Texas Needs More People Like This

Texas has an image problem. Not as bad as, say, Mississippi or Alabama, but bad. A lot of it probably has to do with their sheer size and visibility. Texas is massive, politically influential, wealthy, and oil-rich.

Thus, when they do something stupid, everyone knows about it. For someone not living in Texas, it's very hard to remember that that stupidity is a product of only a subsection of the population.

Obviously, we have Austin, which is famous for being "weird," as they like to call themselves. But I, and most of the people that I know, consider Austin as almost another state. That's not good. It is part of Texas.

Similarly, Texas has large numbers of intelligent, tolerant people. They may currently be out-shouted by the maniacs, but they are no less a part of the state. Texas needs more visible people like this to help drive that point home. It might help their tourist industry.

We Are All The Same

Of Rapists And Nazis

The recent video, uploaded by Anonymous, of the Steubenville "Rape Crew" is suitably mind-numbing. It shows a human being, seemingly too young to even be coherently using the words he is speaking, display a lack of empathy and consideration that would make a psychopath blush.

It is coincidental that I was reading an article about The Angel of Life, Gisella Perl, who described her treatment in the death camps. Men would gleefully kill babies, throw women alive into furnaces, and beat starving, helpless human beings to death.

After the war, psychologists took up the task of studying the behavior of the Nazis. How could humans possibly become so depraved, and do so in such large numbers? Even those who were involved would look back with shock at their own actions.

The core of that depravity is on display today in Steubenville. While the holocaust and the behavior of a small town's stupid population are in different leagues, what allows the two to exist is the same. In a different environment, the boy in that video would have been a Nazi, or a mercenary, or a murderer. That behavior is simply the manifestation of an internal characteristic that I don't think I need to even bother trying to explicate. It is apparent.

What we saw, for a brief moment, is the rotten core that can take hold that is held in check by society. Yes, we do not have bands of mercenaries rampaging around the countryside like it was 1300's Europe. But just because the behavior doesn't manifest in the ways that they previously did does not mean that the Freudian motivation is gone.

What society has done, and especially what the progressive movement of the past one hundred years has done, is make the display of this behavior incredibly unacceptable. It is the genesis of the term "politically correct" in the pejorative sense. People who use the word "PC Police" or something equally negative are essentially saying that they are angry that they are not allowed to be aggressive, violent, or bigoted in public.

But what every oppressed group in the country knows full well is that this rot, this toxin, is in full effect behind closed doors. This monster, this animalistic man-child, would have never dreamed of saying these words in public, but he did so in private. He even defended himself to those in the room who made wan efforts at arguing with him.

This is only the most recent case of the festering underbelly of our society bursting out into the daylight like some pus-filled boil. Apologists for this sort of behavior love to point to the very consequences of their loathed politically correct movement -- the lack of public behavior of this sort -- as proof that it doesn't exist. They claim that those who pull the racism, sexism, or classism "card" are simply paranoid and themselves bigoted.

No. This rot exists, and pretending that it doesn't because we have brow-beaten those that would act this way into some semblance of submission fails to address the wellspring of the poison. We must chase bigotry and anti-social behavior wherever it hides. There can be no apologies. There can be no toleration. We must go after it with a righteous fire and the profound desire to see justice done, no matter how painful. Because until we do, we will continue breeding those who would be well at home stoking the fires of Auschwitz.

Conservatives Losing the Fight on Same-Sex Marriage

From Free Thought Blogs.

The notable silence by the Republicans on the issue of same-sex marriage during the current election campaign is a sign, if one needed one, of how rapidly sentiment has shifted on this issue. In 2004 opposition to this was very potent and was used to galvanize voters to go to the polls and vote for George W. Bush. Daniel McCarthy argues in The American Conservative that it is one more sign of the retreat of religion in the face of modernity... 

Even conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly thinks that they are losing this battle and blames (of course) public education.

No. You are losing the fight because you are a bunch of backward, bigoted, troglodytes and people don't want to be associated with you.

There is an extensive quote from an article in The American Conservative, and the author tries his best to frame the loss of a fundamental tenet of conservatism as something that is totally cool. I guess he is tired of being automatically classified as a bete noire at dinner parties when everyone there finds out he writes for a magazine called The American-freaking-Conservative.

My recommendation: stop being conservative. Then you won't simply be the most recent iteration of a grand tradition of being left behind by the progress of society.

Karen Klein And The Village

Karen Klein is the bus monitor who recently became a viral video sensation after video of her being horrifically berated by some kids on a bus became national news. Her fund-raiser (which had a target of $5,000) has broken $600,000 at the time of this writing. Many people are saying that this has as much to do with hatred of kids as it does support for Karen. I think that it's not simply child-hatred or a perception that children today are worse than children of yesterday. I think that it is merely a visible element of a complex social mix.

Even though conservatives responded very negatively to Hillary Clinton's book It Takes A Village, they actually agree with what it says. The only difference is that in the conservative formulation, they are allowed to be judgmental assholes since they blame the family for the failure of a child as opposed to the society in which the family lives.

What do I mean by them agreeing? Go out and talk to anyone who was of childbearing age fifty years ago, sixty years ago, and ask about the social pressure to have children. Those who didn't have kids were seen as selfish and strange — judgments that the religio-conservative right still fling around today. These ideals were still strongly felt in all social segments as little as twenty years ago. Understandably, this created a feeling of contempt among those who had no interest in having children, and the lingering judgments create further contempt now.

