Category: Marriage

No Man Has Ever ‘Won’ an Argument With His Wife (Change My Mind)

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Now, I heard a cryin’ man
Is half a man, with no sense of pride.
But if I have to cry to keep you,
I don’t mind weepin’, if it’ll keep you by my side.

Ain’t too proud to beg, sweet darlin’.
Please don’t leave me girl (don’t you go).
Ain’t too proud to plead, baby, baby.
Please don’t leave me girl (don’t you go).

Everything you need to know about love, you can learn from old R&B tunes, unless you’d prefer to learn it from old country-and-western songs. What the Temptations were laying down in 1966 has stood the test of time because it’s the absolute truth — however proud a man might be, love will force him to beg for mercy, because that’s how women are.

Rollo Tomassi has expounded on women’s inherent solipsism — it is no use trying to convince a woman to view any conflict or dispute from an objective or logical perspective. If she feels she has been wronged or insulted, no amount of rational argument will convince her otherwise.

Of course, men can be self-centered, emotional and stubborn, but when it comes to male/female relationships, it is the woman’s solipsistic certainty of her own rectitude — her feelings are never wrong — that so often proves the great stumbling block to happiness. No matter how irrational her anger may be, you’re not going to help the situation by telling her she’s wrong to be angry. Indeed, the two words you should never tell her in such a moment are “calm down.” Oh, that will set her off!

If she feels hurt, it doesn’t matter how many reasons you offer for why she shouldn’t feel that way. Her feelings are beyond criticism.

These meditations on the dynamics of male/female relationships are not just random or coincidental. Some readers will be aware of the situation — one which has “gone viral,” as the kids say — that has prompted me to share whatever little wisdom on this subject I can claim to have obtained after 34 years of marriage. Tim Pool is among the several YouTubers who’ve weighed in on the controversy, involving a Ring surveillance video of an unfortunate domestic situation. Tim says it looks to him as if the guy in the video has been “set up,” and that may be true. Dragging people’s dirty laundry into the public eye — leaking a video to Yashar Ali, really? — is the kind of scorched-earth tactic that connotes an irreconcilable breach and, as Tim says, it’s probably wrong to judge somebody on the basis of one (out-of-context) video clip.

“If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps not as memorable as a Motown lyric, Chesterton’s observation is nevertheless true. Men and women are different; trying to reconcile and accommodate these differences is the great challenge of marriage.

The goal of marriage is cooperation. When husband and wife begin trying to prove each other wrong, then it becomes a competition, and marital happiness becomes impossible. If love means anything — if it denotes more than mere affectionate sentiment — then it must include the willingness to lose an argument, rather than to make your beloved unhappy by a bullheaded determination to prove yourself right.

God knows that stubbornness and arrogance are among my faults. As I’ve often remarked, there are two kinds of people in the world — people who agree with me, and people who are wrong. When I was younger, I actually enjoyed arguing for the sake of argument, until it became apparent to me that I was wasting my time trying to convince wrong people of their error. If someone respected my judgment, they wouldn’t be disagreeing with me, would they? So the argument itself is evidence that they consider me unworthy of respect, and why should I indulge them as they seek to prove that I don’t deserve respect?

Perhaps (suggesting this only as a hypothetical possibility) I have been wrong about something occasionally, but if so, I’ve long since forgotten those occasions, and thus my arrogant conviction of my 100% correctness, which certainty forbids me ever to argue with anyone who disagrees with me. Don’t bother arguing with an old man who, even when he was very young, believed he already knew everything, and through the years has not become less convinced of his know-it-all wisdom.

Self-awareness requires me to confront the fact that no one could ever admire me as much as I admire myself, and to realize that this arrogance can be annoying to others. So I’ve learned to be silent, to bite my tongue when I’m tempted to correct people for being wrong. They don’t want to listen to my advice, and are therefore free to go to hell in the time and manner of their own choosing. It’s not my responsibility.

You have to pursue a type of Zen acceptance about your inability to tell other people how to live their lives, or otherwise the sense of tragedy will overwhelm you. Like, why did the Patriots miss out on the opportunity to draft tight end Tucker Kraft? He went to the Packers, alas, and instead Bill Belichick picked a linebacker from Sacramento State — an error, I’m sure, but Bill Belichick didn’t ask for my advice on the NFL draft, and there’s no point arguing about it now. Selah.

So it is with the video of the domestic trouble involving the famous YouTube personality. There are liberals trying to claim that this incident proves that “tradcon” (traditional conservative) ideas about marriage are wrong, and I’m like, “What? Are you kidding me? Because I consider myself both traditional and conservative and sure as hell would never talk to my wife like that.” But people don’t ask my advice, see?

Y’all need to listen to some old Motown records and chill out. That may not sound like “tradcon” advice, but it sure is better than getting divorced over an argument about your dog. Change my mind.



 

 

Proving @RationalMale Right Again

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In Australia, there has been an uproar since Pauline Hanson of the right-populist One Nation party asserted that false accusations of domestic abuse are a problem in child-custody cases. This is relevant to proposals to reform Australia’s family court system, and Hanson’s remarks have prompted outrage from feminists and the Left generally, where the Women Never Lie Myth is sacrosanct. This mirrors the Left’s position on “rape culture,” where mere accusation is considered tantamount to proof.

The dispute over Australia’s family court system highlights something Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale on Twitter) has noted: “Child support is the defining feature of our modern family model, since it is the replacement for marriage whether or not a wedding has occurred.”

Because of the desanctification of marriage in our secular, sexualized, feminist-dominated culture, wedding vows now come with asterisks next to them, pointing to footnotes that in essence declare, “We don’t actually mean all this stuff about ‘death do us part’ and so forth.”

Every couple now goes to the wedding altar under the threatening shadow of potential divorce, and it is generally acknowledged that divorce is a punitive procedure by which aggrieved women are authorized to obtain a sadistic revenge against their ex-husbands. Because accusations of abuse give women greater leverage in divorce proceedings, we should not be surprised that (a) such accusations are often exaggerated or even sometimes fabricated from whole cloth, and (b) anyone who expresses skepticism toward these accusations will be accused of being anti-woman, an enabler of male violence against women.

