevent you from graduating. This is “equality” in 2015.

Feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology promotes a sexual paranoia I call “Fear and Loathing of the Penis,” and this in turn has helped incentivize false accusations of rape. At Harvard in 2014, there were 33 reports of sexual assault, of which six were “determined to be ‘unfounded,’ i.e. ‘false or baseless.’” This climate of anti-male fanaticism has led to the enactment of so-called “affirmative consent” policies, with the practical result that is never safe to assume that any sexual activity on campus is legal, as Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner has explained. At an elite school like Harvard, where tuition is $45,278 a year, a male student would be a fool to take the risk of becoming sexually involved with a female classmate, since Harvard women evidently are willing to make “false or baseless” rape accusations.

Analyzing the Harvard sexual assault data, Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown determined that a “worst-case-scenario assumption means that about one in 114 female undergraduates reported rapes at Harvard last year” — a far cry from the 1-in-5 rate of campus sexual assault claimed by radical feminists (a claim promoted by President Obama, among others). If more than 99% of Harvard women are not at risk of rape, however, this doesn’t prevent Ms. Calcagnini from indicting all male heterosexuals as complicit in harassment:

Catcalls are arresting because they decontextualize the language of physical attraction that might be meaningful when exchanged between lovers. I’m flattered to know that someone who cares deeply about me also finds me beautiful, but this is only because I know that they appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.
Using the same language, a catcall is vapid. It reduces my worth to that of my appearance. In the public context of the street, coming from the mouth of a stranger, a catcall exploits the verbiage of intimacy and makes me feel both objectified and powerless to rebuke my objectification.
Moreover, there is implicit sexual intent in a catcall by nature of the fact that it is spoken aloud. Since anyone can enjoyably objectify me without my knowing, I must take a man’s brazen expression of arousal to mean that he’s hoping for some favor in return. Hoping that he’s singled out a woman whose self-esteem is low. Hoping that I’ll forget I’m en route to Spanish and will instead fulfill his sexual fantasies in an alley. Hoping that, to quote the gallant young man who followed me around Harvard Square yesterday, I will “suck his d–k.” . . .
Perpetrators of this kind of objectification may not realize how many women they undermine when they insult one. Their comments dismantle the significant, but clearly still inadequate, social progress that feminists have made for all women.

Who was that young man who followed Ms. Calcagnini around Harvard Square, soliciting her to perform oral sex? You could safely wager $100 that he is not a Harvard student, that he does not read the Crimson, and thus is not confronted with her accusation that his crude behavior is dismantling “social progress,” about which he almost certainly does not give a damn. No, this denunciation of catcalling is a signifying gesture which affords Ms. Calcagnini the opportunity to inform Harvard men that “objectification” — a feminist term for normal male appreciation of female beauty — is unacceptable. She describes how men “enjoyably objectify me without my knowing” (i.e., she is aware that men derive pleasure from looking at her), but is offended by any vocal expression of male sexual interest, because this “reduces my worth to that of my appearance.” Rather than this type of interest, she desires instead “someone who cares deeply about me,” and who therefore will “appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.”

Did anyone besides me notice that Ms. Calcagnini uses gender-neutral language (“someone who cares deeply about me . . . they appreciate my personhood”) to describe the sort of attention she welcomes whereas, by contrast, it is “a man’s brazen expression of arousal” and “his sexual fantasies” that she makes clear are undermining “social progress that feminists have made”? While there is no specific reason to suspect that Ms. Calcagnini is a lesbian — other than the fact that she attends Harvard and calls herself a feminist — why else would she use the pages of the Crimson to excoriate heterosexual males this way?

Permit me to confess that my wife’s “biological ability to have sex” was so high on the list of qualities that attracted my attention, I could scarcely comprehend her “personhood” otherwise. If I may be allowed to “decontextualize the language of physical attraction” here, exactly how does Ms. Calcagnini suppose a heterosexual man experiences “arousal”? What aspect of her “personhood” does any woman expect a normal man to “appreciate” more than her “biological ability to have sex”? Is this not the sine qua non of heterosexuality?

Civilized men do not yell crude comments from car windows at women on the street, but if we assume that readers of the Harvard Crimson are civilized, what is the point of lecturing them about this? Quite clearly, Ms. Calcagnini’s column had some ulterior purpose, perhaps to guilt-trip any heterosexual male reader who might “enjoyably objectify” her — i.e., look at her and like what he sees — because she is disgusted by the thought that he is aware of her “biological ability to have sex.”