No, it's not as explicitly stated as it once was, but the act of marriage and children is still seen as the badge of adulthood by a large hunk of the population. And for the young people of today, this pressure comes from those who were raised in decades past where these expectations were explicitly stated: their parents, grandparents, and extended family. My own family (and the family of my partner) are not-so-quietly hoping that we will reproduce.

That is, I think, at least one of the primary roots of this amazing outpouring of support for this woman. Many of us hate children not just because children are pricks, which they sometimes are, but because we are seeing children as a symbol of social pressure that is stressful.

Oddly, I also argue that the wellspring of the behavior on the children's part is also of the same sort. We have the aforementioned renouncers of parenthood, but on the other end of the spectrum, we have those who happily engage in child-bearing. They are doing so in a society that today has two large, conflicting pressures: the pressure to be an individual and reject social expectations, and the pressure to be a "good person." This gives an opening for those to inject an enormous amount of self-importance and self-rigteousness into the act of having children. They still see themselves as part of the individualists, but enjoy a sensation of being traditional as well. They try to raise themselves above the individualist din by appealing to conservative values. This sort of activity was hilariously lampooned in the song Pregnant Women Are Smug.



In this rejection/acceptance of parenthood, we run the risk of highly entitled children being produced. People have injected such an enormous amount of importance into the child, because they are living vicariously through that child, that any assaults on the child are seen as unjust, even if the child is a complete jerk. This is because assaults on the child are interpreted as assaults on the parent.

This is not new behavior, obviously. Parents have lived vicariously through their kids for generations. I suspect that the problem is growing because of the loss of reverence of authority.

I think here we are seeing a pendulum swing. Sixty years ago, authority was automatically assumed to be correct in any conflict with a child. Look at the unprecedented child abuse cases from decades past that are only being revealed now. How many of these cases could have been uncovered if children had been listened to. For further evidence, look the trope in television and movies of the child who knows the truth, but is ignored as a liar, fabricator, or storyteller. Sixty years ago, teachers were allowed to hit children, today, teachers can't even hug children.

Compounding the problem is Internet access. Kids today can more easily learn than ever before that adults are just as stupid, immature, and dickish as other kids are. The separation of "child" and "adult" is becoming harder to maintain. And even if kids aren't thinking too deeply about the concept, they can use the Internet to simply enact experimental actions against authority. The AP covered this in only slightly-alarmist tones here.

In Maryland, students posed as their vice principal's twin 9-year-old daughters on pedophile websites, saying they had been having sex with their father and were looking for a new partner. Elsewhere, students have logged on to neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites claiming to be a Jewish or minority teacher and inciting the groups' anger. Others have stolen photographs from teachers' cellphones and posted them online.

These are the kinds of behaviors that we should be regulating. Instead, we try to take cell phones away, expel kids for legitimate criticism of teachers, and have inane zero-tolerance policies that causes kids to be expelled for bringing plastic flatware into school. The pendulum has not only swung too far, it is downright broken.

Obviously, in any discussion like this, alarmism must be carefully avoided. Kids today are not fundamentally worse than kids from a generation ago. I think that observable behavior is increasing because the environment is both allowing or amplifying the behavior. Likewise, since the generation isn't fundamentally worse, they will likely turn out just the same as previous generations — afflicted by the same problems and resulting in the same demographic groups.

This is a long way from my original subject, Karen Klein. I think that the support shown her is a historical fluke. The event of her exposure happened at the right place, in the right time, to the right population. The remnants of an old social order are in their death throes, and are mixing with the emerging social order to create specific psychosocial anxieties and issues. Once the old way dies, so goes our contemporary specific problems with children; so goes the wellspring of our reaction to this event; and so goes the wellspring of the event itself. In another time, no element of this series of events would have ever happened.

But for now, for all of the incidental elements of the process, it did happen. So send the women a couple bucks. Because, man, kids suck.

From Whence Misogyny?

I've been thinking, as I do, about gender hatred a great deal recently, and specifically about the different nature of misogyny and misandry. They are startlingly different. Two great examples of misandry that stick in memory are Cosmopolitan magazine and the Kieu-Becker case from late 2011.

The Kieu-Becker case elicited a response on the penis-chopping incident on the television show The Talk, which NPR hilariously described as "an angry man's vision of what groups of women friends are like." They laughed and generally mocked the incident of a man, who has been proven to be guilty of nothing more than fooling around with other women, who had his penis violently removed and thrown into a garbage disposal. They laughed and giggled and seemed to find it a jolly old time.

An example that sticks in my mind is Cosmopolitan. My mother read the magazine for years, meaning that it was frequently, along with BMW Club Magazine, National Geographic, and Consumer Reports, my primary reading material in the house.

Cosmo has a very defined and twisted perspective on what makes a male, and it is predicated almost entirely on sex. Men are sex-crazed animals that only need placating, after which you can finally be left alone to your painting and novel writing, or whatever other weird things Cosmo seems to think that their readers do. This sentiment is found in every issue, going back decades.

Understandably, issues from the 50's, 60's, and 70's were very much rooted in the society of post-war America, where looking pretty and satisfying the man were the only concerns of women. But we've been living in the Feminist era for a while, now, and Cosmo, instead of evolving, has instead doubled down on its antiquated sexual philosophy. Their perspective on women has changed, but men remain unchanged from the 1950's. In fact, men are even worse. They want sex. They want it wild. They want it constantly. And that's it.

