Senator Says PMS To Blame for Congressional Dysfunction

Holy smokes, this is liable to get somebody's panties in a wad:

Senator Tim Akin said that men are more effective working in Congress because of these traits that they bring to the table.

"We men are less hormonal," Sen Akin said. "We don't have that need to rage once a month, what with bloating and headaches making us and everyone around us miserable. Instead, I think we [men] are problem solvers. That's what this country needs."

Another male senator, Republican, agreed. "Maybe it is the estrogen or insecurity or ego that is attached there. But I look at what I have been asked to do by the people of my home state, and it's pretty serious stuff. And it's not the title, but it's the responsibility that comes with the service that I think makes a difference".

Wow, I can't believe men would dare to say stuff like this in the same year that a record-breaking 20 female senators were sworn in, some 160 years after Seneca Falls and 40 years after the ERA. Keep your heads down fellas, because we're fixing to get blasted with stern pronouncements from NOW and all those paid professionally aggrieved types.

Story here.

Ugh. Nice going, guys.

Note: This post is a parody, riffing on some words from a pair of female senators. I don't do sarcasm or irony here very often, so I probably got some of you going by now. Please click the link to read what was actually said.

Soft Spot for Choice Mommies

Recently, family Wapiti did some hunting for a new church home subsequent to moving to a different house in a different locale.  In the process, I noted something that all of the larger churches had: a divorce support group.

How the Church handles divorce is always a thorny issue, one that often earns her some jeers from the manosphere.  On the one hand, there is the pastoral responsibility to look after the flock, to close ranks around those in need. On the other there is the pastoral responsibility to discipline the flock, rebuking wayward brothers and sisters toward repentance.

While I tend to think that pastors err too much toward caring and not enough toward discipline, I recognize that the Church and her leaders are presented with a no-win scenario: What should be done about those members of the Body who divorce, or those divorcees who present themselves at the church door?  Care for them? Or discipline them? Adding to the problem is victimhood. Usually, divorcees will blame their former spouse for their quandary: women because he was such an abusive or bad guy that they had to get out, men because the solipsistic and hysterical woman took their children, sold them for a few ducats and prizes, and kept half or more of his hard-earned stuff. How are church leaders to know the difference, when most/all claim that "she kidnapped my kids and took me to the cleaners" or "he was so bad I had no choice"?

So I can appreciate the difficult position the Church and her leaders are in. That said, what I find reprehensible is when Church leaders exculpate one population from their sins, and by extension, placing responsibility for the state of this population on another group. In this case, I'm talking about choice mommies--the "population"--and men, the always-useful other.  Single mothers are near-canonized in churches, those saintly women, struggling so hard to make ends meet. Little thought is given to how they got into that position, and whether or not their present condition was due to her choice (most likely) or his (far less likely but still possible).

Thus I cringe when I see things like this from Pastor Driscoll of Mars Hill. I suppose one can add his moral support to the sum total of cultural and financial incentive for women to divorce, and to the near-complete liberalist campaign of removing the stigma from choice mommyhood:

It’s important for kids without a dad to have godly, male investment in their life. Young boys without a dad need the godly investment of a man. Young girls without a dad need a godly man’s loving encouragement. And the single moms really appreciate godly men investing in their kids. 

[The church nursery is] a good place to meet a nice gal. Single guys may not know this, but nice, single gals who love Jesus and want to marry and become a mom someday are working in the nursery. That’s like fishing in a trout pond if you’re a single guy. And the single moms dropping off their kids should be considered for marriage too. After all, Jesus’ mother was a single mom until Joseph married her and adopted Jesus. [bolded emphasis mine]

As mentioned before, there are many reasons for children to be without a dad, and not many of them are good. This white-knighting on behalf of single mothers may be helping a truly innocent woman make her way through a bad situation. Or more likely it is enabling the terrible choices of a choice mommy who has and is harming her children through her self-destructive and child-harming behavior.  Furthermore, how do/would my male readers feel, if your children are the ones a choice mommy is presenting to the nursery for some Godly man investment, as opposed to your paternal guidance?

Then there is the bit about trolling for a wife in the single mom pond. This is just not very wise, and I recommend my brothers avoid looking to this population for long-term mates. Sorry choice mommies, I'm not judging you, but I am judging your behavior, and coming to appropriate conclusions based upon the evidence.


Last, there is the whole bit about Mary being a single mom. I doubt Pastor Driscoll is intending to indulge in blasphemy here, more likely he is clumsily attempting to illustrate that we may not know exactly how a single mother found herself in her position. Even then it is an imperfect analogy, for Mary wasn't single, she was betrothed, which back then was a state akin to marriage. Joseph took betrothal-marriage so seriously that he meant to divorce her quietly--therefore turning Mary into a single mom for being an apparent adulteress--and would have were it not for divine intervention.

Rather than soft-pedal and condone the socially retrograde behavior of choice momies, perhaps church leaders would do better to sadly note their condition while strenuously condemning from the pulpit divorce as the evil that God hates, an evil that Moses only granted to the Israelites because their hearts were hard.  I still think Dalrock's sign at the church door would serve as a good reminder to all that while accidents happen, divorce is not accidental.

Beware the Flesh-Controlled Woman

Is advising women to "follow your heart" functionally distinct from telling men to "follow your penis"? Personally, I can't discern any difference. Thus, via the Social Pathologist, I present to you the Taylor Swift song "I Knew You Were Trouble" [lyrics] about the alluring honeytrap of "5 minutes of alpha". Sad that women, just like men, follow their gonads to their doom:


To which SP commented:

Christian men please note. Sweet Taylor is singing a song about a douchebag. Its a song about about alpha love. More precisely it's about 5 mins of alpha love.

Taylor Swift's transformation is a good example of how a man should not conflate beauty with goodness. Frequently, when it comes to women, beauty is conferred on those who are otherwise moral idiots. A good woman is not just pretty but has good character. Now go and read this post by Roosh V.

For Christian men, the pickings are mighty slim.

One line of lyrics from Miss Swift's song is "...but I just thought, how can the devil be pulling you toward someone who looks so much like an angel when he smiles at you?" Indeed, this story has been the same since the Garden--the Deceiver fakes out man and woman.  How much easier is it to deceive when man or woman is convinced that the rush of urge-to-merge chemicals is "true love", denoting the "one", and to follow your feelings?

Simon Grey, in the comments section to SP's post, said it best: the pickings have always been mighty slim for Christian men (cf Proverbs 31).   The spirit-controlled woman's worth is far more than rubies; for her values make her and women like her scarce.

The Folly of Disarming Evil

The liberalist war on guns, presently in high gear in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre, appears to this cheap-seat commenter to be borne of the left's profoundly naive conceptualization of humanity.  To the liberalist, man is perfectable, and can be shaped toward good and away from evil (that is, if liberalists, some of whom consider themselves "beyond good and evil", can even recognize evil in the first place) if given the correct environment and upbringing. This view clashes violently with that of monotheists of an Abrahamic bent, who recognize that man in his natural state is wicked through-and-through.

This helps explain the present left-right divide on gun control.  The liberalist thinks that disarming evil--or, applied to the gun control question, at least making it really really really hard for evil to have access to firearms--will then deny evil the ability to harm. Evil people are still people however, and homo sapiens being (a) inclined to use tools, (b) adaptive and creative, and (c) don't really deal well with being told "no", well, they'll merely use another implement to do their deeds.  Thus I read with not a bit of surprise that doctors in the UK had called for a ban sharp kitchen knives.  This was back in 2005, mind you:

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

 A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.  They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.  The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.  

 They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.  None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.  The researchers said a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault - but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs.  In contrast, a pointed long blade pierces the body like "cutting into a ripe melon". 

 The use of knives is particularly worrying amongst adolescents, say the researchers, reporting that 24% of 16-year-olds have been shown to carry weapons, primarily knives.  The study found links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established.

The interesting thing about this article is just how similar the "ban the pointy kitchen knife" rhetoric is to the "ban the black/scary looking gun" rhetoric.  Plus ca change. It is also suggestive that when/if the gun-banners get their way, and all civilian firearm ownership is prohibited, the nannies' logic will compel them to move down their hit list to the next most popular class of weapons. After all, merely taking tools away from evil doesn't change the evil hearts of men; with evil left to its own devices, it will merely switch the tools that it uses.

And that brings me to my next point: we don't have a tools problem in America, we have a culture / values / morality problem in America.  We abhor the evil that killed 20 children and 27 adults in Newtown, yet we collectively condone and even defend and advocate a culture of barbaric violence.  As NRA President Mr. LaPierre noted in a post-Sandy Hook press conference, a culture of death is the terrible result: 

Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here's one: it's called Kindergarten Killers. It's been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn't or didn't want anyone to know you had found it?

 Then there's the blood-soaked slasher films like "American Psycho" and "Natural Born Killers" that are aired like propaganda loops on "Splatterdays" and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life. And then they have the nerve to call it "entertainment."

 But is that what it really is? Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?

 In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.

 A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18.

We promote and defend murderous violence as entertainment. We feast on death and mayhem and misery; we snack on it as if it were Ritz crackers. That in and of itself is monstrous. What's far worse is the systematic rubbing out of life deemed inconvenient.  Yes, I am talking about abortion, a singular evil borne of malice, rationalization, and selfish solipsism, an evil which has killed over 54M children since 1973.  The euphemism for this national and worldwide holocaust is "women's choice", while the slaughter of 20 equally innocent children by a lone tipped-over mentally ill male is rightfully called senseless murder. The latter is decried by all, while the former only by a small band of radical activists...thus providing support to the maxim "kill one, they call you a murderer. Kill millions, they call you a conqueror".

Liberalist mouthpieces attempt to Alinsky the NRA (i.e., freeze it, personalize it, polarize it)  for its protection of private ownership of firearms, itself a named Constitutional right, perhaps conservative types should in turn "Alinsky" Planned Parenthood for its commercial promotion of unlimited in-utero baby killing, itself a right nowadays but one that was discovered 200 years after the Constitution was written, hidden under one of the Founders' penumbras. an emanation of liberalist fever swamp rationalizing logic.  Thus I find myself in near-total agreement with columnist Jeffrey Lord over at the American Spectator, when he wrote:

“The horrifying truth is this: we live now in a culture that not only does not respect life, but discards it like trash — not only at the beginning of life, but also at the end, and every place in between.

“What has happened to us?”

— Catholic Deacon Greg Kandra

October 2, 2011

Discards life like trash.

One does not have to be a Catholic, which I am not, to appreciate the irony today in the words above from over a year ago by a Catholic Deacon named Greg Kandra. (You can find the full text of Deacon Kandra’s remarks here.)  

From 1863 until 1972 — the last year before Roe v. Wade — in all those 109 years there were 36 mass murder rampages, and that’s before one adds in school shootings of the kind that went on in Newton this last week.  Since 1973, and Roe v. Wade was decided in January of that year, there have been a shocking 54 rampages. Which is to say there have been 54 of these things in the mere 39 years since Roe v. Wade.  And as mentioned that doesn’t count the school massacres in the U.S. Counting Newtown there have been 5. Before 1973 there was one in 1927 Michigan (where the killer used not bullets but dynamite) and another at the University of Texas in 1966. Since 1973 there have been three — Newtown, Columbine, and Virginia Tech.  Which is to say in all of the recorded American history of school massacres from the time records were first kept, until 1973 — there were but two instances of this. Since 1973, in a mere 39 years there have been three.

Times columnist Charles Blow — again without the slightest sense of irony — talks about “A Tragedy of Silence” while quoting the leftist Mother Jones magazine about all the mass shootings that magazine has counted (their number is 61) “over the last 30 years.” Meaning columnist Blow makes the point without even realizing he has made it: those mass shooting have occurred in the world created by Roe v. Wade 39 years ago. 

The millions of dead babies are unseen, their dismembered corpses disposed of in refuse bins, far away from the public eye. Abortion profiteers fight tooth and nail to keep these images hidden  Moreover, aborted babies lack names, cute pictures, or memorial services.  Yet those same babies, six years on, suddenly have value.  Perhaps this is the reason why...the deaths occur out of sight, tucked away in sanitary abortion mills, covered by the veneer of medical science.

Liberalists fancy themselves the party of science.  It's a shame no one has bothered to investigate the suspicious correlation between the nationalization of abortion via Roe and the precipitous decay of a culture that not only accepts but is entertained by homicidal mayhem.  Would it be that they would be mortified by death and murder rather than amused by it.

Neologism: "Independent" Mothers

Not long ago, the term "choice mothers" was introduced into the lexicon, to denote those (usually UMC white) women who pursue man-not-included reproduction, sometimes as a political statement and quite often to cheers of "u-go-grrl" from the Team Woman cheerleading squad, dancing and shaking their pom-poms over the graves of their child(ren)'s mental, social, moral, and academic development. Strangely, I actually liked this term, for it can be easily and etymologically accurate to apply this term to all situations where female choice--ever the priority of our culture--produces mothers who raise children on their own, without the active interference (but not, incidentally, without the resources) of a man. Thus "choice mommy" applies equally corectly to not only the well-to-do women who selfishly deny their child a resident bio father through IVF and sperm donation, but also to those who selfishly evict the father of their children from the home with the gleeful (and interest-conflicted) assistance of a legal and social system that awards them cash, prizes, and sympathy for doing so.

Now along comes "independent mothers", an oxymoron if there ever was one, in an attempt to re-brand those heroic lasses who just can't seem to get a break from all the judgementalism wrt their selfish behavior:

Was "single mother" really so stigmatizing? Of course not. It was scrupulously nonjudgmental, having been purged of the unpleasant echo of "marriage" that still hovers around the now-archaic term "unwed mother." And while the phrase "single mother" may have been value-neutral, the culture around it operated overtime to celebrate the "strong women" who were raising their children solo and to obliterate from public consciousness the males who regrettably still played a role in reproduction. The iron-clad rule in the MSM has been: When writing about single mothers, one must never, ever ask: Where are the fathers of their children? Male parents of poor children have simply been disappeared from mainstream discourse, too irrelevant to even think about.

And yet, apparently, there was still too much suggestion of deficit in the phrase "single mother." Someone, somewhere, has decided that another rebranding was in order. If single mothers are "independent," then married mothers are "dependent." Marriage is thus a detraction from the ideal feminist state and signifies participation in a compromising, patriarchal institution.  

Of course, so-called "independent mothers" are far more likely to be dependent on welfare and other forms of public assistance than married "dependent" mothers, but substituting a government check for a father has never troubled feminists and their supporters in the Democratic party. Biological fathers are of slight importance to the raising of children, after all, and the larger the welfare state, the more employment for crucial members of the Democratic base.

Like the author, I give this term good odds of survival to maturity. Just as "unwed mother" successfully marginalized "single mother" and now "choice mother", and framed / shaped the public debate ever since, we can look forward to the language police ensuring none of the archaic forms survive, and the Orwellian term "independent mother" become the new approved label that manages to mask both the dependence and, chances are, the selfish behaviors of the woman to whom the term is applied.

Boys In A Modern School

I bang on a lot about the wisdom of homeschooling. It is a choice that I heavily promote, and frankly don't understand the continued popularity of public schools given the available data. Objectively, homeschooling results in superior academic performance [pdf]* and permits parents to impart their values, particularly their religion and moral codes, free of State interference and / or liberalist proselytizing. On top of that, it's far, far safer.**  Then there is this article that documents research suggesting that early compulsory school attendance before children are cognitively ready (about age 8-10) actually stunts academic achievement. This effect is particularly acute for boys, who's cognitive development lags that of girls--with the result that a great many boys experience school failure, become delinquent, experience a lower sense of self-worth, suffer from a loss of masculine identity, and develop contempt for women.

So yes, there is much to recommend homeschooling as a superior form of education, especially for boys. Yet I, as a middle-aged Gen Xer, am looking at the homeschool vs private school question from a distance of over two decades. If public school was going downhill back then, what was it for Millennials and what is it now for the generation currently working its way through the gauntlet? This article at MRA London.org [HT: Andy at AV4M] gives us a clue:

My early school years were great, my education was great, I had maximum grades at that point; I played for my school football team and used to do some boxing. My dad and his dad were both boxers, it was great bonding time for me and my dad in the gym. Life couldn't have better, as I got towards the end of my primary school years, I did start to notice an odd trend though, my family seemed to be the minority that were like this, when I'd stay over at friends houses, it'd almost always be divorced mothers or just simply single mothers looking after my friends. I never paid it much attention however as I was just 6-11 years old at the time but I always wondered, "where's your dad?"about my friends.

 Anyway, moving on to my transition into secondary school, this is where things changed, for the worse. Secondary school is 11-16 in England, not sure what it is in other countries.

Immediately it began, we were taught, at such a young age, all of the atrocities western men had committed against everyone else, we were literally, I'm not exaggerating here, taught to be ashamed of ourselves and of our gender culture, girls were taught how great the suffragettes were and that without them they'd still be under the tyranny of evil men, I remember a particular class about this in history before, the female teachers and female students were all laughing at the stupidity of boys and men, I remember the female teacher pointing out "all the men had to fight wars, while women didn't, but it was always men that started the wars!" while the girls all laughed, I remember looking around at all the boys in my class just sitting there, quietly, blank stares on their faces, saying nothing. Then it hit me like a silver bullet, I was doing the same as them: nothing.

