The Other McCain

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

Feminism: Gender Competition and the War Against Human Nature

Posted on | July 19, 2015 | 32 Comments

Freedom, prosperity and happiness require people to develop and encourage an attitude that can be described in five words:

Voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit

This is the secret of capitalism, the secret of democracy, and it also the secret to a successful career and family life. Selfish, envious people — those who view life as a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain is always another person’s loss — are the very worst people in the world. And speaking of feminists . . .

Every week, we are subjected to stroppy Gawker posts and soporific op-eds in national newspapers about how a woman in the technology industry who was fired for poor performance was secretly a high-achieving go-getter brought down by entrenched sexism and patriarchal oppression.
And every week we’re told that the reason more women aren’t working in technology is a combination of sexism, outdated social attitudes and stereotypes, historical prejudices and too few educational support programmes for women.
We’re told that women find it more difficult to get jobs and that when they do get jobs they’re subjected to hostile workplaces, sexism and bullying and that they’re paid less than their male counterparts for the same work.
We’re invited to believe, contrary to the evidence all around us, that the highly-progressive, socially-conscious and liberal-minded technology industry is in fact one of the most retrograde and oppressive places for women to work.
But here’s the dirty secret about the shrill and insatiable “women in tech” movement: none of that is true.

Read the whole thing by Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart.com. Feminism is simply organized selfishness — unhappy women using political ideology to rationalize their own failures and resentments. Presenting men and women as hostile groups engaged in a competition — gender warfare — provides unhappy women with an all-purpose scapegoat for their disappointments: “Smash patriarchy!”

Of all the many excellent points Milo makes, it’s hard to single out a favorite, but this one is crucially important:

7. Identifying As A ‘Woman In Tech’ Is The Kiss Of Death For Your Career
That’s not because employers don’t believe women should have equal access, but because it tells them certain things about your personality. Namely, that you’re likely to be trouble. They worry, with some justification, about bogus sexual harassment claims, which are rampant.
If there’s a problem in the tech workplace it might be that women can bring frivolous gender discrimination lawsuits against their old firms, costing companies in some cases over $100,000 in lawyers’ fees to dismiss, at little or no cost to the woman, who was fired for perfectly acceptable reasons.

The phenomenon of “go-away money” — where any woman who makes a discrimination or harassment claim is handed a year’s salary as payment to leave and avoid the costs of litigation — is a well-known racket, and it is typically not the productive, efficient, team-player type of woman who makes such claims. So if an employer has reason to believe a female applicant is “likely to be trouble,” as Milo says, she won’t get hired. The private sector doesn’t give a damn about “social justice,” they just want profit, and they don’t want to spend money defending against a lawsuit filed by some disgruntled idiot with a Women’s Studies degree.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

32 Responses to “Feminism: Gender Competition and the War Against Human Nature”

  1. RS
    July 19th, 2015 @ 10:26 pm

    I have a son at a well-respected regional public tech university. It bends over backwards to attract female applicants. And, guess what? There is only one “Women in [Fill in the Blank]” type course. My guess is, the women who cause the problems are the ones who attend larger universities with large Humanities departments in addition to the STEM stuff. If you’re female, breathing, and have a 27 on the math part of your ACT, you can write your own ticket at a STEM school of your choice.

  2. JeffS
    July 19th, 2015 @ 11:33 pm

    Hell, that was the case when I graduated from an engineering college, with an engineer degree.

    In Anno Domini One Thousand., Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Nine.

    Feminists are just a bunch of females who suck at STEM.

  3. Fail Burton
    July 20th, 2015 @ 4:19 am

    Have you heard about the latest movement to introduce diversity into romance fiction, nursing and teaching, Bollywood, Asian TV, middle-weight boxing, the NBA and Samba?

    Yeah, neither have I.

    The reason people have found the science fiction community so interesting in this regard is because its core is so small; it’s like a small town. This lesbian ideology has had free rein there and has gutted it like a fish. If you’re a white man you’re simply not welcome there unless you ride the feminist horse. And if you’re that stupid the sum total becomes one big sea of literary garbage. No one with any talent dreams of being an SF writer nowadays. What institution which acts like a guild or museum exists to appreciate good work? There is none. Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft or Jack Vance would literally have no one to write for.

