Underworked

From Military.com:

Air Force Lt. Doubles as NFL Cheerleader

Apparently, some people are saying that Lt Quaco’s extra-military avocation is not “representative of [Air Force] standards”, but what I want to focus on is that while some enlistees sometimes have after-hours employment delivering pizzas and such, I’m not aware of any precedent where an officer holds two full-time paid positions simultaneously.   Mormons cadets in the Service Academies are allowed to resign without prejudice to fulfill their mission obligations and return, and newly commissioned Academy graduates have been given leaves-of-absence to pursue NFL careers before returning to serve their military obligations.  But in these instances, the officers did one thing at a time.  I’m pretty sure that the Air Force is giving Lt Quaco low-demand make-work to allow her cheerleading time.

It’s Always Year One of the Revolution.

Trumwill name-checked me in a post linking to a brief series of Ross Douthat columns that, while I have counted myself a Douthat fan since his writing for The American Scene, I had neglected.  The columns concerned the ongoing breakdown of Americans’ sexual morality, its attendant social consequences, and the political response (or lack thereof) from the mainstream parties.

I am mystified as to what Ross sees in my old neglected whipping boy Conor Friedersdorf, but for some reason he links approvingly to a column that contained this:

It would be dishonest for me to pretend that there are no benefits to severe stigmas traditionally perpetuated by social conservatives. Even Hester Prynne's scarlet 'A' may have dissuaded a neighbor or two from adulterous forays they would've regretted, but today even the vast majority of social conservatives look upon the stigmas of Puritan America (not to mention modern-day Saudi Arabia) as attempts to perpetuate cultural norms that impose costs far higher than any benefit. Less clear are social conservatives' views on the role stigma should play now. They're averse to making people feel bad and reluctant to repeat the excesses of the past, but they're also reluctant to give up efforts to stigmatize various behaviors that they still regard as sinful, no matter how accepted they have become in American culture.

This reluctance persists even though stigma hasn't been a particularly effective tool. The stigma against unwed pregnancy incentivized an unknown number of abortions even as it utterly failed to stop the rise in out-of-wedlock births. Eve Tushnet has argued that the stigma against divorce causes a lot of people to give up on marriage, and it certainly didn't prevent divorce from becoming very common, even among practicing religious believers.

How about the stigma against premarital sex? Sex before marriage is the norm, and the effort to enforce the stigma prevents social conservatives from participating in conversations about the relative morality of premarital sex in different circumstances, because distinctions would undermine the message that premarital sex is always wrong. Stigmas generally cause those who perpetuate them to focus on norm maintenance at the expense of logic or persuasion. For this reason, many purveyors of stigma are left with no well-developed arguments to fall back on when the culturally dominant status that permitted them to shape norms is lost. (See the early stages of the gay-marriage debate.)

. . . .

I suspect his posts garner criticism from liberal feminists partly because while they're not averse to women being better able to meet their preferences, they see "a somewhat more conservative sexual culture" and assume that it would entail some amount of what they typically call "slut-shaming."

I'm nearly certain Douthat doesn't want that. In fact, he is very much unlike bygone generations of social conservatives in that he explicitly urges men to change their sexual behavior, rather than urging chastity generally but effectively putting the burden on women to bring it about.

. . . .

My general stance in these conversations is that what ought to be stigmatized is the morally objectionable thing itself—thoughtlessly hooking up with someone who isn't ready to do so, even if they consent, for example—and that it's unfair to stigmatize sexual behavior that does no harm to the individuals involved because more typical pairings would be harmed by that same behavior. In my estimation, those are the sorts of stigmas that society is ill-equipped to enforce in a manner Douthat might call Christian, and that it always comes to regret.

One of the advantages of being middle-aged (indeed, the only advantage that presently occurs to me) is that I have lived through enough history to throw the bullsh!t flag on present-day mischaracterization of events that I have lived through personally.

First, sexual immorality has been a feature of the broader society for a long time, certainly since I’ve been walking around.  My parents did their part to protect me from its influence, and to be fair, I wasn’t being invited to those parties anyway.  But the Christian Church, including and even especially its Evangelical variants, were well aware what was going on, and did, in fact, make efforts to engage the culture.

Conor paints a picture of the Church in which it relied exclusively on its institutional strength to enforce social norms in the broader society long past the point it had such power.  I’m not sure to what Conor is referring here, but it’s not to a church that existed during his lifetime or even mine.  More typical of my experience was the kind of message put forward by Josh McDowell in his book Why Wait?  That book was published in 1987, but McDowell was making Christian education films on this theme some years earlier.  Full disclosure:  I haven’t read Why Wait?, and if anyone wants to criticize if for inaccuracies based on what was known at the time, I’ll be happy to listen.  But I did hear McDowell speak on the subject a couple of times, and will summarize his thesis thus:  STDs and unplanned pregnancies will mess up your life; abortion and loss of marital intimacy leave psychological scars.

I have become aware in my adult life that this approach – appealing to the listeners’ self-interest -- has its limitations.  I do not challenge any of McDowell’s factual points; if anything, they are probably better supported by social science today than they were then, and I haven’t lately heard even from the Left that the only thing wrong with the sexual revolution is not enough condoms.  The limitation is rather two-fold.  First, as an epistemological matter, appeals to self-interest ought not normally require so many external constraints, be they physical (“Your curfew is X!”) or moral (as in yet another sermon from Daddy on the importance of chastity).  Self-interest, according to Adam Smith, ought to be self-enforcing.  I have come to believe, late in life, that the reason for having a Decalogue is that, while the obligation to uphold it falls on the individual, the benefits of doing so are realized by the group.  Murder and theft are suboptimum relational constructs for society at large, but I wouldn’t deny, independent of society’s willingness and ability to punish them, that individuals within a society can’t improve their relative position by participating in theft and murder.  That, in my mind, is why we need the commandments.

So why should adultery (by which I mean any extramarital sexual activity) be any different?  Yes, it leave society much the worse, but can any individual illicitly accrue social benefit thereby?  The answer, I believe, is sexually dimorphic:  for men, the answer is clearly yes; for women, the answer is mixed, as a matter of biology and sociology.  Absent any religious commitments, I can’t think of any reason to recommend to a man that he should do otherwise than calculate the cost-benefit ratios and proceed accordingly.  As I have written before from my own bitter experience, there are few points for chaste males even within the church, and probably none in the larger society.

Thus, I don’t really have in interest in “reducing the numbers of semi-forced sexual encounters” (Douthat’s words).  I don’t wish anyone harm, but I don’t put a priority on making it “safe” for people to color outside the lines.  And while Douthat can speak for himself, I’m not really interested in a “slightly more conservative sexual culture” for its own sake, either.  Yes, it would be nice if my daughters could grow up in a country where they never felt pressured to have extra-marital sex, but my expectations here are rather low.  As Douthat writes, and Conor seems to concede partially, the culture will not be shared by both chastity and unchastity.  Better for my daughters to seek their society within the church, where their values will be (nominally, at least) upheld.

Rather, my goals with respect to sex are two-fold.  First, I want, not just “no sex, please” but rather chastity as an expression of devotion to God, loyalty to family, and fidelity to a future life-partners.  As I have said before, the goal here are values, not just behavioral outcomes.

