House of Eratosthenes

I have bad news. Men and women are different…
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Yes, men and women had different evolutionary pressures. There is a pattern to humanity.
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It all comes down to men hunted and women gathered. Neither work was – before I get jumped – easy or what we’d call safe, but they presented different kinds of danger and different kinds of overcoming it, which in turn led to very different group mechanics.

Men needed to trust each other absolutely; needed to know their place in the hierarchy; and allowed for innovation in the service of group success. Women, on the other hand needed to have a cohesive group, meaning you had to behave like the rest of the group. Sticking out was bad because it didn’t materially help the group…
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A while back there was a book about a woman who dressed up and passed as a man – I think it’s called Self Made Man – and the revelations she got this way. The things that “wives can’t know about husbands” type of revelations. By and large, she got me to blink and go “you didn’t know that?” or “You mean most women don’t know that?” Because I already did. But I might be a different case. As I said I grew up around my brother and his friends, and they tended to think it didn’t matter what they said in front of me. And my husband and I talk about just about everything.

BUT that said, there is a group of women, we’ll call them “the sob sisters” who are really really dumb about this. They either view men as a sort of hairier woman with a penis, or they wish he were so. These are the women who fight you tooth and nail on things like “Men are truly different” and “No, gender is not all ‘social construction’.”

I never understood their psychology, though I’ve been interacting with them since Kindergarten. They were the little girls who wanted to boys to admire their pretty frocks, but didn’t want to play rough lest they tore the frills, and therefore demanded that boys not be “rough” around them. (Which largely amounted to their not being boys.)
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…Hell hath no fury and ability to oppress as one of these weak, die-away sisters given some power, but every woman here will know what I’m talking about, because sooner or later you find yourself fin a group where one of these has got the bit between their teeth. Their power is mostly gossip and back stabbing and unbelievable psychological abuse, but they use it to the hilt.

Which is why they think that if men aren’t using their superior strength, it must be because they’re weak, and the “solution” to society (they nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones. It’s nuttiness) is to raise men to be weak and not to know their own strength. Hence the entire “rise of the sensitive male.”
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…yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters. The problem is they aren’t. Not even when they’re raised to act that way.

The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.

Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag.

Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible. Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.
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Chivalry and the code thereof was the laying down of those good reproductive (and civilizational) rules that make for a functioning society that passes on its values to its young: men who put their strength at the service of the weaker; women who praised them and admired them for it; and children who were raised to do the same.

Tearing it down might seem like freedom, but you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.

Superman gets it. “…[T]hey don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.” That’s the whole situation, right there. And that’s the problem.

Apart from that, there is much upon which to be chewed here. The bit about “men and women had different evolutionary pressures” fascinates me, because I’ve often thought so. But the science that has come my way hasn’t been usefully decisive about how this kind of “wiring” could work. And we as a society are only allowed to comment on the eventual results about half the time — when it makes men properly and politically-correctly look like idiots.

Raymond and the Kitchen Fire Only a woman can make things work in the kitchen — good. A woman’s place is in the kitchen — that’s bad. Very, very bad. Can’t say that. Sometimes differences are good, sometimes they’re bad, if ever you’re in doubt just ask yourself if your comment would make a feminist smirk, full of haughtiness, self-righteousness, and smarmy glee churned up with just a touch of ritual righteous indignation. If it does that, then it’s “okay” to say it in mixed company, otherwise keep your dumb retrograde chauvinist monkey-face mouth shut, you sexist hater you. Notice the differences when the differences put women on top. All other times, it’s back to “pretend men are just hairy women with a different way to pee sometimes.”

Over and over again, we see reminders that women are indoors and men are outdoors. There are the fights over the thermostat, and memories of our parents having the same fights about the thermostat.

It’s late September now, and I will soon be stripped of my incentive for walking & biking & jogging early in the morning. No more sexy fellow joggers at 6 a.m. Unless, for whatever reason, you think a sexy jogger can be a dude. A sausage-fest of dudes out there, wearing things guys shouldn’t wear, displaying parts of dude-body that nobody wants to see. The girls will haul it in for the winter, taking their exercise on the machine at the gym, or in the 75-degree living room. Which is really something considering this is NorCal. An autumn sunrise hour here is not harsh climate by any reasonable measure. But every year at this time, the gender shift on the jogging trail is swift, sudden and remarkable. Chicks hate cold. We can pretend it isn’t true, but pretending is about the best we can manage. Their bodies are built to get pregnant. We guys can be well on our way to hypothermia before we’ll admit anything is amiss. Our bodies are thicker, furrier, our fathers were far quicker to tell us something unsympathetic like “put on a damn sweater,” and because of the pregnancy thing, the sensation of cold involves different connotations for us. Besides of which there’s always that male-denial thing.