  4. WJJ Hoge
    July 20th, 2015 @ 6:12 am

    Are there more men working in STEM jobs than women? Yes.

    Are there more men graduating with STEM degrees than women? Yes.

    So what? Let folks choose what they want to do. If fewer women than men choose STEM, let them have the careers they want. Some women will choose to be engineers, will be good at it, and will be successful.

    BTW, I first met Mrs. Hoge at an engineering society meeting.

  5. RS
    July 20th, 2015 @ 6:33 am

    Via David Thompson:

    https://twitter.com/MeninistTweet/status/617022376727818240

  6. BSR
    July 20th, 2015 @ 8:23 am

    My first job out of college was for a major corporation. I was just a computer programmer but that makes me officially a woman in a STEM field. I didn’t mind that there weren’t more women in my classes. It didn’t bother me in the least really. In the workplace my managers were actually women and the other ‘coders’ were majority male but that was fine too. There was a basic culture of respect in our office which I appreciated.

    From my perspective, in that workplace, women had an outsized share of the management positions. There were 3 or more female managers and the management tier above them was mostly men.

    As a female software developer though, I had talents that tended to stand out. I was better at writing documentation than many of my peers because I have good communication skills. I was still capable of digging down into the nitty gritty code and thinking through a substantial bug-fix, but at the end of the day I could also explain what all of it did to a lay-person.

    In school I was able to identify that there were some people who just weren’t suited to the sort of thinking required to do software development. My husband fits that description. He can do it, but it requires some mental gymnastics he doesn’t really like to do. For me it’s actually fun. He’s asked me to write snippets of code to help him out in the past with his management duties where he works. So you can shove women into STEM fields, but that doesn’t guarantee that they are well-suited to that sort of work. You can study and practice to your heart’s content but if you can’t make your brain enjoy solving those kinds of problems you’re probably not going to have an easy time advancing in that field. It has nothing to do with glass ceilings or men holding women back so much as the fact that these fields require a level of thought that not everyone is willing to take on and in order to break into the management tier you have to understand the business too.

  7. robertstacymccain
    July 20th, 2015 @ 9:03 am

    People’s careers are shaped not only by their ability but by their attitudes, their interests, their temperament. For example, I have a profound hatred of any kind bureaucratic paperwork. I hate filling out applications. I can’t stand meetings, conference calls, training sessions, etc.

    Any kind of make-work bullshit annoys me. “You need to submit this form because somebody in the HR department needs a copy of the form for their files” translates in my mind to, “Here, do this pointless thing because somebody else’s job requires you do this pointless thing.”

    Show me what the job is, and I’ll do the work. Stop all this meeting-for-the-sake-of-meeting bullshit.

    Well, that kind of attitude sort of limits my career options. At one point in college, I thought about becoming a teacher and actually took three or four education courses. But then I saw how much bureaucratic bullshit is involved, and I was like, “No thanks. I’d rather drive a forklift.”

    My point being that certain kinds of careers attract certain kinds of personalities. It’s not just about IQ or skill, it’s about attitudes and temperament., and feminists don’t get that.

  8. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 9:43 am

    “Feminists are just a bunch of females who suck at STEM.”

    And who resent women who don’t suck at STEM.

    I was in engineering (electrical) school (FIT) at that time, too. And I’ve also noticed that engineer commenters seem to be disproportionately represented on this blog.

  9. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 9:50 am

    I’m also in a STEM field, and one thing I can say about that is, if you’ve got the technical chops, nobody (outside HR) cares if you’re male or female; black, white or Martian.

    Plus, I like being a woman in a male-dominated field. Less drama.

  10. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 9:55 am

    I hate meetings, too. But because I’m in a STEM field, people *cough* falsely *cough* believe I have no social skills. So I can get away with saying things like:

    “No, I won’t attend your stupid meeting.”

    And, “Can we stop talking about doing work and start doing work instead?”

    Being a nerd is great!

  11. BSR
    July 20th, 2015 @ 10:23 am

    Exactly. Though I’ll admit I’m not in the workplace right now. I was laid off awhile back and decided to stay home with the kids. (I wanted to raise them myself rather than pawning them off to a daycare). At this point my big concern is rebuilding my resume so that I can go back to work eventually.

