The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox, 09.02.15

Posted on | September 2, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox, 09.02.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Red Menace
Michelle Malkin: Eric Cantor – Poster Boy Of The Beltway Crapweasels
Twitchy: Protesters Run Mayor Rahm Emanuel Off The Stage At Public Budget Meeting
Vox Popoli: Scalzi 451


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: BOMBSHELL REPORT – Majority Of Immigrants On Welfare, Including 73% Of Mexicans And Central Americans
American Thinker: The Tyranny Of Consensus
Conservatives4Palin: How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off The Public
Don Surber: We Spend $132 Billion More On Poverty Than On Defense
Jammie Wearing Fools: Hillary Hack Who Called Boehner An Alcoholic Was Busted For Aggravated DWI During Her Failed 2008 Campaign
Joe For America: Black Thugs Beat Up White Kid, Of Course There’s No MSM Coverage
JustOneMinute: David Brooks On Hillary – Keep Hope Alive
Pamela Geller: Obama Finds Final Traitor For Iran Nuke Vote – Full List Of Sellout Senators
Shot In The Dark: To Be Fair, Most Of Us Had Forgotten That Brian Lambert Was Still Being Published, Too
STUMP: Presidential Interlude – What Are The Chances?
The Gateway Pundit: #blacklivesmatter Activist Arrested In La Plata, Maryland For Online “Kill All White People” Threat
The Jawa Report: Allies In Syria Learning Important Military Skills, Like Jumping Through Flaming Hoops Of Fire
The Lonely Conservative: Steinle Family Suing Over Murder Of Daughter By Illegal Immigrant
This Ain’t Hell: VA Secretary Blames Congress For His Agency’s Failures
Weasel Zippers: 307,000 Veterans Died Waiting For VA Healthcare
Megan McArdle: Yes, Computers Have Improved; No, Communism Hasn’t
Mark Steyn: Day Of Disgrace


SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police

Category: Linkagery

It’s 2015 and Everything Is Rape Now

Posted on | September 2, 2015 | 73 Comments

Rutgers University’s Center on Violence Against Women and Children was commissioned by a White House task force to produce a survey about the “climate” of “sexual violence” on campus:

The pilot survey — initially developed by the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women and conducted by Rutgers — generated responses from nearly 11,000 Rutgers University-New Brunswick students. In the report, “sexual violence” has a broad definition that was based on materials developed by the White House Task Force. The definition ranges from remarks about physical appearance to rape and other forms of sexual assault.
The most startling finding in the Rutgers report: Nearly one in four undergraduate women (24 percent) told researchers that they were victims of some form of sexual violence before they ever set foot on campus.

Yes, if the “broad definition” is broad enough, everything is rape.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Murder City, U.S.A.

Posted on | September 2, 2015 | 28 Comments

Violent crime in Baltimore has escalated to the point it’s actually worse than Detroit. Baltimore’s homicide rate has increased 56% this year compared to 2014, and every day brings new headlines about the bloody crime wave:

The son of a high-ranking Baltimore police commander has been charged with murder in the stabbing death of his roommate Monday in Southwest Baltimore, police said.
Melvin Russell, 28, the son of Lt. Col. Melvin Russell, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the killing, police said. The elder Russell leads the Police Department’s Community Collaboration Unit and has been at the forefront of neighborhood outreach efforts at a time of heightened tensions.
The younger Russell was charged with first- and second-degree murder, assault and weapons violations. Police said he and his 49-year-old roommate got into a fight in the 4900 block of Challedon Road and both sustained stab wounds. Both were taken to hospitals, where the roommate was pronounced dead, police said.

#BlackLivesMatter could not be reached for comment.