These two examples are only nationally salient instances of misandry, though. There are many smaller examples littered throughout society. For example, male elementary school teachers frequently have tales of administrators and female teachers all but accusing them of being perverted child molesters. Men receiving harassment and stares if they are near a playground or park.

The takeway, though, is the nature of the misandry; it is almost entirely about sex. Men are animals. It's all that they want. Other elements come into play, but these aren't really misandristic and more just generally sexist. Beliefs that all men are controlling, or all men like sports. These are gender-normative constructs that don't come anywhere close to describing all men.

But that basically goes without saying. Gender-normative concepts fail to describe the majority of society, much less just men. That's why I'm interested in specifically misogyny and misandry. They are very different. All one has to do to see the difference is peruse Men's Rights message boards online and then read similar message boards aimed at women. The language difference is bone-jarring. There's no need to completely detail the many subtle differences, all you have to know is that only one of these communities calls for the raping of those with whom they disagree. I'll give you two guesses as to which one.

And that is the difference. Misogyny is problematic because of its violent nature. Misandry is not violent. It is judgmental, certainly, but a belief in the disgusting sexuality of men does not cause widespread violence like the Kieu-Becker case. Likewise, those aforementioned misandristic message boards are filled with women complaining about men, but the vitriol never turns to violent hatred demanding that men be raped or beaten. Why?

I don't think that it's entirely the framing, context, or the social lens through which we read and interpret events. I think that it's the wellspring of the emotions. For men, sex is difficult to come by. All you have to do is look at the Pick Up Artist community. They are generally unattractive men who are desperately trying to get laid. This causes literal frustration.

Psychological frustration is the physiological agitation one feels when being blocked or prevented from something desired. Many men look out over the population and see multitudes of women with whom they would like to have sex, but cannot. This causes anger. Thus, frustration.

For most women, finding sex is easier. Not easy, certainly, just easier. Their problem is finding someone with whom they want to have sex. So women look out over a social landscape and see few that are acceptable. This results in judgment and sadness, but not frustration. For example, if I want food, but there is only haggis in the room, I am sad. And probably hungry. But if I want food, there is apple pie on a table but someone keeps pushing me away from it, I'm going to get angry. Misogyny is caused by frustration, misandry, by sadness.

Ironically, the very environment that has been built to cater to these men is likely angering them even further. Our media world is filled to overflowing with hyper-sexualized portrayals of women. Half-naked female forms can be found on highway billboards and on bus stops. Magazines for anything even remotely male-focused are filled with attractive, seductive women. The world has turned women into beings of pure sex and made them impossibly attractive.

This only infuriates the sexless men even more. They do not have interaction with real women, so their conception of women is defined entirely by this twisted media landscape. They see women everywhere as throwing in their face the sex that the women will not give. Women become a unified entity of a cruel temptress, mocking men. And when you are a perpetually frustrated man, this is the lens through which you will see the world.

Perhaps even worse is the flip-side of the behavioral coin. Men become frustrated because they can't get the desired sex with super-attractive women, and thus become openly hostile to women who are unattractive because they feel that these are the only women with whom they can get sex. Their frustration lashes out at the related subject of their desires. They feel that other men, be they rich, handsome, or whatnot, are the ones having sex with the attractive women seen in media, and thus the only ones left for these ordinary men are ugly women.

I think that much of this is because of the male focus on sex. It is hard for them to get it, thus, they focus on it. I think that there is a long, complex history that has built our society in such a way as to make sex hard for men to get, even though it doesn't need to be that way. Men and women want the same things! Truly, I feel confident that the vast majority of the differences between the genders are the result of social programming. Ditch the programming, ditch the problem.

The very same sexism that imprisons women to this very day is producing a group of men who feel rejected by the sexist system that was ostensibly created for them. The differences between misogyny and misandry stand as a testament to our need for freedom from sexism in all forms. It hurts us all, and we must grow past it. Men are not animals. We want a lot more than sex. But when society fails to teach us what true happiness is, we fall back on, and thus interpret the world through the lens of, primal drives. We need to teach our boys that sex is only the beginning.

A recent study showed that teenage boys are talking about romance, love, and relationships more than at any other point in history. I can happily say that the cultural shift is happening now. One can only hope that, as being emotional is more acceptable for men, and being sexual is more acceptable for women, this wall of dislike between the genders will fall. Maybe, someday in the future, men will take to message boards to complain that all women ever want is sex. Now wouldn't that be something?

The End of Cheating

Much like issues with the end of judgment and the end of insurance, will future technology bring the end of cheating?

I am, of course, referring to sex robots. They are coming. They are quite literally an inevitability. I would imagine that our first ostensibly human-like robots are less than twenty years away, and our first affordable robots that are at least functional for sexual purposes at a price that people can afford is maybe another twenty years after that.

As with so many things in the future, our ability to understand and thus manipulate the blocks of the world that represent "reality" forces questions upon us. We take so much of the world at face value, which of course makes perfect sense. We evolved in a world where we had to take things at face value. But as concepts like souls, free will, identity, and humanity fall apart under analysis, where we will go?