    Of course you don’t see a lot about feminists making a big stink for SAHMs who want to re-enter the workforce. It’s all about the childless career women who are already on the top of the tree. I’m not too worried about it though. I have skills and can get temp work, even if it means doing some grunt work for my sister who is an independent software contractor.

    BUT that’s my beef with feminism, rather than advocating for things that women and only women have to contend with, they’re butting their noses into the coed workplace. How many men have to fret over how to cope with a 10+ year gap in their resumes? Maybe a stay-at-home dad would have to deal with it, but I think they’re still rarer than SAHMs. And women who have to go straight back to work after having a baby are kind of denied the option to nurse their babies. In my opinion, these are issues feminists should address rather than OMG we need more female STEM CEOs!

  12. RS
    July 20th, 2015 @ 10:31 am

    Nowhere is the plight of SAHMs returning to the workplace worse than in higher education. Women who chose to rear their children doom their careers in academe. The powers that be view SAHM academics as Quislings to the Feminist cause, regardless of the amount research done, conference presentations made and/or articles published. And the oppressors in these circumstances are mostly other women.

  13. GUEST
    July 20th, 2015 @ 11:21 am

    Whoever owns the rights to Marx’s work should sue the entire Feminist movement for plagiarism. It’s so obvious that all of these theories are almost literally Marxism, in which these women have replaced the words “haves” with “men,” “have nots” with “women,” and “capitalism” with “patriarchy.” There isn’t a new idea in any Leftists’ head. Everything old is new again.

  14. Quartermaster
    July 20th, 2015 @ 11:56 am

    I read an article by a guy who addressed a room full of Software Engineers. he asked for a show of hands of those who wrote documentation. After the show of hands he then said, “you are the arm pit of the industry.” C.a. ’81, documentation was, generally, a sorry thing to behold. If you were unwilling to experiment, you wouldn’t get far in using software.

  15. Matt_SE
    July 20th, 2015 @ 12:59 pm

    They also seem to be overrepresented as mass shooters; at least if they’re Muslim.
    I can’t be the only one to notice that, can I?

  16. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 2:34 pm

    This is what happens when you diss our blog comments.

  17. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 20th, 2015 @ 4:15 pm

    You must have loved Office Space with the TPS Reports. http://i.imgur.com/HPjUinx.gif

  18. JeffS
    July 20th, 2015 @ 7:29 pm

    And I’ve also noticed that engineer commenters seem to be disproportionately represented on this blog.

    I’d like to think that’s because engineers tend to be clear and concise thinkers. But I work in a building full of engineering graduates, and I know how wrong that is.

  19. JeffS
    July 20th, 2015 @ 7:32 pm

    HAW! Like I said above, I work in a building full of engineers, and I stand out when it comes to a lack of social skills.

    Not only can I avoid bullshit meetings (and have for years), I’ve actually not followed bullshit processes. Even the most cranky senior manager approaches me with care.

    I’m trying to figure how to pass this on to the next generation….

  20. JeffS
    July 20th, 2015 @ 7:34 pm

    Very true, all around. Even I don’t about the sex of someone who freakin’ does their job.

  21. BSR
    July 20th, 2015 @ 7:40 pm

    If you saw the series Halt and Catch Fire (it’s on Netflix) It’s a series on the first PC clones. The chick that is in charge of writing the system bios essentially fires all the programmers who go to the trouble of commenting their code.

    It’s a cultural mindset in software that if you do write, if you do communicate then somehow that makes you inferior at writing code. I don’t hold to that notion. I can write machine code, but I also like to think that someone could come along behind me and have some road-markers so they don’t bungle it all up.

    More troubling is your loony ‘experimenter’ who writes incredibly bad ‘can of worms’ code that is horrifically inefficient. It takes a measure of maturity to understand that software development is a team effort. You can go comment-free but then you have to pick variable names that are very clear. None of the foolish foo+bar = foobar.

    Software Developers suffer from a certain kind of nerd ego that will work fine if they’re only ever working on their own code, but if you’ve ever had to clean up someone else’s mess you start to appreciate the brilliance of good documentation. Now-a-days in the post tech-boom universe you can’t guarantee you’ll always be working on the same chunk of code and corporations aren’t always wise to the fact that replacing their software team with another one in India isn’t necessarily going to play well into the reliability or longevity of their product.