And second, I want to minimize the “negative externalities”.  Yes, STDs and bastardy.  But more to the point, extra-marital sex distorts the sexual economy and disrupts the process of forming stable families.  People are getting married later, if at all, and marriages continue to break apart.  The reward for being “a reliable husband and father” is greatly diminished, and growing numbers of men find themselves locked out of the mating market.

You might argue that the first does not cause the second, and in this I partially agree.  Conor uses the word “stigma” some 28 times in his post as an accusation of what conservatives want; Douthat uses it not once in the four posts linked above, and only a couple of times in his columns during the past year, neither in a context involving sex.  It is telling that Conor demands to know how Ross intends to make the culture more sexually conservative; Ross is merely articulating such a culture as a desirable thing, and Conor wants guarantees up front that such a project will not impinge on his commitments to social liberalism.

Fair enough.  Again, Douthat can speak for himself, but I submit that all the problems I have identified are functions, not merely of a lack of stigma, but of specific policies directed at female emancipation, and that any meaningful effort at rolling back these problems will necessarily involve curtailing those policies.

I will say candidly that my expectations here are pretty low.  There is no level of social dysfunction, material destitution, or even foreign subjugation below which the modern Squealer will not say, “Surely, Comrade!  Surely you do not want Jones back?”  And so it is.

But to bring this essay back full circle, I offer this as evidence disproving Colin’s assertion that Christianity hasn’t engaged the culture from other than a position of command.  It may be true that certain variants of fundamentalism have sufficed themselves to railing against fornication from the pulpit on strict grounds of morality; that is what fundamentalists have done for well over a hundred years, and exactly nobody believes they were ever in charge of America.  The appeal of mainstream Christianity to sexual morality, weak as it looks in retrospect, has been looking out, not down, for my entire life.

Colin whines that such appeals discriminate against women “in practice”.  On the one hand, this is a step up from the usual calumny, against which no amount of contrary evidence is ever recognized, that opposition to extra-marital sex is discriminatory in spirit.  But it is still false for the same reason:  it is woefully ignorant of the evenhandedness of Evangelical culture and deliberately obtuse about the state of secular culture as well. 

But let me turn the question around.  It is feminism that created this mess.  It is feminism that has privileged the lifestyles of a handful of elite women at the expense of most other women and a great number of men.  And feminism is woefully inadequate to correct it.

Douthat is looking for a “slightly more conservative sexual culture”.  But what does that mean?  Sex on the third date but not on the first?  Apparently, Douthat and Friedersdorf take note that (most) women want to delay sex for longer into a relationship than do (most) men, as well they should.   But I’m not sure what’s in that for me.  To be specific, and mildly less flippant, I don’t see how any goals of mine are materially advanced by the delay of sex as an expression of female preference.  Don’t get me wrong:  if women want to delay sex they should delay sex, and good luck to them.

I suspect, however, that when women state a preference for “delaying sex until further into a relationship,” what they are really hoping is that the men they are currently hooking up with will actually invest in a relationship with them at all.  And again, good luck to them.  But the mathematics – most women hooking up with a minority of men – dictate that most of these women will inevitably go away disappointed.

But either way, if the sex is to happen outside of both marriage and meaningful motions towards that end . . . well, the ethics of Roissy look like a rational way for a man to look at the world.

Victoria’s Secrets in a Bunch

From Military.com:

Too Pretty to Fight? O-6 Steps Down Over Comments

Nov 25, 2013

Associated Press| by John Milburn

TOPEKA, Kan. -- Pentagon officials said Friday that an Army colonel who wrote an internal email suggesting photos of attractive women should be avoided in promotional materials has stepped down from her duties involving a gender study.

Army spokesman George Wright said Col. Lynnette Arnhart had agreed to step aside, and Gen. Robert Cone, commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Eustis, Va., had accepted the gender integration study's leadership change "in order to protect the integrity of the ongoing work on gender integration in the Army."

The content of the email was first reported by Politico this week. In the email, Arnhart stated that "average-looking women" should be used in Army materials used to attract women for combat roles, Politico reported.

In addition, Wright said that Col. Christian Kubik, a public affairs officer also with the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, was suspended for his involvement in the email pending an investigation.

According to the email chain obtained by Politico, Kubik forwarded Arnhart's email to other public affairs officers, cautioning the use of photos "that glamourize women" would undermine the Army's gender integration efforts.

Lynnette’s concern here seems pretty silly.  Then again, most marketing strategies, short of Don Draper-levels of creativity sound pretty silly when you state their assumptions out loud.  And nothing is quite as silly as the entire concept of women-in-combat . . . but we pretend to take it seriously anyway, because to do otherwise is to get fired.

The Morning After

From NBCNews.com:

'Huge win for victims of sexual assault': Congress sends defense bill to Obama

By Donna Cassata, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The women of the Senate who led the fight to change how the military deals with sexual assault in its ranks are hailing passage of a comprehensive defense bill that now heads to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The legislation would strip military commanders of their ability to overturn jury convictions, require a civilian review if a commander declines to prosecute a case and require that any individual convicted of sexual assault face a dishonorable discharge or dismissal. The bill also would provide victims with legal counsel, eliminate the statute of limitations for courts-martial in rape and sexual assault cases, and criminalize retaliation against victims who report a sexual assault.

The bill also would change the military's Article 32 proceedings to limit intrusive questioning of victims, making it more similar to a grand jury, a change backed by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, especially Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and McCaskill, grilled the chiefs about whether the military's mostly male leadership understands differences between relatively minor sexual offenses and serious crimes that deserve swift and decisive justice.

"Not every single commander necessarily wants women in the force. Not every single commander believes what a sexual assault is. Not every single commander can distinguish between a slap on the ass and a rape because they merge all of these crimes together," Gillibrand said. [Emphasis added.]

Lots of good (i.e., bad) stuff here.  As near as I can tell, Congress is addressing the difference between “sexual assault” and rape by punishing them the same?  They continue to turn morning-after regrets into criminal rape?

Like everything else our government does these days, this legislation is evil and stupid.  But it isn't like I have a dog in this fight, after all. The counterpart to my advice on how to avoid rape -- don’t be a drunken slut -- is my advice on how to avoid false rape accusations -- don’t patronize the company of drunken sluts. It's really that simple.

Questions:

• For how many other offenses is a dishonorable discharge required by federal law?
• For how many other categories of victims is legal counsel provided?
• For how many other categories of victims are there limitations on cross-examination?
• Does the legislation prevent the overturning of all courts-martial convictions or only for sex assault?
• Does the legislation require civilian review of decisions to decline prosecution for all criminal allegations, or just sexual assault?

AUCs: They Don’t Mean What You Think

The androsphere (see here and here) is taking issue with a comment, originally appearing on Dalrock’s blog and echoed by Susan Walsh, by “Kelly the PhD Statistician” on the difference between men and women with respect to their changing sexual market values over their lifetimes:

Dr. Kelly opines:

Those graphs are wrong because, with a fixed number of people in the world, equal between the sexes, you have to scale the curves so that the area under each one is the same.

I wouldn’t make a firm assertion either way as to whether the area under the two Excel graphs above are equal or not – appearances can be deceptive – but I do want to offer qualified support to my fellow PhD’s contention that the areas under the SMV curves of men and women are equal – or if you prefer, that the useful comparison is between normalized curves – provided we stipulate the curves are derived from weighted averages.

That the curves are averages of their respective sexes is beyond dispute:  nobody is likely to pretend that individuals’ curves don’t differ substantially in both their AUC and their shape over time.  But the weighting of individuals’ curves is likely to escape many readers’ consideration.

I would argue that the curves should be weighted by not less than two factors:

1. The relative attraction that each has for members of the opposite sex.

   All parties to this discussion recognize that, considered collectively, both men’s and women’s “buying power” is in inverse proportion to their attraction.   (Attraction here should be understood as “demand for” in general, not just sexual attraction.)  I stress that this only applies collectively; no single market player magically increases his individual buying power by being disinterested, not if there are lots of other buyers and sellers.  But if the downward-sloping demand curve moves left, the price increases.  Again, I will not make a dogmatic assertion that the attraction men and women have for each other are equal on lifetime averages, but I will say that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that the relative demand has changed over time, and that such changes have in the last few hundred years raised the relative attractiveness of women.

   Consider, for instance, the discarded custom of dowry.  The cultural assumption of yore was apparently that the only way to persuade a young man to take a woman off her parents’ hands was to pay him some amount of money or other goods.  In contrast, while no money changes hands today, it is a commonly accepted generality that a man must earn more than any prospective mate, at least as far as marriage is concerned.

   Consider also that philosophers, from (for instance) Francis Bacon in the 17th century to Nietzsche in the 19th, could be taken seriously when they wrote that women in their sexual capacity were mostly nuisances not worth the bother.  (My apologies to those philosophical historians who can better characterize the nuances of their thoughts on this subject.)  To the extent their opinions were representative of the men of their station, such views required women to bring more to any effort at attracting them.  But I doubt such opinions would gain mainstream attention today – yes, because of feminist sensibility, but also because, lower-order physical needs having been broadly met, sexual gratification remains in relatively high demand as an important element of both physical pleasure and self-actualization.

   Meanwhile, on the distaff side of the supply-demand curve, the need of an individual woman to obtain the assistance of an individual man in her own material provision has, in the modern economy, mostly dissipated.  That’s not to say that women don’t desire men for their own sexual gratification, but this leads us to the second weighting of the SMV curves:

2. The extent to which polygamy is tolerated.

      Specifically, any given man’s SMV should be weighted by his relative ability, desire, and permission to monopolize the attention of multiple women.  In a society in which monogamy is the legal and social norm, then each man’s SMV curve carries equal weight in the averaging.  But if a man’ s attractiveness is such that he can command the affections of, say, three women, either serially or simultaneously, then his effective contribution to the SMV average for the duration of this arrangement is thereby tripled.  Likewise, the (mathematically necessary) two uncompetitive men have their SMVs, whatever they might be, multiplied by zero for the averaging purposes, since they are not market players.  Of course, in the by-and-by, if either the well-endowed man or his women tire of the polygamous arrangement, there may be an opportunity for the two remaining men to get back in the game, and the SMV averages must be adjusted accordingly.

   It is a well-established critique of contemporary social arrangements that many women today embrace, if not formal polygamy, then at least a willingness to rotate in and out of the sexual orbits of sufficiently attractive men.  For their part, men may have always been willing to enjoy the affection of multiple women, to the extent they could afford them, although this demand was latent under the pressure of socially-enforced monogamy.  That pressure, while still present when children are at issue, is otherwise quite diminished, and the standard of “affordability” in the monetary sense has been obviated by female economic emancipation.  Notice that, in contrast to the first weighting, this would predict the increase in the area under the male SMV curve rather than a decrease.

With these caveats in mind, then, I would concur with Dr. Kelly’s judgment that the AUCs of the male and female SMV curves are identical.

But I find it somewhat ironic that, confronted with SMV curves that imply (maybe) that men have higher lifetime average attractiveness than do women, feminists* turn to arguing in favor of SMV equality as a first-order principle.  I could point to numerous comment threads here and elsewhere in which they see no problem pairing average men with far-left-tail war-pigs on the grounds that, “Hey, that’s who’ll have you!” ignoring the extent to which, say, de-facto polygamy makes that possible.

UPDATE:  Here is my own Excel graph of the Rayleigh distribution with modal SMVs at 25 and 35 years old for women and men respectively and subtracting the years prior to the onset of puberty (ages 10 and 11 according to Wikipedia).  I hasten to say that there is no theoretical reason why the Rayleigh distribution would apply here except that it seems to be shaped right and has the advantage that the AUCs are mathematically identical.

It occurs to me that one of the implications of these graphs is that the average female at her peak attractiveness has no equal among the average men at any age.  In practice, I would argue that the male SMV variance at any age is higher, so women will have equals among men.  But there are necessarily fewer such men, which is why the competition for them among hypergamously inclined women appears so fierce.  And the rest?

They settle.  Women at their peak attractiveness who accept an average man are betting that 10 – 15 years on, the man is still around.  That strategy is not without risk, but the divorce statistics imply that men tend to be pretty loyal to the women they fall in love with at their peak beauty.

Of course, many women do not settle.  They keep “chasing the alphas” until their own SMV has fallen below the male average.  This strategy is also not without risk:  many men are out of the game at this point, and the average male SMV of those that remain is (in general) much lower given their higher variance.  But I will leave women themselves to testify to the extent this strategy secures their happiness.

* Used here as a pejorative meaning “women I disagree with”.  I have no idea whether, say, Susan Walsh qualifies as a feminist in the philosophical sense.

A Hostile Work Environment

From the Army Chief of Staff Raymond T. Odierno:

It is time we take on the fight against sexual assault and sexual harassment as our primary mission.

I had a talk with a squadron commander down at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, TX, ground zero in the current frenzy over sexual assault in the Air Force.

Φ: It must be mentally taxing to wake up every day viscerally afraid of what you will read on the front page of the paper.

CC:  It’s a hostile work environment.  Over the last two years I have seen my boss, his boss, and multiple other squadron commanders been relieved of command, their careers essentially over.  I have been involved in two courts martial and scores of letters of reprimand (LORs) and admonishment (LOAs).  For our enlisted Military Training Instructors (MTIs), these can prevent them from reenlisting, essentially casting them out of the service with 15 years in.

Φ: How has this impacted the ability to find MTIs?

CC: A few years ago, being an MTI was a good career move, so we had more volunteers than opportunities.  Now, nobody volunteers, and the Air Force has to “non-vol” people to the assignment.  And even then, a fair number of non-vols suddenly come down with disqualifying physical ailments that prevent them from serving.  So the Air Force Personnel Center burns through a lot of people to keep the place staffed.

Φ: I have to say, as someone who confines his sexual assaulting to his own house, that I have trouble understanding the mentality of the guy who wakes up and thinks that rape is a good idea.