Have I been “conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components”? If so, who “conditioned” me this way and how, and at such an early age that in kindergarten I developed a crush on Priscilla Yates, a slightly plump brunette with a gap between her front teeth and freckles on her nose? Early and often did I “objectify” girls — Janet Howton, Joanna Richardson and Carol Purdy, to name three objects of my elementary school crushes — before I had even a remote understanding of how “the raw sum of her physical components” related to the “biological ability to have sex.” The idea that male admiration for female beauty is “conditioned” is as ridiculous as the assertion that this entirely natural “objectification” precludes men from being able also to “consider her brain” or appreciate her “personhood.” Are men at Harvard so stupid that they cannot likewise differentiate these concepts? Why does Ms. Calcagnini presume she can accuse the Crimson‘s highly educated male readers of stupidity without anyone answering her insulting imputation? Is it because she knows that no man at Harvard would risk the feminist outrage if he dared publish an answer?

SCANDAL: Man Likes Good-Looking Women;
Expelled by Harvard for ‘Objectification’

‘These Discourses of Heterosexuality Oppress Us!’

Normal male behavior is now a human rights violation. The man who expresses a preference for beautiful women could “dismantle the . . . social progress that feminists have made for all women.”

Used to be, you could get locked up in a lunatic asylum for spewing that kind of deranged gibberish. Now they send you to Harvard.

(Hat-tip: Badger Pundit on Twitter.)





 

Comments

53 Responses to “‘The Psychology of Female Objectification’”

  1. Fail Burton
    October 7th, 2015 @ 8:29 pm

    For women who think they are so qualified to talk about justice, gender feminists seem to be the stupidest and least qualified to approach the subject. Using feminist logic, if I see black folks doing something bad then I should throw down the entire race. Do men ever do anything good as a group? The answer in feminism is no, only bad. Do these idiots not realize they have permanently encased straight white men in immorality and gay non-white women with a sheen of innocence and morality. Feminists don’t use this logic with black folks for the simple reason they know it’s wrong, but having no principles, they can’t extend simple comparisons to straight white men. It’s startling how fluently these crazy women pass off their hate speech as justice and even more startling how many people are fooled by them.

  2. robertstacymccain
    October 7th, 2015 @ 8:39 pm

    “Do men ever do anything good as a group? The answer in feminism is no …”

    What any feminist wants from men is simple:
    1. Shut up.
    2. Give her money.
    3. Go away.

    Is this too much to ask?

  3. Julie Pascal
    October 7th, 2015 @ 9:12 pm

    I think that Space Bunny was right, of course, but with conditions… the young woman who thinks he’s hot thinks it’s totes okay… the old feminist mentor will rush to explain how the young woman is wrong.

  4. RS
    October 7th, 2015 @ 9:30 pm

    Does she not realize that 99.999% of our first impressions about anything are formed from perceiving something visually? Humans “objectify” everything, not just other humans. And there has to be some basis for humans to desire to obtain further information about someone. We can complain that “looks aren’t everything” and that’s of course true. So what? Humans have the ability to appreciate beauty in all forms. It is the first method we use in discerning the good from the bad. Can we be wrong. Sure. But you have to start somewhere in forming a judgment, and for better or worse, we don’t smell our way through life.

    Exit question: Can a blind heterosexual male “objectify” feminine beauty?

  5. AwD
    October 7th, 2015 @ 9:33 pm

    Hey, there’s a simple solution for feminists upset over the prospect of pleasing any passing heterosexual man with their appearance: a burqa. Guaranteed to defeat the male gaze!

  6. Adam C.
    October 7th, 2015 @ 10:03 pm

    According to Dutch researchers in a study, yes, blind men can.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18fob-Bergner-t.html?_r=0

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:39 am
  8. Daniel Freeman
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:39 am
  9. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 1:39 am

    “What aspect of her ‘personhood’ does any woman expect a normal man to ‘appreciate’ more than her ‘biological ability to have sex’? Is this not the sine qua non of heterosexuality?”

    THANK YOU.

    The feminist babble is simply a coping mechanism — intellectualization.