  22. Daniel Freeman
    July 20th, 2015 @ 7:49 pm

    Sadly, under the MPAI theory (most people are idiots), STEM people can be disproportionately rational without being mostly rational.

  23. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 9:53 pm

    It’s easy. You teach the next generation to be really, really, really good in their chosen field. I am, so I can be a diva. (Don’t know what the male equivalent for that is…I want to say devo, but I’m probably the only one who would get it.)

    As a diva, I don’t have to document things, I don’t have to follow processes, and I don’t have to go to meetings when I don’t want to. I don’t SAY that I’m not going to do those things, I just don’t do them. And nobody has the nerve to make me, because I’m the only one who knows certain stuff, and if I bolt, it will cause trouble for everyone left.

    Of course, the very reason that I know things that nobody else knows is because I don’t document stuff. And if, by some random miracle, I’m somehow forced to provide documentation, I leave out the key, crucial elements, and fill in with meaningless technical buzzwords and random gibbering. Then, on the document history page, I put the name of some contractor project manager that I know won’t be around by the time anybody notices that the documentation sucks.

    And sometimes I’ll go to meetings I’m not invited to if I think that some treacherous asshole might be planning to throw me under a bus or stab me in the back. Or sometimes I’m looking for meetings to go to because I don’t feel like working and just want to d1ck off. My reputation preceeds me, so very occasionnally, someone will meekly ask if I was invited to the meeting I crashed. And I answer, in a tone literally dripping sarcasm, “No, I just attend random meetings for the hell of it just cause I’m in the mood. Jackass.” Questioning over at that point.

    My gosh, I LOVE being me!! LOL!!

  24. M. Thompson
    July 20th, 2015 @ 10:11 pm

    Only if you whip it. 😉

  25. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 10:12 pm

    HAHA! Once I worked for a company that wanted to implement some new, vile processes that I had no intention of ever following. I was forced into a “working group” for these new processes, in which my sole contribution was suggesting a name.

    Which was “Technical Procedural Strategy”, comprising a set of documents and, you guessed it, reports.

    Before anybody realized I’d scammed them, they already paid a ton to have blank forms printed, and posters and other materials printed to call attention to the new stupid thing we had to do.

    When I was angrily confronted by the team for my name suggestion, I said, “Seemed appropriate to me.” Or “You could’ve rejected it, so shut up.”

    They should’ve known better, because at this same company, they need a name for a new emergency response team, so I suggested we call it the “Fast Action Response Team”. Everybody thought this was great until they implemented it in job titles in HR and had logos printed on polos.

    I figure if people never learn, they are asking for victimization.

  26. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 10:16 pm

    HAHAHAHA! You’re on a roll today!

  27. DeadMessenger
    July 20th, 2015 @ 10:29 pm

    Hey, you got it! I love Devo. I have a stage-used Bob1 guitar pick that he gave me for my birthday (because I asked for it, not because I know Bob1 in any way, but I know a guy who does), and I actually use that when I play sometimes. 😀

    Knowing people who know people is really helpful. I also got a way-awesome Line6 amp from a guy who knew a guy who knew another guy who knew a Jefferson Starship guitarist who didn’t want it anymore.

    Of course, I developed a lot of these relationships when I had access to really good dope, but since I became a saved Christian back in 2001, I don’t smoke dope anymore. So instead, now I know guys who know other guys who can help me with Greek verb conjugation. 😀

  28. Herbertporter
    July 21st, 2015 @ 2:48 am

    Feel Free Freedom gheothermccai ……… Keep Reading

  29. DukeLax
    July 21st, 2015 @ 8:23 am

    I believe these perversions and manufactured statistics Alliances between US gender-feminists and law enforcement are more than just a stain on law enforcement, these perverse “Alliances” may actually be illegal.

  30. Christophercoaxum
    July 23rd, 2015 @ 8:23 am

    On Our Community h-eothermcca-i Compare You to Others

  31. Michaelburling
    July 24th, 2015 @ 4:20 am

    It’s All About You t-h-e-o < Make It Easy

  32. News of the Week (July 26th, 2015) | The Political Hat
    July 26th, 2015 @ 6:01 pm

    […] Feminism: Gender Competition and the War Against Human Nature Freedom, prosperity and happiness require people to develop and encourage an attitude that can be described in five words: Voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit […]