Saturday, 2 June 2012

"Feminists Against Violence Against Men"


So while debating some pond life on youtube the other day, I was instructed to google "feminists against violence against men" to see how many of the sisterhood are working tirelessly in pursuit of true equality & looking out for us men & boys with the concern they loudly devote to women.

While fully expecting a single blank page with the sound of crickets chirping & tumbleweeds lazily drifting in the wind, I dutifully did as I was told, curious to see how many pairs of open arms & eyes of love were out there waiting for me in the womyn's space.

Try it yourself, see what happens. Here's what I got:

One website article, & a single puff piece by The Guardian. Everything else was either a men's rights site or feminist criticism of the idea of defending men at all, saying why violence against men was a non-issue.

Still, I went to the solitary site in question (desifeminists.wordpress.com), looking to see if this was some new ifeminist-type branch of the feminazi party but sure enough, all it said was while violence against men was not nice, & we should all say so, it is nowhere near as big a deal as violence against women, & probably the result of the patriarchy or something.

Elsewhere on the very same site, which I had flown to in hopes of the sweet balm of compassion, I found this:
SCUM is the Society for Cutting up Men.
Is it any surprise that of all the feminist thoughts and writings out there, SCUM is all that makes it into pop culture? This is once of the few topics I actually heard of while browsing TV channels, rather than in my Women’s Studies classes.
I had dismissed SCUM as some weird and obviously unsupported, obscure writing dreamt up by a crazy woman. But luckily, I got to have a new perspective as a fellow feminist on Feministing.com posted the link to the whole document. Now after actually reading it, I see it as a brilliant satire. It just reverses all the utter bullshit and hatred that patriarchy has spewed about women. If any readers find the claims made in the SCUM manifesto absurd, then consider how equally absurd the hateful claims about women are? Such claims are made by idiotic, sexist religious leaders, politicians, husbands, scientists, fathers, and any Joe Schmo alike (and even sexist women, I should add).
Recently I’d been thinking about the ridiculous makes-me-want-to-vomit kind of women-hating pseudo-spirituality that many ISKCON leaders spread. I was also think about stupid male chauvinistic scientists whose aim in life is to “prove” that women are less intelligent than men, because, you know, their interpretation of research data is “objective” while the rest of us get to “personal.” The SCUM Manifesto would be my response to all those douchebags.
I hope you like the satire as much as I did :)

*

There was one comment there before me, left by someone whose tenuous grasp on satire, reason, & reality itself had led her to remark:


"It’s funny because anti-feminists actually take it seriously, not realizing that it’s satire."

So I replied:


"I think the punchline where the psychotic woman who started a movement called ‘The Society For Cutting Up Men’ went out the very next year & shot two men, killing one & then attempting to kill a third, that was particularly funny.  

I can’t believe some people still don’t get it."

Never got through moderation.

Monday, 28 May 2012

The Woman Racket

An extract from chapter one of The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon (2008). I hope to post further samples from this excellent book in the next few weeks.

We're told that men and women are the same. Or, rather, some of the time we're told this. At other times we're told that men and women are essentially and irrevocably different. We're further told that although men and women are different, this is really just something to do with the way we are at the moment, albeit that we have been that way for a long time, living in the sort of society we do. In time, we keep being reminded, all will revert to how supposedly it should be and how it used to be in times of yore: i.e. men and women are the same after all. Even so, it's then insisted that actually, in the end, no matter what we do, men will never get to be truly the same as women: men and women are forever and totally different (except when it's more convenient to regard them as exactly the same).

We're also told that women are disadvantaged, and that they've got this way because of oppression by men. We're never told how or why this could be. We're not told why—especially if men and women are supposedly the same — there would be any point in one sex oppressing the other. We're not told how it can be—if indeed men are different to women and oppress them— that by most measures it is not women who are disadvantaged but men (or, at least, a large sub-group or even the majority of men). Nobody tells us why men are maligned as if they're at one with the very few at the top of the pile, whereas all women are championed irrespective of who they are, what they have done, or how they have lived their lives.

Confused? You certainly should be. The notion that males and females —or some essence of what is male or female —are the same or different, oppressed or actually advantaged, is like a juggler with two balls up in_ the air. He never gets hold of either of them but is constantly palming each upwards and across the path of the other. Eventually the whole spectacle has to come crashing to the ground. That's what is about to happen to what we currently think about men and women.