Rollo’s comment about the Child Support Model of family structure, where it is more or less assumed on the wedding day that the couple will eventually divorce, highlights how radically our society’s basic institutions have been altered. Between the startling rise in illegitimate births and the frequency of divorce, a majority of children in most Western countries will not be raised in a traditional family. This in turn has produced what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in her book The Divorce Culture, has called the “Love Family” ideology, a mentality in which the loyalties once demanded by permanent ties of blood or marriage are replaced by an imagined system of kinship based on mere sentiment.

The problem with the celebration of “love” as a basis for social organization is that human emotions can be ephemeral, and that “love” can be so easily exploited by selfish and dishonest people. For years, I have disavowed any accusation that I am a “men’s rights activist” (MRA) because, in the first place, I reject the identity-politics formula of group “rights.” Secondly, however, I recognize that most MRAs bring a particular axe to grind against women. Many MRAs — if not a majority, certainly an influential plurality — are men who have gone through the ordeal of divorce and custody disputes which are no part of my direct experience and, I pray to God, never will be. Yet while I am not an MRA, this doesn’t mean that they have not made important points about male-female relationships, especially in regard to how divorce has become a state-sponsored instrument to punish and humiliate men. And this is such a fundamental and relatively sudden shift in our culture that most older people (I’m 60 now, and certainly qualify as such) have no idea what absolute hell many young men now face in their relationships. Statistics showing a decline in men’s willingness to commit to marriage, accompanied by a significant drop in birth rates, testify to how the institutions of marriage and fatherhood have been made into something like a medieval torture device to inflict punishment on men. No matter how much a woman may profess to “love” a man, he must take into consideration that if his relationship leads to marriage and fatherhood, he will be at risk of personal destruction if her “love” ever fades.

Quite often, it seems, women seeking divorce view child custody as a weapon to wield in an all-out war to destroy their ex-husbands. It is not enough, for such women, to be free to pursue their own lives; instead, they develop an appetite for revenge against the man they once vowed to love until “death do us part.” Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid such a hell-on-earth are generally horrified to watch our friends or relatives endure the ordeal of divorce. We don’t enjoy the pressure to choose sides in the kind of interminable warfare that goes on between divorcing couples, but our court system seems to enable (and indeed, to encourage) the scorched-earth tactics so commonly employed in these disputes. Pauline Hanson has provoked controversy in Australia by saying aloud what everybody actually knows, i.e., that some women will invent or exaggerate incidents of abuse in order to “win” court proceedings against their ex-husbands. This threat hovers like a shadow in every divorce involving children: If her ex tries to dispute custody, or if he doesn’t make child-support payments in a timely manner, he may find himself facing accusations of abuse, and such accusations generally amount to a “he-said/she-said” conflict, where the real matter at issue is the credibility of the accuser. Feminists tend to deny that women ever make false accusations, or else contend that false accusations are so rare that we can disregard the possibility that a woman might be lying, and therefore feminists must destroy Pauline Hanson.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no objective reason why men and women should view each other as eternal enemies, but unless and until we are willing to take a hard look at how public policy now offers incentives for male-female conflict — especially including divorce — we are doomed to endure the continuing destruction of our society.


 

In Georgia Divorce Case, Lesbian Claims Her Same-Sex Marriage Wasn’t Real

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Lee Kyser (left) and Lawrie Demorest (right) with Nancy Pelosi in 2007.

A major LGBT activist who now faces a divorce filing from her longtime lesbian partner is claiming their marriage was never legally valid:

Atlanta attorney Lawrie Demorest has devoted tremendous energy and earnings to the fight for LGBTQ equality, but in response to an atypical divorce action brought by her lesbian partner, the former co-chair of the board of directors for the Human Rights Campaign has tried to legally nullify a relationship she once said should be treated the same as a marriage.
In some ways, Demorest is arguing against her younger self in a case that involves an expired marriage statute, the reach of Obergerfell v. Hodges and whether a national leader on LGBTQ rights abandoned the spirit of marriage equality in her personal life.

In 1998, hundreds attended Demorest’s “wedding” ceremony with her partner Lee Kyser at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and Kyser subsequently quit her job to care for the twin infants the lesbian couple adopted. In 2004, they sued Atlanta’s prestigious Druid Hills Golf Club for discrimination, claiming they were not being treated equally to heterosexual couples, but now Demorest argues they never were:

Yet, in an affidavit Demorest filed as part of her attempt to dismiss a Complaint for Divorce filed by Kyser in DeKalb County, Georgia, Demorest said she didn’t have “any inkling” that Kyser would one day pretend their relationship had been a marriage.
“I just can’t get over her blindness,” Kyser told LGBTQ Nation. “How did she get to [a place] where she really talked herself into believing that she can advocate for equality and have this tremendous reputation, and then turn around and try to exit our relationship in this way, which is totally contradictory to fairness and equity. To have built up such a reputation professionally and politically, and to then turn and handle her own relationship and family like this just tears it down.” . . .
In her complaint, Kyser evoked both the Obergefell ruling and common law marriage, which was abolished in Georgia in 1997. Her attorneys have argued these combined principles retroactively date the start of Kyser and Demorest’s marriage to July 1996, when Kyser moved into Demorest’s home. . . .
In a motion to outright dismiss Kyser’s standing to file a divorce, Demorest said the couple began cohabitating because Kyser wanted to rent out her home while the summer Olympics were in Atlanta.
“When I agreed for Lee to move in with me in 1996, I never considered whether this would impose any long term legal obligations on me … because they were not available to us as a same-sex couple,” Demorest said in a sworn affidavit. “I never knowingly took on such legal responsibilities and never expected any legal implications to arise from our dating relationship or our agreement to live together.”
However, over the next two decades, Demorest and Kyser co-mingled their finances, brought property together, agreed that Kyser would scale back her psycholgical practice in order to raise the infant twins the couple adopted, and fought on behalf of same-sex couples, including jointly giving more than $175,000 to HRC.
When Demorest told Kyser she was leaving the relationship in December 2017, Kyser said her ex-partner proposed they each walk away with what was titled in their own names, despite having agreed decades earlier that Demorest would be the family’s breadwinner. Kyser’s only source of income at the time was social security, and she accused Demorest of setting her up for “an undignified retirement.”