As regards sexbots, will we be forced to recognize the philosophical issue of not knowing what happens in another person's head? And our concept of a "person" is extrapolated from behavior of a creature that looks like "me." We already have studies showing that human-like robots can be "blamed" in the same way that we blame other people. We know that the robots are not human. We know that they are nothing more than lines of code. Yet, our emotional drives are apparently willing to ascribe human-like souls to robots if they are suitably human-like.

This drive is there even with robots that look more like Wall-e than Wally, so when robots that look very human, this drive will likely be as strong as they would for real humans. Will the inevitable sexbots change our conception of cheating?

For example, very few people would count masturbation as cheating. Likewise, complex masturbation through tools and sex dolls would also not be seen as cheating. Cheating, at least for most people, requires another person. But what happens when sex dolls look like another person?

Aside from the surface issues, we also get into thorny problems like intent. Would it be cheating if the cheater thought that the robot was another person? Could a person program an impossibly-attractive robot to specifically seduce someone for the purpose of destroying a relationship? Would we accept people being in "relationships" with robots? Many more questions present themselves, because this isn't just about sex, it's about love, friendship, emotions, and our ability to socialize.

My answer to these problems is one that Dan Savage would love: the end of relationships as we know them is less than a lifetime away. Traditional relationships with fidelity and monogamy are, by and large, social constructs. They don't even work very well when we only have human people running around, what with over 50% of marriages ending in divorce, as many as 70% of people cheating at some point in their life, and 10% of men caring for kids that they think are theirs... but aren't.

When sexbots come out, our traditional conceptions of fidelity and relationships will be ripped apart, and we will finally be free from the shackles of our ridiculous, socially-prescribed conceptions, free to live and love as we see fit.

Are You A Creep? (UPDATED)

Jezebel has a great article by Hugo Schwyzer about "creep-shaming." This is only one part of an expanding online discussion on the subject and is fantastically enlightening.

First, before going any further, let it be said that creep-shaming is total nonsense. It's yet another game for men's-righters to play, and as we all know, they are essentially a hate group. I will admit, though, that it would sting much more if someone called me a creep than any other particular name. Why that is is worth addressing.

If I call a black man an asshole, that's behavioral. But if I call him a "nigger," that is qualitative. Ignoring the fact that racial epithets have buckets more emotional baggage than simply a qualitative insult, and as such add to sting, there is nothing that a black man can do about being black, and I am insinuating that this fact makes him less-than.


I think that creep is the same thing. It's not just that "creep" communicates the mental state of a woman, but that it qualitatively jabs the man. A man who is an "asshole" simply knows to stop acting like an asshole, because the statement is generally about behavior. But "creep" is not something where a man can simply stop acting in a particular way. He is a creep.

They hit on something very important in the other articles, and that is the reason why the word "creep" is qualitative. It's because unlike "asshole," which has pretty well-defined behavioral patterns attached to it, "creep" does not. As such, the men who are called creeps may not even fully understand why, and thus, it becomes something they are as opposed to something that they do. In an absence of understanding, it's not surprising that many men become angry.

That doesn't mean that quantifying the behavior is entirely impossible. I think it can be done (I think it has to do with those who copy the gross aspects of confident behavior and those who behave in a certain way because they are confident), but for the sake of this article, we won't try to do that.

Moreover, men who are "creeps" are setting off warning bells with women. People are good at detecting micro-behaviors as a way to interpret someone else's mindset. Facial expression, body positioning, hand movements, eye contact: all of these things come into play in interactions not just for women, but for all of us. These are not things that are easily controlled, which is why when people go into an interaction with someone and try to be a particular way, it seems off. The gross behavior does not line up with the micro-behavior, and thus, we have a creep.

For men who don't want to be creeps, it requires more than behavioral changes, it requires a deep analysis of one's mindset at the beginning of an interaction. This is not easy, but the ease with which it can be done has nothing to do with men's anger. It is the fact that many of them aren't even aware that this is the case.

UPDATE:

A study has been released essentially confirming this. "Creeps" elicit a physiological response that literally gives people shivers.

Misogyny, Misandry, And The Blended Penis.

UPDATE: I feel better, especially considering the hate that I have received from the "Men's Rights" movement, that the Southern Poverty Law Center has published a report on the hateful misogyny contained therein. When I wrote and posted this, all I was responding to was The Amazing Atheist. I wasn't even aware that this "movement" existed. Well, I'm sure as hell aware of it now, seeing as the group took a movement all over the comments section of my video. When something like the SPLC is on your side, you feel vindicated. /UPDATE

The amazing atheist recently posted a video attacking the CBS show The Talk, where they laugh over a man getting his penis cut off and thrown into a garbage disposal. First off, let's address the fact that their laughing about it is rather disturbing, especially being a man who is more that slightly attached to his penis.

That said, his response is wrong on one level, and at best misdirected on others.

First, he is flat-out wrong in his association of feminism with this. Men and women, who more than smack of misogyny, equate misandry, of which there is plenty in our society, with feminism. This is resolutely not the case.

I read Jezebel a lot. I also read lots of other blogs written by level-headed, intelligent people. Feministe, Feministing, and a variety of other sites that deal with gender and society. If these are representative of feminism in the world today, then he is wrong, and if he can't take feminism seriously, if he can't take the drive for absolute equality of women seriously, then he is nothing more than another stupid white guy who can't look past his own perspective.

Is there misandry? Of course. There's tons of it. Cosmo magazine is a great example, with its subtly misandristic portrayal of men as only animals in need of sexual placating. But all of the misandry in the world pales, PALES, in comparison to the amount of misogyny out there, especially in regards to the violent nature of the misogyny. If you feel that I need to make a list of examples of misogyny, you need to read more news.

