“[T]he curse of having been born a heterosexual male . . . meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.”
— Scott Aaronson, Dec. 14, 2014
The Internet erupted in controversy last year over “Comment 171,” in which MIT Professor Scott Aaronson responded to a discussion of “sexual harassment” by describing the sexual fears he experienced as a nerdy Ivy League student in the late 1990s. Professor Aaronson’s specialty is computer science, but in describing how he was driven to suicidal despair by the terroristic campus crusade against “harassment,” he performed award-worthy work as a psychologist or sociologist, exposing to the world what goes on inside the mind of a socially awkward heterosexual male when confronted by feminism’s pre-emptive accusations of wrongdoing. Because he is a male, and because he is attracted to females, such a student is made to feel as if his interest in the opposite sex is a shameful secret that he must be careful never to reveal.
If by any word or gesture he signifies his attraction to a female — or if he even makes a joke that discloses his heterosexuality in a general way — the male student could be accused of “harassment.” When your parents are spending big bucks to send you to an elite school like Cornell University (annual tuition $49,116), the possibility that you could be accused of “harassment” must be a frightening thing, and the risk of a “sexual assault” accusation is the Nightmare Scenario From Hell.
Feminist rhetoric defines both “harassment” and “sexual assault” in terms of experiences that the female deems “unwelcome” or “unwanted.” If a college boy thinks a girl is cute and starts talking to her with the hope that she might reciprocate his interest, his conversation could be considered “harassment” if she dislikes him. Read enough feminist blogs, and you see countless variations of this theme, The Clueless Unattractive Male Who Won’t Take a Hint. His behavior is offensive — “creepy” or “stalkerish” — because (a) he likes her, (b) she doesn’t like him, yet (c) he dares to speak to her without permission, and (d) he doesn’t seem to notice her signals of disinterest. We can easily imagine how a sensitive and intelligent young man like Scott Aaronson circa 1997, being lectured about harassment and rape in a freshman orientation session, must have been stricken with fear upon learning how loathsome his heterosexual orientation made him in the eyes of his fellow students.
How dare this disgusting nerd find women sexually attractive?
“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”
— Radical Wind, August 2013
In describing feminism’s characteristic anti-male/anti-heterosexual paranoia as “Fear and Loathing of the Penis,” I do not mean merely to make a hyperbolic joke, but rather to call attention to the strange and savage hostility toward normal male behavior that is the fundamental basis of feminist theory. My original guide to this was Professor Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Until I read Professor Patai’s book, I had no idea how far feminists had gone in their demonization of heterosexuality, especially in the context of “harassment” charges in academia. During my own youth, we understood “sexual harassment” in the sense of the quid pro quo, in which a male authority figure — an employer, a supervisor, or a teacher — expected females to provide him with sex in exchange for favorable treatment. Everyone understood this kind of harassment to be a wrongful abuse of power. The professor was hired to teach English, not to seduce his students, and the manager was hired to run a restaurant, not to have sex with waitresses. While sex between co-workers might be entirely consensual, everyone understood the problems that could arise in a situation where a female employee was having sex with her male supervisor. Because that kind of quid pro quo harassment was widely understood to be wrong, most people didn’t pay much attention when the definition of “harassment” was expanded to include behaviors that were nothing like the (clearly wrongful) quid pro quo. The feminist legal theorists who pushed this expanded definition of “harassment” — now construed as meaning damned near anything a man did that any woman decided was “unwelcome” or “unwanted” and “offensive” or “sexist” — created a workplace environment where everyday interactions between male and female employees could become the basis of a federal discrimination lawsuit unless males were always strictly and formally professional in their behavior. An easygoing, informal workplace atmosphere — men joking around with their female colleagues in the way they would joke with their male colleagues — was a recipe for disaster, if any woman ever got her feelings hurt, or believed that she was in any way discriminated against in her employment.
A series of high-profile cases in the 1990s — the Clarence Thomas hearings, the “Tailhook” scandal and the Bill Clinton impeachment imbroglio — brought widespread attention to the issue of sexual harassment, so that everyone began to interpret workplace interaction between men and women in a new way. As more and more women succumbed to the feminist sexual paranoia that Professor Patai dubbed Heterophobia, suddenly “harassment” was everywhere, and it was amid this climate of pervasive sexual fear that Scott Aaronson attended Cornell University in the 1990s:
Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years — basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s — feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them — even if I couldn’t understand how.
You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.
You should read the whole thing, if you didn’t read Comment 171 when it went viral last year. Professor Aaronson’s very personal account of his experiences was quite risky. As he said, he was “giving up a privacy that I won’t regain for as long as I live, opening myself to ridicule” and, predictably, feminists began dogpiling him with mockery. I have described how feminism enables deliberate cruelty, rationalizing the sadistic impulses of women who are afflicted with a hateful desire to inflict punitive revenge on males, and the way Professor Aaronson was mocked by feminists (including the execrable Laurie Penny and the hideous Miriam Mogilevsky) was certainly proof enough of that.
Feminists are very bad people — dishonest, selfish and cruel — and only a fool would ever trust them. Every word they speak or write is a deception, because they will never admit the vile hatred that motivates their anti-male politics. In Comment 171, Professor Aaronson made a statement I heartily endorse:
I’ve read at least a dozen feminist books, of which my favorite was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (I like howls of anguish much more than bureaucratic boilerplate, so in some sense, the more radical the feminist, the better I can relate).
Indeed, the shrieking lesbian rage of Andrea Dworkin is vastly preferable to the Foucauldian academese of Judith Butler, as far as getting to the actual point of feminist theory. Feminists do not like men, feminists do not like sex, and feminists especially do not like sex with men. Why? Because men enjoy having sex with women, and anything that men enjoy is wrong, because they are men. Feminism is a movement dedicated to depriving men of pleasure. Anything that brings a smile to a man’s face must be oppressive to women. This spiteful campaign to eradicate every potential source of male happiness is what has inspired the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria. Nowhere does feminist power more nearly approach totalitarianism than at American colleges and universities, where women are 57% of the students, and every male on campus knows he could be expelled if any female classmate ever accuses him of wrongdoing.
If you believe what feminists say (in other words, if you are a goddamned helpless fool), then you must believe that the only reason any boy goes to college is because he wants to rape the girls who go to college. Every male student on campus is a suspected rapist, and every female student on campus is his would-be victim. The absence of actual evidence to prove this feminist claim (“The Campus Rape Shortage”) is explained away by the assertion that female students don’t report being raped because they are afraid no one will believe them. (Circular logic is circular; the conclusion and the premise of a feminist argument are always the same thing, except when they are completely contradictory, but logic is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy.) Statistics showing that the rate of sexual assault has declined, and that female college students are less likely to be raped than non-college women of the same age, raise the question of why feminists have devoted so much effort to portraying the 21st-century campus as a Rape Factory, an assembly line staffed by violent misogynists engaged in the production of sexual victims.
Once we understand that (a) the vast majority of male college students are not rapists, and (b) the vast majority of rapists and rape victims are not college students, we realize feminist discourse about “rape culture” represents an effort to demonize male college students as “privileged.” The eagerness with which feminists leapt onto the 2006 Duke lacrosse team rape hoax and the 2014 University of Virginia rape hoax betrays the real motive behind this crusade. In both of those cases, the falsely accused males were white and belonged to campus organizations where membership conferred high status. To be a varsity lacrosse player at Duke (annual tuition $49,341) is to occupy a very lofty position in the hierarchies of “male privilege” that are targets of feminist criticism. Likewise, the members of Phi Kappa Psi at the University of Virginia are quite likely beneficiaries of the kind of upper-middle-class privilege that feminists condemn as the essence of oppression.
The higher a man’s socioeconomic status, the greater his exercise of male power, according to feminist theory, so that any success a man achieves (or any benefit he receives from his parents’ success) condemns him as an oppressor. If his parents worked hard to provide him with advantages, and if he made the most of his opportunities to excel in school, then the very fact that he is attending a prestigious university marks the male student as a living symbol of social injustice. His mere existence is oppressive to women, and if he adds to this indictment by being (a) white and (b) heterosexual, then anything that feminists can do to harm him is justified in the name of “equality.” The male student branded a rapist and expelled from college now is one less “privileged” male competing with women for high-status jobs in the future. The false accuser who destroys a young man’s educational opportunities today deprives him of career opportunities tomorrow. If campus activists can destroy enough young men this way, eventually the systematic process of destruction will bring about the Progressive Utopia of Gender Equality that feminists have been promising women for more than 40 years.