The contradictory madness about men and women in which we wallow is not shallow. As I will be explaining in depth, it arises from the most pro-found prejudices we have; prejudices that are currently denied, being invisible to us. We are too close to them, so we can't see the wood for the flees, even though they are the very basis of our politics. They are what the philosopher R.G. Collingwood called ‘absolute’ presuppositions. They come from the hidden heart of what we are, in the fundamental difference—and complementarity—between men and women. These hidden prejudices are against men and in favour of women. It is because of this that astonishing nonsense about men and women can hold sway, hanging unsupported from the political sky. The general consensus about human social behaviour — at least the chattering classes - is the most plainly false in history. In no other culture— and at no other point in the history of our own culture—have people got things so spectacularly wrong.

The real story of men and women, that cuts through all of this, has only fully crystallised the last few years with a deluge of new science. It will be a revelation to almost all, having been merely scratched on the sur-
face in self—help titles like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It is not merely that men and women are different. We all knew that. And ordinary people, at least, admit it. It is that they are different in ways far beyond what anyone had thought. Men and women are also unequal, but it is not women at all, but men-not all men, but the majority — who make up the biggest disadvantaged sub-group in every society. Women by contrast are universally and perennially privileged: over-privileged. This unconditional favour has no counterpart for men, who have to meet certain criteria even to be afforded the most basic consideration.

Even so, you won't find me suggesting adding men to the ever-expanding list of "victims'. As it stands there's but a minority of people who aren't already on this list. It really would be the case that ‘we're all victims now’. Instead, the real story of men and women is the key to tearing up the entire list and throwing it away.
The revolution that we are supposedly undergoing towards an androgynous, unisexual world is all but dead. Revolution has always been a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ (as The Who's Roger Daltrey sang back in 1971), and the revolution regarding men and women is very much a case in point. We've merely been chasing our own shadows, perpetuating the same old attitudes in disguise. The benign consequences of wising up to see this can hardly be over-stated. We're set now for what really is a revolution: a science—inspired revolution of understanding. This is a book of popular science, intended to explain the psychology that underlies the prejudice that in turn reveals why politics manifests in the way that it does. Of necessity I tackle political issues, and I'm aware that this is an awkward mix, but such is the nature of the project.

Politics is in the end a matter of conjecture, but its manifestation and the social psychology that underlies it can be informed by science. Never before has there been a time when political debate was more in need of this than today.

Saturday, 26 May 2012

Monday, 14 May 2012

12 Reasons Men Are Second-Class Citizens


1. SUICIDE: Men’s suicide rate is 4.6 times higher than that of women’s. [Dept. Health & Human Services -- 26,710 males vs 5,700 females]

2. LIFE EXPECTANCY: Men’s life expectancy is seven (7) years shorter than women’s [National Center for Health Statistics -- males 72.3 yrs vs females 79 yrs] yet receive only 35% of government expenditures for health care and medical costs.

3. WAR: Men are almost exclusively the only victims of war [Dept. Defense -- Vietnam Casualties 47,369 men vs 74 women]


4. WORKPLACE FATALITIES: Men account for more than 95% of all workplace fatalities.


5. MURDER: Men are murdered at a rate almost 5 times that of women. [Dept. Health & Human Services -- 26,710 men vs 5,700 women]


6. CHILD CUSTODY: Women receive physical custody of 92% of all children of separation, and men only 4%. [Department of Health & Human Services]


7. JURY BIAS: Women are acquitted of spousal murder at a rate 9 times that of men [Bureau Justice Statistics -- 1.4% of men vs 12.9% of women]


8. COURT BIAS: Men are sentenced 2.8 times longer than women for spousal murder [Bureau Justice Statistics -- men at 17 years vs women at 6 years]


9. JUSTICE SYSTEM BIAS: Women are assesessed for Child Support on average at half the rate of men, yet are twice as likely to default on Child Support payments. Ninety Seven (97%) of all child support prosecutions are against fathers. [Census Bureau]


10. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Numerous credible studies from independant researchers report that women are the initiators of domestic violence in 58% of all cases, and cause physical abuse in almost 50% of all cases, yet women only account for 6% of all criminal proceedings in such matters.


11. CHILD VIOLENCE: Mothers commit 55% of all child murders and biological fathers commit 6%. NIS-3 indicates that Mother-only households are 3 times more fatal to children than Father-only households. Despite these compelling figures, children are systematically removed from the natural fathers who are their most effective protectors.


12. WEALTH: Women hold 65% of the total wealth in the USA [Fortune Magazine]





Source 

Friday, 4 May 2012

In Defence Of The Foreskin


You know, I've been trying for awhile to find a simple way to explain to circumcised men – & uncircumcised women – how an intact penis - which of course they have no first-hand experience of - is actually supposed to feel like & work. And I think the best I’ve come up with so far is this: The Eyelid.