CC: Rape is almost never involved.  Almost all of these relationships are consensual as normal people understand the word.  But they are nonetheless improper by Air Force regulations.  Trainees are off-limits to instructors.  They usually get started at the end of Basic Training.  An instructor will slip a trainee his number with a give-me-a-call-sometime.  Which the trainee, besotted with the status and power of her MTI, will of course do.  She will be in “tech school” (specialty training) by this point, but is still off-limits to MTIs.

Φ: My impression is that illicit relationships usually come to light when they go bad, as they often do.  Is that the case here?

They can go bad in several ways.  The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) runs a hotline where anyone can call to report an MTI, and twenty or so agents whose full time duty is to investigate the claims.  The reporters are often the trainees claiming an affair with their MTI, but it can also be an angry wife.  The MTIs are also reporting on each other, which is the primary way the scandal has spider-webbed as it has.

Φ: Are there any repercussions on trainees for their role in the affair?

CC: Only if we can prove that they lied about the affair, which is a practical impossibility, even if the claim itself is found to lack merit.

But that kind of dynamic has come to permeate the training environment over the last couple of years.  There has been an explosion in the number of rules governing what MTIs can do and not do, and a whole different attitude towards enforcement.  There are a million ways in which an MTI can get into trouble.

Here is an example.  I had to write a “letter of counseling” documenting an infraction for an MTI for having “tossed” mail at a trainee during mail call when the rules say that mail must be “handed” to trainees.  Now, there was no evidence of malicious intent here:  the MTIs are handing out mail to fifty people and trying to get it done quickly.  So he’s tossing mail in their laps as they sit around the room.  All it took was for one trainee to take issue with this for the MTI to get in trouble.

Another mail-related example:  the regulations say that trainees are to be given time to read their mail each evening.  An MTI consulted with his flight about how to balance this with the need to clean the barracks prior to an inspection the next morning.  The consensus was that they should get the work done first, but one dissenter decided to report the MTI for not allowing enough mail-reading time.

Sometimes this reporting is malicious.  In one case recently, we had a female MTI, good at her job and popular with most of the trainees, run afoul of a couple of people who decided they were going to get her fired.  So they carefully kept a log of her minutest infractions.  None of this was a secret.  The other trainees told us they were doing this, they admitted their intent, but at the end of investigation, it didn’t matter.  The MTI was fired, and the trainees are now part of our Air Force.

Φ: I don’t have a well-developed theory of military training.  I only know what it was like when I went through it.  But I am concerned about the kind of airmen this new kind of training environment is going to produce.

CC: I don’t think anybody knows the answer to this question.  We’re probably going to find out as these people go about their careers.

Φ: What kind of metrics do you track that measure the effectiveness of your training at producing quality airmen.

CC: There is a complete failure to keep quality metrics at any phase of this process.  We in basic training don’t measure anything except the rate at which our airmen complete the program.  But the problems begin in recruiting.  Air Force recruiters are evaluated on their ability to meet certain quotas of enlistments, but the quota is considered met as soon as the recruit steps on the bus to head to Lackland.  There are therefore no incentives to recruit quality or match it to appropriate career fields.

Φ: What are the consequences of this?

CC: Let me give you an example.  The Air Force puts a priority on creating battlefield airmen:  Air Force Special Operations, mainly combat rescue and combat control.  People are recruited into this career field before they arrive at Basic.  Once at Basic, while they receive much the same training, they are subjected not only to a more demanding physical fitness regimen, including swimming.  But in my experience, many of these recruits discover that the requirements of Special Operations aren’t quite like playing HALO on the XBox.  But they’ve already signed a contract.  They can’t just transfer out of Special Ops.  But they can fail out of it.  Suddenly, we find people unable to pass the PAST* test that they were able to do before arriving.

Φ: So people are sandbagging it.

CC: Probably, but we don’t know.  It could be recruiters are fudging the numbers in order to get recruits who meet particular demographic criteria into the program.

Φ: Demographic criteria?

CC: Oh, yeah.  Recruiters have quotas, but they also get double points for matching certain minorities to particular career fields.  They can get the word:  “This month we’re having a two-for-one sale on Asians in CCT.”

Φ: Umm . . . Asians?

CC: Or . . . whatever.**  And we in Basic have the opposite problem:  we get fit guys whose recruiters didn’t tell them about Special Ops who learn about it when they get here and ask for a transfer.  But they already have contracts to go into other fields, so we can’t just move them over.

Φ: What are the physical standards for basic trainees like?

CC: They are strictly controlled.  Once upon a time, if a trainee flight fell out of line, it was common for the MTIs to pack them in a room and tell them that they would do calisthenics “until the walls sweat.”  Now they can’t tell recruits to do more than 20 seconds of calisthenics at a time, although as training progresses they can be assigned multiple 20 second rounds in a session.

Every so often, we still get trainees who drop dead in the San Antonio heat.  There is a bit of theater about it:  we identify trainees who have or had certain conditions, and require them to wear a yellow ribbon around their arms during PT.  Of course, they still have to do the PT, and treatment for any problems is the same whether they have a ribbon or not, so it has exactly zero impact.  But it does give the commandant something to point that says, “I’m doing something to prevent trainees dropping dead during PT.”

Φ: Kind of a metaphor for the military’s approach to sexual assault, come to think of it.  I would have thought that people with health problems would have been screened out. 

CC: Not all health problems are disqualifying, but yes, the front-end screening isn’t as extensive as it perhaps should be.  There is some medical screening during the recruiting phase, but much more once they get here.  For instance, I had to tell one recruit he was H.I.V. positive.

Φ: How would you characterize the quality of your recruits overall.

CC: Historically speaking, they’re pretty good.  The average age of our recruits is higher than it was, as is the education level.  Whatever my other complaints, recruiters are sending us guys with college degrees now.

Φ: Umm . . . yeah, that’s the crappy economy working to your benefit.  Recruiters don’t have much to do with it.

CC: I guess that’s a fair point.

* BTW, for reasons I’m too lazy to research, the PAST test is easier now than when I took it in ‘95.  Back then we had to swim 1500 meters and run 3 miles, vice 1000 and 1.5.

** This squadron commander is a good and honest man, but he is unencumbered by any political or ideological  loyalties of which I am aware.

The Invisible Perpetrators

As I implied in an earlier post, I saw the movie The Invisible War, about sexual assault in the military.  Our director screened the film at work, with a recorded recommendation by the Chief of Staff.

The film focuses on the experience of a dozen female (and two male) victims, especially the harrowing tale of Kori Cioca, a wisp of young woman brutally attacked by her supervisor while on active duty with the Coast Guard.  Significantly in these cases, none of the alleged perpetrators were ever charged with a crime.

Although the movie is shot through with distortions of military law and policy, I have not found even a disreputable source like me that impeaches the credibility of the victims themselves.  Still, I couldn’t help noticing that not one of the alleged perpetrators was specifically named.  It’s just speculation of course, but I can imagine two possible reasons for this.  Unlike, say, Mark Furman, who called out Michael Skakel in his book Murder in Greenwich, the filmmakers may lack the courage of their convictions.  I can’t say that I blame them; with a dozen victims, none of whose charges were considered by their chain of command to be sufficiently supported, the odds are that at least one of their stories will collapse on close examination.