When we begin examining the “rape culture” discourse in detail, we are struck by how little it takes for a male student to be branded a perpetrator on the 21st-century campus. The “regret equals rape” case at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University and the John Doe lawsuit against Brown University are but two of the data points in an emerging pattern. If we can believe what the male plaintiffs allege in complaints like these, it is obvious that nothing like an actual rape was involved in the cases that resulted in their being punished in campus “Title IX” proceedings where they were deliberately deprived of due-process rights that would be accorded to any common criminal in a court of law.
We may contrast this obsession with accusing “privileged” male college students of rape with the way feminists habitually ignore news of violence against women committed by common criminals:
- MIDLAND, Texas, Oct. 22: Aurelio Luna Sr., 55, was senteced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a jury found him guilty of continuous sexual assault of a child. Luna committed multiple acts of sexual assault against a female family member over a period of at least two years. The girl’s mother contacted the Midland Police Department after she found text messages regarding the abuse.
- OMAHA, Neb., Oct. 23: Reginald Briggs, 31, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Teresa Longo. Police say Briggs is a pimp and that Longo was one of his prostitutes. Longo’s body was fund Oct. 2. An autopsy showed she was killed by a single gunshot wound to the back of her head. Briggs reportedly bragged about killing her, and another one of his prostitutes told police she went with Briggs to dispose of the shotgun he used to murder Longo on Sept. 17.
- MILWAUKEE, Wisc., Oct. 27: Jose Ferreira Jr., 50, was charged with the murder of a seventh-grader more than 30 years ago. Carrie Ann Jopek disappeared in March 1982. According to prosecutors, Ferreira and Jopek were at a party at a house when he pushed her down the steps into the basement. The fall broke her neck, killing her. Ferreira, who reportedly believed the girl was only unconscious, had sex with her corpse. He then buried Jopek’s body under a neighbor’s porch, according to prosecutors. When he recently told his wife about the 1982 murder, she turned him in to police.
- NEW BRITAIN, Conn., Oct. 26: Luis Velez, 43, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to murdering his wife, Johana Gallego, 33. She and Velez had been married less than a year when he strangled her to death. He had previously been convicted of another killing in Puerto Rico.
- ST. LOUIS, Mo., Oct. 23: Keith L. Ivy, 41, is charged with kidnapping after police say he and an accomplice abducted Ivy’s ex-girlfriend from her workplace. Ivy, who had been recently released from prison in Georgia and was also on probation for a separate drug conviction, allegedly told the ex-girlfriend they were “going to die tonight.” She managed to escape.
- SUFFOLK COUNTY, N.Y., Oct. 26: Justin Suarez, 27, was arrested on 34 charges, after police say he raped his ex-girlfriend twice, stalked her, threatened her with a sledgehammer and shot a dog to death in front of her. “He told her that if she told anyone, he would kill her, too,” the district attorney said.
- WACO, Texas, Oct. 22: Emmanuel Emil Bailey of Ft. Smith, Ark., faces trial on federal charges connected to an interstate child sex trafficking ring. Bailey is charged with transporting persons for prostitution and other violations of the Mann Act. Bailey was among more than 40 suspects arrested during an Internet prostitution sting orchestrated by the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office.
You will never find Jaclyn Friedman or Jessica Valenti or Amanda Marcotte discussing cases like that, because none of the men accused in those cases are “privileged” white male college students. The reason feminists ignore crimes committed by perps like Emmanuel Bailey, Aurelio Luna, Keith Ivy, and Justin Suarez is very similar to the reason that feminists never call attention to any crime committed by a woman or a gay man. The hierarchies of privilege determine who is an oppressor deserving condemnation and who is a victim deserving sympathy. A black pimp who murders a prostitute, a Hispanic pedophile who rapes a teenager, female teachers having sex with their students — none of these crimes are of interest to a feminist, because publicizing such crimes does not help promote the “social justice” worldview in which the “privileged” white heterosexual male is the epitome of evil.