It's something we all have, so is something we all can relate to & easily visualize. If you feel the way the eyelid effortlessly slides over, moistens & protects your eyeball – & also how sensitive that eyeball itself is, not able to be exposed to the air for long without drying out & toughening up, or even be directly touched without at least feeling uncomfortable – well, that’s exactly how an intact penis feels & what the foreskin is for. The foreskin isn’t some extraneous piece of skin like an earlobe, or a part of the body that can be cut away only to grow back, like fingernails or hair: it has a specifically designed purpose, & that purpose is directly analogous to, as I’ve already said, that other intrinsic part of an intact body, the eyelid.

Just thought I'd pass that on, anyway. Here also are a couple of interesting links upon this subject I came across recently:

http://www.circumstitions.com/FGMvsMGM.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17320788 


Monday, 23 April 2012

Ladyfur

This may well meander a little. An anonymous poster turned up to give his two-cents worth of personal distaste to my earlier post denouncing the shaving of the pussies & then later to say how 'gross' the hair that grows under girls arms is. My reply grew somewhat volumous (yes I know it's not a proper word but it pleases me) so I'm posting it here instead as a follow-up:


I see these arguments being played out over & over again on the internet, often getting more & more heated & vitriolic, & I don't want to fall into that trap here. Personally, I like a little ladyfur there. In my experience there's all sorts of amazing pheromones - if that's what they are - that disappear once hair is scraped away, so the smell of a shaven armpit can be a turn-off for me.

Be that as it may, the greater point of the post was how this issue is a perfect opportunity to observe how transient & artificially created so many of our most firmly-held personal preferences actually are. This should be obvious, to all, of course, because it's easily observable if we only just open our eyes & look around this great big world, at all the wildly differing beliefs people hold in it. But somehow people never seem to do that for very long, & even when they do just for a moment, they never turn that gaze upon themselves.

If you lived a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago - any other time in human history, in other words - you almost certainly would not find hair growing where it's meant to grow on a grown woman 'gross' at all. Because to be revulsed by a woman in her natural state would mean you were revulsed by all women, by the entirety of womankind. And so would never desire anyone enough to get laid.

Or another way of thinking about it: If you were stranded on a desert island with a collection of the most beautiful supermodels you can dream of, within a fortnight all of them would have the hair come back under their arms & around their sexes, just as you would also have grown a beard, because that's nature, that's how we are when we are left alone in our natural state.

Think about that. Are you really saying you would no longer desire the HB10 after a couple of days & the stubble started to show through? If so, doesn't that mean you believe that what we are in our natural state is wrong? Do you really want that to be the way you view the world? Do you really want that to be the way you view yourself?

*

What interests me most about this, as with the bizarre practice of American (non-Jewish) circumcision, which I've also raged about recently, is how new & demonstrably fabricated it is, & yet how quickly & widely accepted it has become, with almost no dissenting voices. They both have taken root in really only the past hundred years, & primarily - or at least initially - in America. Why? Why America?

"The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is."
- Aristotle

The story of the 20th century (& beyond, up til the present day) is the story of the human race's move into the imagination, away from the real, actual, physical world & into the virtual, transient, manufactured & fake. It is predominantly American culture which has brought this about, the birthplace of modern advertising & the ugly consumerism now colonizing the rest of the human planet. For the story of America - modern America, at least - is that of the triumph of the artificial, temporary & disposable over the real, vital & eternal.

A rock star friend of mine once told me he couldn't make sense of the USA, & refused to play there, the place just creeped him out. It seemed to him, he said, "the white man hit the ground running". What he meant by that was there were no roots, no connection to the spot where you are standing, no real history or shared traditions that weren't imported from somewhere else across the sea. Everything there is so new that the streets in New York don't even have names, just numbers, & they are laid out straight, on a mathematical grid, rather than winding around like live roots the way they do in the old European cities of Dublin, Venice, London, Paris, York, Athens or even Rome. The place names all borrowed from somewhere else: New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York...

I can't help but think that under those circumstances, selling inessential, fabricated goods & beliefs to the masses must be considerably easier than to a tribe in the rainforest or a Bedouin tent. You can't sell snow to an Eskimo. They know who they are. If you don't know what is real, where your food comes from, what you really need to survive, then people can sell you anything. They can make you do anything. And that's what has progressively become the norm the past hundred years or so - again, due to the rise of America as the post-war empire. It's not surprising such a society should become the birthplace of fake tits, botox, cosmetic circumcision, labiaplasty & the shaven pussy.