 However after having years of political correctness and self-shame pumped into me by this so called education system, I had no knowledge of how to even discredit them, everything they said seemed true, if it wasn't for my father teaching me about the great men of our past at a young age, I actually think I'd be another sad fool indoctrinated into feminist ideology.

[A]fter all this, I noticed something change in me, I became apathetic, lazy, unmotivated and my grades went from the top 5% in my country at age 11, to pretty much, rock bottom. I remember at age 11 I was predicted straight A* and As for my GCSEs. Well, I didn't leave that school with a single GCSE, not one. Why? I stopped caring about school, some days I just didn't turn up, I couldn't take it anymore, it was actually horrendous to be discriminated against like that by people who are supposed to be objectively teaching and nurturing me. By the time my dad noticed what was going on it was too late to do anything about it, was in the last 6 months of school; the school never notified him of my drastic drop in grades and lack of attendance. These feelings weren't just felt by me either, I can tell you now that 90% of the boys in my year didn't leave with more than 1-2 GCSEs either, a lot of the girls, the majority in fact, left that school with amazing grades, a girl I was fond of left with 3 A stars, if I remember correctly. Oh and my sister finished Primary school with high grades and carried on the trend finishing secondary school with very high grades all As and Bs. She went on to do A levels and was on her way to becoming very successful, learning multiple languages such as German and Latin when she decided to give it all up to raise a family.

To any of the older generation out there, I'd just like to tell you, this is what it was like to grow up in an education system from 1997-2006. Now I can't say it was like this in every school, as I had no experience in other schools but if generally speaking, every school was the same way mine was, we're in big trouble.

My big question is, what is going to happen when my generation has to step and live their place in the world? From my experience and the facts around me at the time, the majority of boys in my year are either unemployed or doing basic jobs like stacking shelves, digging and other menial jobs. We've literally created a generation of young men who are self-hating and apathetic without any father figures in their lives and even the ones who had father figures like me, got shafted hard by the education system we had to endure. Honestly, I'm actually really interested in seeing what happens in the next 20 years. Will feminists ever realise that their self-gratification condemns this generation of men who have been destroyed and ostracized with little chance of their life’s potential being developed?

 I was one of the few people who wasn't surprised when the UK Riots came about, it was just waiting to happen, this is the generation of young men who are supposed to be the backbone to our future.

Oh and before anyone accuses me of blaming my failings on the Education system, my father paid for me to go to an all male school, where I got 7 As in GCSEs on my first year there directly after mandatory school ended, then two years of A levels in which I got all 5 of them. This isn't some blame, pity me game, I'm just generally very interested in what you all think is going to happen if my scenario holds true for the majority of young men growing up?

I don't think it bodes well at all.  I have stated many times that the best thing parents could do to ensure the mental and physical health of their boy-children--and their girl-children too--their cognitive and moral development, and their future success in life, is to withdraw them immediately from a masculinity-destroying (and femininity-twisting) Molech.  The alternative is to surrender yet another generation of future men to this machine, this grinder which shaves them down to nubs, aborting their masculine identity and training them to be drones. Little wonder that so many male psyches do not survive this unscathed. When we pair the male survivors of an of/by/for female public school system with the male divestment / disenfranchising experiment our culture seems intent on conducting, and we have a real recipe for trouble.

The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.  Why should we plaintively wonder what is going wrong with our boys and men, stumble upon potential solutions, yet never elect to do something different? That "something different" could be as small--yet have as significant an effect--as what the father of this fellow did.  His father (or uncle, grandfather, older brother, manosphere denizen), took an active, not passive involvement in the education (not just schooling) of his son, and thereby effectively counteracted the feminist propaganda bombardment the son was receiving at school. Yes, his son was a physically a prisoner in school,*** but his mind was freed.  This suggests that the active intervention of elder males can do much to affect the fate of those who come behind.

 * Granted, the homeschooling population is rife with selection effects that affect the intellectual gifting and development of children. The biggest one is that, surprise, homeschooling parents are overwhelmingly married, with all the benefits thereto that the investment of a married mother and father bequeath to their children

** I don't have to worry about my child's teacher raping him, physically abusing him, him being bullied, or being in a dangerous self-defense-free zone.

*** Not sure why this fellow's dad didn't pull him out of public school. Perhaps he lacked the ability to do so...there are those who truly cannot exercise this choice...or maybe the DIY alternative never occurred to him

Merry Christmas to All, for He is Born

What are you doing reading this? Go be with your family.

If A Woman Does It, It's Not Rape

It's "just sex", or "midlife crisis" or "he's persistent" or "low self-esteem" or "she's vulnerable" or "it goes on everywhere" or whatever. Anything but the r-word which, apparently, only men are capable of doing:

A Florida teacher was arrested on felony charges this weekend after she was caught with her pants down having sex with a 16-year-old foreign exchange student. Amie Neely, 38, was taken into custody on Sunday, police told South Florida's WPTV, after her husband tracked her location using the GPS on her phone and found her getting it on with the teenager in a nearby parking lot.

Neighbors reported the incident to the police after the teen showed up at a nearby home later that day and said he'd been kicked out of the house "because he had sex with Amie."

Neely denied having multiple sexual encounters with the student, reportedly telling police the boy had repeatedly pressured her to have sex with him and that due to her "midlife crisis issues" she thought he would stop asking if she slept with him once.

A representative for the Community Christian Academy in Stuart, Fla., where Neely was a teacher prior to the incident, told the Daily News on Wednesday that she is no longer employed by the school.

"Community Christian Academy is aware of a legal situation involving a teacher and we are cooperating with law enforcement officials who are dealing with this as an ongoing investigation," Norma Hammond, administrative director for the school, told WPTV in the wake of Neely's arrest. "For that reason we have no further comment at this time. We will be issuing a more detailed statement after meeting with school board and church leadership."

Parents at the school expressed surprise at the news, but also offered sympathy for Neely's situation. "But you know what? She is a human being," parent Terri Gillam told WPBF 25 News. "And we all are vulnerable at different times in our life. You know, and that's sad. It's sad, because evidently, low self-esteem, you never know what goes on in people's homes. It's sad. And that's what I feel like, and that's what I pray for -- for her."

"I was shocked, but it goes on everywhere," Kelly Eldridge, another parent, told the TV station. "That's sad."

[Bolded text mine, EW]

I feel like a broken record here, but given the tenor of most of the comments, I hafta ask this question of all those equalitarians in the audience: If this were a somewhat handsome 38 yo adult male having sex with a 16 yo young adult woman, would we hear any of these excuses being offered? Or would we instead be hearing a near-universal cacaphony of demands for his gonads on a plate, to throw the book at him? If the latter, why the difference? If men and women are equal, and sex neutral laws should be applied in an even-handed manner without regard to the status of the offender, then why do equalitarians tolerate a higher behavioral standard for men, and a lower, more permissive one for women? Isn't that what is done for those not capable of full agency, such as children?

Shifting gears a bit, now comes a question for the rape culture hysteria activists: Isn't statutory rape, rape? Or is it one of the many variants of not-rape we roll up into the category of rape when we want to swing the hammer at men but still reserve the option to excuse away female criminality? Is what Ms. Neely did given a pass because it approaches Ensler-approved rape, and therefore resembles a "good rape"?*

* A fully qualified "good rape" in the Ensler taxonomy would be F-f, but since this is F-m, it doesn't quite fit.

Also, should they be in church at 10:00 AM on a Sunday? Just sayin'.

You've Exhausted All of Your Options

Dang quant-bloggers, they ruin a good, plaintive public wailing every time:

For one, it’s not as if we are holding out for Jake Gyllenhaal, but we do have certain non-negotiable expectations for potential mates that include college degrees and white-collar jobs. Life has always gone according to our plans, so why wouldn’t we land a man with these (reasonable) requirements?

— Why Are So Many Professional Millennial Women Unable To Find Dateable Men?

The author mentions she would like to meet a heterosexual male with a college education, a white-collar job and we will assume by her mention of “millennial” that her dating range is about 25-34 year old men for the sake of simplicity, but the adjustment to different age ranges is simple by using population distribution tables.

The US Census Bureau estimates there is 41,548,000 people in aged 25-34 and over in the United States non-institutionalized population, of which 13,731,000 (~33%) have at least a Bachelor’s degree. (Educational Attainment in the United States: 2011 - Detailed Tables: Table 3)

Using Table 2 from the same release we can also see that there is 29,971,000 men 25 and older with at least a Bachelor’s degree. Using Table 3 again, we can estimate that about 20.6% are aged 25-34, giving us a nation-wide total of 6,174,000 non-institutionalized men aged 25-34 with an education consisting of a Bachelors degree or higher of which approximately 5,939,500 (96.2) are either employed or not a part of the labor force, presumably because they do not need to work (Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment), 98% of which, or 5,820,600, hold what can be considered “white collar” occupations.

According to a 2003 study, American Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-Demographic Differences, and Risk Behavior, it is estimated that men who identify as homosexual or bisexual make up only about 5% of the male population, meaning that assuming no correlation between sexual orientation and age-group or education level, there should be approximately 5,529,570 males meeting the criteria of the author. According to the 2000 Census Marital Status Brief 53% of the male population aged 25-34 is either unmarried or living separately from their spouse. We’ll assume 5% of those observations match-up with the previously cited 5% figure for homosexual and bisexual men (as-of 2000 there was no same-sex marriage), ignoring the incidence of marriages of convenience due to lack of data. That brings the eligible candidate population to approximately 2,654,193 men, or roughly 19% of the college educated male population...[e]liminating married but separated men would reduce the overall count of eligible partners by 5% and eliminating divorcees as well would reduce it by an additional 3%. There is no widely-available estimate of what percentage of the population is otherwise unavailable due to non-marital attachment such as dating.

For example, assuming uniform geographical distribution and the earlier cited 2.654m eligible mate population, a given area would yield approximately 8,428 potential mates per million in total population, meaning that a city the size of New York would feature ~69,500 potential mates; Los Angeles 32,026; San Diego 11,175; Boston 5,267; Atlanta 2,085; and Knoxville 1,525. 

So, next time you feel like you’ve met or dated everybody that meets your criteria in your extended social circle, remember that—depending on your selectivity—you probably have.

The above article from an increasingly pinkified Forbes magazine is chockablock full of attempts to exculpate their hamsters and locate the problem at any place other than the wailers themselves.  But, as one can plainly see, again we see the  problem is choice.  The choice to pass over opportunities for perfectly good but-not-quite-Jake-Gyllenhall men when they were at the peak of their SMP value to promiscuously pursue the education and career unicorns that the feminist narrative says today's women should in order to have a happy and fulfilled life.  The choice to delay marriage and family until one is rapidly approaching the Wall, when a majority of the men who meet Millenial women's stringent mate requirements have already paired off.  The choice to both attend college and pursue high-powered employment; choices that, taken as an aggregate across an entire society, push men out of educational and occupational opportunities and depress the number of males who qualify as hypergamic mates. In other words, choices, deliberate or simply following the herd, to choose education, work, and the Carousel until the ticking of the biological clock cannot longer be ignored.  By making these choices, they disqualify their male peers as marriage partners for them and their sisters--by denying these men the opportunities to become higher status than they. They also disqualify themselves, by inflating their n counts beyond 1 and consequently making themselves far less able to sustain a life-long pair-bond.

