Transcript of "Men not marrying? How deep does "the problem" go?"

Okay, so an online friend of mine was spitting mad after reading this recent effort on the part of I can only assume to be a traditionalist woman, in trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with men these days. As so many traditionalists and feminists before her, she missed the mark by a freaking mile, even though she did dance dangerously close (within 100 miles or so) of a few of the core issues that currently discourage men from being good little married drones like they're supposed to be, dammit.

Despite being critical of feminist attitudes that she rightly sees as anti-male, the article was absurdly gynocentric. It was very much about what women want, and there was a lot of expectation that men *should* do what women want when they want it--that is, get married and have babies on HER schedule as decided by her. One has to wonder if she even bothered to ask any actual unmarried males WHY they are refusing or not bothering to "man up" before writing her article.

But as I said, it did at least poke at the surface of the festering boil that is the systemic nature of "the problem", even if it didn't give it the lancing it truly deserved. Her conclusion was "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? And why get a good job when women are so independent they can just give the milk away for nothing?" Both are backhanded criticisms of women's behavior (yay, for someone brave enough to blame women for their own troubles), but they fall far short of any sort of true examination of the issues.

So I'm going to give it the old college try, and give a bit of an overview of what I believe has become a multifaceted problem.

A recent examination from Heartiste said a very great deal, and with some serious literary flair (pearls of wisdom from that pit of social nihilism that is the pick-up artist community). I'm just going to quote some of the relevant bits and leave a link to the article below:

If you want to know why men are running away from marriage, children and beta provisioning, one major reason is that the women available to these working class men are flat out disgusting. Take a look for yourself. What man of normal mental health and active libido wants to romantically woo and date, let alone marry, a beastly, waddling tatted mountain of pustulence with the issue of three other men barking and nipping at her cankles?

And let’s not forget that economically empowered and government-assisted women, slaves to their hypergamous impulse for higher status mates than themselves, can’t help but winnow the pool of men deemed acceptable marriage material. When women say “there are no good men left”, what the astute observer hears is “there are no good men left thanks to a combination of my increased expectations and decreased attractiveness.”

He goes on to say: 

to the factory-farmed ivory tower sociologists studying marriage trends and turning out paper after paper of half-assed hogwash: there’s a whole other world out there. It’s the world of men, and in that world, men’s desires matter. You should think about incorporating that ugly reality into your theories.

Hey, Heartiste--why don't you tell us how you really feel. As blistering as that little snippet was, it raises some very important points, I think the most important of which is that MEN'S DESIRES MATTER. When men cannot find women THEY desire who are willing to partner with them, why would they partner?

And I think it's important to note that the reality of divorce and family law in our culture plays a HUGE part in men's growing contempt for marriage as an institution. It's not that men are commitment-phobes. It's that women seem increasingly commitment-incompatible. The word "commitment" has in fact, in female parlance, come to mean, "up until the moment I'm no longer 100% satisfied with the person I married". And that attitude is only going to lead to more and more divorces as more and more successful women effectively set their sights higher than they reasonably should while their youth and attractiveness wanes, leading to a growing number of them feeling like they settled even if they didn't--even if they scored someone 2 points above them on the overall attractiveness scale.

And oddly enough, no one, least of all women, seem to really give a shit what MEN desire in a partner. Why can't men just be happy with what's available? Well, let's look at what's available to the *average* man in his 30s: a 35 year old woman who hollers yes over the jangling of her biological clock while unable to keep the grimace from her face because he's a bigger loser than the 5 guys she dumped in her 20s and now she has to settle, a divorcee who's already financially annihilated and emotionally crippled at least one man, and a single mother who's collecting reams of child support from one poor schmuck while her other baby daddy manages to duck his obligations because he's a drug dealer and his income's off the books.

And yes, I'm exaggerating, but you see my point.

And no, not all women are like that. But frankly, the consensus among today's women seems to be that this state of affairs is the new normal, and even responsible women will often frame such destructive choices on the part of other women as somehow valid and defensible. The sentiment in the mainstream is that men should just man up and go along with Pairing Up 2.0: Who Cares What Men Want?, that essentially, a given woman's behavior and life choices should have no effect on whether she is able to attract a good, reliable man...this does not speak well of the principles of even those women who are more well-situated. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the fewer female voices of reason there are out there the more men are likely to wash their hands of the entire idea of partnering.

But I honestly think it goes deeper than even the baggage the average unattached woman now carries, or the danger of ending up an emotionally and financially devastated statistic with "generous" every-other-weekend access to one's children that is keeping men from "manning up".

I've been thinking of the White Feather Girls. For those who don't know, it was a group of young women in the UK during WWI who bestowed a white feather of cowardice on any man they saw in civilian clothes, to shame them into enlisting.

And when I consider how vulnerable so many men were to those kinds of shaming tactics, vulnerable enough to enlist in a war that killed 10 million to preserve their manhood in the eyes of women they'd never met, I simply can't believe that it's only the risks of marriage, as onerous as they are, that have rendered men impervious to the kinds of shaming tactics employed by traditionalists and feminists who seem increasingly desperate to strong-arm men into their old roles.

I think at the very core of it, it's about a positive male identity. Male identity almost always revolves around doing, rather than being. Most of that doing has always revolved around being of use in a uniquely male context. Most of men's usefulness through history has derived from learning "male" skills and performing them well, embodying a male role in the service of women or society. In the more turbulent past, those roles needed to perform a valuable service to women or the community that women could not--or should not be expected to--perform for themselves.

This is the most common path to a positive male identity BECAUSE MEN LACK A MECHANISM FOR AUTOMATIC OWN-GROUP PREFERENCE. Simply put, they do not relate to other men automatically, just because they're men.

Women have this bias, which provides them a natural ability to form cooperatives, relate to other women, and seek consensus though their strong mechanism for own-group preference based on gender alone. Given their gender roles through most of human history, this mechanism makes sense. Their individual value as, to put it bluntly, breeders, meant that in a survivalist environment, you didn't throw a woman on the trash pile without a pressing reason. Adjustments were made when possible to keep as many women as you could within the sisterhood. This is where you find a ton of attention in female spaces given to things like "tone" and "being nice" and "getting along" even when there are disagreements. It's all about comfort level and feelings of acceptance.

Men, however, lack the hardwiring to form a preference for maleness based merely on maleness. And that only makes sense when you think about men's roles for the last couple million years or so--roles that involved things like beating the guys down the valley to a pulp when they threatened his women and children, and competing against other males within his community for a shot at the mating game. Given those roles, automatically siding with one's own gender over the other is...well, it just doesn't work.

And it's not that men cannot manifest a form of own-group preference, it's just that when own-group preference manifests in males, it can't be based on maleness alone. There must be a common purpose, a common set of ideals, a common duty or cause, a common doing or a common position in the status hierarchy.

Men can indeed identify with each other and be team players among other men--you see it in churches, military units, fraternities, sports teams and even sports fans, political parties, movements, project teams. While they will often form hierarchies within those contexts, those realms can be sources of a sense of loyalty and brotherhood among men.

The myth among feminists that men will insult each other for displaying feminine traits because they see women as inferior is just that--a myth. Men do this because women have a trump card that bestows intrinsic value on them--their uteruses--and they retain that value even when they gender-bend a little. A woman who acts like a woman is not seen as inferior. A man who acts like a woman has always been seen not as a woman, but as a "woman without a womb". He has no female value, and he has no male value. Therefore, he has NO value at all. And unlike women, men who were not "useful" did--and still do--get thrown on the trash heap of society.

In the currency of reproduction, an ovum goes for a thousand bucks, a uterus is worth a cool mill, and an ejaculation about 10 cents. To be acceptable mating material, and worth keeping around, a man had to do more than generate sperm. And when the only thing keeping you from becoming completely disposable as an individual lies in differentiating yourself from the feminine, well, guys gonna enforce that shit.

This is why men have always tended to define themselves by their roles. Father, husband, working man, soldier, career man, family man, middle class man, politician, activist, etc...in other words, roles to exist in which allow them to relate to other men who also occupy those roles, and to derive a positive and meaningful identity from performing their masculinity through those roles.

And I think this may be why suicide rates for men skyrocket after divorce--you have not just taken away his kids, his wife, his assets and a chunk of his income. You've effectively stripped him of a huge part of the male identity he's built around himself.

So I'm thinking that for most men, forming a positive male identity in relation to other males requires a couple of things--a male role that is differentiated from the female one (or at the very least, a male-oriented environment) and, well, positivity.

Men used to be able to derive a positive male identity from marriage. That is, through the respected and uniquely male role of husband and father. When that identity is increasingly characterized by society as superfluous, obsolete, or in the words of Harriet Harman, unnecessary to social cohesion, it is no longer a way for a man to defer his disposability, is it? Moreover, when that identity can be unilaterally stripped from him on the whim of the increasingly fickle and hard to please female even when he does everything right, marriage ceases to be a positive way for men to define themselves as men. It becomes a way for men to define themselves as chumps and idiots, and who wants to define themselves that way? Moreover, from sitcoms to romcoms to TV commercials, to billboard ads, the role of husband/father is increasingly one of playing the incompetent buffoon to sassy, smart, together wife or even child. In the mass media there is nothing noble or respectable about husbandhood or fatherhood anymore. Further, when the roles within marriage become virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable, a man's role becomes less and less...well, uniquely male. It's just a role. It can be a path to meaning and fulfilment (if he's lucky), and it may be something he desires to do and become, but it's not necessarily a path to defining himself AS A MAN.

So we can scratch that one off the list--even for men who've been living under a rock when it comes to divorce law. Marriage and children no longer offer a reliable path to a positive male identity. It is no longer positive, nor is it significantly differentiated from the feminine.

The workplace is yet another milieu that has largely lost its maleness. And that's not to say that women ruined everything. It is not so much the presence of women but rather the alterations in environment and interaction many women demand when they want to engage the world through the paid workforce. A male space that leads to a positive male identity need not be free of women, but it still needs to be male--men need an environment that suits their psychology, not one in which they must be metaphorically castrated in order to steer clear of trouble with HR. And I'm not even talking about vulgarity or expressions of sexuality, but aggression, ambition, ribbing, competition, passion, authority, and plain speech--all of these are often discouraged when women are present, in order to spare feelings and prevent discomfort. Outspokenness is replaced with drawing room rules of discourse and ingenuity with protocol, all of which render a feminized workplace, though tolerable to men, no longer a path to a positive MALE identity.

Because it is no longer a male space, and no longer appeals to the psychology of men, the workplace has become a ladder fewer men feel driven to climb in order to construct their identities. Combine this with the fact that we handicap men through quotas and affirmative action for women, well... a large number of men are not only becoming disenchanted with the expectation to perform in an environment that does not feed their natures and has set them up to fail--in the absence of those uniquely male-centered psychological rewards and motivators, a growing number are finally opening their eyes and waking up to the negative aspects of wage-slavery. And that is a pill that, once taken, cannot be unswallowed.

In every space males congregate where women have elbowed their way in and demanded changes, you seem to find large numbers of men giving ground and eventually losing their drive to perform there. And again, I don't think it's the presence of women that does this--it's the enforced necessity to change one's behavior in order to maintain a proper decorum around them, and the changes in how those places function that women often demand. It's the expectation that the environment and the men in it adjust to suit women's needs, rather than expecting women to adjust themselves to the environment.

A few bastions of maleness remain, places where women are often welcome right up until they begin to demand the environment change to suit them, at which point the male protests begin. Hell, you can even see this tolerance on the part of men when women sneak into the men's room when the line-up is too long for the women's bathroom. It's all good unless she takes offence at men behaving the way men do in a restroom by farting and pissing in her presence.

So where are men retreating to? The internet, and the few men's spaces that have not tailored their rules of conduct to suit women's easily offended natures and need for comfort. The MRM, where a common set of ideals and values bonds the community and allows them to define their maleness irrespective of society's or women's approval. A place where words and ideas are more important than the tone or the smiles that may or may not lie behind them.

The hierarchy and uniquely male objectives of the pick-up artist community, where competition and scorekeeping are indeed still allowed, where there are men for others to admire or to mentor, and where they thumb their noses at what women say they want. Society wasn't working for them, so they invented their own society and they're running with by their own rules.

Video games and related forums. Online venues where refusals to police speech are deemed misogyny and the men there don't give much of a fuck.

Men going their own way, who've taken a stand based on a realistic assessment of what's in it for them, and maintain their self-respect not by complying with society's expectations but by disregarding them.

Beer and buddies, hook-up culture, and part time jobs men tolerate but don't care about.

Gynocentrism--the manginas and white knights who supplicate and pander to the feminine even when it's ugly or amoral, differentiating themselves from the feminine through their blind worship of it.

And why? Because all of the "approved" paths to a positive male identity, the paths society both endorses and depends on, are gone. And even when men don't consciously realize this, they know it somewhere in the backs of their brains. Men have always worked and sacrificed and sweated and bled if they were rewarded with a means through which to see themselves as worthy of respect. But when every role society wants to cram you into is no longer a way to respect yourself, then it's time to throw those roles away.

And one thing the apexuals at the top, like Bill Bennett and Obama, feminists like Kaye Hymowitz and Katie Roiphe, and traditionalists like Suzanne Venker, will never realize is that using shame to try to coerce men to do what is expected of them isn't going to work this time, because while it's possible to shame a man into giving his life for his country if there's a promise of respect in it, it's impossible to shame someone into working his ass off and risking his future just for the joy of looking in the mirror and seeing Homer Simpson or Ray Barone looking back at him.

When the cost of society's approval is the self-respect you derive from a positive identity, it ceases to be worth it to a lot of men.

Transcript of "Those privileged blue bundles of joy."

Okay, I had another topic planned for today, but then youtuber PasswordOVER9000 sent me a link to an article by a blogger at 5 cities 6 women called "When women don't want daughters."

I'd like to start with a caveat. When I got married, I was marrying two stepsons along with my husband, and our first child together was a boy as well. I remember being in labor with my second, and what I'd assumed would be my last, child, and gritting out between my teeth, "It had better be a girl!" If my daughter had turned out to be a son, I can't say my disappointment would have registered more than a 0.1 on the richter scale of let-downs, but with three boys already, I'll admit I'd been hoping for a girl. Little did I realize that my girl would end up less verbally and socially wired, and more rough and tumble than any of her brothers, more prone to using the kitchen chairs for evil, more ingenious at breaking gates and making a run for it at age two, using the oven racks to climb up on the kitchen counters before she was a year old, and more interested in leaping from heights that were potentially bone-breaking right from the time she started walking at 8 months.

She wasn't your typical girl, and she still isn't. She's not prone to a lot of the emotional maladies the article's author, Erin KLG, claims scare some women away from having daughters. She was tough on the blood pressure and I think I probably produced more adrenaline in her first five years than your typical base-jumper, but she was never "moody or dramatic", nor "manipulative and dangerous (to anyone other than herself)" nor "too girly," some of the justifications in category 1--Girls are harder to raise than boys.

My own daughter may have been hard on the adrenal glands, but she certainly wasn't hard on my emotions. And while I'd guess that girls are probably more likely than boys to be hard on a parent emotionally, well, that's as much about a parent's choice in how to respond to the negative behavioral traits more commonly found in girls than in boys. You can let those behaviors fly, and you can let them bother you, or you can tell her to pull up her big girl panties and that you're not buying her diva act today or any other day.

Boys and girls, in general, do present different challenges, and for a woman who was raised with, or by, a challenging female--a borderline, or a narcissist, or a manipulator, or a diva, or a drama queen, or a high maintenance princess--I can see hoping to avoid that particular set of potential challenges in favor of the "easier way". (And just to clarify that I put "easier way" in quotes, because just yesterday a friend called to tell me her five-year old son had been sent home from school early for intentionally peeing on the bathroom floor and intentionally plugging the toilet, because, in his words, "I hate it here, so I want people to have to walk in my pee." So as you can see, boys are ALWAYS much easier on a parent than girls.)

However, this is not my main complaint with this article. In fact, that part of the article was...refreshingly free of things I can reasonably criticize. Reason #2 as to why some women prefer to have sons, however, is...sigh.

#2: “I don’t want a girl because the world is harder for girls.” Surprise! It is! But when we’re not dodging rapists or avoiding math and science, we do like to have some fun (I mean, fun we can afford; our paychecks are only78% of our male counterparts’ checks). This is the camp that most of my friends agree is a more reasonable one – after all, it is The Truth. It’s hard out there for an XX. When women say this, it usually comes from a place of personal experience, and their hope is to avoid being part of a process that inflicts more pain on another human being – that is, giving birth to a girl. I can understand that.

Really. The world is "harder" for girls? I think the 80% of youth suicides who are male might have a thing or two to say about that. Or the 4 to 8 times as many boys as girls who are doped with ritalin so they can tolerate the modern school environment. Not succeed in it, mind you, because nearly twice as many girls as boys can read proficiently by the time they graduate, and boys' test scores and marks have been slipping year by year relative to girls--just tolerate it, while quietly and inexorably becoming a less fidgety but increasingly marginalized education underclass. Classrooms adjusted in the 80s and 90s to better serve girls have left boys adrift in a world where competition has been outlawed, amid a sea of pig-tail-wearing, socially savvy classmates who are a hell of a lot better at sitting still, being quiet, using their listening ears and doing reams of open-ended practice work.

In the school attended by my friend's toilet-plugging son, games like dodgeball and tag have been prohibited, because they encourage aggression and lead to bruises. The new, PC mantra, "We don't keep score here, we are all winners," stifles boys' natural competitiveness, and turns even sports into an exercise in going through the motions as pointless to boys as all that open-ended cutting and pasting and rote memorization. And when those boys then turn to video games to exercise the hardwired skills, learning styles and interests more common to them--hands on "doing", achievement, competition and score-keeping--that have been fully excised from the school environment, they're written off as lazy time-wasters.

Boys also have the insidious feeling that female teachers (the vast majority of teachers right up until high school) have it in for them. And the scary thing is, they're right. New research done in the UK found that female teachers scored boys an average of 3% lower than gender-blinded evaluators--subconscious contempt for all the squirming and disrupting, perhaps? And all that squirming and disrupting might explain why boys are suspended at 2 to 4 times the rate girls are, something that has been shown to negatively impact their likelihood to attend and graduate college.

In the case of my friend, a psychological evaluation of her son was demanded by his beleaguered teacher, and much to her dismay, he was found to be bright, emotionally intelligent and well within the range of "normal" by the psychologist. Oddly, in the three months since the psychologist suggested a number of strategies in dealing with him, his teacher has yet to implement even the simplest and most effective and effortless of them--to stop saying, "Can you please," and start saying, "Bet you can't." By simply making a request in the form of a dare or challenge, his performance went through the roof--if that doesn't tell you the sedate tea party of the modern classroom is a poor fit for boys, I don't know what will.

Still think boys have an easier time of it, Erin? Really?

Well, maybe this will make you stop and think. You mentioned the wage gap, that same old tired chestnut feminists of all stripes drag out to prove women have it worse than men--when in reality, when you explore the causal factors of the gap, you'd find the opposite. According to CONSAD, the US government and multiple other sources, the more variables you account for that are based on personal choice, the narrower the true gap becomes.

Same field, same amount of training, same age, same company, same number of uninterrupted years of work, same number of hours worked, same flexibility when it comes to inconvenient shifts and overtime, same level of absenteeism, same everything, and surprise surprise, you get the same wage. On the astronomical chance that you'll ever actually listen to a video that isn't filled with feminist propaganda, I'll direct you to the stellar series, "Why men earn more: the startling truth behind the wage gap."

Women earn less because they have the social and financial freedom to prioritize things like personal fulfilment, shorter commutes, flexible office hours, safety, nicely padded office chairs and family over their earnings.

Due to social pressures and gender enforcement, men are a crap-ton more likely to put earnings at the top of their priority lists, leading to things like longer commutes, camp work, more exposure to the elements, less personal fulfilment, less time with family, more hours worked per day, year and lifetime, inconvenient shifts, more travel, more overtime, and a risk of death on the job 20 times higher than that of women.

And for all of that, he gets paid more than a woman, the oppressive bastard. If he attends college, that is, something that young men are increasingly unlikely to do. Young women have a 50% higher likelihood of finishing high school, and a 50% higher likelihood of attending and graduating from post-secondary, which has in fact led to current average earnings for women under 30 in US cities that is 8% higher than those of their male peers.

Are you waking up yet, Ms. KLG?

Well if not, here are some other "perks" of being male in our culture. Aside from the higher risk of suicide and death on the job, your friend's little blue privileged bundles face at least 10 times the risk of homelessness, 20 times the risk of being incarcerated (with consistently longer sentences for the exact same crimes), a 3 to 4 times greater risk of being a victim of violent crime, an exactly equal risk of being a victim of domestic violence (along with a roughly 0% chance of being offered a bed in a shelter), an exactly equal risk of being forced into sexual intercourse (but the privilege of having it not be considered rape in 80% of those cases simply because the perpetrator was female), twice the risk of having a spouse initiate a divorce, 20 times the risk of losing custody of his children upon divorce, a higher death rate wrt 14 of the 15 leading causes of death, a lower life expectancy, and the understanding that despite this, roughly 8 times as much public money will be spent on the health of the opposite sex.

And some doozies that that little blue bundle of "privilege" gets to enjoy that girls and women NEVER will--the privilege of being forced into the burdens of parenthood against his will, the privilege of having a child he wants aborted against his wishes, the privilege of paying child support at age 14 to the 30-year-old woman who raped him, the privilege of being laughed at or jailed when his girlfriend or wife batters him, and all the potential joys of having his genitals mutilated as an infant, and then growing up to hear women freely opine on their preference for mutilated men.

And if that's not enough to convince you that boys do not and will not have it "easier" than girls, I will direct you to this lovely gem in your article:

By having a boy, they can breathe easier. This is why women fret over the safety of their future daughters, but not over whether their future sons will be rapists or serial killers. (And if you have had such a worry, I salute you.) By this argument, we worry about having a victim, but don’t change the structure that produces the victimizers. 

Really, Erin. Fucking really? You think that on top of all that stuff I just talked about, a boy's life is easier than a girl's, when a woman who is so absorbed with our culture's propagandized cult of vagina-gazing that she actually believes WOMEN are more likely to be victims of ANYTHING than men, believes it's somehow progressive for a mother to fret not about any of the hideous challenges their boys will face as they grow into manhood or those they will face as men, but about whether they're gestating a future rapist or serial killer?

You honestly believe that growing up in a culture so eager to equate maleness with all that is evil that we've sunk to painting boys as potential rapists and serial killers before they even emerge squalling from their mother's wombs only to have their parents encouraged by doctors to have half the skin and nerves in their dicks chopped off without anaesthetic, is fucking "privilege."

I think I'm starting to understand why the suicide rate in young men is so fucking high, Erin. Our culture is so determined to convince boys they're privileged when they are anything but, that when those boys actually wake up to the extent and extremity of the lie they've been told all their lives, it's not like finding out Santa Claus isn't real--it's the equivalent of watching Santa Claus being torn to pieces and eaten by his own reindeer, after which they piss on all the shiny presents he was supposed to deliver.

And if, after watching this video, you still believe your article is any kind of reflection on The Truth, all I can do is relay a personal message to you from my sons: Fuck you.

Transcript of "I am a sexy woman, so stop objectifying me!"

So, a perplexed viewer recently messaged me to ask if I'd do a video on sexual objectification, after he stumbled across two internet brouhahas that had him scratching his head.

In the first, an atheist blogger who writes about ethics posted a list of "sexy scientists" who happened to be all female, other than PZ Myers, who was included as a joke. He was immediately taken to task for compiling a sexist list that objectified women based on their looks. My viewer found the level of anger among those chastising this blogger kind of stunning, and noticed that the blogger had to repeatedly correct some commenters' blatant misrepresentations of things he'd said.

But what got my viewer really wondering WTF was how so many of the people offended to their cores by the list came out and admitted, explicitly, that such a list featuring sexy male scientists would not be offensive to them.

He sent another example of this phenomenon he'd found on Jezebel, where many of the women there were shamelessly objectifying male soccer players, and a few other women said things like "If the World Cup featured women ... we'd be pissed about the objectification. This is not any different."

The response was, "Yeah, we'd be pissed about it. But it's not the same. Here's why: In our current universe, men do not have trouble being taken seriously based on their looks or perceived sexiness, nor is their worth in society primarily judged by them. ... it also won't contribute to the overall oppression of men, ... They will not be treated like meat or chattel. Period."

My viewer asked me if I could explain to him what planet these people are living on.

First, I would have to say that these people are living on a planet where they do not know or understand, or WANT to understand, how sex works.

I'm going to quote a favorite sex columnist of mine, Dan Savage, because his ideas about sexual objectification dovetail very neatly with my own:

"Face facts, ladies: people always have and always will objectify the people they're attracted to. Men who wanna fuck women objectify women (at places like Hooters); women who want to fuck men objectify men (at places like Centerfolds). Gay men objectify other men (at places like Ashton Kutcher's asscrack), lesbians objectify other women (at places where Venus and Serena play tennis). The urge to objectify is universal, and so long as it's fairly and respectfully indulged, it's not offensive, not a problem, and not news."

I would also have to say that these people are living on a planet where everyone lacks the hardwiring and software to view women as having any active role in anything other than as passive beings that stuff--including everything concerning sexuality--just happens to. Which is...sigh. I guess I shouldn't say it's bizarre at this point, but more like par for the course.

I've mentioned before that feminism seems to be the biggest objectifier of women out there, and this bullshit provides me with a convenient way to explain my reasoning to the uninitiated. At its heart, objectification is a denial of personal or moral agency. Agency is the idea that the things you do have an affect on the world and on yourself. That your action A will result in outcome B or C or D, that the outcome actually depends on your action. When people are seen as objects, they're seen as incapable of effectual decisions or actions--actions that actually lead to outcomes. It's basically like saying "nothing you do matters, because shit just happens to you".

Feminism posits that objectification of women is a process that originates in men's brains and dicks, rather than partly in women's decisions and actions. They completely remove women as a causal or interactive factor in this phenomenon. A man's decision to objectify a woman is a decision that originates spontaneously within himself, based on nothing but his piggishness.

I mean, to someone like Rebecca Watson, posing in a "Sexy women of skepticism" calendar should have no bearing on how anyone sees or thinks of her. She may be showing tons of cleavage all the time, and cashing in on her sex appeal, but at the same time she lives in a universe where even as she exploits her sexuality, she denies it has, or should have, any effect on anyone, and woe betide the evil man who might fap to still images of her looking coyly into the camera with an acre of boobage on display because he's not acknowledging her as a human being. Perhaps he is allowed to fap to an audio track of her talking about feminism with her voice electronically altered to conceal her gender, but I wouldn't bet on it. Masturbating to thoughts of anyone you do not know on a deep, spiritual or intellectual level is the purest evil there is.

Unless you're a woman rubbing one off to images of David Beckham.

Which brings me to the other half of the sexual objectification equation. You know, the one feminists have never heard of or thought about because they're too busy admiring their own vaginas in a completely non-objectifying way, unlike you disgusting men who are only interested in SEX.

So let's look at the whole picture, based on the criteria of sexual attractiveness with respect to men and women, and the intellectual dishonesty in people like the commenters at common sense atheism and jezebel.

Women spend hours a day sometimes turning themselves into beautiful and sexy objects. They wear high heels because small feet correlate with high estrogen levels and fertility, and feet look smaller in high heels. Legs also look longer, which correlates with youth, and because those high heels cause the lower back to arch they make a woman's bum look more alluring. Women wear lipstick because women's lips are naturally darker and fuller than mens to mimic women's genitals and lipstick enhances that effect. They dye their hair to hide greys and use wrinkle creams that give the illusion of youth, and agonize over acne because clear skin indicates health and good genes to potential mates.

They may not do any of this consciously knowing why it works, but they do it because they know it's sexy.

And they're MORE likely to do all of these things when they go out in the world where there are LOTS of men to attract, and then live in sweat-pants and yesterday's make-up around their significant other (the man they supposedly want to be attractive to) or when they're alone at home. So, they are indeed doing it for the male attention, and not to just "feel" sexy. It's basically like putting out a broadcast, but hoping only the most fit and acceptable guys will receive and act on the signal.

This is an action, ladies. And it results in an outcome. The outcome is that you are now MORE sexually attractive to men you don't know and who don't know shit about you as a person, and contrary to what you'd like to believe, that IS the outcome you were going for.

And the retarded idea that men aren't objectified and judged based on sexual criteria...it just shows feminists have NEVER been able to put themselves in men's experience, or even understand how their own brains work.

What are the "sexy poses" for women? The ones that show superficial indications of qualities men find attractive--poses that emphasize curves (fertility and child-bearing capability), facial expressions that are coy or coquettish (pleasant disposition), angles that display beauty (good genes), clear skin (health), and long legs (youth). The nakeder the better, because a man's visually detectable criteria for what is sexually attractive in women is based on her body.

What are the "sexy poses" for men? Action poses. Strength and power poses. Work poses. Rebellious or defiant poses. And if those men are all the way naked, then you can't see that they can afford that Hugo Boss suit, or what kind of work they do, or whether they're in some kind of uniform, or what kind of social status they have, can you?

Men are sexy to women because of what they can bring in the way of protection, social status or resources. The poses reflect that, and just because they are all based on what men can do or have or can get or earn doesn't mean they aren't objectifying, and it DOES NOT mean that men aren't judged based on those visual criteria. I read once that a woman decides within five seconds of looking at a man whether she wants to get to know him better, and a lot of the time the decision is based on things like the quality of his shoes rather than how nice his smile is.

And while it might suck to be objectified based on your looks when your looks aren't something you can easily change, it must also suck to be objectified based on how much you bring to the table in performance standards--essentially, objectified based on your utility to a given woman.

Now, you don't hear the kind of moaning and caterwauling over the sexual objectification of men that we ALWAYS seem to hear over the slightest hint of the sexual objectification of women. And the difference not that men have male privilege--it's that men who are UNable to be seen as sexual objects by women because they fail to meet the criteria are seen as losing out, while women who ARE objectified usually feel threatened.

And THAT can be attributed to the differing biological costs and benefits of sex depending on whether you're a man or a woman. Now, for the sake of argument, let's just pretend that we're living 20,000 years ago, before the pill and abortion and slutwalks and the sexual revolution and all that, because 20,000 years ago is the environment our instincts think we're living in.

Unwanted sexual attention--that is, sub-par men or men who haven't been vetted ogling a woman--feels threatening to a woman because the biological cost (pregnancy) of that attraction carried too far (rape) is extremely high.

Getting pregnant by a sub-par man was a biological disaster for a woman. She'd waste one of her finite, timed shots at the reproductive target, risk her health and life, and might have 4 years of decreased fertility from breastfeeding before she'd be able to try again, all of it thrown away on a sub-par child, sired by a man who at the very least had not proven to her in advance that he'd stick around and help her raise it.

That's a HUGE set of risks and costs, so *unwanted* sexual attention from a man she feels doesn't measure up makes her uneasy. But she can't get any sexual attention at all, even from the men she does want, unless she presents herself as a sexually attractive woman, can she? So when she's applying all that make-up and pulling on that snug t-shirt, she's instinctively (but maybe not consciously) aware of why she's doing it--to be attractive to an awesome guy, which will make her feel sexy--but when non-awesome or non-vetted men express unwanted or premature interest in her, she's made uncomfortable and she buries the agent/object conflict under an illogical tangle of rationalization wherein she deems men should NOT objectify her even when men objectifying her was her goal, and wherein none of it has anything to do with HER or anything she is or does--it's all the fault of those men and the dicks they're led around by.

This is one of the reasons why male behavior around women was always bound by strict rules of courtesy, and why even as recently as my grandfather's time, a man could get his lights punched out for offending a woman by using vulgar language in her presence. And it's why women are still the group with the most power to control discourse and rules of politeness--they set the limits of what is acceptable speech and behavior, and pretty much everyone caters to their lowest common denominator of comfort level.

Because of those female costs and risks, men have to compete and perform in order to get a shot at reproducing. But 20,000 years ago, if HE had sex with a sub-par female he wouldn't be interested in hanging out with long term, he lost nothing but a few million sperm that regenerate constantly. He could--at least until recently--just walk away, no loss no foul, and try again with someone better the moment he could spring another boner.

And for him, being objectified is a GOOD thing. He has to compete for females, remember. Being objectified is success, and success makes him a winner, even if he doesn't end up having sex with any of the women making eyes at him across the cave.

So he doesn't make a big deal about being found sexy. Being found sexy by many woman costs him nothing, and can only pay off more the more women objectify him, because then HE might actually get to have his pick of women rather than the other way around. And none of this means that men want sex all the time, or from many different women, or anything like that. It just means they aren't going to have that visceral, instinctive uneasiness around an appreciative gaze from a woman they don't know.

And even if he has no interest in women or sex or reproducing, the things that make him a sexy object are things that will make his life awesome as an individual--money, self-sufficiency, respect, physical fitness and the admiration of others. Even if he doesn't EVER want sex, any of women's sexual criteria he meets are of benefit to him as an individual. Up until very recently in our social and legal evolution, he did not face the conflict that what makes him valuable sexually is also a HUGE potentially life-ruining or even fatal liability if his sexual judgement led him astray, or if a woman took advantage of him.

Women have always had ALL the power in the sexual equation, but up until an eyeblink ago it was a power that could utterly destroy them if they weren't able to exercise total control over it, and even if they don't consciously understand that, their instincts do. Men have always had to earn their sexual power, and it was a power that, once they had it, cost them nothing. It was the getting it that used to cost them a fuck-ton--often their lives as they performed their way into proving themselves valuable enough to lease a woman's uterus.

Now what really gets me is how completely oblivious most feminists are to things like this, how they will deny the agency women exercise when they objectify themselves by shifting all the onus onto men to effectively gouge their own metaphorical eyes out or else they're being pigs, rather than acknowledging the part women play in the game of sexual attraction. And the cognitive dissonance of saying something like "men will not be treated like meat. Period," EVEN WHILE THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT MEN LIKE THEY'RE PIECES OF MEAT.

It gets me that instead of understanding that their problem with the problem of sexual objectification of women originates in instincts that served women in the fucking cave but have nothing to do with the social, legal, technological or economic realities of today, feminists will perform the pathetic intellectual gymnastics required to blame their own double standards on the collective delusion of Male Privilege so they don't have to admit that women are instinctively cautious about sex and men instinctively cavalier about it.

And what I find most hilarious is the denial that women objectify men based on criteria they can determine with their eyes alone--all the cues and signals so obvious in sexy images of men that showcase their utility to women, and that can be as simple as the way he's standing when the shutter clicks.

If women are objectified as ornaments, then men are objectified as appliances. And the difference between an ornament and an appliance is that ornaments are coveted objects prone to theft by the unworthy, while appliances that no one wants get hauled to the dump. A woman objectified by the "wrong man" feels uneasy because once upon a time, her reproductive costs and risks could cost her everything, while a man objectified by women was actually deferring his disposability.

And I can even see that little nugget of truth in the lament of a 50 year old attractive businesswoman who laments that it's been ages since a strange man gave her "the look". “Leering hasn't happened in years,” she says wistfully. Of visiting Italy 20 years ago with friends, she says, “we were furious that the Italian men pinched your bum. When we went back, in our early 40s, we were furious that no one was pinching our bums.” She's now discovering what men understand right from the get-go--that being objectified by others is proof of your market value, which is why young women go to such lengths to make themselves beautiful even as they scold the men who dare to notice.

And though none of this instinctive bullshit, as I've presented it, can be changed on the fundamental level of limbic hardwiring, I really think knowing what the fuck we're dealing with here, and why it exists, is the first step to dealing with the issue. If women WANT to be seen as sexual agents in this age where most of the reproductive risks and costs to them have been mitigated by modern technology, they have to stop denying they have sexual agency, and they really need to grow a pair and talk themselves out of behaving like they live in the goddam victorian age, where women were so at the mercy of their biological vulnerability that a double-entendre from the wrong man could earn him a beating.

It might come as a shock to a lot of people, but WE DON'T LIVE THERE ANYMORE. In this reality, in this environment, with women's fertility on total lock-down if they so desire, and men facing legally enforceable $100,000 baby mortgages when they have an "oops", our instincts are actually diametrically opposed to our current relative risks and costs.

And all this female kvetching over a few appreciative glances or the thought that a guy you wouldn't have anything to do with might be jerking one off with an image of your tits in his mind, really needs to stop.

If feminism wants women to be taken seriously as men's equals, then it's women who are going to have to do the adjusting for a change. And that means not calling for her smelling salts whenever some guy tells her she's pretty.

Can we redefine the terms, please?

And I don't mean changing Patriarchy to Kyriarchy, and leaving the ladder of the rest of society relatively unchanged, with males enjoying privilege and women suffering "benevolent sexism".

I mean changing the words with which we examine the complex interaction of society and gender roles, the oligarchical structures depending on us plebes' subservience, etc etc.

Under the feminist treatment, we talk about rights, freedoms and oppression. When we look at gender relations in this way, we get a very "women on the bottom" picture:

• Men had the right to earn income and own property
• Women did not generally have a right to earn income or own property. This lack is defined as an oppression.
• Men had a right to be in authority over women (and children) and money in marriage
• Women were under men's authority, and were therefore oppressed
• Men were free to bang floozies all they wanted before (and often during) marriage without social outcry
• Women had to be virgins until marriage, and faithful within marriage, and were therefore oppressed sexually
• Men had a right to sex within marriage
• Women were sexually objectified, therefore oppressed
• Men had a right to a clean house and dinner on the table
• Women were seen as domestic slaves
• Men had freedom of movement
• Women did not have similar freedom of movement, and were therefore oppressed

But when you redefine the terms a little, and make them about obligations and entitlements rather than rights and oppression...well, when we look at the base unit of society, the family:

• A man had an obligation to earn income
• A woman had no such obligation
• A man had an obligation to provide for his wife and any children of the marriage
• A woman had an entitlement to a man's financial provision

Wow! Net gain for Team Woman! Let's delve a little deeper, shall we?

• A man had an obligation (social and legal) to be accountable for provision for his wife and children, and maintaining family finances (if all the money got spent on booze and fast women, he was the one working extra shifts to compensate)
• A man therefore had an entitlement to authority over his wife, children and marital finances, including property
• A woman had no such obligation of accountability (if all the money got spent on spa treatments and subscriptions to fashion magazines, her husband was stuck working extra shifts to compensate), therefore, she had no entitlement to authority over finances
• A woman was thus obligated to defer to her husband in financial and important matters

Huh. You mean when someone is responsible for the financial wellbeing of other people, they're the one who has the say in how the money is spent?

• A woman had an obligation to provide her husband with children if she could (sex)
• A man had an obligation to provide his wife with children if he could (sex) 
• A woman had the (biological) entitlement of knowing that her children were her genetic progeny
• A man was entitled to have all the sex he wanted before marriage, and to engage in extramarital sex without much social censure
• A man had no biological entitlement to know that the children of the marriage belonged to him, yet he had a legal obligation to provide for children born into the marriage (whosever they were)
• A woman therefore had an obligation to remain faithful, so her husband would know he wasn't paying to put the milkman's babies through private school

Um....this actually seems too close to call. Tie game!

• A man had an entitlement to freedom of movement
• A woman had an entitlement to the protection of her husband
• A man had no such entitlement from his wife, but was obligated to die to protect his wife, if necessary
• A woman had an obligation to abide by her husband's restrictions on her movement, so that his safety would not be needlessly put at risk
• A woman had an entitlement to share her husband's income
• A woman had an obligation to perform domestic labor in return for sharing her husband's income
• A man had an obligation to provide his wife with a living until her death, if he could

So, to recap, in a different way:

• A man had an entitlement to freedom of movement. He also had an obligation to keep himself safe
• A man had an entitlement to authority over his wife. He also had an obligation to keep HER safe
• A man had an entitlement to domestic comfort provided by his wife. He also had an obligation to provide her with food, shelter, clothing, and all other material necessities out of his own paycheck
• A man had an entitlement to virginity in a bride and fidelity in a wife. He also had an obligation to provide for all children born into the marriage, his or not
• A man had an entitlement to authority over his children. He also had an obligation to protect those children
• A man had an entitlement to earn income. He also had an obligation to earn income, whether he married or not
• A man had an entitlement to control any assets of his marriage, including those his wife brought into the marriage. He also had an obligation to keep the entire family afloat, increase their holdings (if any), and would be held solely socially accountable if he failed
• A man had an entitlement to be provided with children, if his wife could do so (sex). He also had the obligation to provide for and protect his wife until her death, even if said death occurred long after the children left home, or long after any sexual congress between them ceased, and even if there were no children

Now let's look at how it went for women:

• A woman had an entitlement to the protection of her husband. She also had an obligation to defer to his authority
• A woman had an entitlement to be provided for until her death or her husband's. She also had an obligation to provide him with domestic labor, and with children if she could (sex)
• A woman had an entitlement to share in the social and financial status of her husband. She also had an obligation to hand over any of her own assets into his control
• A woman had an entitlement to be provided with children (sex) and to provision for those children. She also had an obligation to ensure her children actually belonged to her husband
• A woman had an entitlement to protection for her children. She also had an obligation to cede authority over those children to her husband
• A woman was entitled to basic provision (from society or extended family) even if she never married. She had no obligation to earn income
• A woman was entitled to basic protection (from society or extended family) even if she never married. She had an obligation to abide by societal restrictions with respect to keeping herself from endangering others by endangering herself

Again...at this point, things aren't really looking that onerous for women, when you consider the entitlements they got in return for their obligations. While feminists have always argued that men "got more", they've never really looked at it in terms of different obligations (most importantly, personal accountability and accountability for others) that were expected of men and women, and different entitlements being derived from those obligations. Women "got less" because their obligations and accountability were less, their responsibility was less. Men "got more" because the buck stopped with them, whether that buck consisted of a sack of coins or his blood.

And this isn't even going into what men owed society. The obligation women owed society consisted of the obligation they owed their husbands--to be wives, mothers, housekeepers, etc, or to be as small a burden on society or family as they could manage. What men owed? Economic output. Military service. Often financial provision for extended family--unmarried or widowed sisters, aging parents, etc, before the days of national pensions, health insurance, 401Ks, income assistance, and unisex office jobs. 

Was it restrictive? For sure! Did history miss out on some serious contributions women might have made if they were not crammed into this very strict, very confined little box? Oh yes. Does this model remotely fit the world we live in now--a world of safe public transit, a social safety net, daycare subsidies, service industry jobs galore, birth control, formula, and a multitude of modern conveniences? Fuck no. Was any of it a cakewalk of privilege for men? I don't fucking think so.

But the impossibility of a different kind of bargain for the majority of women and their children until very recently made it very, very important to society to uphold this system of obligation/entitlement, and uphold it for everyone. The truth is, until the last 100 years or so, most women could not have lived a life of children and public sphere work, independent of a man (and not all can today, realistically). Because of this, men's obligation to provide for women and their children had to be ruthlessly enforced. And the only meaningful way to enforce those obligations in men was to not allow them to become entitlements for women.

And then the nature of work--both in the home and outside of it--changed, feminism descended, and where are we now?

Women have no real obligations--neither to society nor to men. They have no obligation to remain faithful in marriage, no obligation to remain married if they don't want to, no obligation to provide a man with sex or children within marriage, no obligation to bear any children conceived therein, no obligation to become fully self-supporting afterward. No obligation to maintain their children's relationship with their fathers if it becomes inconvenient or annoying.

Only entitlements. The entitlement to share in a husband's social and financial status, and to a share in his income--even after a marriage ends. The entitlement to not have to earn income if she chooses.

And there are NEW entitlements for women that never existed under patriarchy. The entitlement to not be expected to be a virgin on her wedding day. The entitlement to stray without penalty, the entitlement to divorce without penalty, the entitlement to abort a fetus without even informing her husband or partner, the entitlement to child support and alimony, and the entitlement to move with the kids out of state if that's where the new boyfriend wants to live. The entitlement of an unmarried woman to a man's financial support for an illegitimate child (back in the day, that entitlement came with a corresponding obligation of marriage or it didn't come at all). An entitlement to demand her husband help with domestic labor and child care, even if she doesn't work outside the home.

And men?

Still socially obligated to be the primary breadwinner, still socially obligated to share his social and financial status and any assets with his wife, still obligated to share those assets and provide for a woman even after she's no longer his wife, in many jurisdictions still obligated to provide for children DNA testing proves were conceived through his wife's infidelity, still obligated to earn income or be called a deadbeat, and apparently still obligated to provide sex to his wife or he's gonna pay out of pocket.

In the US, he is still obligated to serve in the military if his government sees fit, and still obligated to be self-sufficient or end up in the gutter. He still has a socially enforced obligation to generate more income and economic activity than he requires to meet his basic needs.

And what about what women owe society?

No obligation to serve in the military, no obligation to put more (or even as much) into the economy than she takes out. No obligation to the taxpayer who subsidizes her education as a doctor or lawyer by actually, you know, remaining in the workforce full time over the long haul to help pay back the cost of her training and serve society. No obligation to earn a self-supporting income if she's unable, or can find a man who'll do it for her.

Yet she is still entitled to society's provision (through a multitude of women-targeted income and social assistance programs), and still entitled to society's protection no matter how foolishly she behaves (VAWA, the new sexual assault rules on campus), or how badly she behaves (google any female offender and you'll find criminal accountability for women is at patriarchal levels and not going anywhere).

Women have a "right" to serve in the military (while for men in the US it remains an obligation that hangs over their heads the moment they turn 18), a right to earn income and spend it as they see fit (and then become burdens on the system in their old age), an entitlement to an education whether they're going to do anything with it or not, an entitlement to disproportionate government assistance with their health care needs.

Women now have no obligation to do anything that is not in their own interest. You do what's right for YOU, sister! And yet all of society--including any men they've been more than tangentially involved with--has an obligation to them. An obligation of protection, provision, acceptance and tolerance, no matter how poor women's choices might be, no matter how badly they fuck up, no matter how selfish they are, no matter how much they harm others. The good women and the bad, the productive and the burdensome, all enjoy these entitlements if they so choose. Feminism has done nothing more than free women from any obligation, while simultaneously expanding their tally of entitlements.

And yet feminism seems to have no interest in freeing men from their obligations, does it? Financial abortion for men is pooh-poohed the moment anyone mentions it, even though this option is fully open to women through unilateral abortion, adoption or abandonment. There are giant, free, government agencies whose only purpose is to extract men's (patriarchal) financial obligations to the mother/child unit, while no similar agencies exist to enforce any obligation on the part of women to maintain a father/child relationship. 

200 years ago, we could not grant women an entitlement to earn income without removing the income-earning role as a male obligation--and without that male obligation, perhaps 2% of wealthy, educated women would have found work in a barrister's office, while the other 98% would have been mining coal with babies strapped to their backs. But now? The world has changed just enough to free women from any obligation toward anyone but themselves, while keeping their entitlements virtually untouched and actually increasing them.

And who pays? I mean, entitlements aren't free, right? So who's paying for all this?

Well, all of us. And if these entitlements were equally available to anyone, regardless of their gender, this would be just peachy, wouldn't it? But they aren't. And those to whom none of these patriarchal and more modern entitlements apply are now paying for them through a disproportionate cost of obligation.

The more I look at it, the more I realize women have never had it as bad as feminists believe they did, and no one has EVER had it as good as women in the west do today. They receive left right and center, from society, from government, from men. And the only person they owe any obligation to is themselves. Pretty sweet deal.

Woman and Black are Not the Same Thing

The other day, I had someone who identified himself as a feminist man, tell me that he is certain that women are more disadvantaged than men in our society because men hold more positions of power and influence than women.

I told him that when examining patterns of oppression, advantage, disadvantage and privilege, one cannot look only at the top. One must look downward as well (to the needless deaths, the incarcerated, the homeless, the suicides, the impoverished, etc), and frankly, men dominate the numbers there, too. They always have, and their domination of these areas has become even more lopsided relative to women as women break through the glass ceiling without concurrently breaking through the glass basement.

He replied that looking to those in power has always been a good indicator of privilege and oppression, citing apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow America as examples. Whites at the top, therefore whites are privileged. When I asked him if he did indeed feel that the experience of women throughout history was remotely comparable to the experiences of blacks during slavery, he replied "Absolutely."

I was shocked. And a little sick to my stomach. And I began to realize one of the reasons why I've been seeing more and more women of color throw up their hands and disavow mainstream feminism.

Anyone who has read my piece on Patriarchy will know that in my view, patriarchy was not a system of oppression, but a collective strategy for dealing with a world that was very different from what the world looks like now. Differences in biology that go just a little deeper than the color of one's skin, and a history of public sphere labor that more closely resembled the work portrayed on "Dirty Jobs" (only without the machinery) than "The Office" made it essentially impossible throughout most of humanity's time on this planet for women to collectively put their hands to "men's work".

The most effective team strategy humans ever stumbled on for perpetuation of the species, one that has been seen in some form or other throughout most of human history, was the pairing of a resource-gathering unit with a child-caring unit. Given the fact that until very recently, any sexually active woman was, or could have been, pregnant at any given time, that she was the sole member of the team who had the necessary equipment to provide food to a child in its infancy, and that the vast majority of public sphere work was either beyond her physical capabilities or more ably performed by the larger, stronger, faster man, it should really come as no surprise that the vast majority of societies have always arranged themselves this way. It was, up until recently, virtually impossible for men and women to swap roles on the team.

Then the nature of public sphere work began to shift dramatically with the Industrial Revolution, assembly lines, and automation, allowing women entry into jobs outside the home and giving them the tools to be able to compete with men. But even so, it wasn't until women got control over their fertility (the pill) and were provided with realistic options that eliminated their children's physical dependence on them and only them (bottles, formula, disposable diapers, regulated daycare providers), AND the workplace became dominated by service jobs rather than resource ones, that women gained some serious equality in the working world and became 50% of the workforce.

To say that this means men and women are equal is...disingenuous. Women and men are not equal and can never be, because men are still larger and stronger than women, and women are still the ones who gestate and lactate. What it does mean is that both public and private sphere work have changed in such as way as to make the biological differences between the sexes largely irrelevant. A father cannot lactate, but he can bottle-feed a baby as well as any woman can, and so can a daycare provider. A woman could never have been reasonably be expected to cut down trees with a handsaw for a living or harvest grain with a scythe, but she *can* file documents, run an office, diagnose an illness, operate a forklift, drive a taxi, enter data on a computer or work a cash register as ably as any man.

The biological differences between men and women are not even remotely the same as the skin-deep differences between black people and white people. Women's unique gendered disadvantages throughout history can ALL be traced back to those very real and significant biological differences between the sexes. Women were forced into their roles not by men, but by reality. And men's options were, realistically, not much more varied than women's.

The disadvantages blacks faced under slavery, and the ones they still struggle to overcome even now? Those disadvantages owed to nothing more than the color of their skin, and what that signified with respect to their status as persons to those in power. How on earth can the two be considered even remotely comparable?

Moreover, when we examine oppression with respect to men and women and their relative places in society through history, we see men at the top and men at the bottom. If we looked only at the top, as feminists have been, and are still, wont to do, we could say men were the privileged class and women oppressed. But if we look only at the bottom, and the expectations and obligations required of men that were not required of women, we could just as accurately and justifiably say that women were the privileged class and men the oppressed.

While there were downsides to being a woman, there were upsides to being one as well.

• She might have less freedom of movement, but she had a greater expectation of safety and protection than a man did.
• She might not be able to own property, but she had an often legally codified entitlement to financial support from men.
• She might not be able to work outside the home, but at the same time, she wasn't expected to risk life, health and limb earning money.
• She may have been "stuck" at home with the kids, but she wasn't "stuck" for 12 hours a day in a coal mine, either.
• She may have been under her husband's authority, but if she committed a crime, she wouldn't be held fully accountable for her actions.
• The upper echelons of power and influence were mostly (not completely) barred to her, but she couldn't be ordered against her will to die for her country, either.

When we examine the pattern of oppression, disadvantage and privilege with respect to black people and white people during slavery, things are rather more...uh...black and white. You looked up, and you saw all whites. You looked down to the very bottom and you saw mostly blacks. And things still very much look that way even now--the higher up you go in the strata of society, the whiter things look. And blacks still disproportionately dominate the areas of greatest disenfranchisement--the poor, the incarcerated, the uneducated. All based on a difference that is no more relevant than eye color or the size of one's nose.

And what, pray tell, were the "upsides" to being black in America during slavery? Can anyone here name a single white slave owner who ever died to save the lives of his black slaves? Who ever gave up a space in a lifeboat to his black slave and chose himself to go down with a ship? Who ever stood with a rifle between his black slaves and an enemy to defend their lives, rather than his right to own them?

Can anyone even imagine a white slave owner working 16 hours in a field while his black slaves stayed inside and kept his house tidy, then coming home and sharing the fruits of his labors with his black slaves?

Did a black woman who was the sexual partner of a white man have any expectation of respect, lifelong provision or shelter, or of sharing the benefits of his quality of life and his social status? Or was she just an object of the moment, free to be used and cast aside at will? Did a black man who was obligated to obey his owner's wife have any legal right or recourse when she turned around and pointed a finger and claimed he raped her? Or was he swinging from a tree within hours?

Can anyone imagine a reality where a white slave owner would perform physically gruelling or dangerous work his black slave was incapable of? Or would he simply set more slaves to the task, or work his slave to his death, or discard his used-up slave and buy a better one? If women were truly oppressed by men, would they have been spared the most onerous and dangerous work because they were less physically capable of it, or would men have simply assigned more women to the task?

Can anyone here name a single black person, man or woman, who rose to a state-sanctioned position of serious political power during slavery? Off the top of my head, I can name a fuck-ton of women who have been heads of state, going as far back as Ancient Egypt. The greatest and most notable black leaders emerging from Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa rose to influence by opposing the government, not being elected to it, because they had no avenue to power within a system that oppressed them.

Women have always been less likely to be punished than men for the crimes they commit, and less severely punished. When, under slavery or Jim Crow laws, did black people enjoy this advantage? While women historically had to defer to men, in return for this disadvantage they have always been held less accountable for their actions. Black slaves, on the other hand, were under the total authority of their owners, and could be (and often were) brutally punished or executed--without trial--for crimes not their own.

Even now in these "enlightened" times, blacks are not only more likely to be convicted of crimes than whites, but their sentences are disproportionately long compared to whites. At the same time, while women no longer have to defer to men in any aspect of life in the west, they are STILL not held as accountable for their crimes as men are.

While a woman had less freedom of movement than a man, she had a socially and legally enforced expectation of safety and protection from the harshness of the world. Black slaves, on the other hand, had NO freedom of movement, and no right to any expectation of protection from those in authority over them, or from greater society.

Women had no money of "their own" (once they were married, anyway), but the most difficult, dirty, nasty, smelly, dangerous, physically arduous jobs (other than childbirth) belonged to someone else. And slaves? Do I really need to outline how it was downside all around for them in this area too?

When one wishes to identify groups which oppress and those which are oppressed, one simply cannot look only at the top of society and draw all your conclusions from who occupies those positions. In order to be oppressors, a group doesn't just have to occupy positions of power, but they have to, you know, do some oppressing. And while the biological differences between men and women could be said to be oppressive to both parties with respect to the expectations, obligations, choices, freedoms and rights afforded to each group, the oppressor responsible for patriarchy was not men, but nature.

The nature of human sex differences and the nature of the world we lived in, wherein some choices were simply not realistically open to either gender. Roles were rigidly enforced because rigid enforcement was beneficial to the stability of society. Was a man "oppressed" by women because his inability to lactate forced him into the role of provider rather than a possibly preferred role of nurturer? How then can we characterize a woman as oppressed by men because her inability to control her fertility and the limitations of her physical size and strength kept her from earning her own money working in a foundery?

The only quantifiable, material, functional and practical difference between black people and white people? Skin color. That's it. And yet it is black people, who won the right to vote before women did, who are facing a more difficult and arduous struggle for equality with whites than the women who have breezed to equal, near equal, or better than equal status with men in the space of a century. It is black people--not women--who even now inhabit an average position of lower social, educational, legal and economic status than white people in America, who are still disproportionately represented among the incarcerated, the poor, and a dozen other areas of real disenfranchisement.

And that's because the oppression of black people in America was--and is--really-and-for-true, one-way, genuine oppression that looked NOTHING like the experience of women relative to men at any point in human history.

Patriarchy was a cost/benefit partnership where men and women each bore some of the costs and reaped some of the benefits. Slavery was a cost/benefit system of oppression where all the benefits were reaped by one party and all the costs borne by the other.

To compare the experience of women--a valued, protected and provided-for class--throughout history with that of black people under slavery and apartheid is a slap in the face to every single black man who died wrongfully imprisoned in South Africa, to every single black woman who was forced onto her back by her white owner, to every single black man who was ever executed by a mob without trial, to every single black person who lived and died in bondage or in a concentration camp, and every single black person who still struggles to overcome the lingering and devastating effects of the utterly baseless, unjustifiable and man-made oppression of slavery and segregation.

So I just wanted to repeat, so we're all clear on this:

Women and Black are NOT the same thing.