 

Category: Crime

Self-Correcting Stupidity

Posted on | September 2, 2015 | 26 Comments

Houston mourns the loss of a promising young man:

A man posing with a gun and taking selfies was killed when the gun went off and struck him in southwest Houston, police said.
Family members said the victim is 19-year-old Deleon Alonso Smith.
Investigators said Smith was taking selfies with a gun at an apartment in the 9800 block of Forum Park Drive and Bissonnet around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday when the gun accidentally went off, shooting the 19-year-old in the throat and killing him. . . .
Family members said Smith has two young children and was starting college Wednesday. . . .
Police said Smith believed the gun was unloaded at the time.

It’s so sad that this aspiring scholar — already a father of two at age 19 — won’t be starting college, where he might have studied Basic Principles of Not Shooting Yourself in the Neck.

 

Category: Crime

Testicles Are Not a Social Construct

Posted on | September 2, 2015 | 88 Comments

The science is settled:

However much we’d like to think of gender as a social construct, science suggests that real differences do exist between female and male brains. The latest evidence: a first-of-its-kind European study that finds that the female brain can be drastically reshaped by treating it with testosterone over time.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix, to summarize Judith Butler’s influential ideas as succinctly as possible — must be seen for what it actually is, a War Against Human Nature.

Feminists have been fighting this war for more than four decades, and you will be accused of misogyny (woman hating) if you express skepticism about their project of creating an androgynous “equality” by eradicating male/female differences. These arguments about gender roles show how, in so many ways, feminists are trapped in the past, forever fighting battles rooted in the adolescent frustrations experienced decades ago by women who never successfully adjusted to normal adult roles that most people take for granted. The tomboy, the lesbian, the awkward bookish girl who felt marginalized in the high-school popularity competition — we may grant that their grievances against the “system” are real without endorsing their intellectual assault on the social order.

Youthful resentments of slights and slurs have a way of being rationalized by feminist ideology, becoming an indictment of society as oppressive to all women, even though the vast majority of women do not share the grudges that motivate the disgruntled misfits who grow up to become academic ax-grinders. Beyond their tendency to turn their own narrow grievances into theory — because “the personal is political” — feminists rely on ideological certainties that are obsolete because they were formed in an earlier era whose conditions are no longer relevant to the experience of young women who have grown up in a society profoundly shaped by previous feminist “reforms.”

Consider, for example, that when the Women’s Liberation movement erupted in the late 1960s, a prime target was the traditional marriage-based nuclear family, within which most of them had been raised and against which they had rebelled. Young college-educated radicals did not want to follow their parents’ respectable middle-class lifestyles. Just as radical men did not aspire to emulate their fathers’ example as dutiful hard-working husbands with “Establishment” jobs to pay for their suburban homes, radical women rejected the ideal of the Happy Housewife with a kitchen full of shiny appliances. Because the modern feminist movement erupted in this specific context, one still finds feminists railing against the “Ozzie and Harriet” family, a descriptor based on a TV show that went off the air in 1966. (The last surviving member of the cast, David Nelson, died of colon cancer in 2011 at age 74.) How does feminism’s anti-family ideology, formulated in opposition to the social norms of 1968, address itself to today’s 18-year-old college freshman, who was born in 1997, during the presidency of Bill Clinton?

Today’s freshman grew up in a society where divorce, abortion and single motherhood are commonplace, where many public schools promote a “safe sex” curriculum, and where homosexuality is widely considered a civil right. Even if the 18-year-old grew up in an intact nuclear family household, she went to school with many other children who came from what were once called “broken homes,” and her mother probably had full-time employment outside the home. Today’s typical freshman does not feel overwhelming pressure to conform to an “Ozzie and Harriet” lifestyle, which may not even seem possible as a choice for her. Where could a young woman in 2015 hope to find a loyal husband who will provide her that suburban home and enable her to play the Happy Housewife, devoted to raising their children and tending to domestic chores? There are very few 21st-century Ozzies available, even if she wanted to be a latter-day Harriet.