Well, isn’t this an ugly little sequel to “marriage equality”? And I wonder how their adopted twins are dealing with this trauma . . .



 

It’s Very Simple

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Many of our country’s problems can be traced to a single factor:

Two headlines splashed across adjoining pages of the Wall Street Journal this week underscored a desperate but largely uncommented-on challenge facing America.
“Red Ink Seen for Social Security by 2020,” screamed one, as the program’s outlays will exceed income next year — and its trust fund will be insolvent by 2035.
And directly to the right: “High Court to Take Up LGBT Rights,” discussing three Supreme Court cases that will determine whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act covers sexual orientation or gender identity. 
What links these headlines? 
Simply this:  Social Security is going broke because we’re in a slow-motion demographic train wreck. As Chief Actuary Stephen Goss put it back in 2011, “Lower birth rates are the cause of (the) substantial and permanent shift in the cost of Social Security as a percent of GDP from 2008 to 2040.”  
America’s total fertility rate hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2017 at just under 1.8 children per woman in her lifetime. The stork’s been in free fall since 2010 — and baby-making is cratering in particular among women 20-29, prime reproductive years.  
It gets worse. The Journal coverage estimated that old age benefit shortfalls will “account for 90% of larger budget deficits.” Wonder why America is patrolling the seas with a deteriorating fleet half its size compared to the 1980s?  Why there’s no money for infrastructure?  Or why, despite the Trump boom, we may return to economic secular stagnation? 
Dare one paraphrase the 1992 Clinton campaign watchword?  “It’s the fertility, stupid!”
So why the plummeting birth rates?  Largely, according to Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), because marriage in America is in critical condition.
Stone writes that fertility among married women in 2016 remained above 4.0 per woman across child-bearing years. Yet “a smaller proportion of women are married during (their) peak-fertility years.”

In my experience, when you try to talk to young people about this problem, what you get in response are economic arguments — they can’t afford to get married and have children, they say. However, this argument is easily rebutted by the observation that, first of all, marriage itself costs nearly nothing. My wife and I will mark our 30th anniversary Sunday. On April 28, 1989, we went to the courthouse in Gordon County, Georgia, and were married by Probate Judge Johnny Parker, with two of our friends in attendance as witnesses. You don’t need a big expensive ceremony to get married and, proverbially, “two can live as cheaply as one.” Furthermore, very poor people have more babies on average than do the college-educated middle class, so that income and assets are inversely correlated to fertility. Thus, the claim that young people can’t get married and have children because of their economic circumstances is exposed as a self-justifying rationalization.

When our eldest daughter was just a baby, my father came to visit my wife and I at our tiny little roach-infested rental home in Calhoun, Georgia. When I complained about our difficult financial circumstances, Dad laughed and said, “Son, if you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’ll never have children.” So true!

We ultimately had six children — our youngest is a high-school sophomore, while the oldest three are married with children of their own — and we have been struggling financially the whole time. A family like ours is only possible for those who reject a prejudice I call “middle-classism,” where people’s imagination of what is possible is limited by concern for material wealth and social status. If you believe children must live in a “good neighborhood” with “good schools” (these phrases are a sort of code, if not indeed a racist dog whistle), then you will find yourself within those those imaginary limits. On the other hand, if you believe children are a blessing from God, you will have more babies and figure some way to survive despite economic adversity. And you might be surprised to discover that, whatever the financial disadvantages or loss of social status your family experiences by rejecting the prejudice of “middle-classism,” your children actually do quite well in life.

However poor a large family may be (in relative terms, given the general affluence of American society), if you inculcate good values in your numerous children — especially a strong work ethic — they may well accomplish great things in life, far exceeding their more privileged peers who have fewer siblings but more social status. Religious belief is strongly correlated with high fertility, and it is not surprising that U.S. fertility has declined as atheism has flourished. I have often remarked that liberals, who never hesitate to declare their commitment to Science™ — particularly Darwinism, but also such totems of the intelligentsia as “climate change,” gender theory, etc. — generally seem to be failures at the basic biological task of procreation, whereas us ignorant Bible-thumpers are winning by Darwinian terms.

Those who speak of “overpopulation” tend to think of people as statistics — interchangeable units, without any individual value — and this dehumanizing conception fails to take into account the differences in human quality. However equal we may be, in terms of our basic rights, some people are more valuable to society than others. If you consider yourself a person of superior quality, as liberals obviously do, isn’t it logical to assume that you would be a superior parent? Your children would not only inherit whatever genetic advantages you might pass along to them, but also they would also benefit from being raised under your wise guidance and, it also logically follows, your children would grow up to be very worthwhile members of society. Yet liberals don’t act in accordance with this logic, instead preferring to avoid parenthood altogether, or else having just one or two children.

Whatever else might be said in favor of larger families, the need for future taxpayers ought to be something everyone could agree on, but instead we seem to be drifting toward fiscal catastrophe because of what Bob Maistros calls our “slow-motion demographic train wreck.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

This Abnormal Life: How a Nice Guy™ Predictably Gets Played for a Chump

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Rob Lim (left), Lauren Lim (center) and Elyse Quail (right) in ‘This Incredible Life.’

“Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 27, 2015

Rob and Lauren Lim are a Canadian couple with two young children. They have been together about 14 years, but a couple of years ago, Lauren “came out” as bisexual and started dating women, and the Lims tried “polyamory” until — plot twist! — Lauren decided she’s actually a lesbian. So now Rob and Lauren are getting a divorce, and Lauren is engaged to Elyse Quail, a 26-year-old dance instructor. Did I mention that Elyse has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that, until 2016, she had been in a long-term relationship with a guy? Oh, and also, Lauren and her new girlfriend have decided that Rob’s oldest son, Max, is actually a girl.

It’s your Five Basic Food Groups of Craziness, and they’ve turned this circus of insanity into a YouTube series called “This Incredible Life.”