For example, JUST as I was writing this, Kotaku, the gaming blog that is actually the sister website of Jezebel, wrote of a large LAN party celebrating the release of Battlefield 3, a video game. They banned women because their presence causes the men to act up. Put yourself in the shoes of the female gamers who wanted to attend, or those who attended the previous year, thus motivating this absurd regulation. You can appreciate the urge to portray men as chimpanzees.

He uses an example from Forensic Files where a woman killed her husband, but doesn't give us all of the details. The woman shot her husband in the head with a shotgun while he slept, and claimed that he had been beating her. Has he never seen Burning Bed? It's a viable defense. And it's not a viable defense for emotional reasons, there are reams of psychological research data describing the state of mind people can come to be in when living in an abusive household. He uses this as a counter example, but it fails.

He fails to take his OWN words into consideration when saying that women are treated differently. He talks about how every show is the husband killing the wife, and I watch the same shows, it's true, and then a episode is of the wife killing the husband. Doesn't that make any intelligent person think that, if all other cases are one way, and this one is another way, that there might be something different about it?

Especially considering that the episodes of that very show that involve women, which I've seen and I'm sure so as he, where the women's motivations are black as pitch, the women never do what he described. They poison, which is very popular, or they hire someone else.

Women do not physically abuse men. Even with recent research showing that female on male abuse is higher than originally thought, it is still a tiny fraction of the abuse of male on female.

He also mentions a case in Russia that may or may not be true of a woman who beat up a man who was trying to rob her store, cuffed him, and kept him as a sex slave for three days. He talks about the reaction to her behavior, with people creating her a Facebook fan page. Well, I have another case that is definitely true. The Russian “Black Widow.” A woman who was charged with drugging and raping ten men in 2009. I find the reaction of the men interesting. If this had been a man, the response from women would have been universal, “That is horrible. I can't imagine being in her shoes.”

But instead, the response from men was frequently “Why can't I find women like that?!” One of the men even refused to press charges because he liked it and only wished he hadn't been drugged. But even here, there were many obviously misadristic women nearly calling for the beatification of the Black Widow. Their words dripped with hatred. This is not feminism. Not in the very slightest. You would never hear these words from actual feminists like those on Jezebel. But EVEN THEN, the situation is not equal.

Misandry and misogyny are different. Absolutely. They are not different because one is right and the other wrong. They are both equally wrong. But they are different in the behaviors caused by them. The Amazing Atheist fails to notice that men raping women happens all of the time, but women raping men makes international news because it is so very rare.

That is not to say that female-male rape doesn't exist. Truly, women can be sexually aggressive as is found in statistics of sexual coercion between lesbians. But my likelihood of being raped by a woman, in ANY setting, is about as low as winning the lottery. My chances of being raped by another man, on the other hand, are much higher. This is probably the root of misandristic threads in gay culture and the fact that in your average gay club, every man in the building is watching their drink like a hawk.

The Amazing Atheist and the women on The Talk talk about cutting off the penis as identical to the breasts and clitoris. No. Wrong again. As my partner Danielle pointed out very succinctly, the penis can be a weapon, and it is a weapon that is widely used by millions of men every year when they rape. Women simply do not have a counterpart to the penis.

Even the very video to which the Amazing Atheist linked stands as a testament to misogyny, and this is again something that he doesn't discuss. It was posted by some absurd “Manhood Academy,” which references “getting your balls back.” Because in this blatantly, horribly sexist and misogynistic world, masculinity is something that women can take away, because masculinity exists only vis a vis women.

If a man is attacking you for being a bad person, even if you aren't, you call that person an asshole. Nothing else. He's just an asshole. But if women do it, you're being stripped of your masculinity. Because here, masculinity is a reciprocal construct that exists to put women in their place. If women are not in their place, masculinity has been “stripped.” Masculinity is directly associated with sex.

That “Manhood Academy's” website lists this, and I quote”Manhood Academy is the first worldwide male educational center specifically designed to train men like you in social competence. And best of all—our content is ABSOLUTELY FREE. Whether it's going on your first date, saving a troubled relationship, addressing your wife's 'bitch' behavior, making new friends, or standing up for yourself in this emasculating feminist environment, our goal is to teach you how to conduct satisfying social interactions.”

Notice how in their list of things that they can help you do, of the five items that emasculate you, four are directly associated with women. Funny how that is. That is because in this view, women are not people. They are “women.” Something that is somehow fundamentally different and separate from men.

The content of the video is just that, but you cannot avoid recognizing that the people who saw fit to post this video online are just as bad as those they attack.

So why are people not getting up in arms, like the Amazing Atheist demands? Because women doing this is so damned rare. Rape of men is not a pestilence on society. Men might fear mugging, but women on the street fear abduction, rape, murder, AND mugging. It is a predatory world out there, and it is just plain stupid to argue otherwise. How many serial killers killed men? How often do women form gun-toting gangs? How often do women form small armies that are paid with the rape and pillage of wherever their leader sends them? Do you have any examples? I do not. I do have examples of the men doing it, like when the Red Army raped every German woman they came across during the fall of Berlin. Again, you can appreciate the urge to portray men as chimpanzees.