A movement that began in rebellion against society as it existed in 1968 is ill-suited to address the problems facing young women in 2015 and it may be added that, insofar as feminist ideology originally had any basis in science, that science is now as obsolete as Ozzie and Harriet. Reading the foundational texts of the Women’s Liberation movement — including Sexual Politics (Kate Millett, 1970), The Dialectic of Sex (Shulamith Firestone, 1970) and Woman Hating (Andrea Dworkin, 1974) — one finds the authors attacking ideas of psychosexual development that were then very respectable, but which have since been largely or entirely debunked. In particular, Freudian theories have been eclipsed by advances in neuroscience that have enabled us to learn more about how, for example, hormones influence personality and behavior.

You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to understand this. Just read the testimony of a lesbian feminist who spent 18 months on testosterone as a female-to-male transsexual before changing her mind. Why? Because she “never knew anger like this until going on testosterone,” experiencing psychological disturbances that included “a lower frustration threshold . . . burning rage” that was ultimately “unbearable.” Even after quitting testosterone, she found that her moods and attitudes seemed to have been permanently affected by this artificial masculinization of her brain.

This tells us a lot about the biological basis of male/female differences. Once we realize that these differences are inherent to who we are as men and women, the question is how we can teach young people to deal with the reality of human nature, rather than trying to abolish these differences in pursuit of utopian schemes of “equality.”





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Godless Commies: The Critical Theory Cult and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace

Posted on | September 1, 2015 | 72 Comments

 

“The greatest difference in the universe . . . is the difference between nothing and something, between an infinity of darkness and a single point of light. . . . It is the difference between atheism and God.”
— Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

A decade ago, when my oldest daughter Kennedy was 16, I drove her and her friend Mandy to Creation, a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania. As we were driving along, something inspired me to start talking about Communism, and I mentioned that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, this was a miraculous event that answered the prayers of millions. Then I explained how, growing up a Baptist in Georgia, I learned to despise “godless Commies,” who had persecuted Christians in Russia, China and everywhere else Marxist-Leninist regimes gained power.

“You kids have no idea what it was like,” I said, attempting to explain the constant terror of growing up in the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the potential to annihilate humanity. As a boy growing up, I knew that my Uncle Casper fought the godless Commies in Vietnam, and when I was in second grade, the local park in Douglasville was named in honor of a hero in that war:

Robert Gerald “Jerry” Hunter left his native Douglas County to attend the Citadel, where he graduated with honors. He joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and was deployed to Vietnam. On May 25, 1966, Hunter was on his 34th combat mission when his F-105 jet was shot down near the Laotian border. He bailed out — his comrades saw the parachute — and it was initially believed that he had survived. The 25-year-old pilot was listed as missing in action, and the Air Force promoted him from first lieutenant to captain while rescuers searched for him. Hunter’s family, including his young bride Laura, prayerfully waited for word that he had been recovered safely. Seven weeks later, however, the sad news came that his remains had been found in Laos, where he had apparently died of injuries. First Baptist Church in Douglasville overflowed with mourners at his funeral and local businesses closed early that afternoon in honor of Captain Hunter, Douglas County’s first casualty in the Vietnam War.

Kids don’t know that history, and they are fortunate not to live under the shadow of the existential menace of Communism, the bloodiest tyranny in the history of the world. So on that summer day in 2005, I tried to explain to my daughter and her friend why the Soviet Union — the “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan called it — inspired such resolute opposition from Christians. Marxism is an explicitly atheist philosophy, and the Communist is bound by no morality whatsoever. Communists are always deliberate liars, who believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” justifies any deception necessary to advance their cause, and Communists kill without remorse, unrestrained by conscience. The disciples of that deadly doctrine were responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people in the 20th century. The collapse of the Soviet Union was achieved only after decades of conflict and tension between the free world, led by the United States, and the International Communist Conspiracy headquartered in Moscow.

