The Other McCain

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

Replicating Failure

Posted on | February 4, 2015 | 102 Comments

The other day, we encountered Jillian Dunham, the 37-year-old who had her eggs frozen because she can’t find a husband.

Who is to blame for men’s unwillingness to become husbands and fathers? Could it be the phenomenon of “frivorce”? This portmanteau of “frivolous” and “divorce” was coined by Men’s Rights bloggers to describe situations in which a woman leaves a marriage that is not objectively bad, but which she perceives as failing to satisfy her emotional needs. The Douchebag Credo: “I gotta be me.”

One of the best books about the disastrous decline of the American family is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture. To summarize briefly a very complex argument, marriages are falling apart because people have forgotten what marriage is about, replacing traditional beliefs with what Whitehead calls the “love family ideology.” The decline of marriage is also part of what Christopher Lasch analyzed in The Culture of Narcissism as “a society that has lost interest in the future.” How does this manifest itself in everyday life? At Jenny Chancey’s Ladies Against Feminism blog, a commenter named “David J.” explains:

Ladies, here’s one of the biggest reasons, if not THE biggest reason, that Christian young men are leery of marriage: the behavior of their mothers — your Christian sisters.
My wife and I were married at age 21, two days after graduating from a conservative Christian college. We have three sons, ages 23, 20, and 16. The oldest graduated from a Christian college last year and is a 6th grade teacher. He is tall, good-looking, brilliant, fun, heavily involved in a very good church, and has many friends of both genders. But he is not even dating, let alone looking for marriage. My second son is a junior at a Christian college and will be going into law enforcement. He is also tall, good-looking, smart, hard-working, and very popular. He is playing the field, not dating seriously. The youngest is obviously not of marrying age, but he is seriously estranged from his mother.
The reason? Their Christian mother filed for divorce, without biblical grounds and contrary to our pastor’s and Christian marriage counselor’s advice, 4.5 years ago, after 26 years of marriage. She later withdrew that filing but then re-filed two years later. The divorce was final a little over a year ago. She immediately began dating online, then met, “fell in love” with, and married a twice-divorced man who lives 400 miles away — all within a span of 13 months. She has now relocated, taking our 18-year old special needs daughter with her.
My sons are shell-shocked, both by the unbiblical divorce (commonly referred to in the “manosphere” as a frivolous divorce, or a “frivorce”) and by the rush into an unbiblical remarriage. They are asking themselves why they should even contemplate marriage when their primary example of Christian womanhood and wifehood has demonstrated that nothing protects them from a unilateral, frivolous divorce at any time — not the law, not the woman’s profession of faith, not the input of Christian counselors, not the church (which is afraid to step in or “take sides”), not the length of the marriage, not even the interests of the children. Perhaps most importantly for this audience, my sons also saw that other Christian women will do nothing to protect them from a frivolous divorce.
I’ve learned that mine is not at all an isolated situation. In fact, two-thirds of all divorces today are initiated by wives, and only rarely for non-frivolous/biblical reasons.
So, if you really want to raise the level of interest in marriage for Christian young men and/or increase the number of potential suitors for your daughters, (1) don’t divorce their fathers and (2) don’t sit silently by while your Christian sisters initiate frivolous divorces.

Parental behavior communicates a powerful message to children, and how parents treat each other is part of that message. Bail out after four kids and 26 years of marriage? Why? Do you really think you’ll be happier as someone else’s third wife? You think he’s Mister Perfect, but his first two wives just weren’t good enough for him?

Failure replicates:

Many people see remarriage as a fresh new chance at happiness with a partner whom they should have chosen in the first place.  But the statistics reveal that second or later marriages are much more likely to end in divorce.

Not only does marital failure replicate in this way — people who have divorced once are more likely to divorce again — but it also replicates in the subsequent generations:

The National Opinion Research Council conducted a survey of adult children of divorce that spanned more than 20 years. Here’s what they found: In 1973, adult children of divorce were 172% more likely to get divorced than adult children from intact homes. In 1999, adult children of divorce were only 50% more likely to get divorced than adult children from intact homes . . . which sounds like good news.
However, the bad news is that the survey also found a 26% lower rate of marrying in the first place among adult children of divorced parents. . . .
Children of divorce often experience expectations of failure, fear of loss or abandonment and fear of conflict throughout their lives. These anxieties are reflected in their romantic relationships by poor partner or behavior choices, giving up too quickly when problems arise or avoidance of any perceived level of commitment.

People see statistics like that and say to themselves, “Well, my choices won’t follow the trend,” but exactly where the hell do you think  trends come from? Trends don’t cause human behavior, human behavior causes trends. Your choices, your decisions, your actions inevitably have far-reaching ripple effects on others, and yet narrow-minded selfishness causes people to think they can live according to the Douchebag Credo — “I gotta be me!” — without consequences. These are the same people, of course, who blame “society” for their problems without pausing to look in the mirror and realize they are part of “society,” too.

You can’t outsource personal responsibility. And failure replicates.

 

Category: Marriage

The Rape Culture …

Posted on | February 4, 2015 | 24 Comments

. . . no feminist can ever be bothered to notice:

Prosecutors allege Qayed Shareef, 39, pretended to be a teenage boy named Jeremy Stevens when he used an app called Tango to contact a 9- and 10-year-old boy, two brothers in Virginia.
“He basically just started it off, ‘Hey what’s your age?’ And within an hour, took it sexual,” said prosecutor Vanessa Woods.
“He sent photos and videos of himself, as well as pornographic videos.” Authorities say the 39-year-old then gave instructions to the boys to record each other and to him send the photos and videos.
“He was very specifically asking them to do various sexual positions, acts, show sexual body parts,” Woods said. . . .
Lt. Jeff Hallock of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said Shareef likely had more knowledge on how to evade law enforcement because he “has an expertise in computers and IP addresses and Internet.”
Shareef, who has pleaded not guilty, is expected to return to court on March 27. He is being held on $2 million bail.

Should we lock him in a cage and set him on fire?

(Hat-tip: Eric Dondero at Libertarian Republican.)

 

Category: Crime, Sex

In The Mailbox, 02.04.15

Posted on | February 4, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Mattress Girl Saga Continues
Doug Powers: Obama Still Unclear On ISIS’ Ideological Motivations After Latest Act Of Barbarism
Twitchy: Gawker Writer Worries Execution Of ISIS Terrorist Might Get “Spun Badly”
Kipling Society: The Grave Of The Hundred Head (Does anyone doubt that Jordan’s King Abdullah knows his Kipling? – WS)


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Jordan Executes Prisoners In Retaliation For ISIS Burning Pilot Alive
American Thinker: Islam And Appeasement
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Blood Infernal
Conservatives4Palin: The Big Lie – 5.6% Unemployment
Don Surber: Obama Was Also Anti-Vaccine. EVIL.
Jammie Wearing Fools: Draft Of Arrest Warrant For Argentine President Found In Dead Prosecutor’s Apartment
Joe For America: Don’t Want To Vaccinate Your Child? Then Maybe You Should Do This.
Pamela Geller: “Just Wait” – Islamic State Reveals It’s Smuggled THOUSANDS Of Jihadis Into Europe
Protein Wisdom: So.
Shot In The Dark: Saint Paul Republicans, It’s Go Time
STUMP: Causes Of Childhood Death (And Dickens)
The Gateway Pundit: Homeland Security Secretary Threatens Sheriffs – Obama Will Cut Their Grants If Congress Doesn’t Fund Amnesty
The Jawa Report: King Abdullah To ISIS
The Lonely Conservative: Will The Media Call The Democrats The Party Of No?
This Ain’t Hell: Not Balancing The Budget On The Backs Of Veterans
Weasel Zippers: White House Says Obama’s Upcoming Summit On “Violent Extremism” Will NOT Focus On Radical Islam
Megan McArdle: Government Blinks Again On Obamacare
Mark Steyn: Islam, Europe, And Free Speech


The Works of Rudyard Kipling

Category: Linkagery

Lesbian Police Officer Accused of Illegal Sex With 17-Year-Old High School Girl

Posted on | February 4, 2015 | 84 Comments

Make her a “school resource officer.” What could go possibly wrong?