If I met any misandristic women, I would just as soon run for the hills from their toxic nonsense as I would from misogynistic men. They are equally large assholes in a purely intellectual sense. But something tells me that those same women would not go off and rape, beat, and molest. The men do. I do not feel threatened by misandry, but women do and should feel threatened by misogyny.

It's not that men don't have the right to get up in arms, it's that they have no reason. Sexism doesn't affect them systemically. Men, for all intents and purposes, rule the world. As women reach higher positions of power in the future, this will likely need addressing, and I may become to feel threatened by misandry, but it doesn't today.

Women and those damned angry feminists get up in arms precisely because the pissed off men who follow stupid shit like Manhood Academy are so ready to put women back into their “place.” The definition of manhood for these people is having women under control. Religion wants them back in the kitchen. Society wants them sexualized and put up for decoration.

Angry men the world over want those bitches down. Look at the scummy social underbelly of France that has been revealed with the Strauss-Kahn case in New York. Or the governmental representatives in Australia who keep meowing at female representatives. This is a seething, toxic undercurrent to our social zeitgeist. And because of that, misogyny and misandry are, and will remain for the perceivable future, different. Logically identical, but practically very, very, terribly, violently different.

UPDATE: Because of the direction that the comments on this site and YouTube have taken, I want to focus on a good example of what shows up on real feminist websites. Misandry is not feminism. Real, level-headed feminists write about gender in general, and freedom, and apple pie, and the American way, and all that good stuff!

Once Again, Men Can Be Raped Too (Jezebel.com)

The Hooker Teacher and America's Sex Shame

The Hooker Teacher has written an article for Salon. In it, Melissa Petro describes how she, holder of dual Masters degrees, was revealed to have a past as a stripper and prostitute. Since her past has been revealed, and after being fired, she is entirely unable to get a job.

The degree of the online shaming, and even some of the comments on Salon, reveal in stark contrast what's wrong with America. We are sexist. We are sex-obsessed. And we are disgustingly moralistic.

Prostitution remains a heartbreaking problem not only because it is illegal when it shouldn't be, but because even if it was legal, our culture still shames it. We still look down upon it. People doing it want to keep it secret for fear of events like this. That might not be legal ostracizing, but it is cultural. And that cultural bias will find its way into police work, and prostitutes won't get the protection that they deserve, thus furthering pimps and sex worker violence.

And don't think for a second that this sort of reaction would happen to men who were revealed to be porn stars or prostitutes. For them, culture might see it as a bit seedy, but still well within the boundaries of male behavior. No. Only women are sluts. Men are studs.

This illustration of our sex obsession is also infuriating. Look at religion, look at television, movies, and schools. We are FIXATED on sex. It's everywhere, and nowhere is it more explicitly obsessed over than in the moralistic halls of religion. We can't get enough of it and yet we hate it, and we really hate anyone who doesn't engage in the same self-loathing as us. As such, prostitutes, who, being women, should be especially self-loathing, are looked at as literal pariahs.

This reminds me of the secretary who was recently outed as an ex porn star by a student. The fact that the student tried to blackmail her and demanded sexual favors (this kid was fourteen, mind you) was seemingly missed in the media's focus on her being a porn star. The secretary was fired, because obviously enjoying sex in the past makes you evil.

The root of this problem is male dominated religion, of course. Men are obsessed with porn stars and prostitutes because of the sexual aura around them. I obviously have no support for this theory, but I suspect that religion's obsession with sex is because western religions were started by ugly men who couldn't get laid. Thus, they hated what they couldn't get. That's pretty basic psychology, and I'm simply projecting on those in the past. In fact, the only major religious figure of whom I can think that apparently could get laid was Augustine.

I can also point to current-day cults and micro-religions. Ever notice how they all have a serious focus on sex, and the leader is always a guy, and that guy seems to frequently get in trouble for weird sexual behavior? Yeah.

Men Are Retarded

More Surveys

I just received a call, 1:20pm, from the National Organization for Marriage... again. In my first post on the subject, I commented on how suspicious the wording of the question was and the timing of the call. First off, if the name wasn't a hint, the National Organization for Marriage is a right-wing, religious organization that is of course against gay marriage, because letting two gay people do what they want will bring about the apocalypse or something. That bias in the polling makes me more circumspect of the actual poll.

My first call, on January 26th, was received at 2:00pm. They also asked whether I was 50-years of age or older. What demographic is at home at 2:00pm? Old people. And what do old people hate more than any other age bracket? Gays! This is in contrast to polling calls that I've received from Gallup, The New York Times, CNN, CBS, and other, I dunno' respectable organizations. I usually receive the calls after 5:00pm.

This successful call was actually the third. The first was successfully answered back in January, I then got a second which was answered by my machine at about 2:00pm yesterday. That's three calls, all around the same time, 1:45pm. Highly irregular.

Humans And Monogamy

In an earlier post I attacked a book that made the argument that humans developed monogamy because of weapons. I find this hypothesis to be highly inadequate. I've read it before, but I'm not sure how widespread this perspective is, that human semi-monogamy as we have it now came about because of the concept of ownership. Some argue that this happened with the development of agriculture, others with artistic creations like necklaces. Whenever it developed, I think it makes much more sense if you look at the highly political lives of chimps and bonobos.