This history, and the sense of what it meant to grow up in the Cold War era, was what I sought to convey to my daughter and her friend on that drive through the Pennsylvania countryside. During this improvised lecture — something of a sermon, really — I kept repeating the phrase “godless Commies,” which subsequently became an inside joke between us. My daughter and her husband came to visit us over the past weekend, and her friend Mandy joined us for a family dinner, and I got a laugh out of them when, discussing recent news events, I asked the rhetorical question, “You know what the problem is, don’t you?”

“Godless Commies!” Mandy replied.

Yes, the battlefield has shifted, but the enemy remains the same, and this post-Cold War “twilight struggle” of the Culture War is what Michael Walsh examines in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Walsh’s choice of the word “subversion” is apt, because the effort by Marxists to subvert the culture of the West did not stop after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Godless Commies are everywhere in 21st-century America — in academia, in media, in Hollywood and in government. It is remarkable that Hillary Clinton, who certainly could be described as what anti-Communists used to call a “pinko” or “fellow traveler,” finds herself challenged for the Democrat Party nomination by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist. Clearly, this is not the Democrat Party I was raised in, because there is a world of difference between old-fashioned AFL-CIO liberalism (my father was a member of the Machinists union) and the neo-Bolshevik radicalism of today’s “progressive” Democrats.

The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is an examination of a subversive worldview that has been variously called “political correctness” or “Cultural Marxism,” which Walsh identifies by its academic moniker Critical Theory. Whatever it is called, this intellectual virus was brought to America in the 1940s by a group of left-wing refugees — including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — who are generally known as the Frankfurt School because of their former associations with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Embraced by the avant-garde of American academia, the ideas of the Frankfurt School has enormous influence after World War II. One of their key ideas, given a patina of “scientific” credibility by Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, was the belief that the traditional family was a breeding ground of fascism. This provided the Left with a trite pseudo-Freudian explanation of anti-Communism as rooted in neurotic insecurities. The Frankfurt School’s “diagnosis” of conservatism as a form of mental illness was notoriously echoed in 1964, when a left-wing smear offered the consensus of nearly 1,200 psychiatrists that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was “psychologically unfit to be President.”

However, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is not a dry factual history of the Frankfurt Schools ideas and influence. Michael Walsh is a highly literary man — a screenwriter and novelist, and former classical music critic of Time magazine — who seeks to evoke the humane impulses of artistic creativity in opposition to the soul-crushing forces that Critical Theory empowers. Exposing the hostility of this crypto-Marxist ideology toward that which is spiritual in man’s nature, Walsh appeals to the finest traditions of Western culture, deriving his book’s title from Franz Schubert’s first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss. Walsh’s book bristles with references to classical music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) and philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche), as well as literature and films, including Casablanca, High Noon, The Wild One, The Godfather and Independence Day. Adding to this arsenal of high culture, however, Walsh also dares to invoke the religious foundation of Western civilization, citing the Book of Genesis to explain the eternal conflict of human history: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die . . . ye shall be as gods.”

Believing this satanic lie made Original Sin our inherited condition, and human rebellion against God’s sovereignty began with the impudent desire to usurp divine authority — a “liberation” that results in violence, misery and death. Like the serpent in Eden, the godless Commies tempt us to imagine ourselves freed from God’s law, so that law is no longer a matter of transcendent morality, but is instead simply a matter of power. The destruction of religious belief is necessary to the success of this political wickedness, and the all-powerful State must also destroy the family, as Walsh explains:

Like Satan, the modern leftist state is jealous of the family’s preprogatives, enraged by its power, and it seeks to replace this with its own authority; the satanic condition of “rage,” in fact, is one of the Left’s favorite words (e.g., in 1969, the “Days of Rage” in Chicago) as well as one of its chief attributes. The ongoing, expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “family” is part of the Left’s assault. . . .
Soviet Communism . . . understood this well. Destroy the family, seize the children, and give the insupportable notion of a Marxist post-Eden replacement paradise a purchase on power for at least one more generation. American youth who grew up in the 1950s, as I did, heard numerous horror stories of Russian children who informed on their own parents. . . . Probably the most famous was the thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, an instantly mythologized Soviet Young Pioneer who informed on his father to the secret police and was in turn murdered by “reactionary” members of his own family, who were later rounded up and shot. Whether the story is actually true — and post-Soviet scholarship suggests that it was largely fabricated — the Soviet myth required just such an object lesson and just such a martyr to the Communist cause.