SEATTLE — A Bothell police officer accused of having sex with a girl she met while serving as a school resource officer has been charged with sex crimes.
Detective Dione Thompson is alleged to have first had sex with the girl when she was a 17-year-old student at Bothell High School. Thompson, now 45, has been charged with sexual misconduct with a minor, a charge meant to punish authority figures who have sexual contact with older children.
According to charging papers, Thompson had sexual contact with the girl in her patrol car, at the Bothell library and outside an Ivar’s restaurant during their months-long liaison. Thompson persuaded the student to move in with her for a time. . . .
Writing the court, a King County Sheriff’s Office detective said Thompson’s ex-partner reported the claims in August after the former student contacted her. Police then contacted the former student, who detailed the allegations.
Thompson first chatted with the former student by Facebook, then began seeing her outside of school in the summer of 2010, the detective said in charging papers. Thompson ultimately persuaded the student — who was facing “a lot of turmoil” personally — to move into the Shoreline home Thompson shared with her partner. The former student apparently lived there for some time. . . .
The former student told investigators Thompson broke off the relationship in February 2011. Recounting an interview, the detective said the student only recently realized the harm Thompson caused by misusing the power and trust given her.

You may be wondering why this teenager had “a lot of turmoil.” The young woman is under the delusion she’s a young man:

According to charging documents, the alleged victim identified as female in 2010 and 2011, when the alleged sexual misconduct occurred, but now identifies as male. Male pronouns are used throughout the charging papers to refer to Thompson’s alleged victim.
The allegations against Thompson came to light in August when the alleged victim emailed Thompson’s former domestic partner and wrote that Thompson had sexually manipulated him, the papers say. The domestic partner wrote the alleged victim, now 22, and told him she is mandated by law to report allegations of abuse, though the charges don’t indicate her profession.
She then contacted police in Shoreline, where Thompson once lived, the charges say. Shoreline contracts with the King County Sheriff’s Office for police services.
Detectives interviewed the former student, who was 17 and 18 when he had sex with Thompson in her unmarked patrol car, her personal vehicle and her Shoreline residence as well as at [Thompson’s] parents’ home in Arlington, charging papers say. They also once had sex in the woods off the Burke-Gilman trail between Woodinville and Bothell, say the charges.

The lesbian cop’s domestic partner is “mandated by law to report allegations of abuse” — perhaps a teacher or a health-care worker — yet thought nothing of Thompson’s idea of having this profoundly disturbed teenager move into their home?

A society under pressure to accept deviant sexual behavior as normal — the “Emerging Awareness” Doctrine that was the crux of the landmark 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling — finds itself unable to make necessary judgments. Decisions about who should be entrusted to supervise vulnerable young people are among the most important decisions in any society. The vast majority of people (more than 97%, according to federal research) are heterosexual, and the vast majority of sex offenders are also heterosexual. But for many years, our society has been under pressure to accept homosexuality as normal, so that anyone who objected to a lesbian policewoman being appointed as school resource officer would have been condemned as a homophobe.

“Discrimination! Hate! Prejudice!”

So, hey, here’s a teenage lesbian –a young butch who subsequently decides she wants to be a man — having personal “turmoil” at home, and she’s becoming unusually friendly with the lesbian cop. Maybe the tolerant and enlightened staff at Bothell High School viewed this as a sort of beneficial mentoring, but if anyone suspected anything was wrong with this situation, what could they say? If this had been a male cop who seemed to be getting too friendly with a teenage girl, no one would hesitate to raise an alarm, but how dare you suspect a homosexual of inappropriate interest in a minor?

Some things are predictable and some things are not, but when you destroy moral tradition, don’t be surprised by the unhappy results.

Ideas Have Consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences.

BONUS IRONY: Powerpoint slide show about “Sex Offender Community Information” produced by . . . Detective Dion Thompson.





 

Category: Crime, Sex, Washington State

Harvard Sluts and the Thought Police

Posted on | February 3, 2015 | 60 Comments

Badger Pundit called my attention to a column in the Harvard University student newspaper by freshman Nian Hu:

I am a feminist. I believe in the equality of the sexes. For me, feminism means freedom: freedom to dress the way I want, freedom to choose whether or not to get pregnant, freedom to say no to unwanted sexual interaction, freedom to have as many sexual partners as I want without being looked down on, freedom to be an engineer or lawyer or nurse or stay-at-home mom — basically, freedom to live my life.

Whoa. Never mind whatever point Miss Hu thought she was making. The “freedom” she demands involves prohibiting others from having their own opinions. If you disapprove of promiscuity — and most people do, whether or not they openly express their disapproval — then you have somehow infringed Miss Hu’s “freedom” to be as slutty as she wants to be. That is to say, Miss Hu believes she is entitled to your approval.