If you have a son attending college, or if you have a teenage son who is about to finish high school, he must be warned. Every feminist seeks to destroy him, and therefore every woman he encounters on a college campus is his enemy. No female he meets can be trusted, because all college women are being actively encouraged to accuse male students of rape. Anything your son says to a woman on campus can be interpreted as “harassment,” and any active expression of heterosexual interest puts your son at risk of an accusation of “sexual assault.” The only way a male student can safely attend college in the 21st century is to avoid any contact with female students on campus.
Warn your sons, America. It would be best, if possible, for your son to consider a field of employment that does not require a college education. Let him become a truck driver or a carpenter, rather than subjecting him to the risk of being falsely accused of rape by college feminists.
Wake up, America! It’s 2015! The only reason any girl goes to college nowadays is to seize her opportunity for advancing the feminist cause of “gender equality” by accusing a boy of rape.
Feminism is a movement that seeks to eliminate “male privilege” by preventing men from having any opportunity for success. Because feminists now exercise unlimited authority at American colleges and universities, a young man seeking success in life should contemplate how best to pursue a career path that permits him to avoid attending college, where his presence on campus is considered offensive by the monstrous man-hating fanatics who call themselves feminists.
Academia is now so tightly controlled by radical ideologues that it would be better for your child to have no education at all, rather than to be corrupted by 21st-century “higher education.” Millions of young minds are being permanently warped by the godless perverts who have seized power on campus and are using that power to destroy our civilization.
Dann them all. Damn them all to Hell.
(Incidentally, Scott Aaronson said his purpose in writing Comment 171 was to ensure “no one will ever again be able to question the depth of my feminist ideals.” Some people just never learn . . .)
More good work, Mr. McCain. What else is this hate movement than a suicide cult which wants to drag everything with it? It disdains reproduction, the laws which protect it and the culture and demographic which created those laws. It is a death wish. Short of extinction, the only thing which awaits it would look like a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or walking across the Sahara with gum Arabic balanced on their heads, with the reward being sold into slavery. Keep killing our Constitution and don’t be surprised where you end up.
“You should read the whole thing, if you didn’t read Comment 171 when it went viral last year.”
No kidding. The guy is so smart but he’s hopelessly trapped in his intellectual bubble with his “triumph of abstract reason over experience.” He apparently needs something akin to electroconvulsive therapy. His triumph of reason is more like a delusion. I suppose he’s still afraid to acknowledge that the malignant feminist ideology of his leftist shtetl ruined the first few decades of his life.
Feminists are self-loathing masochists just as surely as they are sadistic misanthropes. So perhaps it should be no surprise that they’re not motivated to preserve and perpetuate the comforts of Western civilization.
So now the repulsion to the sexuality of a geek has become a philosophy of social justice and actionable in campus tribunals.
In my day, you just laughed at the geek and walked away. Of course, you did this at your peril, because these geeks ended up making a ton of money in the 90s. 🙂
But nobody dragged a pock-marked weakling through a freaking star chamber because he made a clumsy pass. We are truly through the looking glass. I can’t help thinking that what feminists really want is to outlaw straight male sexuality altogether.
The book “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice” recently came out on Kindle, so I finally had to read it.
We can see evidentially therein where pro-baby-murderers have no issue whatsoever murdering babies to advance the “narrative”, but also have no issue whatsoever with the mother dying also in order to advance the cause.
#NoLivesMatter
That is the point of view of progressives. Their narrative and their political position is all that matters.
As for stalkers, wouldn’t it be accurate to say that there are as many females as there are males? The link below seems to sum that up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FvH0WAYNI
This stupid sexual harassment thing has gone too far. I wrote before about my son in kindergarten being accused by his imbecile teacher of “sexually” harassing a little girl named “Juliet” by quoting Shakespeare to her. Which might’ve ended badly except for me and Juliet’s mom ganging up against the school administration. Meanwhile, Shaun is crying about them “being mean to Juliet” and Juliet is sobbing about them “being mean to Shaun”. And these were 5-year-olds back in 1992.
Contrasted to 1964, when I was 5, and a boy gave me a rhinestone “engagement” ring (see ring in picture, modeled by my cat). No worries there, but I did learn that the boy went on to become a wealthy surgeon. I think I might see him in civil court for breach of contract. In fact, an interesting point would be that I still have this ring 51 years later. ‘Cause, you know, it’s all cute and stuff.
And speaking of sexual harassment. I was working for a government agency with tens of thousands of employees in one location, when they decided to get work groups into the auditorium one after another, to show some idiot video and give some discourse about the “dangers” of sexual harassment.