There’s a certain element of foreshadowing in this story, like clues scattered at the scene of a crime. For example, in their first video, we learn that Rob and Lauren met in 2004 because they were both bloggers and she saw Rob’s photo of himself doing a backflip on the beach. She left a comment on his blog, then arranged to meet him at his workplace — they attended the same university — and they were instantly inseparable.

Love at first sight, or dangerous impulsiveness? With the benefit of hindsight, we must conclude it was the latter, especially when we get to Lauren’s “How I Realized I Was Gay” video, in which she says that a 2015 Hailee Steinfeld music video was the decisive moment.

Like I said, your Five Basic Food Groups of Craziness.

What I can’t understand is why Rob is cooperating with this project, the whole point of which is that he’s a clueless chump who wasted more than a decade of his life in a doomed marriage, but he’s such a Nice Guy™ that he seems perfectly OK with this Hindenburg-at-Lakehurst disaster.

We are looking for clues at the scene of the crime, and one of them is in the first video, where we learn that Lauren met Rob when he was 21, just four years after his own parents divorced. As a result, he was reluctant to get married because “just the concept of marriage itself was, like, a very constructed thing . . . I didn’t want to submit to the authority of this, like, societal pressure.” In other words, he lacked any moral idealism or religious reverence, in contrast to the Christian understanding of marriage as an institution ordained by God. If marriage is a “constructed thing” imposed by “societal pressure,” without any moral meaning, then Rob has no basis to resent that his wife is dumping him for a bipolar bisexual dance instructor she met via the Bumble dating app.

Also, hey, she’s raising your son Max to be transgender.

Here in 2019, everybody is supposed to be accepting and supportive, but what do these “progressive” values mean, except an acquiescence to moral relativism, an abandonment of any standard of judgment?

Nietzsche saw this: If there is no God, then we are Beyond Good and Evil, in a world where the will to power is everything. If there are no definite moral limits — if even “Thou shalt not kill” lacks the force of law — woe unto the weak! During the blood-soaked 20th century, we associated this moral nihilism with the violence of totalitarian dictatorships, and many failed to see how an atheistic worldview might influence life in western democracies. For a time, the social damage was limited by a sense of bourgeois respectability that remained among the middle class, even as the moral strictures of our Christian cultural heritage lost the force of law. Now, however, we behold a generation of young adults raised without any sense of moral limits in a society where abortion is celebrated with bizarre euphemisms (“reproductive health” and “a woman’s right to choose”), where sexual degeneracy becomes a lifestyle (“polyamory”) that no bien-pensant liberal would dare criticize. Of course, it is “hate speech” to express disapproval of homosexuality, and you’ll be heckled and assaulted if you criticize transgender ideology.

My intention in writing about “This Incredible Life” was more than just the usual point-and-laugh exercise, but I didn’t expect it to turn into a sermon or a lecture in moral philosophy. Rather, my intent was to point out the way so many warning signs were missed during the decade between the time Rob Lim met Lauren in 2004 and their drift into bisexual “polyamory” as a prelude to divorce. If there is no God, the phrase “holy matrimony” is a joke, and wedding vows are no more meaningful than the fine-print “terms of service” on your Facebook account. Without a binding moral obligation between them — with no sense of honor and duty in marriage — man and wife become selfish negotiators, trying to maximize their individual advantages, and the sense of teamwork is lost. In the traditional marriage ceremony, according to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, everyone was reminded at the outset that marriage was not to be “taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly . . . but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God,” as the couple were entering a divine institution “ordained for a remedy against sin.” Nowadays, of course, it seems marriage ceremonies are an extravaganza to provide commercial opportunities for the Wedding-Industrial Complex, and many middle-class girls would be disappointed if their wedding cost less than $50,000 — limousines, catered reception, honeymoon in Bali, etc.

Just as weddings have become an exercise in status display, so also has the spirit of competition and envy entered marriage itself. Watch the video “Our Sex Life,” in which Rob and Lauren discuss the sources of dissatisfaction that emerged in their marriage before that Hailee Steinfeld video made Lauren “realize” she was actually a lesbian. (In case you didn’t notice, my eyes just rolled completely out of my head.) Secular readers might be surprised to learn that the ancient Book of Common Prayer also warns against this error; the purpose of marriage is not “to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding.” From this it is obvious that neither husband nor wife have any legitimate grounds for complaint merely because their sex life is less than a Fourth of July fireworks spectacular. Having entered the matrimonial bond “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly” — understanding its religious significance, with realistic expectations and a serious sense of permanent commitment “in sickness and in health,” etc. — how could a conflict over sex ever divide them?

As I say, marriage must be informed by a sense of honor and duty to succeed. The young man who seeks a bride must realize what he is asking of her — to reject any other possible future for herself, to “keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live” — and vice-versa. It wasn’t as if Rob Lim had no other options, as a promising young university student with an athletic physique, when Lauren caught sight of that profile photo of him doing a backflip and decided to lure him into her spider’s web. But his self-esteem had been wounded by his parents’ divorce, and he was vulnerable to her enticements, evidently having no religious faith and therefore being outside God’s protection. Little did he suspect that, 10 years and two children later, this woman would have a lesbian conversion experience by watching a Hailee Steinfeld video, and then drag him out for public humiliation in this ridiculous YouTube series.

 

The Nice Guy™ who gets played for a chump is a cliché of pick-up artist (PUA) or “red pill” discourse of the so-called “manosphere,” but feminists never acknowledge this dynamic, because it does not serve their interests to admit that women can be selfish, dishonest and cruel. While the “manosphere” is generally condemned as anti-woman, what man would not be “anti” such women as Lauren Lim? If learning how to avoid these dangerous traps is “misogyny,” every man should be a misogynist!

The most cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong with modern marriage is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture, in which she describes (p. 143) “the post-nuclear family ideology” that “abandons the norms of permanence in marriage . . . in favor of a norm of unfettered choice.” Feminists would denounce the selfishness of any man who discarded his loyal wife to pursue sexual adventure, but when the tables are turned — when, as in the case of Rob and Lauren Lim, it is the wife ditching her husband — feminists celebrate this act of selfishness as the essence of “empowerment” for women. In a world where women’s selfishness is praised, is it any wonder that men are less respectful toward women? How many times do men have to see the Nice Guy™ get played for a chump before they come to the conclusion that women are innately cruel creatures who always perceive kindness as proof of weakness?