Nothing is more important to the Left than the political “cause” because no personal loyalty — not even to one’s own family — can be permitted to challenge the power of the total State, which arrogates to itself the authority to direct and control every aspect of our lives. Pavlik Morozov’s betrayal of his “reactionary” parents is a model for how the government school system now requires children to reject the moral authority of their parents. Teaching the child to hate Mom and Dad — to despise his parents as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic bigots — is the most important lesson of the modern public school, and this lesson is reinforced daily by the educational bureaucrats who are paid with tax dollars to indoctrine children with an anti-religious, anti-family, anti-American ideology. But I’m ranting again, eh?

Godless Commies! We can never hate them as much as they deserve to be hated, nor can we hate them as much as they hate us, because they hate us with a fanatical fury that a Christian cannot even imagine. It would be a sin to hate anyone that much, but the godless Commies don’t believe in sin, and so they are free to indulge their hatred, which is infinite.

The Critical Theory cult promises to create a utopia of “equality,” yet lacks any real creativity, because it is inspired by a spirit of destruction manifested in a limitless lust for power, with which to punish its enemies. Walsh points out how Herbert Marcuse “celebrated ‘polymorphous perversity,’ advocating the liberating power of sex” as a means to weaken “the foundations of the society he sought to undermine.” Yet this attack on sexual morality produced consequences that the prophets of “liberation” failed to foretell, as Walsh explains:

The attack on normative heterosexuality . . . invariably disguised as a movement for “rights” . . . is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory. . . If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men . . . then that poliitcal party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs. . . .
The result has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work n the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the “hookup culture” . . . to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male “rape culture” hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

This result was “predictable,’ as Walsh said, to those who understood human nature as a fixed quantity that could not be infinitely molded to fit the theories of godless Commies. Yet if the soul-crushing misery the Left has delivered is nothing like the paradise of “equality” they promised, the cult of Critical Theory has at least kept its promise to destroy the traditional American society that was always the target of the Left’s vengeful hatred. Very little remains of the America that triumphed in World War II and then endured the “long twilight struggle” to emerge victorious in the Cold War. Having captured control of the educational system, the godless Commies have relentlessly purged religious faith from our nation’s schools and colleges, so that no sincere Christian could possibly hope to be hired in American higher education, even if any Christian were willing to work within the satanic pulpits of academia.

Is there any hope at all? Can we defeat these godless Commies and rescue civilization from annihilation by the cult of Critical Theory? Michael Walsh believes there is still reason to hope, if only the American people can summon the courage to keep fighting:

Facing overwhelming odds at Thermopylae, the Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas responded to Persian demands that they surrender their weapons with these words for the ages: “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.”

We live in an evil age, and are confronted with the infinite darkness of oblivion, yet there is still hope in that single point of light that is the difference between atheism and God.

 

Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 09.01.15

Posted on | September 1, 2015 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Mystery of ISIS and Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy
Da Tech Guy: Ted Cruz in Hollis, NH
Doug Powers: Obama’s Mixed Messages Contributing To Climate Change, Mass Confusion
Twitchy: “This Is Why America Hates Us In DC” – Ron Fournier Calls Out Paul Begala For “But Bush!” Hackery
Conservative Intel: Hillary – Kill Joe!
Shark Tank: “Wassermann Schultz Should Go To The Ovens” (Video)