Don't Take Responsibility, Blame An Other

The reliably awesome James Taranto at the WSJ highlights another attempt on the part of rape culture hysteria activists to relieve women of any responsibility whatsoever for what happens to them...they can do whatever they want, "others" just have to deal with it. The "others'" shoulders are broad, so why not? Apparently they missed the part in civics class that discussed how adult freedom and adult agency come with adult responsibility...and how children don't have agency because they can't be expected to be act and be held responsible for what they do:

This headline on Forbes's website caught our attention: "Blaming Women for the Behavior of Others." Apparently mankind is divided into two kinds of people, women and "others." It's reminiscent of the Constitution's infamous Three-Fifths Clause, which refers to slaves as "other persons." Anyway, here's author Liza Donnelly's argument:

We live in a society where some still blame women for others' inexcusable behavior, and it is supported in our institutions, media and advertising. It's time to foster respect and understanding, this is what feminism is about. And we need to do whatever it takes to end rape culture. An article in Ebony by Zerlina Maxwell lays out the problem: we need a paradigm shift in the way we look at rape in this country.

The Maxwell article is titled "Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped." She writes:

Telling women that they can behave in a certain way to avoid rape creates a false sense of security and it isn't the most effective way to lower the [incidence of rape]. We need anti-rape campaigns that target young men and boys. Campaigns that teach them from a young age how to respect women, and ultimately themselves, and to never ever be rapists...Holding women and girls accountable for preventing sexual assault hasn't worked and so long as men commit the majority of rapes, men need to be at the heart of our tactics for preventing them. Let's stop teaching 'how to avoid being a victim' and instead, attack the culture that creates predators in the first place.

The exhortation "to never ever be rapists" is irrefutable, but let's try applying this logic to a less emotive crime, say theft. The analogous position would be that we need to stop taking precautions against it--putting locks on our houses and cars, say, or carrying a concealed handgun or being careful not to leave personal property unattended--because that creates a "false sense of security" and implies that victims, not thieves, are to blame. Instead we need to teach people not to steal.

One problem with the argument is that it sets up a false choice between hortatory and precautionary measures. In fact, society does, in myriad ways, teach people not to commit crimes. But some people do anyway, either because they defy the message or because it doesn't get through.

And how in the world would it be helpful to stop taking precautions against becoming a victim of crime? If everyone decided to give up locks, wouldn't that make the prospect of becoming a thief more attractive to someone on the cusp of making that wrongful choice?

Where rape culture hysteria activists stub their toe on this issue is in the apportionment of responsibility. Yes, the offender is 100% responsible for his/her actions in the commission of a crime. Yet that does not mean that the victim's actions did not contribute to a chain of events that led to the event. From the clothing one wears, to demeanor, to habits, to morals, to where one goes, to whom one hangs out with--the choices people make greatly affect what eventually happens to them. The cops who beat Rodney King were responsible for their over-the-top response to his bellicose and bizarre behavior...yet to say so doesn't absolve Mr. King of responsibility for his drug-fuelled actions which led to his getting beat down. The hood rats who pulled an innocent Reginald Denny from his truck and beat him within an inch of his life were responsible for their hate crime...yet to say so doesn't necessarily mean that a white Mr. Denny made the prudent choice in entering black South Central L.A. during a race riot.

The same principle applies to rape, a crime which gets far more press and prosecutorial attention than a white victim of a hate crime. If a provocatively dressed woman swaggers into a bar, gets a buzz on, leaves with a sober fellow she just met that night only to complain of rape the next morning, well she had several opportunities to break the chain of events and elected to ignore them all. This despite the fact that said sober fellow was 100% responsible for sexually taking advantage of said woman. To claim otherwise simultaneously makes tyrants and children out of women, the latter hardly a feminist position to take.

Strange how feminist activists claim to advocate for a libertine agency for women, but when it comes time to take responsibility for the outcome of their libertine acts, that burden is laid on a male other.

An Email From Dittohead Listener

Interesting perspective about the demographics of RMM offenders (HT: Christina):

The problem in America today is how we have treated white boys for the last decades, and it all has at its root the unrelenting liberal political agenda. Boys have been pushed out of two of the most important activities: school and sports. In an all-out effort to convince girls they can do anything a boy can, schools have ignored the natural needs and learning traits of boys and forced them to learn like girls. Fewer boys are going to college, in part because they're being pushed out by a feminist agenda in education. We have rushed to dilute the energetic aggressive aspects of the male species by drugging them as children and chickifying them at every turn.

We allowed our young boys to play violent murdering video games. These types of games are the same ones the military uses to train soldiers. But they are being played by very, very young kids in dark rooms all over the country. You want to ban something, ban those. We have overlooked the devastating effects on all children of not having a father in the house. And we have ignored and not helped boys with their mental illness. We've hyperventilated endlessly over girls and their eating disorders, image issues, self-esteem, sex, blah, blah, blah, but we have most totally ignored the mental challenges that boys face. 

While the comment is specific to white males--black and Hispanic males evidently direct their unhappy energies at each other, apparently, and not at random innocents--I think it applies to all males, regardless of skin color or ethnic background. Couple rampant fatherlessness with a usually neglectful and sometimes flagrantly anti-male popular culture (preferring instead to focus on/invest in women rather than men), and a school system hostile to masculinity, and I am scarcely surprised that such events happen...and happen repeatedly.

The liberalist response is to go after the instruments of violence--as if disarming evil makes evil less able to do evil--rather than evil itself .  This is convenient, for it relieves the liberalist of having to address the consequences of their policies over the last few generations.