“Thou shalt not be a chump” is not among the commandments found in the Bible, but it is nevertheless sound advice for young men. It must be kept in mind that predators have a natural instinct for spotting prey, which is why a selfish woman will instinctively find a Nice Guy™ to serve her needs, until such time as she becomes bored with his compliant obeisance and seeks a more challenging game, casting her victim aside after draining him of whatever self-respect he ever had.

Finally, permit me to ask a question: If finding Hailee Steinfeld attractive makes a woman “bisexual,” why aren’t all women “bisexual”?

This brings up a point that I once made in conversation with Ladd Ehlinger, namely that what is called “homophobia” is an entirely normal sentiment, implicit in heterosexual identity. The political rhetoric of LGBTQ activism promotes the idea that it is wrong to disapprove of homosexual behavior, but it should be obvious that, if such disapproval were not commonplace, many more people’s lives would resemble the circus of insanity into which Rob and Lauren Lim have stumbled. Until relatively recent times, homosexuality was considered so abhorrent that it was an insult even to suggest someone might have such inclinations. You could be sued for slander for suggesting such a thing, or more commonly, be threatened with a punch in the face for insinuating that someone was homosexual. And punching someone in response to such an insult would be legal under the “fighting words” doctrine. Now, however, with the LGBTQ rainbow “pride” ideology celebrated everywhere in our culture — even in many churches! — everybody must pretend to approve of homosexual behavior, and we are all expected to have “gaydar” that enables us to perceive a subtext of homosexual desire in almost anything.

What this worldview conveys is the self-congratulatory arrogance of the gay community, where it is imagined that the only reason straight people are straight is because they lack the courage to be gay. Supposedly, everybody is secretly harboring gay desires that they are afraid to pursue, so that it cannot be presumed that straight people are capable of considering the case objectively and answering, “No, I disapprove.”

Far be it from me to presume to know exactly how gay Lauren Lim is. However, if she insists that she is completely homosexual and just failed to realize this until she saw that Hailee Steinfeld video, I must either accept her explanation as sincere, or else make the cynical deduction that she is engaged in a self-justifying rationalization. Of course, I am naturally cynical, but even if I accepted her explanation as sincere, still she has no right to compel my approval of her behavior, nor can I be forbidden to express this disapproval. She is free to ignore my opinion, or to answer in her own defense, but what we have seen recently is a trend toward silencing almost any criticism of sexual behavior — gay, straight, whatever — under the rubric of “hate speech.” This is what we see in the claim that it is “slut shaming” (a category of misogyny, and thus “hate speech”) for anyone to express disapproval of female promiscuity. Feminism’s double standard is apparent here, because feminists routinely condemn heterosexual men as complicit in “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.” Practically anything a guy does in an effort to get laid is wrong — it’s now “harassment” for a boy to flirt with a girl — according to feminists, whereas no women can ever be criticized for her sexual behavior, no matter how selfish and irresponsible her actions may be.

Call me a hater, if you wish, but you’re not going to force me to be silent while you run that shabby three-card monte hustle on me.

It is an objective fact that Hailee Steinfeld is attractive. Insofar as a woman might harbor any homosexual inclination, I wouldn’t be surprised that she would find Ms. Steinfeld worthy of admiration, but Lauren Lim seems to imply that no woman can acknowledge Ms. Steinfeld’s attractiveness without also betraying her own homosexual desire. The word for such a claim is crazy. To most men it is obvious why, for example, women are attracted to professional athletes, but does this mean every male sports fan is engaged in some kind of subconscious homosexual activity when he cheers for his favorite NBA or NFL team?

Just because people can’t offer a sustained argument to justify their beliefs doesn’t mean their beliefs are irrational, and yet heterosexuals have allowed themselves to be shamed into silence by LGBTQ activists who claim to have a monopoly on both rationality and compassion. One does not need any elaborate psychological theory of sexuality to observe that people respond to incentives, and to suppose that someone like Lauren Lim has at all times acted in accordance to what she perceived to be her own narrow self-interest. When she believed it advantageous to herself to have Rob Lim as her husband, she pursued this outcome despite his avowed reluctance, and when she grew bored with her marriage, she pursued other options that she considered more advantageous to herself. Am I being too cynical in believing that the actual reason that her sexual preferences have changed is because the incentives have changed? That is to say, if the culture in Edmonton, Alberta, had been as avidly pro-LGBTQ (and as avidly feminist) in 2004 as it is now, perhaps young Lauren never would have bothered dating men at all. As recently as 15 years ago, however, the sort of anti-male rhetoric one now hears from the feminist movement was rather rare, and one seldom encountered the radical lesbian claim that heterosexuality is inherently oppressive to women. In 2019, however, college boys are afraid to talk to college girls, for fear of being expelled over a “harassment” complaint, and everyone has to watch their words lesy they accidentally say something that could be interpreted as “homophobic” or “transphobic” by the Thought Police who constantly monitor the Internet in search of “hate speech” to condemn. In such a climate, it’s scarcely surprising that fewer young people are having sex, nor is it surprising that so many are now identifying as “bisexual” or “queer” in an effort to escape the accusation of possessing “heterosexual privilege.”

Well, I could never be deceived by such scams, but scammers always manage to find a Nice Guy™ they can play for a chump, and so you can watch “This Incredible Life” on YouTube to witness a chump volunteering for public humiliation. But it’s not “incredible,” it’s just pathetic.



 

National Review’s ‘Pro-Family’ Writer @xan_desanctis Insults Dennis Prager

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Alexandra DeSanctis’s parents sent her to an ultra-Catholic all-girls school — Opus Dei! — in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and thence to the University of Notre Dame, where she graduated two years ago and joined the staff of National Review. Somewhere along the way, Ms. DeSanctis acquired an unfortunate insolence, so that her reaction to an excellent column by Dennis Prager was to declare: “I’m as pro-marriage and pro-family as anyone, but I’m really ready for the ‘women need to avoid working so they can find a Nice Man to support them and make them happy’ genre of conservatism to fall out of fashion.”