    Ms. Calcagnini is angry that some dingy proles at Harvard Square had the temerity to notice her conspicuously. Calcagnini would relish the same attention from an attractive, high status male — with or without an appreciation for her “personhood”.

  10. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 1:42 am

    “The way I see it, a compliment is composed of three things: its content, the context in which it’s shared, and the speaker’s intent. Of these, the first plays the smallest role.”

    She forgot number 4, the most important one:

    How hot he is (would she want to have his babies)?

  11. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 1:46 am

    Oh, but she wants to please men. She just wants men of the unwashed masses to avert their eyes.

    “Know your place, grubby little man!”

  12. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 1:56 am

    She understands all this. She just wants low status men to stop mentally undressing her and drop dead.

  13. DeadMessenger
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:03 am

    I personally don’t think guys are catcalling because they reasonably expect to do it with you. I have young guys…20’s, 30’s, or yeah even older, yell “baybeee”, “mami”, “woman, you beautiful”, “shake it” and stuff like that, and hell, I’m 56 and damn glad somebody is noticing. So I don’t want child brides like Lily Wutzername spoiling it for me. Those guys aren’t retarded; they see a massive gold ring on my left finger, and I’m sure, realize that I ain’t their age.

    If we’re talking crotch grabbing and potty mouth, that’s another thing, but inevitably, it’s that rapist Haven Monahan guy doing that. Nobody else is, except in a meat market bar after 8 shots.

    So, does Miss Lily get catcalls? If she does, that’s not a bad thing. But she invents fake “catcall” crimes to make the situation much worse than it actually is. Because by far the most frequent form of male attention is catching a man’s eyes on your rack or butt, and when caught, he looks elsewhere. But there’s no feminist mileage for Lily in that, the lying beyotch.

  14. DeadMessenger
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:06 am

    No, so hit MY freakin’ tip jar, McCain. 😀

  15. DeadMessenger
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:07 am

    What does SHE know? She’s a kid.

  16. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:32 am

    “I personally don’t think guys are catcalling because they reasonably expect to do it with you.”

    That’s a very good point and I think she knows this, despite what she says in her essay. Your comment reminds me of Seinfeld’s comments about men honking at beautiful women:

    “We like women. We want women. But that’s pretty much as far as we’ve thought. That’s why we’re honking car horns, yelling from construction sites, these are the best ideas we’ve had so far. Honking the car horn, amazes me! This has gotta be the last living brain cell in this guys skull that comes up with this idea! I don’t understand – it’s so awful – she’s on the street, he’s in the car “beep beep, brrrrrrr…(drives away). I think I made my point.

    What is she supposed to do, kick off the heels, start running after the car. Grab on to the bumper. The car comes to a stop, ‘it’s a good think you honked! I had no idea how you felt'”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTbNtO0hZsk

    Again, I think Ms. Lily understands that the unattractive middle class man on the street and the grubby urban outdoorsmen in Cambridge have no expectation of “doing it” with her royal highness — she just wants lower status men to know that it’s not okay to talk to a Harvard woman.

    But she can’t come right out and say that.

  17. robertstacymccain
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:36 am

    “Lily’s feminist babble is simply a coping mechanism — intellectualization.”

    This is true of all feminist babble, ultimately. They cannot cope with adult life — the duties, the conflicts, the disappointments — and so they denounce “society,” spending a career criticizing those who cope more successfully.

  18. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:51 am

    Not much, but I bet she knows that “decontextualized language of physical attraction” isn’t her real beef.

  19. Dana
    October 8th, 2015 @ 7:00 am

    Our esteemed host wrote the only five words that matter in this article:

    When a college sophomore asserts . . . .

    When a college sophomore asserts something, the word which comes to mind immediately is “sophomoric,” a word which was coined for the obvious reason.

    Looking at the photograph of Lily Calcagnini, I see a young woman — though, oddly enough, not really as young as I would expect a college sophomore to look — wearing makeup and earrings, someone who has, apparently, taken some time to make herself look as physically attractive as she can, yet being wholly upset that some men actually do find her to be physically attractive. . . . .at least, if we assume that her tales are actually true.

    Mr McCain questioned whether any of the young men she described would actually be Harvard students, because the behavior described seems very much unlike what would be expected of such men; I question whether the behavior described occurred at all, at least on he Harvard campus. Are we really expected to believe that a young man followed her around Harvard Square asserting that she would fellate him?