Ban Gun-Free Zones

Image HT: Wintery Knight

By now, nearly all my US readers and a goodly portion of my overseas ones have likely heard about the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting rampage that left 20 children and 6 adults dead at Sandy Hook elementary, not including the suspected shooter's mother, who was slain off-site, or the suspect himself.  Before I touch on a post over at WinteryKnight's place--from whence I drew the title of this post--allow me to enter into the record this excerpt of research extracted from Newsletter 218 of the Force Science Institute:*

Ron Borsch, who monitors active killing incidents worldwide, has released his latest statistical summary, indicating that the frequency of these bloody events is continuing to escalate and that the interruption of a suspect’s murderous rampage is most likely to be initiated by a single citizen or LEO.

Borsch, manager of the Southeast Area Law Enforcement Regional Training Academy in Bedford, OH, tracks what he terms Rapid Mass Murder (RMM): four or more persons slain within 20 minutes in a public place.

He also tallies attempted RMMs: incidents that would likely have reached the four-victim level had they not been aborted. Attempts, he concedes, are a case-by-case judgment call, determined by the number of persons wounded, the weapons and ammunition the offender had, suicide notes, and/or other evidence suggesting apparent intent.

Among Borsch’s findings:

+ RMMs are at a record high. From 1975 through the Columbine massacre, “successful” and attempted RMMs in the US and abroad averaged one per year. Post-Columbine through 2010, the yearly average was four. Last year there were eight, and the total for 2012 through Thanksgiving was 9.

+ Statistically, the most dangerous months are March (23%) and April (16%), with September and December tied at 11%.

+ Schools (pre-school through 12th grade) are target 38% of the time; colleges/universities 17%; and churches/religious facilities 10%.

+ Intervention occurs to stop the killing in just over half the incidents, Borsch estimates. Of known aborts, two-thirds are accomplished by civilians and one-third by law enforcement.

+ Citizens for the most part act unarmed, and eight out of 10 times their intervention is initiated by a single actor. “When law enforcement successfully stops RMM,” Borsch reports, “the abort is initiated by a solo officer seven out of 10 times.“ 

+ Borsch has found examples of successful two-officer and three-officer intervention on occasion, but he says he has “never been able to objectively document a case where four or more officers acting together in a formation have been able to stop RMM.”

* FSI is subscription only, a subscription gained only by submitting a lot of personally identifiable information.  However, they publish their list of available newsletters here, after a lag time of a few weeks/months.

Takeaways: (1) Gun-free zones, like educational institutions and sports arena create very tempting, soft targets for those intent on doing a lot of evil in a short amount of time.  (2) RMMs are increasing in frequency. (3) A single civilian with a tactical mindset (IOW, a sheepdog), or a lone LEO are most likely to stop the RMM.

Conclusions: (1) Being in a gun-free zone poses an additional risk to your life. (2) Homeschool or die, physically as in the case of Newtown, Columbine, Santee, Paducah, Jonesboro, Springfield (Ore), or worldwide as one may see here, or politically/morally/socially as one may see here. (3) Many more RMM "aborts" would occur if the tactically minded sheepdog(s) were armed...when seconds count, LEOs are minutes away. (4) SWAT-style dynamic entry interventions are not effective at stopping RMMs in a timely manner, likely because of the time it takes to assemble and dispatch a team.

Now on to Wintery Knight's post.  First, he links to this editorial in USA Today, by Instapundit, aka Glen Reynolds:

Plenty of people...[would] be much more comfortable seeing ordinary Americans disarmed. And whenever there is a mass shooting, or other gun incident that snags the headlines, they do their best to exploit the tragedy and push for laws that would, well, take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, but one of the most significant is this one: It doesn’t work. One of the interesting characteristics of mass shootings is that they generally occur in places where firearms are banned: malls, schools, etc....

Policies making areas “gun free” provide a sense of safety to those who engage in magical thinking, but in practice, of course, killers aren’t stopped by gun-free zones. As always, it’s the honest people — the very ones you want to be armed — who tend to obey the law.

Adding to the pile on comes John Lott of "More Guns, Less Crime" fame:

Because America has the most guns, multiple-victim public shootings are an American thing, right? No, not at all. Contrary to public perception, Western Europe, most of whose countries have much tougher gun laws than the United States, has experienced many of the worst multiple-victim public shootings. Particularly telling, all the multiple-victim public shootings in Western Europe have occurred in places where civilians are not permitted to carry guns. The same is true in the United States: All the public shootings in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where civilians may not legally bring guns.

It may be a surprise to those who believe in gun control that Germany was home to three of the five worst attacks. Though not quite as tight as the U.K.’s regulations, Germany’s gun-control laws are some of the most restrictive in Europe. German gun licenses are valid for only three years, and to obtain one, the person must demonstrate such hard-to-define characteristics as trustworthiness, and must also convince authorities that he needs a gun. 

The phenomenon is not limited to school attacks. Multiple-victim public shootings in general appear to be at least as common in Western Europe as they are here. 

It isn't the gun that kills. A firearm is an inanimate object; it is the criminal intent on doing so that pulls the trigger.  And the wolves--the vast majority of whom are men with no/low attachment, the subject of a different, later post--find their pool of ready targets in places where the sheepdogs aren't. Or are disarmed before they can enter.

Rather than infringe upon the common man's natural-law right to defend himself, it would be better to outlaw gun-free zones.  You can't stop crazy with rules crazy doesn't observe....but 350-450 ft-lbs (the energy delivered by a .45) just may.

Update: Seems the shooter's parents divorced three years ago. I'm not sure how much to make of it, since the divorce happened when he was nearly of the age of majority, but it is certainly an interesting data point that may help explain why this happened.

DV More Common In Two-Earner Couples

More evidence that complementarianism, as opposed to equalitarianism, yields superior social results. In this case, less violent homes (H/T Wintery Knight)

While the researchers found that differences in education levels appeared to have little influence, when both partners were working, intimate partner violence increased.