*

Let me try steer this back to the point:

The desire to fuck, particularly in men, is universal & overwhelming, & the basic mechanics of that biological imperative can't really be tampered with too much without it interfering with the survival of the human race. But the trimmings - the arbitrary individual preferences - are inessential enough to be shaped & manipulated by a society whichever way prominent voices within it choose without any immediately catastrophic repercussions. So, you can make people think sex is dirty & sinful, just so long as you give them a get-out clause where sex is allowed (marriage). You can place limits upon men's natural biological drive to spread their seed as widely as possible but you can't make the whole society of men not want to have sex at all. As long as there is some kind of outlet for the shoots of grass to break through the cement, life can still go on, & whatever you've laid on top of it will seem the most natural thing in the world.

Again, the same with circumcision: if the Rabbi or the 'doctor' took an extra half-inch off: no more Jews or Americans. But take only a little less & those same Jewish & American boys don't feel there is anything unusual at all in having their genitals mutilated as infants. They don't - can't - feel that they're missing anything, any sensations etc, because they've never known anything else. And no-one ever told them they shouldn't have to need to use hand-cream to beat off without it hurting.

*



Most people, of course, are no more complicated than sheep in the choices they make & the causes they support. The herd mentality makes people defend beliefs & positions they never chose. 'Outraged monarchists' will defend the Queen, who never did anything for them, stole their land, resources & money, keeping them as peasants. She doesn't even know those individuals are alive & yet they're ready to die for her - not for the dream of something she stands for, something she represents, just for her, just... because. Because... that's what we do here. Nothing more complicated than dogs defending their masters. The thing is, though, leave anything around for three generations or more & it will come to seem not only normal & ordinary, but an inviolable fact of reality, & one that needs to be defended at all costs, perhaps even with our lives.

The same goes with religion: almost every Christian I've ever met is utterly incapable of recognizing that they would be holding equally passionate but entirely opposing views on, say, Islam, if they had only been born in Morocco, Iran, or Afghanistan, all of which are more than 99% Muslim.

But, of course, they would, & so would everyone else they know - what are the odds it could be otherwise? But still they believe that their set of assumptions, the set of assumptions they were brought up with, which only make sense within their particular culture & over a particular period of time, are the one & only Truth.

*

In any culture you lived you would find women you desired & want to be with. The cultural norms of this specific age are temporary, in this instance only 20 years in the case of the scraping of the punanis, & shaven armpits are only really as old as Hollywood. These societal norms are arbitrary & have no actual value or meaning in themself. We could just as easily have been made to find eyelashes or fingernails ugly & unsightly, & so be offered the opportunity to rip them out by the roots at beauty salons.(For a fee, of course, but then beauty comes at a price. In this culture, anyway). I'm asking you to see, Anon, that much of what seems to be your own revulsion is societally created. It doesn't belong to you, even though it very much feels that way.

We all believe things we have never questioned. We all have beliefs we never chose.

If we take that as our starting point, we can at least begin to attempt to approach the universe as it is, & perhaps start to make a little sense of it. As long as we cling to rigid, codified ideologies, the only thing we can be assured of is that we will never even begin. We may not be able to transcend fully the set of neuroses we were told were normal for the society we were born into but we can do our best not to pass those hang-ups onto the next generation.

We can blindly accept the propaganda of our times & location or question how we got to where we now are. Thinking about why we think the way we do, asking ourselves 'What is this in front of me? Beyond what I have read, beyond what I have been told, what am I actually seeing here?' seems to me a far more beneficial occupation of one's time than illusion & blind obedience, & the only way we know of to liberate ourselves from that game, that lab-rat maze.

It's funny the things that can set you to thinking.

Sunday, 15 April 2012

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap


Okay, so two things: first a piece by Carrie Lukas that was published in The Wall Street Journal about this time last year, that I thought bore another look-see. At the time it predictably came in for quite a lot of criticism from feminist quarters, though I took a little look & as far as I can see there was no substantive argument against Lukas' figures or basic premise, just a few angry women saying 'childcare & office work are not easy jobs'. No facts, no figures, no reasoned debate, nothing. So that was easy.

And I was just getting ready to post that when I came across this video of Thomas Sowell effortlessly taking apart feminist claims of discrimination in a television interview from way back in the 1970's. What strikes me is how the argument used in both pieces is basically the same, & the figures that don't add up today didn't add up then either. In other words: the Pay-Gap today is a myth, & perhaps it always was.

*
So anyway, first the video, then the Lukas piece, 40 years apart.




There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap by Carrie Lukas

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.

In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.

Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.

The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.

Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.

Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.


Ms. Lukas is executive director of the Independent Women's Forum.

Saturday, 14 April 2012

Titanic Day

A little post-feminist song to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago today.