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Migrant Crackdown Sows Chaos In Europe
American Thinker: Officers’ Letter To Congress On Iran Deal Not A One Day Story
Conservatives4Palin: Obama’s DOJ Continues To Stonewall Investigation Into IRS Corruption
Don Surber: Ben Carson Wins WV Straw Poll
Jammie Wearing Fools: Not A Peep From Obama On Execution Of Houston Police Officer, but Plenty Of Climate Change Psychobabble
Joe For America: Ted Cruz Puts Blame For Cop’s Death Where It Belongs – On Obama
JustOneMinute: Progressive Banking
Pamela Geller: Scholars Catch Up To Robert Spencer, Realize Ancient Quran Challenges Islam’s Origins
Protein Wisdom: “No Fiction Is Worth Reading Except For Entertainment”
Shot In The Dark: Our Underachieving Cro-Magnon Governor
STUMP: Pension Quicktakes – How About That Stock Market? And Red Light Cameras?
The Gateway Pundit: #BlackLivesMatter Radio Show Calls For Race War – “Kill Whites And Cops”
The Jawa Report:
The Lonely Conservative: Washington State Professors Will Punish Students Who Use The Wrong Words
This Ain’t Hell: Rest In Peace, Forgotten Angel
Weasel Zippers: Moonbats Lose In Montana – Appeals Court Cites First Amendment, Okays Jesus Statue On Big Mountain
Megan McArdle: Printing Money Goes Haywire In Venezuela
Mark Steyn: Sewers And Servers


Out today! S.M. Stirling’s The Desert and the Blade

Category: Linkagery

‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’

Posted on | August 31, 2015 | 184 Comments

Online dating apps are fueling an “apocalypse” of hook-up culture, Nancy Jo Sales reports in a frightening Vanity Fair feature:

[Alex] says that he himself has slept with five different women he met on Tinder — “Tinderellas,” the guys call them — in the last eight days. Dan and Marty, also Alex’s roommates in a shiny high-rise apartment building near Wall Street, can vouch for that. In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can.
“Brittany, Morgan, Amber,” Marty says, counting on his fingers. “Oh, and the Russian — Ukrainian?”
“Ukrainian,” Alex confirms. “She works at—” He says the name of a high-end art auction house. Asked what these women are like, he shrugs. “I could offer a résumé, but that’s about it … Works at J. Crew; senior at Parsons; junior at Pace; works in finance … ”
“We don’t know what the girls are like,” Marty says.
“And they don’t know us,” says Alex.

Hey, guys, let’s add a word to your vocabulary: Herpes.

Did you know that herpes is incurable, and that condoms don’t protect against herpes? You could ask Ella Dawson to explain this to you. Ms. Dawson was a student at Wesleyan University (annual tuition $47,972) who said she “never had unprotected sex,” but experienced a “tidal wave of shame” when she was diagnosed with a herpes infection. (Ms. Dawson graduated in 2014 with a bachelor of arts in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “theorizing the feminist possibilities of erotica,” so I guess that makes her an expert of sorts.) A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the herpes rate “was nearly twice as high among women (21%) as men (11%), and more than three times higher among African-Americans (39%) than whites (12%). The infection rate among African-American women was 48%.” For obvious reasons, promiscuity increases the risk of infection, and the CDC found that about 27% of those who reported 10 or more partners are infected with herpes.

So while Alex is congratulating himself on hooking up with five “Tinderellas” in the span of eight days, he should perhaps be thinking in terms of epidemiology. Yet the herpes virus may ultimately be less harmful than the emotional damage inflicted by mindless promiscuity:

Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”

See? Marty understands the game he’s playing. Pretend that you’re emotionally available — “a boyfriend kind of guy” — and “racking up girls” via online hook-up sites is not difficult nowadays for any reasonably attractive young man. The more a guy succeeds at that cynical game, however, the lower his estimation of women in general, because each “win” for him just proves how easily girls can be deceived. No amount of feminist “consciousness raising” can change the fundamental reality of human nature. Casual sex is a game in which guys have a decisive advantage, and therefore any girl who plays that game is a fool. When so many young women are willing to play this foolish game, however, it produces a culture shift that hurts women:

“It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option,” wrote Erica Gordon on the Gen Y Web site Elite Daily, in 2014.
It is the very abundance of options provided by online dating which may be making men less inclined to treat any particular woman as a “priority,” according to David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the evolution of human sexuality. “Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there,” Buss says. “One dimension of this is the impact it has on men’s psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.”
“For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not — they can go, ‘She’s girlfriend material, she’s hookup material.’ … There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena.”