How will this “freedom” she demands be enforced? How can these Harvard sluts be sure that they are not “being looked down on” while they’re putting out for every random guy in Cambridge?

And this won’t stop at Harvard. Next thing you know, those tramps at Princeton and floozies at Cornell will be demanding that everyone also approve of their notoriously rampant fornication. Ivy League girls, with their high SAT scores and low morals, have a basic human right to know that they are not “being looked down on” while they’re hooking up with any dude who is willing to risk a case of chlamydia.

“Boston residents ages 15 through 24 are almost four times
more likely to have Chlamydia than residents overall.
Among that age group, 70% of those diagnosed are female.”

What percentage of them are Harvard girls, huh? These vile hussies are a public health menace, but you’re not allowed to look down on them.

The Thought Police are everywhere now, monitoring our minds to make sure we aren’t harboring forbidden beliefs and impermissible opinions. We must think only what the progressive elites want us to think, or better yet, not even think at all. Thinking is dangerous — although perhaps not as dangerous as having sex with a nasty Harvard slut.

 

Category: Education, Feminism

In Which a Grumpy Lesbian Offers Her Feminist Understanding of Men

Posted on | February 3, 2015 | 49 Comments

You know, just once, it would be nice if we heard a married grandmother’s analysis of male psychology, sharing insights from her happy life with her husband, raising sons and daughters, observing their experience of dating and marriage and so forth.

Grant that men are always irritated by female criticism — it injures our pride and puts us on the defensive — but we might be willing to heed such criticism if it came from a woman who was successful in her own relationships with men. Instead we get lectured by emotionally unstable graduate students and various professional ax-grinders who have made careers of proclaiming their oppressed victimhood.

“The personal is the political,” and so feminist analysis nearly always emerges from the experiences of maladjusted misfits.

But why bring up Laurie Penny again?

No, let’s consult the amateur feminists of Tumblr.com. Here is Lost Princess of the Lizard People (“40 .. . gay, female . . . geek”) attempting to analyze Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs):

One of the funny things about MRAs is, many of their ideals seem self-contradictory — for example — not wanting to compete with women in the workforce, but at the same time, angry about female freeloading (I’ve even heard arguments that resent women for having sex work as an alternative to homelessness — totally ignoring the existence of men who do sex work — and that argue that women even take traditionally female dominated jobs away from men), They also tend to scream pretty loudly about their resentment of the traditional male role. They call women prudes on the one hand but sluts on the other.
It would seem this doesn’t make any sense. This is not what your chauvinist grandpa from Texas would’ve ever said; this is not the sexism we’re familiar with. It seems so ridiculous. Is anyone really this stupid??
Most seem like they’re espousing some kind of progressivism out of one side of their mouth and traditional chauvinism out of the other, and it seems so self contradictory …
What I am realizing is that no, these guys aren’t actually stupid. Many MRA attitudes are part of a larger, self-consistent world view. Let’s look at the things so many are into: a particularly radicalized form of atheism (rejection of traditional religions). Your chauvinist grandpa was all for organized religion. Objectivism, though strangely, from the other side of their mouth, they sound like they want a weird form of communism wherein they are just given accolades and raises and bonuses and kudos without ever earning them. Your chauvinist grandpa was too proud for that and even had a sense of fulfillment in hard work. And then there’s all the Libertarianism and anti-statism. Your chauvinist grandpa was an old school patriotic man, all for the military-industrial complex.
Instead of looking at MRAs only in terms of their misogyny facet, why not examine the entire picture?
They want to be aristocrats. They’re under the impression that this is the birthright of all white men. They don’t SAY this, but … it’s the only way their worldview makes sense, because from that point of view, the views that seemed contradictory, actually make sense. The “alpha/beta” (heirarchies), “Return of Kings” (an MRA site) brand aristocratic or even royal branding (this language pops up a lot) … it’s the only thing that makes this whole thing make sense.
This is a reason why arguments against them fail, because most people can’t figure out what their stand actually is, and get caught up in the vacillation. They listen hard to what’s being said but miss what was actually NOT said.
This is the only way that their superficially contradictory views make any sense. . If they were — they wouldn’t be competing with women, let alone other men, except very high status men. Any women they partnered with would come with their own wealth and *born* status (but low-status women of course would be sexually used and disposed of). They wouldn’t personally have to deal with the labor involved in running a household and they would be awarded kudos and pay without having to work overly hard for it.
Taken this way, their views about women become logically consistent, and fall into a consistent and logical frame work that accommodates their other views.

