No Dog in the Fight

From the Let-it-Burn department:

A giant Teutonic brothel

HOW modern and liberated Germany’s Social Democrats and Greens sounded in 2001. They were in government and wanted to raise the legal and social status of prostitutes. So they enacted a law to remove the stigma from sex work by, for example, giving prostitutes full rights to health insurance, pensions and other benefits. “Exploiting” sex workers remained criminal, but merely employing them or providing them with a venue became legal. The idea was that responsible employers running safe and clean brothels would drive pimps out of the market.

Germany thus embarked on an experiment in liberalisation just as Sweden, a country culturally similar in many ways, was going in the opposite direction. In 1999 the Swedes had made it criminal to pay for sex (pimping was already a crime). By stigmatising not the prostitutes but the men who paid them, even putting them in jail, the Swedes hoped to come close to eliminating prostitution.

. . . .

In the end, the policy choice comes back to culture and ideology, argues Susanne Dodillet at the University of Göteborg. Both the Swedish and the German laws originated in the feminist and left-leaning movements in these countries. But whereas progressive Swedes view their state as able to set positive goals, Germans (the Greens, especially) mistrust the state on questions of personal morality as a hypocritical and authoritarian threat to self-expression.

Here is yet another example of a debate that has removed itself so far from the concerns and interests of ordinary people that I just can't manage to be much interested anymore.  This article (and the Economist is admirably candid about its social leftism) looks at prostitution through a prism, not of morality, nor of family stability, nor even of the well-being of individual women, but of an intramural fight between various shades of feminism.  All that remains is for me to decide which faction of my enemies to whom I should offer surrender. With choices like these, I should probably prefer the German way, since I, too, though with better reason, mistrust any likely German state on questions of personal morality.  But, mostly, I plan to sit this one out.

I Got Your “Empowerment” Right Here, Baby . . .

So, the other day, our agency celebrated “Empowering Women in the Workforce”.  I heard it was a good place to meet girls, so . . .

The keynote speaker was “The Honorable” Dot Harris, Director of the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity for the Department of Energy.  A diversicrat, in other words.  Some highlights from her speech:

“Women have an IQ five points higher than men.”

I’m not making this up.  Apropos of nothing at all, this was the first thing out of her mouth.

So, first of all, no, they don’t.  In the categories most relevant to STEM (the purported focus of her speech) they are behind men in IQ.  And that’s especially true at the level Ms. Harris is supposedly operating.  And second, I’m pretty sure this is not the glass house she really wants to be throwing stones in.

"Our students place #31 against other countries in academics"

Thank you, immigration!  But in point of fact, and with very few exceptions, we educate students much better than their nations of origin do.

"Women make $.70 on the male dollar."

Mostly bogus:  This Forbes article summarizes a bunch of studies showing that, with appropriate controls, the differential is in single digits, and sometimes favors women over men.

"Girls in Georgia and Tennessee are told to be nurses."

The point being that they aren’t told to be doctors, presumably like the girls in Blue states are and like boys everywhere are.  I googled around unsuccessfully trying to find a citation for or against this 50s-era factoid, but for now, I’m betting that the same class of people decrying the alleged tracking of girls into nursing are also crying that the shortage of nurses means we have to have immigration reform now!  Yup, I’m betting that’s the case.

Can we say “please”?

Back during the SOPA controversy, when I was signing every email and petition I came across, I wound up on the mailing list of an outfit called SumOfUs.org.  As it became apparent during the effort to undermine Rush Limbaugh, this is a left-wing organization.

Who knew?

Anyway, this is to explain how I found out about the latest outrage du jure:

It was “Housekeeping Appreciation Week” at the Hyatt and to celebrate, a digitally altered photo collage of Hyatt Housekeepers' faces -- including Martha’s and her sister Lorena’s -- superimposed on bikini-clad cartoon-bodies was posted on a bulletin board at work.

She felt humiliated and embarrassed. But she knew her sister Lorena -- also a housekeeper at Hyatt -- would be even more so. Martha tore the posters of her and her sister down. Then, with management present, a coworker told Martha she needed to return the photos.

She refused and said if they wanted it back, they'd have to take her to court.

Hyatt management fired Martha and Lorena just a few weeks later.

If it’s relevant, here is a picture of the Reyes sisters:

Okay, so now that that’s out of the way, a few thoughts:

Given that their likenesses were part of a collage, and apparently one put together by some of the employees themselves, there doesn’t seem to be much to indicate that they had been singled out for special harassment.  But while I am not nearly as censorious of these kind of gags as I was in my youth, I know, or knew, people that are.  And I can also see how, given their appearance, these two might construe the incongruity between that appearance and the “bikini-clad cartoon bodies” somewhat negatively.  So if they had asked not to play, I think they’re oversensitive, but I also think the civil response would have been to not make them play.

Unfortunately, that isn’t what they did, and it is here my attitude hardens.  Nothing about this situation justifies interfering with the work of other people, a lesson I learned myself during my own intolerant phase. 

If this is representative of the way these two interacted with anybody at the hotel, staff, management, or guests, then this had likely more to do with their discharge than this single incident.

I would add that my guess is that Hyatt has a sufficiently sophisticated HR department to warn management away from overtly firing people over something that could be spun as sexual harassment.

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.

Sold Down the River on the Liberal Plantation

Megan considers an academic paper on partisanship and the anti-war movement.  She observes:

Have you noticed all the huge antiwar demonstrations in the last twelve months?  Yeah, me neither.  It turns out that a lot of the energy for the movement seems to have been provided by Democrats who are a lot less worried about wars conducted by Democratic presidents.  Or at least who believe that advancing the Democratic agenda is much more important than trying to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sadly, this is not limited to the anti-war movement.  I can think of three other examples.

• Environmentalists once understood – correctly – that greater human populations put greater stress on the environment and that immigration into the U.S. put greater stress on American environmental goods specifically and the global environment generally.  Yet the environmental movement has completely abandoned its opposition to immigration, sometimes in exchange for cold cash, but more often to assure its organizations a seat at the table of the grand Left-wing Democrat coalition.
• The leadership of the labor movement, from Samuel Gompers to Cesar Chavez, once understood – correctly – that as the supply of cheap immigrant labor went up, the ability of labor unions to command higher wages for their members went down.  Yet our present crop of union organizations, most conspicuously the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), agitates for more immigration on the grounds that more low-wage workers = more low-wage dues-paying union members, even if the union fails at increasing wages.  And, yeah, it also assures them of a seat at the table of the grand Left-wing Democrat coalition.
• The feminist movement advertises itself as the protectors of women’s interests.  Yet in the 1990’s in two high-profile cases involving the mistreatment of women – Bill Clinton’s alleged rape of Juanita Broderick and O.J. Simpson’s murder of Nicole Brown – the leadership of feminist organizations suddenly went mute:  in the first instance, to protect a politically valuable ally; and in the second, to avoid offending blacks.  Again, the titular objectives took a back seat to assuring a seat at the table of the grand Left-wing Democrat coalition.

Megan quotes someone claiming that the Tea Party faces similar pressures, yet I can’t think of any examples of Right wing partisanship this egregious.

Redistribute Sex

For those who haven’t followed it, Robin Hanson called attention to a video in which college students in favor of “wealth redistribution” are asked their opinion about “GPA redistribution”.  Unsurprisingly, their reaction is negative yet largely incoherent.

Robin writes:

My point isn't to say one can't come up with reasons to treat these differently. One could, for example, argue that we prefer differing school signals to help employers sort people into jobs, to achieve higher productivity so that the pie is bigger when we redistribute money. My point is that most people can't think of such reasons, making it pretty unlikely that such reasons are the cause of their opinions.

Robin then allowed that little can be learned from the inability of college students to instantly articulate their objections to such an off-the-wall proposal as GPA redistribution.  On reflection, XPostFactoid lists some objections, which Megan rebuts, although I think she give short shrift to this point:

[I]t's still true that student performance bears a closer relationship to grade than the social utility of the average person's work does to that person's earnings.

More specifically, metrics for assessing student academic performance are specifically contrived to measure individual mastery of the subject matter.  Leaving aside for the moment Half Sigma’s notion of the difference between “value creation” and “value transference” in the modern economy (a notion I find broadly persuasive, by the way), consider that if GPA was accumulated the same way as wealth in the market economy, then students would be free to exchange the answers to test questions they know for answers they don’t know – complete with IP protection!  But of course, this isn’t allowed:  testing conditions are set up to most resemble those of subsistence farming, in which wealth and GPA are only a function of an individual’s ability to extract them from the raw earth.

If we really want students to reconsider the morality of wealth redistribution, then Brandon’s comment on Megan’s post is apropos:

But what about sex redistribution? It's not fair that a small number of people are having lots of sex with many attractive partners while others have sex only infrequently with unattractive partners, if at all. The government needs to step in and do something to address this inequity.

I chimed in:

So much of the welfare/affirmative action/civil-rights apparatus, in effect if not in design, redistributes wealth and opportunity from men (who create and control it) to women.

Yet not only will women object to redistributing the resource they control, they have set about dismantling such equality-inducing arrangements such as marriage / legally enforced monogamy as once existed.

Conservatives believe in economic freedom, and we are prepared to tolerate a fair amount of economic inequality to preserve it.  Yet we frown on social inequality and would enforce social regulation to prevent it.

Liberals, in contrast, believe in economic equality and happily redistribute wealth to that end.  But they believe in “social” (i.e. sexual) freedom and positively revel in the inequality that results.

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.

Sex in Season Four

Okay, I get that with Don Draper single again, the Mad Men writers would likely amp up the sex content.  But I’m afraid they took their cues from, say, the post 1990s hookup culture rather than mid-sixties Manhattan.  I mean, come on:  upper-middle-class girls dispensing fellatio in the backseat of taxi cabs?  Today, sure, but in 1964?

My mother-in-law remembers being a nursing student in New York around this time.  (It was upstate, granted, but it wasn’t a religious school or anything that would make it unrepresentative.)  She remembers the one classmate known to be having sexual relations with her boyfriend mainly because of how scandalous it was.  I get there were segments of The City that were more, um, progressive, and the show has Peggy Olsen falling in with what I take to be the East Village Bohemian set.  But the show would have us believe that East Village sexual ethics were more widespread than they really were.

The rush to make the show more titillating has undermined character consistency.  I’ve already remarked on this regarding Don Draper, but consider Joan Holloway Harris.  Joanie has done a lot of bad things, but if I had to summarize her character in one word, I would say she is loyal:  a loyal secretary, a loyal mistress, a loyal wife.  So . . . crap, what’s this with her committing adultery with Roger Sterling on a frickin’ public street?

One of the themes of this season is the extent to which manners were coarsening among younger members of the new Sterling-Cooper.  I’m guessing the show gets this right, but they rob the development of context.  Since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, we’ve been endlessly conditioned to believe that there is one set of rules for our social lives and another set for “work”, but that this should be so was not likely obvious to people in 1964.  (My point is not that these rules are unfair, only to state that the question of fairness is orthogonal to the process by which they were created.)

But the show takes a dive on why manners were coarsening.  I suspect that the career of Lenny Bruce had a lot to do with it.  Bruce advanced the ball quite a way as to what was considered acceptable conversation in public.  For this reason, progressives lionize him, but the other side of that coin is that a lot of people were now subjected to what feminists would come to call a “hostile work environment.”  Unfortunately, connecting these dots would undermine the writers’ premise that “liberal” = “good”.

Misandry, Sweden Style

Next time Justice Breyer praises European law in one of his anti-Constitutional opinions, remember this:

The backstory to this video is that it was submitted and accepted to an Amnesty International film competition, but was expelled in response to feminist protests.

H.T.:  Elusive Wapiti.

Early Marriage Reconsidered

The excellent Robin Hanson, after quoting from a couple of articles that document the steep decline in female fertility with age, observes:

Today high status women stay long in school, start careers, and take long to match up with a man before having kids.  They are often too late, their kids have more defects, and the interruption hurts their career.  Low status women more often have an accidental early kid out of wedlock.

Imagine a different equilibrium, where females pick a male at 15, then school more slowly to have kids till some standard age (20? 25? 30?), when females return to full-time school and uninterrupted careers.

While it is not entirely clear if this new equilibrium would be better or worse, it certainly has some positive features.  Kids and moms would be healthier, kids more numerous and less accidental, moms more energetic, older folk would enjoy more grand kids etc., and career interruptions wouldn’t make female employees suspect.

Early parenting would have to be paid for by grandparents or via loans (or perhaps income shares), presumably in trade for some loss of autonomy.  While childhood does seem to be lengthening, it is not clear if this autonomy loss could be accepted.

For the male pattern, there are two obvious variations: males switch life-plans along with females, or males stay on the current plan.  Having males also switch would keep mates at similar ages, promote healthier kids and more energetic dads, and reduce opportunities for gender discrimination.

You knew this was coming . . . .

In fairness to Hanson, he almost certainly realizes the thoroughgoing cultural change we would have to affect in order to realize these kind of downstream effects.

The most obvious problem is that, as Taylor Swift candidly sings, there is no evidence that fifteen year old girls are especially competent decision makers, especially in matters of love and sex, and even more especially in choosing with whom they should spend the rest of their lives.  As I have argued previously, our culture sends a lot of false signals to young women in the regard, but that only deepens the required cultural retrenchment.

Hanson hints that parents should take a more active role in screening their daughters’ suitors, and indeed advocates greater involvement by extended families in helping new couples get their start in life.  Certainly this would be both necessary and appropriate; however, were they to actually follow Hanson’s apparent advice and match their teen girls with teen boys, they would have very little in the way of useful signals as to which of these suitors will be capable of providing for their daughters in The Manner To Which They Have Become Accustomed, or even which of them will tubs-o'-lard by age 40.

Hanson continues:

Randomness in kid timing and number would make it a bit harder to estimate student quality based on student performance – could we find ways to correct for this?  And the fact that low status moms now have kids early makes it harder to coordinate a switch to this new equilibrium.  But still, it seems an interesting thing that never was, about which to ask: why not?