Basically, for men, if you own crap that you want to pass down, you want to give it to your own children. In chimp society, it's not a matter of passing down possessions, it's simply not expending energy to care for the children. There's no planning for the future. Ownership incentivises an understanding of blood lines. I find this explanation much more likely. But even then, there is no way to test these things. Every society on Earth has a system of ownership, so we can't go and find one that doesn't. We can't find a society without weapons. It's all intellectual masturbation.

Human Monogomy Is The Result of Weapons?

There's a new book coming out that I, admittedly, have not read. So I don't know whether my criticisms of this article should be aimed at the author or at The New York Times. Regardless, someone doesn't know jack-shit about chimps.

First off, the author is assuming that our behavior is similar to chimps, while that is hardly an accepted fact. Lots of researchers think that our ancient society was closer to the bonobo.

So what caused us to become primarily monogamous? Well... wait. Since when have we been primarily monogamous? I know lots of sex researchers who would dispute this claim. What about theories that we pair-bond for three years, with a huge burst of sexual desire at the beginning. This gets us pregnant and provides care long enough for the baby to become self-mobile. Where does that fit into his theory? In born behavior like that must have come long before our development of weapons.

Regardless, the article, at least, contends that the force behind monogamy was "perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies."

What brutal tyranny of alpha males? Apparently, the NY Times didn't bother reading the Wikipedia entry on chimp social structure, where "more than one individual may be dominant enough to dominate other members of lower rank."

Furthermore, "the 'dominant male' does not always have to be the largest or strongest male but rather the most manipulative and political male who can influence the goings on within a group. Male chimpanzees typically attain dominance through cultivating allies who will provide support for that individual in case of future ambitions for power."

There is no tyranny of the alpha male in chimp societies. And to put the explanation exclusively on the males WILDLY ignores the complexities of chimp society. Again, from nothing more than Wikipedia;

"Its often the females who choose the alpha male. For a male chimpanzee to win the alpha status, he must gain acceptance from the females in the community as they are the ones who actually dictate the lifestyle... In some cases, a group of dominant females will oust an alpha male who is not to their preference and rather back up the other male who they see potential of leading the group as a successful alpha male."

Tyrant, indeed.

This is the reason why there's such blowback on evolutionary psychology. They make inferences and conclusions that are, at best, fleetingly supported by evidence. Broad statements can be made, but to argue that details that this or that variable was definitely the cause of a shift in behavior or evolution is not, NOR EVER WILL BE, supported by evidence. This book is intellectual masturbation.

Circumcision And Parental Rights

San Francisco is trying to ban male circumcision. Apparently, they're following France's lead in passing laws that proscribe religious practice, i.e. Jewish circumcision. Their logic goes that removing chunks of your baby at a young age is mutilation in the same way that female circumcision is mutilation. While they're similar, male circumcision is much less destructive. With the female variant, you're not only removing skin, you're removing the densest ball of nerves on the human body. Moreover, female circumcision removes the vast majority of sexual pleasure... it's kind of the point. Male circumcision, while damaging sexual pleasure, does not eliminate it. So while both procedures count as mutilation, they are in different leagues as far as actual damage goes.

This case also runs counter to my belief that parental rights are paramount, even if that ends up killing the child. Parents, basically, have the right to do whatever they want to their child in their quest to raise the child "right." Considering that there are religious sects out there that won't bring their kids to doctors for any reason, letting parents remove a flap of flesh seems pretty inconsequential.

What Males Do

Huffington Post has a short article about a bunch of high school girls rallying against a website that apparently rates the girls of that school in rather nasty terms. Sexist words are as one would expect, but racist words also permeate the website.

It got me thinking about men and our psychology. For example, I don't think that rape evolved, I suspect that it's a side-effect of males being prone to violence and being frustrated by something that they want, as such, they lash out in the form of rape. With this, we're talking about high-school boys. They can't be much older than seventeen, with the youngest clocking in at thirteen. Why on God's green Earth would they, at an age where they can barely poop correctly, feel the need to create a website to not only objectify girls, but to positively degrade them.

I suspect it's, again, because they want them, and they're too much a bunch of pussies to do anything about it, so they lash out. They want them, but they fear them. Mature, guys. Real mature.

Bayer Beyaz Commercial is Shockingly Straightforward (UPDATED)

Bayer has released a new birth control pill called Beyaz, which isn't notable in and of itself; it's the commercial that's amazing.



This is the most frank and truthful ad I have seen in a long time, especially in the world of prescription drugs. Most of them seem to imply that the drugs allow you to do things that you were never stopped from doing anyhow. For example, ads for herpes drugs show people in hot tubs, horseback riding, swinging from trees, sailing, and other weird shit that herpes wouldn't actually stop you from doing. They could at least use euphemisms for sex. But no. It was like the first ad for Claritin, where they had to legally avoid mentioning what the drug did, instead showing some guy windsurfing through a field of wheat, which eventually spelled out the logo. WTF? How does that convey allergy relief?!

But back to Beyaz. I actually find this ad refreshing. It's saying what lots of people are already thinking. Take this pill to prevent pregnancy, because babies ruin your life. TRUTH! Obviously, that's not only true for women, but they have the most to risk. Indeed, it is true for anyone who wants to be a parent, man or woman alike. Having a kid ruins your life for at least ten years. You can't do shit. You can't go to movies, you can't go to nice restaurants, you can't go on two-week trips to exotic locales. You need a baby sitter for everything.