I was on vacation when my work group’s time came, so I missed it. But, by golly, I had to make it up! And they did that by assigning me another viewing. Which happened to be a group of blue-collar male workers.
So the stupid HR woman gets up and gives some kind of blah-blah-blah yakking, then they show this video. In it, there’s an extremely beautiful hottie who is supposedly the “manager”. And she’s sexually harassing this guy, who is backing off with “uh…uh…uh…this isn’t right” and other various lame excuses, when we all know that in the real world, these two would be rutting like pigs.
So the entire auditorium of guys starts laughing outrageously, and there must’ve been 2000 of them in there. You couldn’t hear a single other word because of the chaos. Of course, I was laughing, too, because the example was so damn improbable.
So the HR woman comes back onstage and has them stop the video because of everyone laughing – and it WAS hilariously funny – and scolded the group because of the response, and then everyone left.
Eeyup. Gotta love asinine HR initiatives.
I matriculated at the University of Kentucky in 1971, when persons of minority sexual orientation — you like that formulation? — kept their minority sexual orientation private, where men were simply expected to like women, and the women’s greatest concern was that they were so terribly non-competitive with other women that they’d never find a decent male who would be attracted to them. The sexual revolution hadn’t proceeded so far that women weren’t concerned with not being seen as sluts, so they were at least somewhat coy about things to start.
Fortunately, I found a really cute girl — a lot better looking than I thought I’d ever “land” — and we stayed together, sharing a domicile, for 6½ years. That made college easy, not having to spend my free time out looking for girls. It also meant that I wasn’t spending my meager earnings on alcohol, and I was never interested in recreational pharmaceuticals.
At any rate, I have to admit: I simply do not understand the travails of male college students today. I always knew if a woman was interested in me or not, right away, because it’s easy: women supposedly decide within the first few seconds if they are interested, and the signals are always very clear, unless a man is just too stupid to read them.
That would be “breach of promise.”
Reminds me of the cheer at MIT when the opposition scores in Football:
“That’s alright
That’s OK
You’re gonna work for us someday!”
“(Incidentally, Scott Aaronson said his purpose in writing Comment 171 was to ensure “no one will ever again be able to question the depth of my feminist ideals.” Some people just never learn . . .)”
As Vox Day says: SJWs always double down.
I think it’s bad advice to tell young men to avoid college completely. Better to rear them correctly so that they simply avoid the weirdness inherent in the harmonic convergence of the “Hook-up” culture with the new “Feminist Prudery.” Additionally, there are colleges and universities where this madness has yet to spread. It takes some research to find them, but they’re out there. Just stay away from flagship state universities and snooty liberal arts colleges where this stuff is not as prevalent.
It’s really not that difficult, and I speak as a business owner: Treat everyone with respect. Be kind to your coworkers. Focus on perfecting the product and not assessing blame. Don’t spend your time actively seeking out failure or mistakes in others, but look for reasons to bestow compliments.
It’s about having good manners, a trait which, alas, seems to be conspicuous by its absence these days. The fact that modern business believes that high priced consultants are necessary for this speaks ill of modern America. Ninety percent of business problems would be resolved if we returned to methods of parenting employed two or three generations ago.
The question must be: how to make higher education safe for males. Part of the dynamic of this issue is that when the federal government can create near-infinite amounts of money out of thin air, then they can loan college students nearly unlimited amounts of money for tuition. This allows colleges to charge as much as they want and thus have money to fund liberal folly and madness like Women’s Study programs.
Clearly the current atmosphere is more hostile to males than it had previously been hostile to females. Maybe there is some legal leverage that could be employed there. Turnabout is fair play. Liberals will recoil in horror should somebody turn their own laws and regulations against them.
“Ninety percent of business problems would be resolved if …”
Well, we also need to openly acknowledge that most women aren’t happy unless they’re bitching about something. ERGO, when you have a lot of female employees and they’re “unhappy”, most of the time there is nothing you can do to “fix the problem”, because there is no problem; and, in fact, your attempts to “fix the problem” are more likely to be the cause of a real problem.
I still don’t think the Feminazis get the irony of the fact that according to the graph provided in the story, forcible rape dropped grossly after Bill Clinton was put under 24/7 Secret Service protection.