On the contrary, my understanding is that this has been the arrangement throughout most of the history of civilization. It is our current equilibrium that is historically anomalous. But again, our historical antecedents offer little of a roadmap on how to get from here to there, even if we agreed that we wanted to.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that Hanson's timeline appears to assume that families surrender the primary education of their children to conventional schools. But homeschooling families undertake full-time child-rearing responsibilities for a good twelve years longer. At some point, we should be realistic about the chances of a woman returning to "high school" at age 35. Indeed, the "historical antecedents" to which I referred took for granted that a woman's education would peak at a level far below that of a man.

That said, it will not surprise my readers that I would be largely complacent about this development. On the one hand, I want positive life outcomes for my daughters, and quitting school at age 15 makes these outcomes highly improbable, given the culture we actually have. But in general, I'm not especially enthused about the mass production of female corporate drones, and as far as education's claims to making a woman more "cultured", I would question the efficiency of conventional schooling to achieve this relative to, say, a library card.

The Social Intelligence Hypothesis

For the few of you that don't already read Roissy, check this out:

[T]he absurdity of mid-20th to early 21st century feminism and all its adjuncts are better understood as progressively sophisticated emergent sexual selection strategies which act as social obstacles to filter out men who aren’t able to successfully navigate them. In essence, feminism is an advanced biocomputational Turing test; a giant social subcommunication roadblock devised and embraced by women and, at least in principle if not in practice, by alpha males intended to ensure the continuation of the hypergamous weeding out of lesser men who don’t possess the savvy to play by ever-shifting sexual market rules. Feminism is only superficially about female equality; at its core it is a ginanomicon of secrets to which only socially adroit men are privy.

Why feminism? Why now? In a word: Beta males acquired too much power. The ascendance of the beta male (and, not coincidentally, the rise of American power) through the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, exemplified by the common man seeing his income and standard of living rise and his opportunities for marriage with quality women rise in response, resulted, as is necessary in the zero sum sexual market, in a lessening of female market leverage to satisfactorily satiate their hypergamous impulse. As I wrote back in this post:

Roissy Maxim #15: Female cultural equality = male dating inequality. Female cultural inequality = male dating equality. You cannot have both. So sayeth human nature.

. . . .

Given the endless appetite of women to date up (even though there is evidence that engorgement of this appetite makes them unhappier), this wide and deep Beta Ascendance was an evolutionarily unstable environment. New complex memes would naturally arise in reaction to assist in pushing the evolutionary envelope of what qualifies as an alpha male, and here feminism and its discontents, its counterintuitive criteria and amorphous edicts, entered the vacuum left by the absence of widely practiced hypergamy to serve as the newest iteration of female sexual selection strategy. And the winners were the alpha males who could mouth the right platitudes while practicing the dominant behavior that put the lie to those same platitudes.

Wow!

I would push back on that last bit, though. Roissy himself has nothing but contempt for those men who "mouth the right platitudes," identifying this behavior as the mark of the "mangina". But certainly the primary effect of feminism has been to increase inequality among males and thereby make hypergamy easier to indulge.

What's in a Name?

Trumwill has a post in which he discusses societal norms with respect to the conduct of weddings. The particular norm he examines -- that a father walks his daughter down the aisle to "give her away" -- wasn't one I had been required to think about during my own wedding. The future Mrs. Φ was very attached to the symbolism of this tradition, and as you might expect, I had no objections.

But one of the commenters brought up an issue that had rather more resonance: the last name. I have a vague sense that a fair percentage of women, even ones with no socio-political axe to grind, go through some "separation anxiety" with respect to their maiden names, and Mrs. Φ fell into this percentage. At some point, she made noises about keeping her maiden name, and this became one of the issues we discussed.

Supposedly, there are some cultures that are matrilineal, by which I mean women keep their last names and pass them to their children. (I don't have any specific examples of this, but I am assured that it is so.) Hypothetically, were I the product of such a culture, I would not have any objection to following its rules. I can't think of any theoretical reason why matrilinealism is superior to patrilinealism, or vice-versa.

But . . . in our culture, a man with a wife that keeps her maiden name is saying something very specific. He is aligning himself with . . . those people. And I had no desire to align myself with those people. I had no occasion to keep company with those people, nor did I aspire to. And it didn't matter to me that Mrs. Φ wasn't trying to make any kind of social statement about "equality" or anything. So this was, potentially, a deal-breaker.

Ultimately, the compromise, such as it was, was that she would keep her maiden name "for work". Ultimately, the work never materialized, Mrs. Φ got on the mommy track, and I'm pretty sure we haven't discussed the matter in nine years.

Father's Day at the White House

I made the White House mailing list. I don't remember signing up for this mailing list, although I'm not objecting. Evidently, my email address must have been extracted from one of the many emails I have sent to lawmakers complaining about the direction of our current policy. I sent these emails to the Bush White House, too, but I was never made the mailing list. Indeed, I can't even remember having received a response to my specific comments. (Congresscritters are much better about this.)

This email represented itself as being a Happy Father's Day message from Michelle Obama and said, inter alia:

We all know the remarkable impact fathers can have in our children's lives. So today, on this 100th anniversary of Father's Day, take a moment to celebrate responsible fatherhood and the men who've had the courage to step up, be there for our families, and provide our children with the guidance, love and support they need to fulfill their dreams.

"our children . . . our families." Ours as in, we women possess the families? As opposed to their children and families which would have implied that the fathers possess the children and families?

This overuse of "our" may be out of the political stylebook, but it strikes me as unnatural and inappropriate. Husbands and father don't pick a random family to support. They very specifically support their own families and children: i.e., the families to whom they hold lawful title and to whom they exercise lawful responsibilities.

But maybe this is the point being contested?

Clive James on Feminism and Democracy

For BBC News:

Democracy is the best chance for women. Or if that sounds too naive, too pro-western perhaps, then let's put it this way. The absence of democracy is seldom good news for women. Or, to get down to bedrock, if women can't vote for women, then they haven't got many weapons to fight with when they seek justice.

My own view, which I'm ready to hear contested, is that this is the main reason why some feminists in the west have been so slow to get behind those women in the world's all too numerous tyrannies who have to risk their lives to say anything.

It's just too clear a proof that men have a natural advantage when it comes to the application of violence. When you say that women have little chance against men if it comes to a physical battle, you are conceding that there really might be an intractable difference between the genders after all.

Ideological feminists in the West were for a long time reluctant to concede this, because they preferred to believe that there was no real difference, and that all female handicaps were imposed by social stereotyping that could be reversed by argument. But this belief was really possible only in a society where the powers of argument had a preponderance over the powers of violence.

And since many western feminists are still convinced that the social stereotyping of the West is the product of fundamental flaws within liberal democracy itself, they have a tendency to believe that undemocratic societies are somehow valuable in the opposition they offer to the free countries which the feminists are so keen to characterise as not free enough.

I have to pick my words carefully here, because this is the touchiest theme I have ever tackled in these broadcasts, but I do think it's high time to say that if feminist ideologists find liberal democracy unfriendly, they might consider that the absence of liberal democracy is a lot less friendly still.

But isn't this the story of the Left generally? At its moment of triumph, Western Liberalism embraced an ideology of suicide: multiculturalism. Its victory over America hadn't come soon enough, it reasoned, so we lost the moral authority not only to speak against evil abroad -- indeed, only America itself is truly evil -- but even to defend ourselves against enemies far more socially "backward" than we ourselves had ever been.

Feminism, for its own tactical reasons, chose to join this coalition-of-the-damned. I predict that path will end badly for them.

Beta-hatred: the Jane Austen Version

I finished reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to my daughters recently. I had not read it since high school, and I was impressed with how faithful its 2005 movie version had been. But I was also struck by something that had escaped my notice on its first reading, something that is directly relevant to the observation that still marks my primary claim to internet fame.

To recap: Elizabeth Bennett, the novel's protagonist, receives a proposal of marriage from her cousin, Mr. Collins. It is difficult to fully describe the metaphysical level of absurdity achieved by Mr. Collins, although the movie captured it pretty well: his obsequious devotion to his wealthy patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh; the unflattering way in which he compares everyone else to her; the extent to which he is convinced that his association with Lady Catherine elevates his own status; his endless promotion of the most trivial aspects of himself; and his utter insensitivity to the affect that his manner has on those around him. He is, in short, a beta, and an oblivious beta at that. He doesn't intend anyone ill, and in contrast to Mr. Darcy, Mr. Collins does nobody any injury other than inflict his none-too-likable presence on those around him.

But Elizabeth is a romantic, naturally, and summarily declines the proposal. But rejecting Mr. Collins, it turns out, is insufficient vindication of her low opinion of him. Let's review her reaction when she is told by her best friend, Charlotte Lucas, that Charlotte herself has accepted Mr. Collins's offer of marriage.

From Chapter 22:

"Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte -- impossible!"

The steady countenance which Miss Lucas had commanded in telling her story gave way to a momentary confusion here on receiving so direct a reproach; though, as it was no more than she expected, she soon regained her composure, and calmly replied --

"Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it incredible that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman's good opinion because he was not so happy as to succeed with you?"

Charlotte's accusation here goes unrebutted, and indeed, this was exactly Elizabeth's expectation: because she did not want Mr. Collins, nobody else ought to want him either. Mr. Collins was a bad person who deserved to find all romantic options closed to him.

However, for reasons of her own, Charlotte has evaluated the trade-offs, and decides that Mr. Collins's proposal is acceptable. And for this crime, Elizabeth, in fact if not in form, withdraws her friendship. From Chapter 23:

Between Elizabeth and Charlotte there was a restraint which kept them mutually silent on the subject; and Elizabeth felt persuaded that no real confidence could ever subsist between them again.

Elizabeth elaborates on her feelings towards Charlotte in a conversation with her sister Jane. From Chapter 24:

"The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense. I have met with two instances lately: one I will not mention; the other is Charlotte's marriage. It is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable!"

"My dear Lizzy [replies Jane], do not give way to such feelings as these. They will ruin your happiness. You do not make allowance enough for difference of situation and temper. Consider Mr. Collins's respectability, and Charlotte's prudent, steady character. Remember that she is one of a large family; that as to fortune, it is a most eligible match; and be ready to believe, for everybody's sake, that she may feel something like regard and esteem for our cousin."

"To oblige you I would try to believe almost anything [continues Elizabeth], but no one else could be benefited by such a belief as this; for were I persuaded that Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man: you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him cannot have a proper way of thinking. You shall not defend her, though it is Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness."

Even if we take Elizabeth's assessment of Mr. Collins's character as gospel truth, notice the chain of logic: Mr. Collins is inadequate; therefore, no worthwhile woman would accept him; therefore, any woman that does accept him is unworthy of continued friendship. From Chapter 26:

The [Collins'] wedding took place; the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door, and everybody had as much to say, or to hear, on the subject as usual. Elizabeth soon heard from her friend, and their correspondence was as regular and frequent as it had ever been: that it should be equally unreserved was impossible. Elizabeth could never address her without feeling that all the comfort of intimacy was over, and though determined not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the sake of what had been rather than what was. Charlotte's first letters were received with a good deal of eagerness; there could not but be curiosity to know how she would speak of her new home, how she would like Lady Catherine, and how happy she would dare pronounce herself to be, though, when the letters were read, Elizabeth felt that Charlotte expressed herself on every point exactly as she might have foreseen. She wrote cheerfully, seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing which she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighbourhood, and roads were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine's behavior was most friendly and obliging. It was Mr. Collins's picture of Husford and Rosings rationally softened; and Elizabeth perceived that she must wait for her own visit there to know the rest.

Let me put it bluntly: Elizabeth's conduct here is repugnant. She expects -- nay, she is eager -- that Charlotte will be unhappy, and the desire of savoring the details of this unhappiness is her motivation for continuing their correspondence. But Charlotte is not unhappy, at least not on balance, and Elizabeth can't bring herself to admit this possibility.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Φ's breakout blog post was an extended reflection on beta-hatred. Not just the cumulative affect of female preferences, but a nigh eliminationist stridency: betas morally deserve to suffer all the loneliness, ostracism, and despair that women can inflict. In that essay, I sought to explain this stridency as a function of the cognitive dissonance embedded within modern liberalism: a no-sparrow-shall-fall embrace of the welfare state, coexisting with a social darwinian sexual anarchy.

But reading Pride and Prejudice again made me wonder. It appears that beta-hatred has much deeper roots than either liberalism or the welfare state, and may exceed my diagnostic powers.

On Socially Confident Women

At the ice rink the other day, I noticed a couple of young (late teen, I think) women wearing ankle length dresses and head coverings. Amish getup, or maybe Mennonite, but anyway, some sect that requires distinctive dress for women. I hadn't ever noticed them there before, even though they owned their own skates and skated well enough to be regulars.

Anyway, as we were heading around the rink I caught one's eye and nodded a greeting. And in return, I was rewarded with . . . full eye contact! A smile! A "hello"!

Poor, poor Amish girls. If they weren't so oppressed by religion, they would know to avoid eye contact with men, and quickly look away when one says hello.

The Coming Feminist War on Engineering

Via Steve Sailer, this story, and its implications for the future of Science and Engineering in America, is the scariest thing I have seen all year.

On a lighter note, this story (via Juliette Akinyi Ochieng) . . . well, let's just say that Ann Althouse has decended into self-parody.

Chuck

On Monday's episode of NBC's new spy-comedy Chuck, the title character, in a flashback sequence, remembers his first meeting Bryce Larkin, his fellow Standford undergrad and eventual arch-nemisis. Upon learning that Chuck, portrayed as the uber-geek (with sporadic levels of plausibility) by Zachary Levi, is programming his own version of an old video game, Bryce offers to introduce him to a girl he knows with a similiar interest in the same game, an offer Chuck enthusiastically accepts.

Even though my back was to her, my wife remarked that she could feel me getting pissed.

The desperate fantasy of geeks everywhere (and I include myself in this category): if only I could meet a girl with the same interest in my essentially geeky-male hobby, she'd be the girl for me.

Even if enough such women existed to go around (they do not), it is unlikely that they will be interested in geeks. "Shared interest," in an of itself, is an exceedingly weak basis on which to attract a woman. At best, a woman's knowledge of your particular field of interest might help her appreciate your status within that field, assuming you have status. But don't kid yourself: it is the status itself that attracts women, not the fact that she "shares your interests."

And I would issue the further caveat that the field of interest in question must have some intersection with the real world. Even a prodigious talet for reverse-engineering out-of-circulation video games, in an of itself, is not going to be much help.

So returning to the show: it is all to plausible that Chuck might share this fantasy. I had the fantasy myself until well into my twenties. But I guarantee that Bryce Larkin, portrayed as the alpha BMOC by Matthew Bomer, would know better. And that was the implausibility to which I reacted.

More broadly, the writers of Chuck try to portray his present lack of success with women entirely as a function of a low self-image resulting from his expulsion from Stanford. Geeks everywhere love to be told this, even when we don't believe it. It is entirely plausible that his sister would encourage him in this way; that's what concerned female relatives do (or at least, that's what my own did). But in several ways, the writers show that they want the audience to think this really is the reason! (As opposed to, say, the stink of underachievement that permeates his existence.)

So, okay, low self-esteem is a real turn-off all by itself. Point conceded. But this almost never exists in a vaccuum.

Sex and Status (again)

Steve Sailer republishes his 2001 review of the Ashley Judd / Hugh Jackman romantic comedy Someone Like You. The money paragraphs:

The sociobiologists may have the last laugh over the plot, since they argue that much of what we call the War Between the Sexes is really a War Within the Sexes. Kinnear's behavior turns out not to be driven by novelty after all. He merely left Judd and returned to his old girlfriend, played by Ellen Barkin. But that revelation makes Judd dislike him even more, since it shows Kinnear preferred another woman to her.

At the fade out, Judd falls into the manly arms of Jackman, who really has been living out the [playboy] lifestyle. Yet, his years of promiscuity make him all the more desirable to her, since snagging his love means she's triumphed over all the other women he dumped.

This reminds me of an observation I posted over at Bobvis:

Here is an anecdote from one of those "date-off" shows whose name I forget, but it features a girl interviewing two guys who want to go out with her. Unbeknownst to the guys, the girl has a female friend secretly listening to the interviews and feeding her advice through a hidden earpiece. The guys have been prescreened for their attractiveness and photogenicity.

So one of the questions she asks the guys is, "When was the last time you had sex?" One guys says a couple of months. The other guy says, last Wednesday. Both girls are horrified that a guy who had sex so recently is here pursuing another woman.

At the end of the episode, the girl picked the guy who had sex Wednesday.

Observation: it is fairly apparent to me that, while the girls may have disliked the fact that he had sex on Wednesday, this fact indicated to them that he was the type of man who could have had sex on Wednesday, and this they liked very much.

I think this observation could be generalized to all kinds of behavior that women complain about, but yet serve as proxies for qualities they desire.

Now, sho'nuff, another commenter came along and said, well, the girl must have really picked him because of the same qualities that got him laid. (These qualities did not appear, to me, obviously superior to his competitor.) But while I would not insist that these are uncorrelated, I will insist that the attractiveness alone does not account for all the variation. The sex life served as a proxy for status, and women respond to that independently of attractiveness.

Feminists and the Alpha Male

I recently came across a couple of blogs that generated the following post. Spungeon posts at bobvis.blogspot.com and Dizzy posts at dizzydoesit.blogspot.com. Both are thirty-something women, both lawyers or aspiring lawyers, and both have written dismissively about the "alpha-male" paradigm, i.e. the pop-sociobiological explanation for female sexual selection. It is this last point that I write to address.

This post is not intended to be a comprehensive defense of either sociobiology or its application to human sexual selection; this has been done better elsewhere. Nor is it an unalloyed apologia. In fact, there may be perfectly valid criticisms of the “alpha male” paradigm used to explain female mate selection: it can sound tautological, and therefore doesn’t really predict anything; it often tries to account for more variation than it actually can; and the paradigm doesn’t really apply to women over 30. (Both Spungeon and Dizzy are over 30, so they have had plenty of opportunity to assess the market and their actual buying power in it − but this is a subject for a separate post.) But feminist (broadly speaking) objections are seldom expressed in such an analytical way. My impression is that such as Spungeon and Dizzy reject, root and branch, the idea that the choices of women might be biologically determined. They are not alone in this rejection: all the (few) feminist bloggers I have read have expressed similar hostility. Since the hostility is so widespread, I decided that it requires some examination.

Sex and Liberalism

With the exception of libertarians, those of use who came of age politically in the last 30 – 40 years accept as a matter of course the political correlation between holding traditional views on sexual morality and pro-market views among conservatives on the one hand, and sexually licentious views and pro-interventionist economic views among liberals on the other. As any student of history could tell you, these correlations are anomalous: one only need to consider the writings of a tradition-minded socialist like G. K. Chesterton and a libertine capitalism like H. L. Menken, both of whom wrote during the 1920s, to realize that these correlations once cut the other way. But during the 1960s, the sexual revolution hitched its wagon to the horses of economic interventionism, a union that ultimately drove many Democrats into a newly-traditional Republican party. These coalitions, whatever their roots in expedience, and whatever theoretical tensions may exist within them, were ultimately marketed, and purchased, as package deals. (I myself bought the conservative package back during the Reagan administration.)

So the anomaly has become established fact: interventionist, sparrow-catching liberals, for whom no human suffering is beyond the reach of government to remedy, also advocate sexual anarchy. So long as they are between “consenting adults,” not only must our sexual relations be free from the reach of the law, they must be free from the reach of convention as well. Men and women should be free to mate with whom they wish, under whatever arrangements on which they mutually agree. (I shall write a post on whether this anarchy constitutes a stable end-state, but not today.) It didn’t take feminists long to realize that this anarchy left a lot of female victims: young women, pregnant and abandoned; older women, traded out for the new model. Feminist response to these victims varied in the particulars, but the central theme was that these injustices were artifacts of the imbalance of power between men and women. Specifically, men had greater social and economic power, and therefore were able to enjoy most of the benefits of sexual liberation. Correct that imbalance, and women, too, would reap its benefits. So ultimately, “liberation” required yet more intervention: affirmative action, childcare subsidies, taxpayer-funded abortion, comparable worth, etc.

The Invisible Men

But there was a second group of victims unaccounted for in the feminist worldview. Indeed, it was not until the age of the internet ended the monopoly of the “mainstream media” that these victims found each other, compared notes, and found in sociobiology a parsimonious explanation for their plight.

Under the tradition dispensation, there was some social and economic pressure on men and women to get married and to do so relatively young. Men enjoying higher status by virtue of their wealth and power, and young beautiful women got their pick, but monogamy was the rule, and almost everyone had the opportunity to marry somebody. Under the new dispensation, monogamy was most definitely not the rule, so it was very easy for high-status men to “play the field,” and easy for the majority of women to believe that they would eventually monopolize the affections (and resources) of a high-status male (because, after all, they slept with one). So women, lacking economic pressure to do otherwise, spend their twenties ignoring the majority of ordinary men and wait their “turn” to be with the alpha.

It is possible to overstate the injustice here. As I said before, most women realize as they approach thirty that sleeping around is not a viable strategy to finding long-term happiness. Therefore, most men will eventually get a shot. And it may be difficult to have much sympathy for those men whose disappointment stems from their failure to live the playboy’s life themselves.

Feminist Hatred

But even this does not account for the scorn with which feminist women hold low-status men. It is not enough for them to say simply that low-status men are unattractive. It is not even enough to say that they are socially inept (which is often the case for personalities bred in social isolation, itself a function of unattractiveness). No, these men are evil for one reason or another. Witness Spungeon’s observation that unattractive people are conveniently mean and treacherous. I say “convenient” because these qualities relieve Spungeon of any obligation to have compassion on them. The liberal worldview does not allow for distinctions like “the deserving poor” or shrugging at the realization that the free market leaves some better-off than others. No, low-status men must be morally undeserving, because if they weren’t that would mean . . . .

I will at this point officially decline to speculate what “affirmative action” or a “welfare program” would look like for men who can’t get dates. My point is that it is in this direction that left-liberal reasoning takes them. And since feminists most emphatically do not want to go in this direction, it is necessary for them to postulate something that they refuse to recognize in any other sphere of life: absolute, de facto, equality of opportunity. For the sexual anarchy of the feminist worldview to be morally coherent on its own terms, it is absolutely necessary for them to believe that, but for men’s own choices, all men have an equal opportunity to mate with all women.

And it is this postulate that runs into a fatal collision with sociobiology. Because sociobiology, as Darwinism in general, starts from an assumption of inequality. Indeed, it is precisely the inequality, and differential rates of reproduction, among individuals and groups that drive natural selection, evolution, and speciation. If Darwinism is describes reality, then the feminist worldview necessarily cannot describe reality. So in conflict with feminism, Darwinism must yield.

Update: Dizzy and Spungeon post comments that require me to issue a clarification. Both Dizzy and Spungeon, having reached their thirties, broadened their dating pool and had a number of negative experiences as a result. Dizzy in particular tells tales that beggar the imagination. Dizzy, Spungeon, and any other woman who has been treated like this has fully earned whatever feelings she has.

So in an effort to salvage my theory, I may need to restrict its explanatory power to the attitudes of women in their twenties torward men that they do not date. I had in mind such a woman when I wrote the post. I have no doubt that many "beta" males can behave abominably, especially when they try to imitate the behavior of the alpha males they see as successful. But what I attempted to explain was the willingness of women who have never dated such a beta to make gross (and, in my opinion, unwarranted) generalizations about all of them. This is most definitely not to say that they should feel obligated in some way to date anybody they do not wish to date (although she might be pleasantly surprised, as my wife was when she finally went out with me).