    What Miss (and I refuse to use “Ms” as an honorific, as I wish other conservatives would do) Calcagnini described is behavior that might have occurred in the barrio (note here my racist assumption of the neighborhood from where she probably comes), but is wholly improbable on the campus of Harvard, unless we are talking about rowdy and intoxicated fraternity boys.

    Naturally, I have no way to prove that Miss Calcagnini has fabricated part of her story, but I suspect that she did. She might have been the “victim” of catcalls — apparently the old saw about sticks and stones is incorrect, since Miss Calcagnini is asserting that names really can hurt her — but my guess is that they occurred other places than Harvard Square.

    Miss Calcagnini is claiming that we wicked heterosexual men are valuing her solely for her looks, rather than for her intelligence and wisdom. I would suggest that, were she to be valued solely for her intelligence and wisdom, we would be talking about loose change, and not currency.

  20. Dana
    October 8th, 2015 @ 7:12 am

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    At an elite school like Harvard, where tuition is $45,278 a year, a male student would be a fool to take the risk of becoming sexually involved with a female classmate, since Harvard women evidently are willing to make “false or baseless” rape accusations.

    We realize that you are only 56 years and two days old, but even at my advanced 62 years, 5 months and 16 days of age, I can remember just how wise some of my actions where women were concerned were when I was in college. When you stop thinking with the big head . . . .

    Fortunately, I found a 5’7″ size three brunette who didn’t wear too many clothes the first week of my sophomore year, and stuck with her for the next 6½ years, so I was able to stop making a complete fool of myself for a while.

  21. Finrod Felagund
    October 8th, 2015 @ 9:26 am

    I would suggest that, were she to be valued solely for her intelligence and wisdom, we would be talking about loose change, and not currency.

    You deserve an upvote for that line alone.

  22. Daniel Freeman
    October 8th, 2015 @ 9:38 am

    I’ll take that bet. The female imperative can work subconsciously as well as not, and the rationalization hamster is a powerful force.

  23. Lulu
    October 8th, 2015 @ 9:45 am

    Well she speaks truth — we lesser mortals just need to accept that a 25 year old Brad Pitt could never have been guilty of sexual harassment but a 25 year old Danny DeVito would pretty much always be guilty of sexual harassment. That’s why if you are not smoking hot male or female you should be careful how you are perceived in the workplace or anywhere else perceptions can be used against you.

  24. Bob Belvedere
    October 8th, 2015 @ 10:06 am

    Actually, a lot of druggies hang-around in Harvard Square.

  25. Bob Belvedere
    October 8th, 2015 @ 10:12 am

    I thank the Good Lord that I’m in my fifties because, physically, Miss Calcagnini is the kind of gal I’d see and immediately try to get to know in my younger days. And I might have been dumb enough to forget that bit of Wisdom that you never date Harvard Girls [this even applied back in the early 1980’s – they wuz just as crazy then].

    [My drummer had a one-nighter with a Harvard gal back then and got crabs…and nagging!]

  26. LIbtardian slayer
    October 8th, 2015 @ 10:47 am

    I lived in and around Boston for over a decade.
    The women of Harvard are not all that appealing.
    You have to really lower your standards to find Harvard women attractive either physcially,emotioannly or spiritually.
    men are treated like objects by women, but feminists never notice when men are mistreated.
    Men are treated like walking wallets. Like atm machines.
    Chaching

  27. daialanye
    October 8th, 2015 @ 11:33 am

    If Calcagnini (hope I spelled that correctly) had a big tough-looking boyfriend next to her she might not be subjected to so many rude expressions of admiration. Get yourself a real man, young woman!

  28. Adobe_Walls
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:27 pm

    Fred is always worth a read, or a reread. That line ”I was confused myself. I remember a woman screaming at me, “Women don’t want to be objects!” Trying to be conciliatory, I said, “OK, you can be subjects.” That didn’t suit her either.”
    Is one for the ages.

  29. Gunga
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:33 pm

    Hey, Where’s Carrie? Shouldn’t she be here shrieking and femsplaining “SHUT UP!” to us by now?

  30. Dana
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:52 pm

    Don’t limit it to feminism; that’s true of the left in general.