I agree, there is difference it seems between men and women in that women seem to focus on the problem while men look for a solution. (I think the reason for this is that men do not like to see women unhappy. Thus, they seek the means to end the unhappiness.)
I’ve experienced that, and my response is to no get sucked in. Remain calm and redirect the conversation toward the solution while avoiding anything which smacks of assessing blame or fault. Culpability is normally obvious. There’s no need for me to pile on. Fix the problem and rely on the perpetrator to learn from a mistake.
Of course, there are those who never learn, and so, letting people go is sometimes necessary. However, I’ve found most people are expecting to be berated for a mistake. When they’re not, they’re grateful and try even harder to get things right in the future.
Whether I’m right or wrong is open to debate, I suppose, but in almost thirty years, I’ve had remarkably little employee turnover in my business.
And of course one must love the fact that insane feminism is pulling itself apart over insane men, as witness the witch hunt about Germaine Greer and transgender. In other words, men still rule, but only the insane ones. Of course this all was coming when Judith Butler’s bible of queer feminism – Gender Trouble (1990) – accidentally stated transgender was false before it became an issue. When it did, Butler changed her tune immediately. However, all that did was reveal the self-contradiction and lies implicit in queer theory in the first place. The irony is Greer has made a career on the group defamation of men and doesn’t like it when she’s attacked as an actual individual, a thing she of course doesn’t understand any more than neo-Nazis or the KKK does.
A thousand years ago this was the anti-science known as “witchcraft.” Butler’s “gender performativity” works by linguistic repetition; in other words, an incantation. One repeats “I am woman, I am woman, I am woman” and then dons the cabalistic garb: a dress, a stuffed bra, a wig. Voila! A woman. Sheer witchcraft. Are we really surprised gender feminism dresses up mystical incantations as “science”? Are we surprised a nuthatch like Butler didn’t understand the implications or contradictions in her madness? Why wouldn’t mystic bullshit be confusing; this shit doesn’t exist.
I’m getting a sad kind of ‘battered housewife’ vibe off him. ‘I know he beats me, but he still loves me!’.
Maybe cross reference against the rise of private firearm ownership? A lady with a gun is a lot better at resisting rape than a lady without, and a dead rapist is a good reason to drink to the lady’s health.
I noted to Jason Lee above that it has a kind of sad, ‘battered housewife’ vibe to it. He can’t comprehend that the wisest thing he could do is LEAVE feminism, poor fellow.
Mr. McCain,
My one objection to this article is how you claim that this behavior represents all feminists.
I won’t deny that these examples are widespread. I won’t deny that they are the loudest. I won’t deny that they are noxious and dangerous to American society and Western Civilization, I won’t even deny that in our attempts to “compromise” and “make everyone happy,” we invited this disaster.
I know some feminists who are just as repelled by these actions as you are. They want equality, not privilege.
Granted, their dissenting voices often get drowned out by this drek and it’s enabling echo chambers. But I think we owe it to the not-so-radical feminists and ourselves to find and celebrate them. Let competition work, and let it work without government interference.
Remember the articles speculating about the risk to feminism the (inevitable) prospect of sexbots pose? http://www.constantinoplenotistanbul.com/2015/09/feminists-in-danger-of-being-replaced-by-fembots/
Well, it’s this kind of thinking that is going to cause that to happen. There is absolutely no incentive anymore for men to put up with this kind of crap. And it’s why we aren’t marrying. Marriage, in post-modern America is the dumbest thing a man can do.
And they need us more than we need them. A man can survive his 30’s without a woman and stay sane. Women cannot survive their 30’s without a man and not go insane!
Libertarians will tell you it’s not gun control, it’s victim disarmament.
Yeah, whatever. At this point, I think he needs to provide me with a nicer ring, too. One commensurate with his post-kindergarten revenue. 😀
I really should look that guy up and say, “I’ve been waiting for 51 years for you, and this is the treatment I get? [sob]”
“The question must be: how to make higher education safe for males.”
No, the question is how to make clear COLLEGE IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY.
It is possible to have a worthwhile life without ever attending college. Too many people have bought into the idea that if a kid is smart, the kid must go to college. Why? Because college (we are led to believe) is the key to success in life. This kind of thinking leads to a situation where having a college diploma is viewed as obtaining a Smartness Certificate, and it is believed that anyone who does not have a college diploma is simply too stupid to get one.