Will feminists ever wake up and realize that human nature is an immutable reality impervious to ideology? Viewing sexual problems as a quasi-Marxist struggle between two classes — men and women as collective groups — does not necessarily help any individual woman and may arguably make her life more difficult. Strategies recommended by feminist ideology may seem to “work” for lesbian sociology professors who view all males as hostile and dangerous, but political rhetoric about “gender inequality” doesn’t help the college girl trying to negotiate personal relationships. Are we to believe that Professor Armstrong (author of the 2002 book Forging Gay Identities) is best qualified to advise young heterosexual women on how to find a guy who will treat her right? Nancy Jo Sales reports the anecdotal evidence:

At a table in the front, six young women have met up for an after-work drink. They’re seniors from Boston College, all in New York for summer internships, ranging from work in a medical-research lab to a luxury department store. They’re attractive and fashionable, with bright eyes highlighted with dark eyeliner wings. None of them are in relationships, they say. I ask them how they’re finding New York dating.
“New York guys, from our experience, they’re not really looking for girlfriends,” says the blonde named Reese. “They’re just looking for hit-it-and-quit-it on Tinder.”
“People send really creepy s–t on it,” says Jane, the serious one.
“I think that iPhones and dating apps have really changed the way that dating happens for our generation,” says Stephanie, the one with an arm full of bracelets.
“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt — well, not on the surface.” . . .
They say they think their own anxiety about intimacy comes from having “grown up on social media,” so “we don’t know how to talk to each other face-to-face.” . . .
“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.
“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.
“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.
“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.
“Honestly, I feel like the body doesn’t even matter to them as long as you’re willing,” says Reese. “It’s that bad.”
“But if you say any of this out loud, it’s like you’re weak, you’re not independent, you somehow missed the whole memo about third-wave feminism,” says Amanda.

No, ma’am. You got the memo. It’s just that you seem to be smart enough to realize that the memo was completely wrong. What feminist ideology tells young women they should do — being sexually “empowered” and expecting this empowerment to lead to “equality” in their relationships — is the exact opposite of what common sense based on an actual knowledge of human nature would advise them to do.

The accumulated wisdom of centuries still holds true. If you want to be loved, be lovable, and if you want to be respected, be respectable. As I tell young women, don’t just “play hard to get,” be hard to get. A girl who acts like trash thereby forfeits the right to complain that guys treat her like trash. One of the worst things feminism has done is to attack the sexual “double standard” by encouraging women to lower their standards, to screw around heedlessly and to view short-term “relationships” as an acceptable substitute for actual commitment.

This strategy of “equality” doesn’t work to women’s advantage. It has never worked and will never work, and any girl who plays that game is a fool. Yet feminism teaches women to blame men for taking advantage of the foolishness that feminists themselves encourage. If millions of women are on Tinder offering themselves as hook-up partners, how are men to blame if they react to “a perceived surplus of women” by playing that game? “Hit it and quit it.”

Certainly, I would never advise my kids to play that game. No decent parent would ever want their daughter to be offering herself to random strangers online, and decent parents would be horrified if their son brought home a woman he’d picked up that way. “Tinder trash” for a daughter-in-law? No, son. Leave those trashy women alone.

Remember that herpes is incurable, 21% of women are infected, and I’ll bet the rate of herpes infection is even higher on Tinder.

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)





 

Category: Sex Trouble
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