 

This is a deliberate distortion of what the column was actually about — I’ll get to that momentarily — but perhaps more importantly, it is a 25-year-old presuming to stand in judgment of Dennis Prager, a conservative warrior who has suffered many wounds on behalf of the cause. The faculty at Oakcrest evidently failed to teach young Ms. DeSanctis to respect her elders and, were I her father, I would be outraged to find my daughter publicly disporting herself in a manner unbecoming a proper young Christian. This shocking insult was called to my attention by Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi, who read Ms. DeSanctis’s remark as an omen of future misfortune, referring to a genre of “38 year old Trad-Con spinsters” (i.e., unmarried traditional conservative women) who lament, “where have all the good men gone?”

 

This is a real phenomenon. There is an entire category of self-help books by Christian women whose devotion to “traditional family values” somehow never resulted in them walking down the aisle, and so they write about the “godly single” life and offer relationship advice (which would seem to be the blind leading the blind, so to speak). As Rollo says, the “38 year old Trad-Con spinsters” often blame men for their failure, complaining that men need to “man up.” The more likely explanation, of course, is that these women actually had matrimonial opportunities in their youth, but just didn’t play their cards right and, rather than confess their errors — “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa” — instead rationalize their failure by scapegoating men.

Rollo Tomassi went on to accuse Ms. DeSanctis of “advocating for the Sandbergian plan,” a reference to Facebook executive Cheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Tomassi added: “The Sisterhood Über Alles recognizes no politics or ideology.”

 

In other words, even many self-declared “conservative” women now embrace a careerist worldview in which women must join an anti-male alliance — “Sisterhood Über Alles” — to defeat men in a ruthless competition for educational and employment opportunities. Believing that career achievement is the only measure of success, such women distrust males as implacable enemies both in the workplace and in their personal lives. Not only must the Sandbergian woman destroy any male coworker who might be her rival for advancement, but she must also eschew any serious heterosexual romantic involvement, because marriage and motherhood might impede her professional ambition.

Because I know absolutely zero about Ms. DeSanctis’s personal life, it would be foolish for me to presume she is so unpopular as to have never had a serious boyfriend, but we might infer from her vehement reaction to Prager’s column that she is quite sensitive about this subject. One can imagine that her Catholic parents are probably beginning to express concern about why their daughter hasn’t found a husband yet. So, what was it about Dennis Prager’s column that offended Ms. DeSanctis? He shared the comments of a woman who called in to his radio show:

I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.
I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this. . . .
It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. . . .
You sit home alone and you do nothing. I avoid my friends now that have children because I have nothing in common with them.
Somebody asked me the other day, “Why did you stay single and never have kids?” There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, “I don’t know. I ran out of time.” . . .
I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.

Very good advice and, in truth, young men should be similarly advised. The carefree young bachelor who becomes accustomed to playing the field is apt to become “set in his ways,” as folks say down home, so that he finds it harder to accommodate himself to the compromises necessary to making a relationship work. Trust me on this, guys — I didn’t marry until I was 29, and the adjustment was more difficult than I expected, but the tale of how and why I didn’t marry earlier is a story for another time. My point now is that Ms. DeSanctis’s insolent attitude is unfortunately common among young people, who think old-fashioned common sense is obsolete, so that they can scoff at the advice of their elders.

While my devout Catholic friend Pete Da Tech Guy might wish to include Ms. DeSanctis in his prayers, I suspect she’s already a lost cause. Why? Well, in high school, she played varsity softball.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.



 

Another ‘Red Pill’ Exit: Fools Rush In, But Wise Men Don’t Marry Crazy Women

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Wise men say, only fools rush in,
But I can’t help ….

SSCCRRAAAAATTCCHH!

More than 10,000 people have read last week’s post (“Exit Strategy: Did This Guy ‘Red Pill’ His Way Out of a Doomed Relationship?”) about a guy whose live-in fiancée moved out after he said something that seemed almost perfectly calculated to offend her. While feminists were applauding that woman’s Twitter thread about her exit, none of them seemed to consider the possibility that he wanted her to leave, and had cleverly used a so-called “Red Pill” tactic to get rid of her. We haven’t heard the guy’s side of the story, so we don’t know his motives, but feminists never seem to consider the possibility that a man might be smart enough to escape plans for his destruction.

Consider this recent news article about a crazy woman in France:

A woman decided she would marry herself in her dream wedding after being dumped three months before the big day.
Laëtitia Nguyen, from France, had been with her fiancé for three years and the pair had spent a lot of time planning their $40,000 (£22,000) wedding.
However, the 38-year-old was left heartbroken when her fiancé left her just three months before the ceremony was due to take place on the picturesque island of Santorini on 27 May 2017.
That didn’t stop Laëtitia from going through with the ceremony that she’d spent so long planning and so she walked down the aisle to marry herself.
“I am amazing, and I know it,” she said.
The wedding was attended by eight people, and Laetitia kept a lot of the details the same as what she had planned with her then-fiancé.
She has since frozen her eggs in the hope she will one day have children.
[The crazy woman and fiancé] were very equal minded about how they wanted the ceremony to play out, however just months before they were going to tie the knot, her fiancé became distant, before eventually walking out in February.

Again, notice how the guy’s side of the story is missing, leaving us to speculate about what it was that inspired his exit, although it seems obvious enough: If a 38-year-old woman wants you to spend $40,000 — FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS! — on a wedding, get the hell out.

Let me dub this “The Princess Diana Rule.”

Ever since Prince Charles married Diana on worldwide TV in 1981, the expensive “Dream Wedding” has become a sort of entitlement in the minds of delusional young women who can’t be bothered to consult tradition or use ordinary common sense in matrimonial custom.