OK, I’ve got a college diploma. Does this automatically prove I’m smarter than everyone who doesn’t have a diploma? Of course not. Let me let you in on a secret: Genuinely smart people don’t need a diploma to succeed in life. There are many fields of endeavor where a college education is unnecessary and, in such fields, the only thing you accomplish by going to college is to delay by four years your advancement in the workplace (and perhaps to do this while accumulating student-loan debt).
We must encourage young people to avoid college unless they intend to pursue a career in which a degree is absolutely necessary. If that is the case, then young people should be encouraged to gain their degree at the lowest possible cost. Do not — do NOT — let your kid be persuaded to take out student loans to become a residential student at a faraway school if, at all possible, they can attend a nearby school as a commuter and graduate debt-free.
The lure of “prestige” — and the recruiting-brochure image of autumn leaves shining in the afternoon sun as sweater-clad students stroll past ivy-covered gothic buildings — is a marketing illusion that private colleges use to dazzle prospective students and their parents. Unless your Daddy’s so rich that money is no object, however, a kid would always be better off attending the nearest community college as a commuter student for two years, living at home and working part-time to pay his way through.
Let the rich kids have the “elite” schools to themselves. Do not ruin your child’s life by pushing them toward one of those expensive educational boondoggles just because he is “smart” and you think he “deserves” a degree from an “elite” school. That’s bullshit. Don’t buy the snobbery the Ivy League is selling and, whatever you do, don’t let your kids anywhere near one of those small, pricey second- or third-tier liberal arts schools — a very bad bargain.
Marriage, in post-modern America is the dumbest thing a man can do.
But that is surrender to the new “culture.” I concede the institutions of Marriage & The Traditional Family are on the ropes in the current climate. For that reason, it is imperative that parents teach their sons the importance of being husbands and fathers. It is imperative that parents teach their sons to find women who appreciate what Marriage and Family have to offer. No question it is now more difficult. But if our society has any hope of redemption, it will be in rearing decent sons who can help stem the tide. The alternative is the Abyss.
Actually, we can adopt the current meme of “Do college like they do in Europe! It’s FREE!!!!! Yay!!!!!”
Frankly, I’d be happy to do that, because if we did, only about 20 percent of the kids in college now would still be there. In Germany, one is placed on a college track at age 10, based on test scores. (It varies by German state.) The academic requirements are rigorous. Two foreign languages, Calculus, etc. merely to get a university qualified high school diploma.
Further, once one is in college or university, there are no junk “[Fill-in-the-blank] ‘Studies'” degrees to be had. It’s all “meat and potatoes” and if you can’t cut it, you’re gone. And the state determines the permissible majors based upon needs, at least in education.
I laugh when I hear Progressives/Socialists praise the European system. They have no idea for what they’re advocating. The NEA would destroy them if they tried to implement a similar system here.
The largest selling novel genre is still romance where men are still portrayed as having masculine desires and where having a partner and getting married is still the desire of every woman, even if she tries to tell herself differently.
As for one of the posters up there… you’re a bitch if you say no because *feminism* has promoted the hook-up culture, not men… YOU… have promoted the hook-up culture where sex is meaningless to women and there isn’t any particular reason TO say no so why are you? Even Lena D’s stupid “I was raped on campus” story was about how SHE felt like she was supposed to want to have sex with anyone and everyone so she felt reluctant to say no. The bad old “patriarchy” demanded that you remain pure, told all the guys “no”, and when you said “no” you weren’t a bitch, you were asserting your status as someone who had to be won and cherished and who men had to prove themselves worthy of.
I don’t disagree except for this… those reasonable feminists? How are any of their ideas different from mine? Feminism as a movement requires something to move *against* and what is there anymore? If your opinions are the same as mine… women are equal and how dare you treat me like a child you twit… and considering that women are more privileged than men in our culture by any number of different measures… what is taking on that label of “feminist” actually do for you other than give cover to the crazies?
Oddly enough, in their mind, there’s still plenty to move against. Starting with the RadFems.
Here’s one of the best examples.
http://www.ifeminists.com
Just so you know, Wendy McElroy is also a small “l” libertarian.