  31. Dana
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:57 pm

    A tough-looking boyfriend would mean that she was surrendering to the white cisheteronormative patriarchy. If she has a boyfriend, I’d bet that he wears the thong panties in the house.

  32. Steve Skubinna
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:58 pm

    “College sophomore.”

    Say no more. The invariable go-to source of wisdom on any topic.

    As for her unsavory encounters, I would refer her to what I call Raylon’s Law: If you meet an asshole, you just met an asshole. But if everyone you meet is an asshole, then you’re the asshole.

  33. Steve Skubinna
    October 8th, 2015 @ 12:59 pm

    Well, all women want a Modern Man in their lives, right?

  34. Dana
    October 8th, 2015 @ 1:00 pm

    That’s what the left tell us, and we all know that they never lie.

  35. BozoerRebbe
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:03 pm

    “To the two sirs who, from the safety of your car, hurled cries of Chica,
    Beautiful Lady, Sexy, Mami, Honey, and Pretty One out of your windows:
    You made me want to cry.”

    No humblebragging there, no not at all. If being called beautiful and pretty makes her want to cry, one wonders how she would have reacted to, “You’re so ugly I wouldn’t do you with someone else’s d!ck”.

  36. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

    I think this has been posted at TOM before, but this sums it up:

    Hot dates and hot sex for alpha men, in-depth analysis of decontextualized language of physical attraction and rape accusations for unattractive guys.

  37. Neo
    October 8th, 2015 @ 2:48 pm

    This has got to be a real bummer for those women who still go to college looking for a husband to support her for the rest of her life.

  38. Jason Lee
    October 8th, 2015 @ 3:12 pm

    There’s often a lot of wierdos at Harvard Square, so it’s a plausible story but artistic enhancement of her story does seem likely.

  39. Steve Skubinna
    October 8th, 2015 @ 3:16 pm

    “And him pushing!”

  40. BSR
    October 8th, 2015 @ 3:18 pm

    There is an obvious disconnect in these people who complain about heterosexuality being the societal norm. They will have an argument, maybe someday in the far future when it no longer requires a male sperm and a female egg to produce another human being without phenomenal interventions. Until then, they should just cope because they’re denying their own origins.

  41. Tonestaple
    October 8th, 2015 @ 3:24 pm

    In the late 70s, in Atlanta, I was walking down Peachtree Street to the bank one fine day. I was wearing a bright red cotton knit dress and high heels. Two men, possibly in construction – I don’t know because I didn’t really look at them – passed me by and said, “Red, you are a sight for sore eyes.” They made my day.
    My friend, growing up in Honolulu, had to walk past some construction sites to get home. After I told her the memory above, she told me that if she hadn’t gotten catcalled by the construction workers, she would have wondered what was wrong.
    Girls are so very, very, very stupid nowadays.

  42. ‘The Psychology of Female Objectification’ | Living in Anglo-America
    October 8th, 2015 @ 3:40 pm
  43. Federale
    October 8th, 2015 @ 4:59 pm

    Disappointed that Stacy didn’t identify the obvious, the first guy was black and the second group was Hispanic.

  44. Guest
    October 8th, 2015 @ 5:26 pm

    The best way to get a guy to “appreciate your personhood” is to not screw him on the first date. Just sayin fellow females.

  45. Daniel Freeman
    October 9th, 2015 @ 12:40 am

    Sounds like a corollary to the law that if you look around the poker table and can’t tell who the mark is, it’s you. (A female comic had a version that went if you don’t know who the slutty one in your group of friends is, it’s you.)

    No wait, it’s more like the principle that if you go on a date with someone who says that all of her exes are crazy, then either she has a broken picker and you’re already nuts, or she’ll drive you bonkers like she did the rest.

  46. Daniel Freeman
    October 9th, 2015 @ 12:51 am

    I dunno. The flip side is that probably all those gals have to do is just be sweet and attentive to get a guy wrapped around her finger, due to the incompetence of their competition.

  47. Daniel Freeman
    October 9th, 2015 @ 1:16 am

    Our host respects both our intelligence and proper journalistic skepticism, both good reasons not to spell out an inference where the evidence is anything less than airtight.

    The described behavior is suspiciously stereotypical. I halfway suspect that she made up both incidents just so that she could gasp and cry “RAAAAACIST!” when readers drew the obvious conclusions.