Customarily, the wedding is a display of the bride’s family status — a party thrown in her honor by the paterfamilias. If her father is fairly wealthy and wishes to indulge his princess, he’ll pull out all the stops, paying for the designer dresses of his daughter’s five bridesmaids, hotel rooms for out-of-town guests, rehearsal dinner at a luxury restaurant, limousines for the wedding party, a lavish reception with a live band and an open bar, the two-week all-expense-paid honeymoon to an exotic locale, etc. He’s a big-shot lawyer, a banker, a CEO, whatever, and nothing is too good for his precious princess, who might suffer a loss of social status (however slight) if her wedding wasn’t the most extravagant gala event her hometown had seen in recent memory.

On the other hand, if her folks are regular middle-class folks, custom certainly does not require them to bankrupt themselves — and it would be considered gauche, a tacky pretension — to give their daughter a lavish wedding. Common sense informs this customary attitude. Because the newlyweds cannot rely on generous parental subsidies as they commence upon married life, the daughter of a less-than-wealthy family should not wish for such an extravagant wedding, an irresponsible expenditure that does not betoken the kind of frugality that a middle-class wife needs, if she and her husband hope to prosper together.

Wedding etiquette used to be well-understood by ordinary Americans, back in the day when common sense was actually common. The wedding is a party in honor of the bride, and thus her family is responsible for the expense, with the groom or his family expected only to pay for the wedding rings and whatever his groomsmen might require. (I remember being fitted for a tuxedo rental as a groomsman when my friend Patrick Carter got married in the Heinz Chapel in Pittsburgh circa 1990. His folks were fairly well-off, and covered all my costs. Of the bride’s family, the less said, the better.) Once upon a time in America, parents took pride in raising daughters who were sensible and practical, and who had that old-fashioned sense of Protestant decency that frowns upon the ostentatious display of wealth. Even more than that, decent Americans once would have been horrified at the idea that a woman who had reached her late 30s before marrying would expect her wedding to be anything extravagant. Until the late 1980s, median age at first marriage for U.S. women had never been higher than 23, so that a woman who hadn’t married by age 25 was typically such a low-status social misfit as to have few friends who might RSVP to her wedding invitation.

Times change, but human nature is permanent.

There has never been (nor will there ever be) any society in which a 38-year-old woman is considered prime “wife material”; any unmarried woman that old should be extraordinarily grateful to find a husband. But no wise man would marry the kind of fool who would waste $40,000 — FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS! — for a wedding “on the picturesque island of Santorini.” Of course, this story happened in France, and thus Laëtitia Nguyen’s pretensions might tell us nothing about the decline of American marital customs, but the way her story is told as some kind of feminist triumph of empowerment indicates that we are expected to celebrate how “amazing” she is. Except she’s not amazing at all, except as an example of the increasing craziness of women in an era of decadence.

Note also: “She has since frozen her eggs in the hope she will one day have children” — having lost the Darwinian lottery, she expects technology to help her cheat nature, employing some sort of medical intervention like IVF with donor sperm to conceive a Frankstein baby.

 

Let’s think about this, shall we? You are a woman so undesirable that it was not until you were 35 that you met a man willing to marry you. Having spent three years planning a $40,000 wedding, your undesirability was confirmed when your would-be husband escaped your trap. What next? She decides to freeze her eggs and “marry herself,” expecting that at some point in the future she’ll have those eggs fertilized, giving birth sometime in her 40s (with or without a husband/father) and what sort of child might we expect such a mother to produce? Imagine the Frankenbaby offspring of Laëtitia Nguyen, reaching high school circa 2035. This child will likely be fatherless, with a 55-year-old mother who is obviously neurotic. What sort of 15-year-old will Ms. Nguyen’s offspring grow up to be? Will her child be a healthy, attractive, popular, outgoing, emotionally well-adjusted teenager? Don’t bet on it.

There is a correlation between parental age and autism-spectrum disorders and, while the question of causality is still being debated and researched, doesn’t it make sense that those who are so disadvantaged in the mating process that they don’t produce offspring until they are past their reproductive prime would, in turn, find that their children are likewise disadvantaged? We don’t need to consult any scientific research into the nature/nurture aspect of this phenomenon when common sense tells us that the acorn seldom falls far from the oak. Behavioral patterns replicate themselves in successive generations, and if you couldn’t find a mate until you were 35, it’s probably not likely that your only child (born when you were 37 or 38) will be married at age 25.

What’s that? You hope to see grandchildren in your lifetime? That’s a long-shot bet for older parents, as simple arithmetic will demonstrate. Keep in mind, as I say, that autism-spectrum disorders are more common among the children of older parents and, in most cases, the older the parents, the smaller the number of offspring. If you had your first child at 20, there’s a chance they might have two, three or more younger siblings, so that your children gain the benefits of greater socialization within the family. But if you don’t have your first offspring until you’re 37, the chances are that this will be your only child, and if this child repeats your pattern, 37 + 37 = 74, so live to be a septuagenarian and maybe your semi-autistic child will provide you with a grandchild. Considered objectively, however, the odds don’t favor older parents living to hear themselves called Grandpa or Grandma, and you might think that the atheistic young proponents of Science™ would be perspicacious enough to foresee this. If they are Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors, as they imagine themselves to be, shouldn’t these devotees of Darwinian theory act in such a way as to favor “the survival of the fittest”?

Oh, you shouldn’t be judgmental, they tell us. We are expected to ignore our own common sense and instead sit silently while all these advocates of Scientific Progress and Social Justice — acolytes of The Vision of the Anointed — tell us what opinions are permissible. The liberal media tell this tale about Laëtitia Nguyen in such a way as to persuade fools that she really is “amazing” and her solo wedding is empowering.

No, she’s pathetic, and her Santorini “wedding” is a travesty.

She deserves to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

 

What shall become of us, if we are taught to celebrate such folly? When did it become “hate” to speak the truth? Why is it that, even as Darwinism has become a quasi-religion in the West, we aren’t allowed to discuss the way in which certain choices (e.g., women postponing marriage and motherhood until they are well past their peak reproductive years) have harmful consequences for individuals and society as a whole?

Also, why has no journalist interviewed the guy who dumped Laëtitia Nguyen just three months before the $40,000 wedding she’d planned? Because that guy’s probably got a great story to tell — first, how did he stumble into her web, and second, what inspired his nick-of-time escape? “When did you realize she was batshit crazy, sir? What advice would you give to other men to help them avoid crazy women like Laëtitia?”