Let the rich kids have the “elite” schools to themselves. Do not ruin your child’s life by pushing them toward one of those expensive educational boondoggles just because he is “smart” and you think he “deserves” a degree from an “elite” school.
Case in point, this recent Prager video points out just how degraded the English Literature curriculum has become:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Sxttk5REkM
Ever wonder why Dilbert cartons are so popular?
Because there are so many idiot managers in business these days and the deliberate intellectual befuddlement of “higher education” is why they’re idiots.
Heh, we pulled that out at my alma mater when we were playing our arch-rival in basketball at their place; the game had gone to overtime but we’d gotten hopelessly behind in OT. Needless to say, they didn’t appreciate it much. 🙂
They’re right.
There are still a very small number of all-male colleges out there; my alma mater, Wabash College, is one.
It is self evident that you are a mindless (or otherwise a) supporter of the cisheteronormative patriarchy and must be sent for a proper re-education.
True Christianity is a subversive subculture now. There are women out there that buy into that, and those are the only women worthy of a commitment from a masculine male (AKA Man). Some men will have to go abroad to find those women, but they are out there. As my son has found, they are not easy to find.
Instead of LUGs (lesbians until graduation) they have QUGs? (I’ll let you figure out the acronym).
Just as the label “slut” can’t be redeemed, neither can the label “feminist.” There has been far too much damage done by the crazies.
More rape culture that isn’t talked about.
From over in England http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11959495/Woman-posed-as-a-single-father-to-con-Facebook-friend-into-sex.html?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook
http://www.people.com/people/mobile/article/0,,20914699,00.html
Mary Kay wanting everyone to know she isn’t a rapists and that this is wrong for her punishment to be labeled as a rapist.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11898495/Schoolboy-reveals-he-slept-with-teaching-assistant-more-than-50-times-and-that-she-claimed-she-was-pregnant.html
More rape culture from across the waves.
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2015/01/french-teacher-charged-with-molesting-students-at-bellevue-school/
Just like a certain Hollywod director. A teacher escapes punishment for being party to rape culture.
Where is the outrage about these folks? Oh wait wrong chromosomes. So it’s a hush hush on the downlow sort of thing.
You evil XY type, you noticed things are beyond the pale of notice. I firmly and energetically denounce you.
Dilbert became the Semi-Official strip at OHDOT while I was there. There was very good reason for it. “King” George Voinovich was Governor at the time.
Didn’t see much of that, but I wasn’t in a fraternity.
I can remember the stress in my German playmates when the tests were coming up to determine if they would go to a trade school or Gymnasium. Several of my playmates disappeared for a couple of months until after the testing cycle was over.
About 13 years ago I had an email exchange with an Economics Prof at the University of Trier. He said the quality of student was falling in spite of the rigor that I saw in German schooling.
An interesting aside is that a Master’s degree is booby prize there. No one enters University to obtain a Master’s, but a PhD. The Master’s is given if the work is not considered up to PhD levels and is something of a shame to bring home.
Since he’s a surgeon, chances are he’s divorced and he just might take you up on that. Of course, there is the little road block of your present partner in life.
It depends on the German State. I don’t have the facts in front of me, but the quality is generally going down in the states where the Left is prevalent. Bavaria is still holding the line. (My lovely wife is Bavarian.) Bavaria generally won’t accept graduates in Education from other states because of the standards.
I’d say the lack of appreciation is the point.
I lived in the Palatinate near Kaisersalutern 4 years and Near Stuttgart in Baden-Wurtemburg for 2 in the early and late 60s. I don’t count the 1st 3 since I was too young. I was politically aware in ’66 however and noticed a lot more. Germany was still exercising Teutonic rigor back then.
Trier is in the Palatinate, but since I haven’t lived there in years, I’m dependent on those who do for my info. I’ve heard Bayern is on the slope, but isn’t sliding quite as fast. It’s a more conservative state, and always has been. But it isn’t an island, alas.
There’s an inherent hypocrisy in saying “You’re a bad person because you were born this gender, which means you’re a sexist!” Same applies for racism. “Members of this ethnic group are all racists!” But, then again, if you took hypocrisy out of the vocabulary of the liberal, you wouldn’t have a liberal anymore.
You know, it *is* possible to keep it in your pants … even until you get married.