I've read some commentary online where people are taking offense to the ad, saying that the ad implies that women can't have a kid and do fun stuff. They can't! Nor should they! If you aren't ready to focus your life on that kid, you shouldn't be having it. It's that simple. Having a child is a massive obligation. Possibly the greatest obligation that a human can accept. And frankly, the fact that the commercial doesn't sugarcoat the idea that having a kid isn't nearly as fun as visiting other countries, owning things, and finding love isn't at all offensive.

In fact, it is my opinion that life offers so many great things, having a kid borders on insane. If you have a child, you should have one for a wide array of emotional and philosophical reasons. If you can't articulate those reasons, you're not ready to have a kid. So take this pill.

UPDATE:

A recent study has come out seemingly indicating that people who report how satisfying having kids is might be lying just a wee bit. Basically, people talk up the joys of parenting to gloss over the massive financial burden of children.

Me thinks they doth protest too much.

Legalize Prostitution, Already!

I've said it before, but we need to legalize prostitution. Not only do we need to legalize it, we need to have a large, social push to legitimize it. To make people stop seeing it as the exclusive domain of seedy people that we shouldn't give a rat's ass about. Only then, ONLY THEN, will we have any chance to stop sex trafficking. We have to draw the world out of the shadows. If we keep moralizing about it and charging around with our Bibles out, we only succeed in driving it underground, where it's going to happen anyhow!

Stop persecuting these women! If they choose to sell sex, it's their choice. We have no right to judge them or any other aspect of the situation. We can't assume that they'd rather be doing something else. We can't feel sorry for them. It's a job for which they get paid. That is the only thing that we can safely assume.

"I'm Not Buying It" Targets Super Bowl Sex Trafficking (Jezebel.com)

Living Forever

On that same episode of Nova Science Now that I mentioned in the previous post, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that, if we ever develop an ability to live forever, our only option to deal with the population problem that would follow is interplanetary travel. I disagree. And I think it's patently obvious that that position is false.

Our only option, and I want to be perfectly clear in this, our ONLY option is social restrictions on breeding. I'm talking dystopian-level stuff. We either do what China did and make is so absurdly expensive to have children that the vast majority of people can't, or we make it illegal to have children and force abortions on people.

Population growth would be logarithmic. Even if we develop interplanetary travel, we would fill up those planets in very short time. With a population of 60 billion, we'd be generating a billion people every couple of years. There is no where that we could put that. We couldn't build space ships quickly enough.

Our only other option is stopping sex. If you want to live forever, you forfeit the right to want or have sex. Because if the desire is there, there is nothing we could do to stop it. Adultery is punishable by death in some areas of the world, and people still mess around.

This is undeniable. Immortality would force the greatest cultural upheaval in the history of our species. It would require a complete rewriting of our concept of human rights, because for the first time, doing something that is natural and, in itself, not harmful, would be incalculably destructive.

Wouldja Like to Take a Surrrveeey?!

Do you like George Wendt? Five points to Gryffindor if you know where that's from.

I just received a call with an automated survey from the National Organization for Marriage. If you can't tell just by the name, this is a right-wing, Christian organization that of course believes gay marriage is evil and, somehow, a threat. I'm getting the call because Lincoln Chafee, Rhode Island's governor-elect, has made it clear that he supports gay marriage, so there's a lot of attention being paid by American religious groups to our tiny, little nugget of the union. It doesn't help that Rhode Island is so damned Catholic.

Regardless, there's a fantastic episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit called Numbers, you can watch it here. It's a Hong Kong site called Megavideo, which is a little scummy, but it's at least safe. The important part comes in at about 12:20, if you want to fast forward.



The survey that I answered, and I'll try to be as accurate as I can, opened the survey, opened the survey, with the statement "This survey involves one of the most important subjects of our time: the institution of marriage." Nice primer, there, assholes. Look at what they said. This is IMPORTANT. We're talking about an INSTITUTION.

Then, the money question "Do you believe that marriage should be legal only between a man and a woman?" It's worded juuuust funny enough to possibly elicit a particular answer. Why not just ask the most straightforward question? "Do you believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry?"

Because asking that question emphasizes that we are not allowing a group of people to do something. We have a rather strong freedom streak running through us, and pollsters want to avoid asking questions that collide with it. They phrase the question not in a way that makes it sound like we're preventing people from doing something, but that we are protecting something. That we are, in that protecting, preventing people from doing something is glossed over.

If you've watched the episode of P&T, you'll understand that this is not a merely semantic issue. It is a fundamental issue in the posing of the question. By phrasing it as though we are defending something and not as though we are oppressing a group, and priming people with the concept of "the institution of marriage" beforehand, the pollsters can easily shift the results of the survey in the direction that they want.

They then asked whether I was male or female, and whether I was over the age of fifty. This is likely important because men are shifting towards a pro-GLBT position faster than women, and there is a startling opinion shift in the mid-40's. People younger than 45 are strongly pro-gay, and people older than 45 are strongly anti-gay. Damned old people. Just die.

This also makes me question the timing of the call. I work out of my home, so I'm here, but calling on a weekday, at 2pm, when most people are at work; the pollsters are likely to get a disproportionate number of women and old people answering. Miiiiighty suspicious. It reminds us that the sample quality is important for any survey. Is it actually random? Or is there some other variable that can be affecting the qualities of the sample? And, even more perniciously, are the pollsters well aware of this and using it to their advantage? Judging from the wording of the actual survey, I'm quite sure that they know what they're doing in calling at 2pm.