Thanks for your analysis, Lizard Princess.

As I’ve said before, I’m ambivalent toward the “Men’s Rights” movement. On the plus side, A Voice for Men consistently and directly opposes feminism, per se. This is very important.

For too long, the established Right has offered a neoconservative opposition to feminism that tries to win the argument by ceding the premise (i.e., that “sexual equality” is either desirable or possible) and offering women an ersatz “me too” Republican feminism. This is not the original (and successful) anti-feminism of conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly. Nor is it even the anti-feminism of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a real neoconservative who rejected the feminist movement because of its hostility to marriage and motherhood. While I appreciate the valuable work of Christina Hoff Sommers, her attempt to rescue the “feminist” label from the feminist movement was doomed from the start. The title of Dr. Sommers’ most famous book poses a question: Who Stole Feminism? And the answer is, “Nobody.” Marxist radicals, abortion lobbyists and lesbian man-haters did not “steal” feminism; they were in control of the Women’s Liberation Movement from its very inception in the 1960s. Trying to re-define “feminism” for conservative purposes is futile and perhaps even dishonest. Our proper goal is to oppose feminism, and MRAs are willing to do so without apology.

On the negative side, however, the phrase “Men’s Rights” implies that males and females are necessarily antagonistic in their interests, an idea I reject. The problem, as I see it, is that feminists have wrongly intruded the political language of “rights” into a private sphere. Remember that the title of Kate Millett’s 1970 book (the first book produced by the Women’s Liberation Movement) was Sexual Politics — which is the problem of feminism summarized in two words.

FEMINISM IS ABOUT SEX!

POLITICS CAN’T SOLVE YOUR SEX PROBLEMS!

Excuse me for shouting in ALL CAPS there, but after more than four decades of failing to solve the basic problem they set out to solve, I think people need to wake up to the truth. Human nature is not infinitely malleable. Attempting to re-arrange society to accommodate the permanent discontent of professional ax-grinders has not solved their problem, because their problem is an inability to adjust successfully to normal adulthood. Instead, feminism has only created new problems for women, problems that did not exist before the Women’s Liberation Movement began its futile attempt to bring about an egalitarian androgynous utopia.

Is anyone surprised to learn that our Lizard Princess (“40 . . . gay, female . . . geek”) failed in heterosexual relationships — she speaks about an ex-husband, a marriage that apparently lasted less than two years — and has since experienced failure in her lesbian relationships? Valentine’s Day was always unhappy with her most recent partner:

This is the kind of sh*t my ex pulled about nearly all “special days”.
me: “So what do you want to do?”
ex: “Anything you come up with will be great” (note that it was always up to me to do the romancing; I was basically cast into the traditional male role in a lot of ways)
The day rolls around.
me: “How do you like it?”
ex, starry eyed and smiling: “Oh it was wonderful! I love it when you do that.”
Six months later:
Ex picks fight seemingly out of nowhere.
ex: “I knew you’d forget about ___ (insert random thing), you didn’t even remember what I liked for [Valentine’s Day].”
me: “Wait, I asked you what you wanted to do.”
ex: “there you go, you never remember our conversations, because you weren’t paying attention. I TOLD you.”
-or-
ex: “You did, but if you’d actually paid attention to what I like, you would’ve known. But you didn’t, and never do.”
me: “Well, I can’t read your mind.”
ex: “You didn’t have to read my mind, you just didn’t know me.”

Lizard Princess elsewhere complains:

Basically, my associations with relationships and [Valentine’s Day] are memories of painful awkwardness. It only tended to highlight how bad the relationship actually was, it was something we had to grin and bear until we broke up a week later. Seriously, most of my relationships have broken up a week or two after [Valentine’s Day] . . .
So yes. I F–KING HATE VALENTINE’S DAY AS A COUPLE HOLIDAY.
Every single [Valentine’s Day] I have is a day I count my blessings that I am not in a f–ked up situation and it feels like *fresh air*. And dammit, I do want to be healed and whole enough to love someone again, but I have really bad associations around [Valentine’s Day].

This is the woman, you see, who presumes to provide objective analysis of the “self-contradictory” ideals of Men’s Rights activists. She couldn’t succeed in heterosexual marriage, but she can’t sustain a lesbian relationship, either. It’s almost as if . . .