Every four years we see a voting disparity, also impossible to ignore. That isn’t because dudes-is-racist. That, as we have been reminded even in recent years, is the security-versus-freedom thing. And why should we criticize one side of that divide or the other, really, when you think about it. If you’re personally caring for a small child for a good chunk of your days and nights, it makes perfect sense to value security over opportunity. If men and women can indeed evolve on separate tracks, then it stands to reason women would look at such issues differently, even the women who’ve decided they’d rather have a career than a family.

I’m wishing Ms. Hoyt did not choose to put the following inside the parentheses…

[T]hey nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones. It’s nuttiness…

That is the tip of a tail of a very, very large dinosaur skeleton, worthy of study over every corner of every bone, every rib, every tooth and claw. Feminism, today, is an unworkable contradiction: It seeks to assert doctrinaire beliefs about personal characteristics, while at the same time seeking to obliterate those very characteristics. They seek to render meaningless the gender divide, even though the gender divide is the cornerstone of every argument they have to make. And you see this conflict in everything they do. If a feminist plays miniature golf, or Tetris, or Monopoly, or Poker, or Risk, and there is a way to play the next move that is somehow anti-gender-identity, then that is how she will want to play it. It’s fascinating to watch. And a little bit embarrassing, if you can feel embarrassment for the object of your study, by proxy.

Finally, “you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.” Excellent. Stealing that one, shamelessly and probably soon.

The cheif Rabbi in France (in First Things about homosexual parenting, which he says does not exist) :
Today we face the immense risk of irreversibly scrambling the chain of generations. Just as one cannot destroy the foundations of a house without the house collapsing, one cannot reject the foundations of our society without putting that society in danger.

Also, the following from this article I found very interesting:

So G-d created man in his own image, in the image of G-d he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). The biblical account grounds sexual difference in the act of creation. The polarity of masculine–feminine pervades all that exists, from clay to G-d. It is part of what is given primordially and what guides the respective vocations—the being and the agency—of man and woman. The duality of the sexes is part of the anthropological constitution of humanity.

Thus, every person is brought sooner or later to recognize that he possesses only one of the two fundamental versions of humanity and that the other will remain forever inaccessible. Sexual difference is thus a mark of our finitude. I am not the whole of humanity. A sexed being is not the totality of the species; it needs a being of the other sex to produce its likeness.

Feminists are generally pro gay men because it brings themselves closer to being accepted in
masculine roles.
- Becky | 09/20/2013 @ 05:17
Feminists are generally pro gay men because it brings themselves closer to being accepted in
masculine roles

That’s an interesting take. I’d always thought of it the other way — they liked gay men because those men display more feminine traits (empathy, outer-directedness, &c). But your view makes a lot of sense as well.

[I’m reminded of an old quote from Fred Reed: “Feminists aren’t happy being women, and they can’t be men, so they compromise by being disagreeable”].
- Severian | 09/20/2013 @ 06:26
I’ve had a lot of trouble with that. I suspect it’s a generational thing and there are some other 40+ people having problems with it too. This gets back to the comment “They seek to render meaningless the gender divide, even though the gender divide is the cornerstone of every argument they have to make.” In the early seventies it made a lot more sense: Here’s a woman, brimming over with womanly hair and a womanly skirt and womanly traits, now there’s NO REASON why she can’t be the boss, or at least take on some responsibilities greater than clutching a steno pad taking notes while someone else is speaking.

People may have balked at the whole thing about “When you do construction on a two-lane road, at least 50% of your flag-men must be women” thing. But the argument, at least, made sense. It didn’t contradict itself.

Now, it’s more like “Women are strong, women are capable, if women ran the world there wouldn’t be any wars, and oh by the way there’s no difference between the sexes.” It’s weird. It’s like people have come up with the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in their noggins at the same time, by way of losing the ability to detect & act upon contradictions…and this new direction of feminism is sort of building on top of that. Or, alternatively, digging down beneath the bedrock of the hole that was already dug.
- mkfreeberg | 09/20/2013 @ 07:09

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Thursday, September 19th, 2013