The second possible reason is that certain (how can I put this?) commonalities among the perpetrators would, um, muddy the film’s message about the evil and heartless chain of command.

But having said all this, the film certainly left me with the impression that the armed services, under pressure from feminists to fully integrate females into all aspects of military operations, have by so doing created an environment in which not only do women not have sufficient protection from sexual assault, but also one in which it is very difficult to bring the perpetrators to justice.  Like the victims themselves, I would have to think hard about recommending military service to any young woman.

The film opens with a montage of recruiting commercials directed at women.  Most old commercials look hopelessly dated, and the efforts at recruiting women in earlier decades look comical to modern tastes.  But it was interesting to watch their evolution.  Whereas once the ads emphasized the compatibility between femininity and military service, contemporary commercials take the “grrrl power” angle:  today’s women can “man” (is this word still acceptable?) a machine gun, too!

Except . . . the women in the movie are demanding something that no other serviceman (oops again) has:  a law enforcement body, independent of command channels, that investigates and prosecutes sexual assault.  I don’t actually have an opinion about this demand or its effect on readiness, but I would point out the contradiction:  women demand admission to male institutions on the grounds of equality, then demand special consideration.  But nowadays, this is beside the point.

The film mocks the military’s various “training” efforts aimed at combating sexual assault.  Like most propaganda, some of these efforts deserve a good round of mocking on their aesthetic merits, but it’s worth pointing out that, in contrast to the related experience of these particular victims, most sexual assault involves the abuse of alcohol by both victim and perpetrator, and social situations that are frankly indistinguishable from the average hookup.  I understand the frustration of the women in the movie, some of whom were brutally attacked in their own quarters, that what happened to them would be characterized as “date rape,” but regrettably, the bad behavior of too many women have changed men’s baseline expectations, and not for the better.

An Officer and a Lady . . .

From the Fayetteville Observer (via Military.com):

AF General Touts Women's Role in the Military

Let’s assume for a moment that the “touting” herein is in good faith.  The problem I have with these kinds of speeches and the reporting of them is that the first sentence reporting a contrariwise speech – “AF General Criticizes Women’s Role in the Military” – inevitably says that the general was relieved of command by the end of the day.  So notwithstanding their knowledge of the truth of the matter, what else is an AF general likely to say about women in the military except to “tout” it?

[AFMC commander Janet C.] Wolfenbarger, the U.S. Air Force's first female four-star general, spoke about the advancement of women in the military Monday night as part of the Fayetteville State University's Chancellor's Distinguished Speaker Series.

To the best of my recollection, I have never heard a female cleric speak on any subject that wasn’t a variant of, “Look at me!  I’m a woman preaching!”  That may not be strictly true in the case of female generals, but it’s pretty close.

Wolfenbarger was among the more than 150 women who entered the Air Force Academy in June 1976, the first time women were allowed in the U.S. service academies.

Several male cadets were concerned about the admission of women into the academy, Wolfenbarger said.

"Their fear was that standards would somehow be lowered as a result of women being a part of the student body and that consequently their experience would some how be diminished," she said. "I, along with my female classmates, spent the next four years proving that the standards did not have to be lowered . . . ."

Um . . .  yes they were.  And there are no end to the USAFA alumni who assess the current kinder ‘n’ gentler regimen as being much easier than it was.  These changes are advertised as making the training environment more “professional”.  Maybe, but if a general is saying it then I assume it’s a lie.

Army ROTC cadet Tara Jaime, a junior majoring in sociology, said the general's comments about the advancement of women in the military were profound.

Yup, sociology.  Just the sort of education the future leaders of our high-tech military need.

Nerd Fantasy

An Alex Goot original, directed by Kurt Schneider:

Lightning–Alex Goot

I’m a sucker for this stuff.

The coffee incident reminded me of the time a girl came up and stood next to me at one of those coffee prep stands with holes in the countertop for trash.  I proceeded to open a sugar packet . . . and pour the contents into the trash.

This wasn’t a bad opener actually, considering I got a giggle and a question about my caffeine dependency.  But I had no follow-up, mumbling something noncommittal and shuffling away.

Lies, Damned Lies, and I-Just-Want-A-Nice-Guy

At my family's urging, I just watched the What Not to Wear episode featuring Denise, the flight attendant. It's pretty clear from the get-go that underneath the nigh clown-face makeup and hair extensions, Denise is an exceptionally beautiful and well-built young woman (and unfortunately, the TLC clips at the link don't include any profile shots highlighting just how well-built). The makeover succeeds in upping the class of her appearance considerably.

But I got mad when she told Stacy and Clinton that all she wanted was to "meet a nice, cute, dork". At some point, these kind of lies become cruel in a way that dangling a piece of candy in front of a child is when you have no intention whatsoever of giving the candy to him.

Then again, for a young woman like Denise, there isn't really a winning answer to that question. I suppose I should feel guilty about creating no-win situations for, um, the particular types of woman she represents. I don't though, probably because my "situations" couldn't be more irrelevant to the way she will actually experience her life. But I am willing to admit that had Denise answered that she "wanted to meet a nice, cute, dork who happens to own his own Cessna Citation," which, I think, is a lot closer to the truth of it, I would dismiss her as a gold-digger.

Christian women should be encouraged to (1) be self-aware, and (2) elevate certain priorities over others (and I should say that neither of these is worthwhile without the other). But otherwise, I don't see much point in asking a woman what she wants. Within fairly narrow parameters, we all know perfectly well what she wants: the same things every other woman wants. These things, to the extent they vary, vary with the wider culture. Inviting women to go on about "nice guys" only serves to mislead us nerdy aspies into misdirecting our energies.

Bad, bad teacher!

I watched the movie Bad Teacher on DVD. A few thoughts:

- The movie is laugh-out-loud funny. Even watching it alone, as I did. Cameron Diaz's portrayal of a shameless goldigger / deadbeat middle school teacher barely phoning it in subverts all the education movie clichés about caring teachers that challenge and motivate their students.  Instead, Diaz’s Elizabeth Halsey spends the first semester showing these movies while she sleeps at her desk.

She finally finds her niche though:

Bad Teacher (2011) – “I love Chase Reuben Rossi!”

The following year (SPOILER ALERT) she becomes the school guidance counselor, with all the school’s nerds lining up outside her office, presumably seeking similar transformation.

- The movie is politically incorrect, an observation Steve made in his reviews.  The old-money SNAG* (Justin Timberlake) that Diaz seeks to ensnare is, like most SWPLs, a dilettante in diversity, holding up his taste in ethnic food as a bold political statement; this is subtly mocked by Jason Siegel’s cynical gym teacher.  Diaz’s vanquished rival is ultimately sent to “bring my zany energy to the underprivileged students at Malcolm X Middle School.”  The audience doesn’t even need to have explained to them the implications.

- The movie is dirty.  Diaz emits a steady stream of vulgarity as in the clip above, plus there are a couple of truly cringe-inducing sexual situations (if you can call them that).

- The movie is, at a philosophical level, a little disturbing.  Diaz is lazy, promiscuous and conniving; a liar, a thief and a cheat.  With the exception of the scene above (and even this is obviously not without its moral downside) she shows absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever . . . and yet she is the character we are asked to root for!  On comic value alone we are expected to cheer as she blackmails silence from the bureaucrat from whom she steals the state’s standardized test and then frames fellow teacher Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch) for her own drug use.  What makes this worse is that Amy is a inspirational and successful teacher whose students routinely outscore the entire school on that standardized test.  Now, Amy’s sing-song, affected pedagogical style is easily recognizable from my own childhood, and the comic effect comes from seeing her use that style – probably more appropriate to a lower elementary school context in any case –  in her adult interactions as well.  Still, she (and Justin for that matter) clearly try really hard at being good at what they do, so why are we supposed to hate her and love Diaz?  The movie never really explains this.

* Is SNAG still a separate personality type from emo?  Or maybe I’m dating myself; I haven’t heard it used since the ‘90s.

Just say “No, thank you.”

Megan examines a Kenneth Anderson post on the origins of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, the summary of which is that it represents internecine conflict between the “upper tier New Class” (international financiers who have come through the recession relatively well) and the “lower tier New Class” (aspiring members of the “virtuocracy” whose members have been hard pressed by collapse in state and local revenue).

Both pieces should be read in their entirety.  But I was struck by something that Megan wrote as she contrasted her experience of red-blue class conflict with that she observed (or didn’t) on Wall Street:

[Y]ou sneer at the customs of the people you might be mistaken for.  For aside from a few very stuffy conservatives, no white people I know sneer at hip-hop music, telenovelas, Tyler Perry films, or any of the other things often consumed by people of modest incomes who don't look like them.  They save it for Thomas Kinkade paintings, "Cozy cottage" style home decoration, collectibles, child beauty pageants, large pickup trucks, and so forth. 

In part, obviously, this is a reaction to the politics of it, since uneducated white people of modest means vote (and attend church) very differently from the hyper-educated but modestly remunerated people in New York or DC.  A group of people who are quite empathetic, even tender, in writing about the financial difficulties of lower-middle class whites as workers, can also be quite vicious about them as voters and consumers. 

And they're worse when it comes to the tastes of people in successful-but-not-intellectual people like sales(wo)men. The vehemence makes it seem, at least in part, like a way to say "I may have their incomes, but I'm not like them.  I'm better."

Similarly, in the 1990s, when I worked with a lot of mostly blue-collar and first-generation college grads (with a fair sprinkling of Ivy Leaguers, to be sure), I didn't hear nearly so much about the rich and how greedy they were--even though in the late 1990s, income inequality was almost certainly worse than it is right now.

As IT consultants, we were mostly working around some of the richest people in the world--investment bankers, traders, and money managers.  And they did occasionally abuse their power. I received some rather astonishing invitations from men who were literally my father's age, on the basis of the fact that . . . I had entered their office to check up on something.  And one trader at a mutual fund liked to throw things at the IT staff when his screens didn't work--at least until the day he winged one of the techs with a stapler and had to apologize with a very expensive gift.

But in all that time, I'm not sure I heard any complaints about rich people, or even traders or bankers, as a class.  Since OWS started, I've occasionally wondered: does this explain why there seem to be so many more educated white kids than long-haul truckers or home health care aides occupying Wall Street? [Emphasis added.]

I love Megan, both for the warmth of her personality and the self-awareness and humanity she brings to discussing the red-state-blue-state divide.  But Megan is not a believing Christian, and nowhere has she denied being . . . a woman of her time and place.

Which brings me to the bolded sentence above.  Megan has elsewhere described the intrinsically boorish sexual behavior of some of the men to whom she provided IT services, yet I can’t help but doubt that it was her virtue, as such, that was mortified by the “astonishing offers” to which she alludes.  So what was it, then, that made what was surely intended to flatter her appearance and disposition so offensive?  What made appropriate any other reaction than a simple “no, thank you?”*

Reading about this reaction, in this context, I was struck by the possibility that a dynamic very similar to the blue-state sneer at red-state mores also drives Megan’s reaction to the romantic overtures of Wall Street execs and, more generally, the median female sneer at betas.  As elite coastal whites shudder at being mistaken for the denizens of flyover country, so Megan shudders at being mistaken for someone who would accept those kinds of proposals.

Think of it as a reaction to, not just the implausibility of a suggested pairing, but the gulf between its personal plausibility and its perceived social plausibility.  If the gulf is small, either because the offer is, in fact, personally attractive, or because the offer is socially outlandish – from a child, say, or Strom Thurmond in his later years – then no offense is taken.  This may explain my recollection that in my single years I received less social hostility from beautiful girls than from average girls; the truly beautiful faced no danger extending the appropriate condescension.

But when the gulf is wide – in other words, when a woman isn’t interested but thinks that other people might think she would be – then the reaction is harshly negative.  That’s how we wind up with a network of sexual harassment laws policies protecting women from the advances of their workplace peers.

Anyway, that’s my theory for today.  Thoughts?

* Actually, given what I think I know about Megan, I suspect this was exactly her outward response.

Hoarding Social Capital

I wound up the last post thusly:

I speculate that the motivation behind a lot of the animosity that socially adept kinds of people show towards PCC is precisely that they lose a lot of their social status and power when the rules get written down for everybody to learn equally.

As I thought more about it, I was reminded of one of Steve’s posts:

I want to note a social trend, that's reflective of a general theme: that in contemporary society, a lot of the rules for successful living aren't spelled out for people the way they used to be. This means that people who are smarter and/or raised in better social settings and/or naturally inclined toward successful life choices will still pick up the messages, but lots of other people won't . . . .

[C]onsider single motherhood and the term "bastard." A century ago, single motherhood was deterred, among other ways, by heaping opprobrium on the children of single mothers. That was cruel, but also pretty effective. Today, the term "bastard" has lost almost all connection with its original meaning. Nice people today would be shocked by the notion that society should discriminate against a child just because his parents weren't married. That's hardly the child's fault, now is it?

In fact, society is now deeply uncomfortable with the notion that we should be impolite to single mothers themselves . . . .

Not surprisingly, this decline in "preemptive discrimination" to deter single motherhood means we now have far more bastards. On the other hand, we don't see many bastards in the upper reaches of society, outside of celebrity bohemian circles. In fact, upper middle class life is evolving in directions that quietly but effectively discriminate against not just bastards, but also against the children of divorce . . . .

I suspect that people of ornery and/or impulsive dispositions inherited from their screw-up parents are less likely to make it to the upper reaches of society than in the past. In older times, parents with screw-up inclinations were more likely to be deterred by explicit social pressures against bastardy and divorces.

The whole thing is worth the read.  But I want to open the subject of the ethic of “non-judgmentalism” by way of example.

The LCMS church we attend is, for the most part, solidly middle class.  We do have a couple of families that are well-to-do yet have a family history here that keeps them coming back, and we also have a couple of, judging by their appearance, a couple of poor families.

The teenaged (I assume) daughter of one of those latter families attends sporadically.  She’s never particular well-dressed – thus I discern her socio-economic status – but one Sunday about a year ago her attire was especially egregious.  She was wearing a pair of cut-offs cut off too high.  And by too high, I mean high enough that if my own daughter were to wear them at the beach, I would probably say something.  But this girl was wearing them to a worship service.

This display bothered me enough that I brought it up, first to my wife, and then a few weeks later in the context of our Sunday school class.  (The class is heavily participatory and the discussion ranges widely; you can take my word that it was in a relevant context.)  I was unwilling to embarrass the young lady by name, but it was recent enough that I believed anybody who had seen her should have been able to figure out to whom I was referring.

What bothered me was my inability to get buy-in that somebody – and here I mean specifically one of the women in the church, since I have a vague sense that it would be inappropriate for me – should speak to this young lady in private and explain to her the standards of dress for Sunday churchgoing.  What I instead got was – at least among those who bothered to respond – was a vague appeal to the importance of being welcoming to all comers.  This bothered me because I know the daughters of these families and I know that they know what respectful attire looks like because they make sure that their own daughters abide with those norms.

Yet confronted with the opportunity to share that cultural capital with someone who didn’t have it – I am reasonably sure that the girl dressed as she did from ignorance rather than malice – everybody took a dive, and dressed up their hoarding in the language of non-judgmentalism.

Where the Line Is

Sofia writes:

Male-female friendships can work, but I don’t think they can be sustained with the kind of regular interaction you see with best friends. And, they usually don’t center around emotional substance. If I have to randomly assign a gender to someone with whom I would rather have an intellectual or abstract conversation, I would probably choose a man 9 times out of 10. Adversely, if I want someone with whom I could discuss something emotionally based, I would probably opt for a woman 90% of the time. I will go ahead and state that male-female friendships with that kind of heavy emotional content is boundary-crossing. If you have that kind of connection with the opposite sex — the kind usually sought out for romantic relationships — what is really prohibiting you from eventually f’ing this person?!

This put me in mind of a conversation I had with Trumwill a while back about Pensacola Christian College, a school that has achieved some notoriety for its heavily regulated social life.  Let me begin by saying that I am not an uncritical defender of PCC, whose enforcement mechanisms strike me as Orwellian, and Trumwill basically persuaded me that their lack of accreditation is less a bold statement of independence than yet another instrument of control.

Yet the people most inclined to point-and-sputter at PCC are not especially motivated by its lack of due process, to which they have evinced no particular attachment.  Rather, they are driven to hysterics by the rules themselves, and on that subject I stand by my comment at HitCoffee:

The actual student conduct standards are on pp 31 - 33 of the student guide. My reading is that they are on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to evangelical Christian colleges, but they’re still on that curve. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure they would have made much difference to me personally. Restrictions on music? I already listen to classical and Christian contemporary. No movies? I didn’t see many anyway (I couldn’t afford them either in time or money.) Don’t dress like a slob (or a slut)? This is just the grown-up dress code we all follow now without being told, so I might as well have got started in college.

No touching? A nerd’s paradise! Seriously, nothing sux to a guy without a girlfriend like watching that guy flaunt his higher status.

I would elaborate that while it’s easy to make sport of PCC’s nitpicky rules once we see them written down in black and white, any socially mature adult carries around a vastly more complex mental schema governing his social interactions, especially interactions with the opposite sex.  I would further assert as generalities that this is more true of women than of men, and even more true of those whose lifestyles resemble that of a Sofia or, once, a Sheila Tone, than of those whose lifestyles resemble that of Dr. Φ.  I bet either of them could explain exactly the socio-sexual distinction between, for example, speaking with a fellow student while walking to class and stopping to speak with him.

Indeed, my own lack of intuition in this regard was brought home to me recently in a conversation I had with Mrs. Φ.  For reasons I cannot recall, we were comparing the relative attractiveness of the young woman I mentioned at the end of this post and her older sister.  I expressed my preference for the older sister, my wife expressed hers for the younger.  But the conversation wound up like this:

Mrs. Φ:  “Anyway, older sister is just weird.  She’s got bizarre ideas about vaccinations [she’s against them] and diet.  And she lacks social grace.  She’s loud and uncouth.  All the women at church thought so.”

Φ [hotly]:  “That is so not right!  Even were I to concede the merely physical component of the comparison – and I don’t – older sister has vastly more social self-possession than younger sister.  Older sister always greeted me warmly whenever we saw each other while we lived there and especially when we’ve visited since.  Younger sister pretty much ignored me the whole 2 1/2 years.

Mrs. Φ:  “Maybe that’s true, but the circumstances were different.  Older sister is married, you are friends with her husband, we got together in groups at Bible study.  Younger sister is single, and single women DO NOT FRATERNIZE with married men.  It just isn’t done.”

Φ:  “Well . . . first of all, that rule sux.  And second of all, in this particular comparison, the difference went beyond context.  Older sister would stop and talk to me even when we were just milling around in the sanctuary, and what’s more, she seemed genuinely happy to do so.  Younger sister, in contrast, never said word one to me even when the context would seem to allow it.  I remember one specific instance when she was minding the nursery and I came  to collect Γ.  You’d think that I would at least get a ‘good morning,’ but no.  Not.  Word.  One.  The effect was not a positive one.

Mrs. Φ:  “Don’t you think that you might be a trifle oversensitive to this kind of thing given your, um, social background?”

Φ:  “Maybe.  But I know the difference between nice and not-nice.  I pick nice.”

On the other hand, it occurs to me that there are two specific advantages of a heavily-regulated place like PCC for someone like me:  I wouldn’t have to guess about what the social rules are, and I would have less opportunity to take things personally.

Less charitably, I speculate that the motivation behind a lot of the animosity that socially adept kinds of people show towards PCC is precisely that they lose a lot of their social status and power when the rules get written down for everybody to learn equally.

Your Air Force In Action

From the archives of The USAFA Educator, Fall 2006

DF’s Inclusive Excellence Initiative

Col Rita Jordan, Professor and Head, Department of Management

Higher education is at a defining moment as institutions of learning look to educate students to become multiculturally proficient, informed about the human and natural world, and empowered to act responsibly and with moral courage in a fast-changing, stratified, and globally interdependent world.

Globalization is changing the face of the world, making it more competitive, both economically and intellectually.  The United States cannot expect to continue as leader if its largest pools of talent remain untapped.  Therefore, organizations are aspiring to a more heterogeneous workforce, one that enables leadership to draw upon the abilities and perspectives of all members to offer a range of creative solutions.

Higher education is responsible for producing this next generation of leaders, of all races and ethnicities, who can be agents of change and who will lead people and ideas in diverse workplaces.  Multicultural skills and knowledge now are integral to the flexible, inquisitive, and synergistic thinking that is a hallmark of an educated person.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has had a long standing interest in diversity efforts that value die contributions of all students. This initiative is known as "Inclusive Excellence." In an inclusive excellence curriculum, faculty create appropriate learning experiences that chart pathways of success for all students.  To better understand AAC&U's initiative, two key definitions are offered:

• Diversity - individual differences (e.g., race/ethnicity, class, gender, country of origin, cultural, political, religious, or other affiliations) that can be engaged in the service of learning.
• Inclusion - consists of an active, intentional, and on-going engagement with diversity in people, in the curriculum, and in the communities (social, cultural, intellectual, and geographical) with which individuals might connect in ways that would increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions.

The Dean of Faculty's Inclusive Excellence Initiative is a developmental approach which extends beyond merely increasing the number of women and minorities on faculty.  It also seeks to develop and enhance faculty understanding of the value and importance of inclusion resulting in integration of multicultural experience opportunities with course learning goals. Inclusive excellence is fundamental to DF's Learning Focused Initiative and integrally linked to USAFA's educational outcomes.

Thought for the Day

Jimmy Stewart schools Lee Remick on wifely decorum.

 

Well said.

A possibly related article at Scragged:  Friends Don’t Let Friends Shag Feminists.

Flirt-deaf Men

An interesting article from the Daily Mail (H.T.:  Savvy) about how men can’t tell whether a woman is ‘flirting” or “being friendly”, commonly mistaking one signal for the other. 

The researchers also found that women overestimate men's ability to pick up on sexual signals.

They argue that many females wrongly believe that the men are well aware of their attempts to woo, but are just not interested in responding.

"Failure to pursue could be an indicator of misperception but could easily be explained by noninterest,” the scientists write in the journal Psychological Science.

In contrast, women are very aware that males get the wrong end of the stick when they are simply being friendly.

This is because, the researchers argue, men who misconstrue a friendly gesture as a come-on are more likely to follow through with inappropriate behaviour.

Such embarrassing encounters will lodge more keenly in a woman's memory, and she will also be more likely to discuss it with her friends.

Of course, this is the only time men get feedback, too.  When we make Type II errors, we generally never know it, going our way thinking our assumption that the young lady was “just being friendly” was correct.  So you can see how exclusively negative feedback would over time make us very conservative in our estimation of female attraction.

This line was funny:

"The average bloke either doesn't realise that we fancy him until we are giving birth to his children in the labour ward; or he presumes all women fancy him all the time.”

I find it comforting – and therefore suspicious – to think that those kind alpha girls were actually flirting with me back then.

Justin Bieber

I just acquainted myself with the Top 10 Most Disliked YouTube Videos (H.T.:  Ace).  Five of them belong to Canadian singer Justin Bieber.

Not being a 12-year-old girl, and not having any 12-year-old girls yet*, I hadn’t to my knowledge ever laid eyes on young Justin, although I had come across his name in many of your blogs, usually as a punch line to a joke.  As I watched his videos, especially “One Less Lonely Girl”, I struggled to articulate what it was about him that I found . . . annoying.  Fortunately, Wikipedia was there to help:

Bieber has often been criticized for looking and sounding younger than his age, his teen-pop music, image, and frequent media attention.

I would add, I think, that Bieber shows no particular talent in these videos.  His looks and his voice are unexceptional other than belonging to a boy of 17 instead of 13.  Most of the competent dancing in his videos is done by others; his own moves are pedestrian by the standards of the industry.  I doubt he composes his own music, although I couldn’t find any statement to this effect.  But his seems exactly the kind of over-produced, manufactured stardom for which The Backstreet Boys take so much grief**.

And there’s something especially galling about the way his videos show attractive women falling at his feet.  And knowing that, yup, they probably do that in real life too.  Pisses me off.

But that said, is he really worth all this?

He has been a frequent target for internet bloggers and message board posters—notably by users of internet message board 4chan, users of YouTube, and various Facebook groups. Pranks have included a successful campaign to push "Justin Bieber Syphilis" to the top of the Google Trends Hot Searches list; hacked YouTube videos that were altered so as to redirect users to adult websites or trigger pop-up messages saying that Bieber had been killed in a car accident; his Last.fm photograph being changed to pornographic images; various rumors circulated, from rumors that Bieber had died, joined a cult, or even that his mother was offered $50,000 to pose topless in Playboy magazine—none of which were true.

Good heavens, what has the kid done to motivate his haters that much?

It seems out of proportion to me.  But one clue might be this:  Bieber identifies as Christian, although of an apparently latitudinarian sort (he passed on the opportunity to speak against fornication).  He did speak negatively against abortion, although not in a political context.  And his statement on homosexuality to Rolling Stone (“It’s everyone’s own decision to do that. It doesn’t affect me and shouldn’t affect anyone else.”) prompted this remark:  "It is not clear whether he intended to label homosexuality as a lifestyle choice."  What a totalitarian ideology liberalism has become!  It’s not enough to be tolerant of homosexuality; you have to believe the correct thing about it!***

Otherwise, I don’t know why Bieber is hated so much.  Thoughts?

* My daughters have thus far shown zero interest in the kind of things that tween girls are thought to obsess over.  The eldest’s favorite TV show is How It’s Made.  I think I have a true nerd girl.

** I want to write a retrospective on the music of the 80s and 90s.  Pursuant to this, I want to ask my readers:  hypothetically, is admitting to an enjoyment of The Backstreet Boys a socially acceptable preference, or is it a surefire ticket to blogosphere-wide mockery and ridicule?

*** As it happens, I myself don’t think homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice”, only because I think something is really, really wrong different at a visceral level about a man who would want to do the kind of things that homosexuals are alleged to do.

Lesbianism, though, I kind of get.

Clueless Evangelicals

. . . because sometimes you have to throw a flag on your own team.

RBC Ministries publishes a daily devotion guide called Our Daily Bread that is popular among evangelicals.  I was introduced to it in high school myself and have used it off and on for some 27 years, more consistently so since I’ve had children with whom we have daily scripture reading.

In its commentary on Romans 5, the January 7, 2011 devotion began:

I read these words on a young woman’s personal Web site: “I just want to be loved—and he has to be amazing!”

Isn’t that what we all want—to be loved, to feel cared for by someone? And so much the better if he or she is amazing!

The one who fits that description most fully is Jesus Christ. In a display of unprecedented love, He left His Father in heaven and came to earth as the baby we celebrate at Christmas . . . .

and on in like vein.

Where to start?

Truth be told, I don’t have daily devotions to have every tick of my social critique reinforced.  And it may be that I have eaten too much of the tree of knowledge for my own good.

But.

Really?  Are you seriously telling me that you read this expression of the culture’s license to unbridled female hypergamy and the only reaction you could muster is, “oh, look, what a cool metaphor for Jesus!”  Because if that’s the extent of your cultural engagement, if “don’t fornicate” is truly the limit of your moral imagination, then frankly, you will have deserved your own irrelevancy.

International Women’s Day (Afghanistan Style)

From the Guardian:

Musa Khan, the governor of Ghazni province, once associated with the fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, marked international women's day on 8 March. Unfortunately, he appeared to have missed the point of the event.

According to Alex Dietrich, the head of a US military female engagement team operating in Ghazni, in a morning of speeches, only two women were invited onstage to participate. Instead ranks of burqa-clad women watched a group of men dominate proceedings with speeches on the importance of practising marital obedience.

Khan told them they should not leave their homes without permission from their husbands. "At the end the men sat down for a feast, while the women waited outside in the cold for some of their leftovers," Dietrich said.