“When both male and females were employed, the odds of victimization were more than two times higher than when the male was the only breadwinner in the partnership, lending support to the idea that female employment may challenge male authority and power in a relationship,” said the researchers.

Of course, a key limitation to this study, published in the tellingly entitled Violence Against Women scholarly journal, is that they interviewed only women.  I would have liked to have seen the dataset expanded to men, who report near-parity rates of abuse at the hands of women in America and in Canada, and the UK, and see what the effect of spousal employment is on male-female relationship dynamics.  I would further like to see the dataset differentiate between physical violence, both minor and severe, and psychological aggression, and measure the associations between each type of violence and employment status.  That data would be quite interesting, I think.

Going back to the assertion that female employment may challenge male authority and power, perhaps we may accurately apply power dynamics theory for states and countries to human relationships. Accepting for a moment the debatable feminist postulate that remunerated employment imparts greater power to women in a relationship, the literature, of this is but one example, suggests that power parity--in this case, wage parity--leads to greater, not less, dyadic conflict.  Thus by subverting complementarianism and by encouraging equalitarianism, the literature suggests feminists themselves encourage more, not less, inter-personal violence.  In other words, and paraphrasing libertarian theorist Harry Browne, feminists break men's and women's legs [with equalitarianism], only to later hand them a crutch [heavy handed and misandrist DV laws], saying, "See, if it weren't for us, you wouldn't be able to walk".

A Test: Do You Hate Women?

Over at Taki's, in a post regarding the so-called "war on women", I found this quick-and-easy self-exam to determine if one is a misogynist:

A popular meme claims there is a “War on Women” in America. Unlike an actual conflict, this conflagration takes on as many metamorphoses as there are maniacs to proclaim it is occurring. For thinking individuals, “feminism” means equal rather than identical. Yet the only thinking done in this mêlée is the degree to which everyone thinks their opinion is right.

All of the following have been considered proof positive of one’s hatred of the fairer sex:

• Believing a woman should pay for her own contraceptives, make her significant other pay for them, or simply abstain from sexual relations altogether means you abhor women.

• Believing a woman who goes through more than five boxes of prophylactics (approximately 60 condoms) in a month (roughly $30 worth) is more than likely a whore or sexual deviant means you do not disdain that particular woman but all women everywhere.

• Believing whether you agree with their dogma or not, certain religions should not be made to subsidize the sexual behavior (or nymphomania) of others is clear indication of your animosity toward women.

• Believing abortion is inadvisable religiously, morally, philosophically, physically, socially, or even plain old economically shows you dislike women.

• Believing it is not a positive thing to abort a baby in the second trimester, even when it could survive outside the womb, shows you hate women (though supporting such carnage evidently does not mean you hate babies).

• Believing any baby born which still has so much as a little pinkie toe still inside its mother isn’t ripe for chopping up means you detest women.

• Believing any woman who claims she was raped must proffer some kind of proof of said allegation in court aside from her word means you are a Doubting Thomas Woman-Hating Troll.

• Believing that any woman anywhere at any time might make a false allegation of abuse for money, notoriety, or simple mental instability means, yes, you loathe women.

• Believing in the proven and well-documented (though seldom discussed) statistic that women instigate physical abuse against men at least as often as the inverse means you are a despicable demonizer of women.

• Believing the notion of “equal pay” is entirely dependent upon proving “equal work” is yet more demonstration of your woman-hating ways.

• Believing that being a woman is not, of itself, a good enough qualification to be elected to any office means you are a woman-abominating Old Boy’s Club member who is probably homosexual anyway.

• Believing it is unseemly to rejoice in being “the first woman to ever do X” when we are all supposed to be equal means you are secretly filled with fury at women everywhere.

• Believing women in a traditionally male sport are fine but if so everyone plays on a level field, as in auto racing where equipment must be balanced so as not to give a woman weighing 100 lbs. less than a man an unfair advantage, then you clearly scorn women. (If you mention a certain woman hasn’t won a single race since the enforcement of such conditions you detest her, all female racers, and every vagina on Earth.)

• Believing there is no problem for the best professional female golfer to compete in the men’s tournament but also think that means the worst pro male gets to participate in the ladies’ tournament, then obviously you have no idea what the word “parity” means and are filled with Sapphic scorn.

• Believing, saying, or even thinking that women are often other women’s worst enemies is more proof of your chauvinism and that you are femme-ferocious.

It's official. I do indeed hate women. At least in the world where "hate" is defined as any disagreement with the loudmouth, dour-faced, my-ring-finger-is-as-long-as-my-index-finger woman in front of whom the media always seems to stick a mike.

When A Religion Dies, The Empire Goes With It

Given all the attacks on Christmas symbols in the US in the last few days, symptomatic of a larger uncoordinated conspiracy of like-minded adherents to the religion of Liberalism to scrub Western society of its Christian roots (as well as a striking apathy toward religious cleansing in Islamic civilization), this quote from Pat Buchanan seems particularly apropo:

The emperor Julien the Apostate, Gibbons' hero in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, believed Rome could not survive Constantine's embrace of a Christianity that foreswore the martial virtues for "Love thy neighbor".  The empire could not survive the loss of the old pagan faith. When a religion dies, the culture and the civilization that grew out of it die with it. And indeed, as Rome was invaded by barbarians, popes would stand at the city gates to plead for mercy from the likes of Attila the Hun. [bolded emphasis mine]

The part that I don't understand is this: for a religion that elevates tolerance so, how can it hate so much the peoples and culture in which it was birthed and gave it succor, so much so that it will kill (or has already killed) its host and therefore will likely murder itself?  Particularly when the chief rival for the spiritual loyalty of the masses is a religion that eschews "love thy neighbor" in favor of evangelization by the sword and death for apostates?