  48. robertstacymccain
    October 9th, 2015 @ 7:03 am

    “… not screw him on the first date.”

    Or the second, or the third. When I was a teenage boy, a guy explained the Three-Date Rule to me this way: “If she doesn’t sleep with you by the third date, stop wasting your time.” I only broke that rule once, and I married her.

    It was not until after I was married that I learned some women observed the Three-Date Rule by the obverse principle, so that they would never have sex before the third date. Men and women have a similar understanding about the inverse relationship between female promiscuity and marriageability. Sexual behavior is, in great measure, a matter of habit.

    At some basic level, most people understand that the habit of promiscuity is likely to make someone a poor candidate for marriage, because they are more likely to be unfaithful, and lack the habits necessary to sustain a long-term relationship. This is equally true for men and women, of course, but chastity and fidelity are traits highly valued in wives — for reasons that social anthropologists have written entire books to explain — and so promiscuous females degrade their marital prospects in a significant way.

    When feminists complain about the “double standard” in this regard — i.e., that female promiscuity is uniquely stigmatized — they ignore the obvious fact that it takes two to tango. In other words, if women are generally chaste before marriage and faithful within marriage, men will have few opportunities to indulge in promiscuous sexuality. It is only where a significant number of women are engaged in promiscuous behavior that the notch-in-his-belt mentality — men “keeping score” in a competition for racking up the maximum number of sexual conquests — becomes possible. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s (made possible to a large extent by the development of the contraceptive pill) made widespread female promiscuity a phenomenon that changed the incentives in a way that disadvantaged women, and the subsequent rise of the Women’s Liberation movement must be seen as a reaction to that phenomenon.

    What I have concluded, based upon my own experience (having come of age in the 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of these social upheavals) as well as my research, is that the smartest strategy for women is to be “old-fashioned.” Whatever her ambitions may be in terms of education and career, a woman gains nothing (and exposes herself to many harms) by “riding the carousel” of sexual adventure. In high school, don’t be that girl who’s chasing after boys. In college, don’t be that girl getting drunk at parties. Develop the kind of independence, based on integrity of character, that makes men respect you. Do not let peer pressure cause you to lower your standards, and do not let your boyfriend manipulate your emotions. The secret of female power, really, is a woman’s willingness to walk away — to say “no deal” — if she feels that a guy isn’t treating her right.

    Healthy relationships are based on voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit. Feminists who see themselves as threatened by “male power” have simply failed to negotiate well.

  49. robertstacymccain
    October 9th, 2015 @ 7:18 am

    Look, when we were in college, feminists hadn’t turned Title IX into a lethal weapon. The concept of “sexual harassment” only became enshrined in court precedents after 1979, and the consequences of that did not manifest themselves on campus prior to my graduation in 1983. When I was in college, therefore, it was not possible for me to be hauled before a disciplinary tribunal for making an “offensive” joke, nor was I at risk of expulsion if a romantic relationship broke up badly.

    It is simply impossible, I think, for any intelligent young man to ignore the enormous risks on the 21st-century campus. Charges of “harassment” and “sexual assault” have proliferated and, when we examine these stories on a case-by-case basis — especially in the numerous lawsuits like Nungesser v. Columbia — we realize that the threshold of what is considered a punishable offense has been dramatically lowered. I simply cannot imagine that a young man with the kind of intelligence necessary to be admitted to Harvard would not be aware of the risks involved in every male-female interaction on campus. These are dangerous times for the college man, and I’m sure they watch their step very carefully nowadays.

  50. Uranus
    October 9th, 2015 @ 8:10 am

    Feminists put feels before reals. Sure, I love intelligent women. I prefer women with free, strong minds to silly weak ones. But feminists rarely if every have any interesting mind to show. They exist in a very narrow mental space that doesn’t allow for wrongthink, it doesn’t allow her to entertain a thought without accepting it. In her mind she can’t step away from feminism and provide a different thought. Why would I be impressed with that? Why would I be impressed by a person’s ability to regurgitate misandric propaganda?

    Why, when I can find some pretty girl with pleasant voice, whose mind will still be free and I’ll actually feel good in her company?

    You want people to love your personality – have a lovable personality. But that means also expand your horizon beyond feminism, which for feminists is blasphemy.