Here’s the thing: By the time a guy gets desperate enough to hook up with a crazy 30-something woman who thinks a $40,000 wedding is a good idea, he’s probably already made a lot of mistakes in life. You don’t get to coffin corner because you made the right moves as a teenager. Probably he had some not-too-bad options in high school or college where, if he’d played his cards right, he could have married a sane woman. Instead, he wanted to “play the field,” so he ditched his first girlfriend, then things “just didn’t work out” with his next girlfriend. Tempus fugits, but he didn’t realize he was wasting valuable time until he reached that point, many years later, when he was like, “Wait a minute — I’m going to marry this woman? This wacko who thinks a picturesque island wedding is a smart way to spend $40,000?” And then au revoir, Miss Nguyen.

What causes such blunders? Bad advice.

The blogger Dalrock calls attention to three “Christian dating experts” — Mandy Hale, 39, Wendy Griffith, 54, and Lisa Anderson, 46 — who have one thing in common: None of them have ever been married. What this indicates is that secular ideas of feminist “empowerment” have been baptized, so to speak. When the church attempts to emulate the latest worldly trends, it becomes “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2) and the salt loses its savour (Matthew 5:13).

“In view of questionable sociological, psychological, and political theories presently permeating our culture and making inroads into Christ’s church, we wish to clarify certain key Christian doctrines and ethical principles prescribed in God’s Word. . . . Specifically, we are deeply concerned that values borrowed from secular culture are currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality.”
— “Social Justice and the Gospel”

If you’re a parent, do yourself a favor and send this post in an email to your kids (or print it out and read it aloud to them) so that if they become fools and Darwinian failures, they can’t say you never tried to warn them. We have a responsibility as adults to steer young people away from the path of decadent madness that leads down to destruction. Selah.



 

Feminism and the Darwinian Dead End

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“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . .This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14, 2014

“The United States is in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis. The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues . . . the country could face economic and cultural turmoil.”
— Washington Post, June 30, 2017

What happens to people who embrace the Culture of Death? It should be obvious that feminism’s hatred of motherhood — the anti-maternal bias that expresses itself as a celebration of “choice” — must ultimately lead all those who embrace this ideology down the road toward extinction.

Even before I began the Sex Trouble project four years ago, this was already apparent to me, as it must be to any intelligent person who takes time to seriously examine contemporary cultural trends:

Low birth rates lead to economic stagnation and other social and political problems, which pro-life activists have been warning about for years. . . .
For the past half-century, our elite culture has been dominated by the neo-Malthusian “overpopulation” myth popularized by Paul Ehrlich, a myth fostered by a eugenics cabal led by David Rockefeller (see Donald Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, 2001). Progressive feminists like Amanda Marcotte refuse to acknowledge that their “pro-choice” ideology wasn’t developed with an eye toward the rights of women, but instead originated with a racist billionaire who was worried that poor brown people were having too many babies.

In a free society, people can have as many babies as they want, and if Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want to have any babies at all, far be it from me to try to change her mind. Would anyone want to place a helpless infant in the care of a soulless atheist monster like Amanda Marcotte?

The real problem arises, however, when feminism’s cultural influence encourages other women to believe that they can embrace this warped belief system without any negative consequences. Half a century since the start of the modern feminist movement, the secondary and tertiary effects of this destructive ideology are scattered about our society, like the fragmented artifacts of ancient Rome overrun by barbarians. Young women today, born in the 1980s or ’90s, have little if any knowledge of the world their grandparents grew up in, which was blasted out of existence by the radical upheavals of the 1960s. Many problems now affecting young women are, in fact, a direct result of feminism’s “success” in destroying the moral infrastructure of our society, and yet they are told that the solution to their problems is — of course — more feminism.

What we are witnessing in the 21st century are the late-stage effects of cultural decadence, where children raised in chaotic environments — with divorced or never-married parents, no religious influence, surrounded by drug abuse and other social pathologies — grow up to become dysfunctional adults who exercise toxic influence in the lives of others. Institutional commitments to “inclusion” and “diversity” make it difficult to avoid these dysfunctional people, and we are forced to tolerate deviant behavior in our midst. Whether it’s riots on university campuses, drug addicts encamped on the streets or deranged lunatics threatening violence against us, citizens are expected to adapt to the increasing prevalence of antisocial behaviors, which become normalized.

“Oh, look — it’s a gender-fluid bisexual seventh-grader leading a gay-pride parade through the streets of the state capital!”

“Oh, look — a state university faculty member tortured to death by a gay Hollywood executive in a basement BDSM dungeon!”

“Oh, look — an Ivy League student arrested for child pornography!”

These tip-of-the-iceberg occasions — when unquestionably weird behavior makes headlines — are becoming so frequent we might not even notice, because we may be too busy dealing with the larger submerged mass of this iceberg of weirdness as it affects our own lives. A friend, a neighbor, a co-worker or a relative might go off the rails, requiring us to cope with the collateral damage of their antisocial behavior.

The cultural elite consider themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, and if you ask for actual evidence of their presumed superiority — something other than their diplomas from prestigious universities — you’ll find they have nothing to offer. They want to tell you how to live, and what your opinions should be, but beyond their academic credentials (and their careers in positions of cultural influence, for which such credentials are a prerequisite) there is no real evidence they are qualified to exercise the authority they claim. What makes Amanda Marcotte qualified to speak as the Official Arbiter of Correct Womanhood? Nothing, except that she is a feminist, and therefore her authority cannot be questioned. Disagreeing with her makes you an Enemy of Women.

If you consider yourself superior to others, and you want to make the world a better place, shouldn’t you have lots of children? One might suppose that, as an atheist proponent of Darwinism, Amanda Marcotte would subscribe to a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, wherein reproductive success is considered proof of superiority. From a Darwinian perspective, shouldn’t Marcotte’s superiority make her more desirable as a mate? And wouldn’t her offspring, inheriting her superior traits, be a beneficial influence to the future of humanity? Continue reading Feminism and the Darwinian Dead End →