UNHAPPY PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

There’s your real bottom line. Do I claim to know why all of Lizard Princess’s relationships have been such hopeless bummers? No. As I said of Jillian Dunham, maybe it’s just bad luck or maybe it’s bad judgment.

Finding a good relationship requires either (a) an ability to recognize good character, or (b) an ability to cope with the particular character flaws of the imperfect partner you have chosen. Maybe also (c) a bit of both, because very few people are of such excellent character that their partner never has any cause for complaint. What you must avoid is situation (d) — being a flawed person who attracts other flawed people and yet is unable either to admit your own shortcomings or to accept your partner’s shortcomings.

The Lizard Princess’s complaints about her partners are not necessarily wrong, nor do I doubt that she might have identified something important about the mentality of many MRAs, in their ideal of an atheist libertarian aristocracy of Alpha males. The problem, as with most feminist analysis, is that we have unhappy misfits telling us what’s wrong with “society,” rather than having successful people telling us how to succeed and be happy in society as it exists.

Alas, the unhappy misfits are so full of envy and self-righteousness that none of them would listen to good advice if it were offered, nor can we expect them to ask happy successful people to share the secrets of our success and happiness. (Hint: People used to tell me I acted like I was God’s gift to women. I seldom bothered to explain that it’s not acting.)

And what’s with this site calling itself “A Return of Kings”? When were we ever deposed and overthrown? Our reign has been continuous, no matter what that chattering rabble may say.




 

 

Speaking of A Voice for Men, Pierce Harlan reports that a New Jersey grand jury has declined to indict five students at William Paterson University who were accused of gang rape.

The accusation was false? But . . . I thought women never lie about rape.

 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox, 02.03.15

Posted on | February 3, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Fire Darrell Bevell
First Street Journal: The American Left – Do As I Say, Not As I Do!
Twitchy: Protesters Kicked Out After Disrupting American Sniper Screening
Terry Teachout: WASP Without A Sting


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Fox’s Shepard Smith Slams Anti-Vaxxers – “You’re Science-Deniers!”
American Thinker: How To Make Young People Conservative
Conservatives4Palin: NO CONSERVATIVES ALLOWED – LGBT Needs New Leadership, New Blood, New Ideas
Don Surber: Liberal Lies Never Die. EVIL.
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Monsters Throw Gay Man Off Building, Then Stone Him After He Survives
Joe For America: Four Countries That Are On the Right Economic Track
JustOneMinute: Monday Morning QB
Pamela Geller: Most Americans Remain Unaware Of This Gruesome Milestone
Protein Wisdom: A Wonkish Non-Wonk’s Thumbnail Analysis Of The Obama Budget Proposal
Shot In the Dark: Women And Guns, Take II
STUMP: 80 Percent Pension Funding Hall Of Shame – It Would Be Ideal To Pay The Pensions
The Gateway Pundit: Obama Admin – Transgender Illegal Aliens Have Right To Hormone Therapy
The Jawa Report: Lebanese Reporter Pwns Da Jooos
The Lonely Conservative: Scott Walker Way Ahead In Drudge Poll (SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!)
This Ain’t Hell: ISIS Relabels And Distributes UN Aid
Weasel Zippers: Obama Threatens To Halt Paychecks For 143,000 Homeland Security Employees If GOP Doesn’t Give Up Amnesty Fight
Megan McArdle: The Goldilocks Approach To Unemployment
Mark Steyn: Shoulder To Shoulder, But Not Head To Head


Thanks to everyone who contributed to my GoFundMe!
We reached the $1500 goal yesterday!
Special thanks to Bob Danger, wherever you are.


Shop Amazon Fashion – 30% Off Jewelry

Category: Linkagery

Or Maybe It’s You

Posted on | February 2, 2015 | 87 Comments

Jillian Dunham was 37 when she made a desperate choice:

When David Keefe made egg freezing a part of his clinical practice a decade ago, he imagined that single women looking to delay childbearing would be a small percentage of his patients. Before then, few women froze their eggs, and those in his clinic who did so were usually about to undergo cancer treatment. But when I met him in 2012, the year the American Society of Reproductive Medicine declared the procedure no longer experimental, he told me that close to half of his freeze patients were single women like me. Today, 80 percent of his patients are women electing to delay childbearing. . . .
I cringed every time I saw a reference to single women in their 30s and 40s “searching for Mr. Right,” which means that I cringed a lot. Dating was cast as “a desperate series of co-parent interviews.” . . .
Before he was a fertility specialist, Dr. Keefe was a psychiatrist. He speaks in scientific details but also in parables. He told me the story of a woman who did one freeze cycle and later had a child, and another who did multiple cycles but was unable to conceive. He told me the story of a woman who broke up with a man who had strung her along for years, only to learn that she had almost no eggs left. . . .
“I wasted a lot of time in my last relationship,” I admitted. “I want to make sure that I take care of myself.”
He leaned forward and paused. “There’s something wrong with the men in your generation,” he said. I was stunned. Here was a doctor who had just been talking about the importance of considering statistical significance, and now he was chalking my dating problems up to the broadest of generalizations. But he was articulating two forms of truth: the mathematical and the personal.
“It isn’t you,” he said. “All day long, I see patients like you. You’re smart, beautiful, accomplished, nice. It makes no sense. I go home to my wife and I say, ‘There’s something wrong with the men in this generation. They won’t grow up.’” . . .

You can read the whole thing, and I don’t want to argue directly against Dr. Keefe’s analysis. However, there is countervailing evidence: Women no less smart, beautiful, accomplished and nice than Jillian Dunham do get married and do have babies long before they turn 37.

Nevertheless, when I worked in D.C. every day for a decade, I routinely encountered women who were in her situation or, if younger than her, were clearly at risk of someday being in her situation. They kept wasting time in “relationships” with men who refused to close the deal. These romantic involvements would last anywhere from a few months to several years, and it was always — always — the guy’s aversion to a permanent commitment that prevented these relationships from becoming marriages. The real problem, it seems to me, is not merely the widespread phenomenon of “Peter Pan Syndrome,” but that (a) young women unwittingly enable such male immaturity because (b) they miscalculate the economics of love, and therefore (c) they waste one of a woman’s most valuable resources, her youth.

The smart, beautiful, nice girl is popular in high school. She has no trouble getting a boyfriend in college. As a 20-something in the singles scene, she gets plenty of attention. To such a young woman, the idea of being in a hurry to find a husband may seem absurd. Yet in the immortal words of Teen Talk Barbie, “Math is hard.”

If you graduate college at 22, you have eight years before you turn 30. Those are very valuable years. However smart, beautiful and nice she may be, a woman is more attractive to the average male when she’s 22 than when she’s 30. You can complain that this double standard that places a premium on female youthfulness is unfair, but you can’t avoid the fact that it is nevertheless real. A woman who is very attractive may think she can defy the odds and that it will be no problem for her to find Mister Right when she’s 30, but what if she’s wrong? She fritters away her 20s in a series of pointless relationships — six months with this guy, two years with that guy, etc. — and before she even notices the pattern, the clock is ticking down: She’s 27, 28, 29 . . .

Bad habits are hard to break. The girl whose first “serious relationship” ends in heartbreak after a few months may not recognize that she has developed bad romantic habits. After the second or third breakup, she’s like a poker player on a losing streak and tells herself she’s a victim of bad luck. An attractive woman in her mid-20s still has a large stack of poker chips in front her, so to speak, and she can keep playing with the same bad strategy a while before the odds shift decisively against her. She’s 30, 31, 32 . . .

Jillian Dunham, predictably, turns her failure into a feminist lesson:

Freezing my eggs did not change my dating life. What it did do was expose me, again and directly, to the ways we treat women when there is a decision to be made about their bodies: We judge, pressure, and publicly debate a woman’s ability to direct her own life. We fret about women’s susceptibility to “false hope,” about their being manipulated by the egg-freezing industrial complex, rather than believing women to be capable of assessing information and understanding risk. We judge women who pay thousands of dollars to freeze their eggs, rather than spending that energy advocating for those who can’t. We criticize women for not being able to control variables that are necessarily out of their control, something that is insulting to everyone involved.

You may notice that rationalizing failure seems to be the point of many feminist narratives. The whole point of feminism is convincing women they are never responsible for their own failures. Feminists will call you a misogynist if you ask a woman to consider the possibility that maybe men are not to blame for all her problems.

Still, not all women have the same problem, do they? Maybe it’s bad luck or maybe it’s bad judgment, but maybe your problem is you.

 

Category: Feminism
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin