Looking For Feminism's Lysenkos

I was having a Twitter conversation with @facerealitynow, who brought to my attention this post about the (literal) cartoonish sexual dimorphism present in the Disney feature film, Hercules, and in particular, this graf:

In the more mundane aspects of relationships — attraction and mate selection — this thinking helps set up the ideal in which women should be smaller than men, the result of which is pairing couples by man-taller-woman-shorter much more than would occur by chance (I reported on this here, but you also could have read about it from 538’s Mona Chalabi 19 months later). The prevalence of such pairs increases the odds that any given couple we (or our children) observe or interact with will include a man who is taller and stronger than his partner. This is also behind some notions that men and women should work in different — and unequal — occupations. And so on.

Which is to say, they have a rather radical notion that everything is socially constructed, even things like height and physical build. We have heard this before from other sources, in other times, particularly from Trofim Lysenko, whose politicized views were enforced within Soviet agrarianists by jailing dissenters. This isn't to say that culture could have no influence in such matters, but to claim it's a primary one, as a Swedish documentarian recently suggested, is simply absurd. Sexual size differential is a consequence of reproductive advantage; all the primates have males larger than females. The necessity of perverting all features of life into cultural constructs seems to be a necessity for third-wave feminism generally, because otherwise, what is the point of the feminist endeavor?

Harvard Professors Discover Obamacare Realities

Oh, this is rich:

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

 And what medical hellscape awaits Havahd faculty and staff now?

The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

Horrors.

In many states, consumers have complained about health plans that limit their choice of doctors and hospitals. Some Harvard employees have said they will gladly accept a narrower network of health care providers if it lowers their costs. But Harvard’s ability to create such networks is complicated by the fact that some of Boston’s best-known, most expensive hospitals are affiliated with Harvard Medical School. To create a network of high-value providers, Harvard would probably need to exclude some of its own teaching hospitals, or discourage their use.

So, after years of gold-plated everything, they might have to think about costs.

Scott Aaronson's Brilliant Dispatching Of "Patriarchy"

A Facebook friend pointed me at Scott Aaronson's latest response to the Penny/Marcotte attacks, and I must say, it contains a fantastic response to Penny's assertion that his problem is due to "Patriarchy". I quote the grafs in full from his Dec. 31 update (emboldening, as ever, all mine):

I struggle always to be ready to change my views in light of new arguments and evidence. After reflecting on the many thoughtful comments here, there are two concessions that I’m now willing to make.

The first concession is that, as Laurie Penny maintained, my problems weren’t caused by feminism, but rather by the Patriarchy. One thing I’ve learned these last few days is that, as many people use it, the notion of “Patriarchy” is sufficiently elastic as to encompass almost anything about the relations between the sexes that is, or has ever been, bad or messed up—regardless of who benefits, who’s hurt, or who instigated it. So if you tell such a person that your problem was not caused by the Patriarchy, it’s as if you’ve told a pious person that a certain evil wasn’t the Devil’s handiwork: the person has trouble even parsing what you said, since within her framework, “evil” and “Devil-caused” are close to synonymous. If you want to be understood, far better just to agree that it was Beelzebub and be done with it. This might sound facetious, but it’s really not: I believe in the principle of always adopting the other side’s terms of reference, whenever doing so will facilitate understanding and not sacrifice what actually matters to you.

Smash the Patriarchy!

 So, in one quick graf, he observes that

1. "Patriarchy" is a religious tenet, and
2. better to pay homage to it and get on with your life.

 Which is to say, of course, he gives Penny and Marcotte the same exact due one gives Scientologists, phrenologists, and voodoo practitioners. It marks Aaronson as a man of flexible intellect and reason, unlike the retrograde savages decrying him. It reminds me of H.L. Mencken's essay, "Martyrs":

...[I]t seems to me sheer vanity for any man to hold his religious views too firmly, or to submit to any inconvenience on account of them. It is far better, if they happen to offend, to conceal them discreetly, or to change them amiably as the delusions of the majority change. My own views in this department, being wholly skeptical and tolerant, are obnoxious to the subscribers to practically all other views; even atheists sometimes denounce me. At the moment, by an accident of American political history, these dissenters from my theology are forbidden to punish me for not agreeing with them. But at any succeeding moment some group or other among them may seize such power and proceed against me in the immemorial manner. If it ever happens, I give notice here and now that I shall get converted to their nonsense instantly, and so retire to safety with my right thumb laid against my nose and my fingers waving like wheat in the wind. I d do it even to-day, if there were any practical advantage in it. Offer me a case of Rauenthaler 1903, and I engage to submit to baptism by any rite ever heard of, provided it does not expose my gothic nakedness. Make it ten cases, and I'll agree to be both baptized and confirmed. In such matters I am broad-minded. What, after all, is one more lie?

Just so. The ball's in your court, Ms. Marcotte.

The First Time Amanda Marcotte Shows You What She Is, Believe Her

I realize I've mangled the Maya Angelou quote ("When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time"), but I've never liked the way that scans. Still, it's wholly appropriate for an exchange and subsequent observation I had in the comments of her dreadful Scott Aaronson attack piece of last week. The whole thing started with this interaction:

I don't particularly have any interest in stirring up the sand flies infesting the comments section over there, but I found myself scanning the other comments, and "tough guy" kept showing up. His interaction with me there notwithstanding, he was pretty reasonable elsewhere, so this bit really shocked me:

To which the commentariat ungenerously replied (as he predicted!):

But here's the kicker: Marcotte herself steps in:

Well, boy, howdy.

Well, of course. Not enough that I tell him that Marcotte engages in character assassination; apparently one must live through it. No matter who the subject, from an otherwise obscure MIT professor to an unknown commenter on her blog, men are always liars. Marcotte just knows this, just like she knows Aaronson supports rapists. Amazing.

Saturday Links

Some links for a slow Saturday:

• First, an amazing long rant about the Amanda Marcotte/Laurie Penny pile-on to MIT professor Scott Aaronson because he had the temerity to reject feminism (and its perpetual abhorrence of male sexual frustration). It's a super-long rant, and I confess I skipped a bunch of it, but there's some gems scattered among the failure to edit:

  When Penny bares her suffering to the world for all to hear about, she gets sympathy, she gets praised as compassionate, she gets published in important magazines whose readers feel sorry for her and acknowledge that her experience sucks.
  
  When Aaronson talks about his suffering on his own blog, he gets Amanda Marcotte. He gets half the internet telling him he is now the worst person in the world.

  And then, this:

  Patriarchy is yet another motte and bailey trick.
  
  The motte is that patriarchy is the existence of different gender roles in our society and the ways in which they are treated differently.
  
  The bailey is that patriarchy is men having power over women.

  The post from a lesbian friend of Aaronson's and author of Unit of Caring is worth reading, too, making the point that even female desire for other women is the sort of thing that anti-sex feminism is all too eager to police, even to the point of suppressing lesbians. The whole post is a goulash of interesting insights and somewhat tedious at the end (rants get that way), but worth picking up.
• One of the things I find objectionable about much modern feminism is how it claims to favor grrl-power, up until women have to be protected like little girls. A good example of this is how sexual assault figures get calculated, mainly by stripping the purported victims of agency and volition, i.e. determining for them whether they've been raped. Tough women who have actually had to make their own lives and get out from real oppression, both legal and social, are harder to come by when many of those battles have been won, which is why I was tickled to learn of Hortense Mancini, Dutchess Mazarin from the wonderfully talented artist Jason Porath, who runs the delightfully offbeat Rejected Princesses blog. Atypically for a portrait designed to appear as a setting for the goddess Diana, “she is surrounded not by nymphs, but hunting dogs and four dark-skinned boys dressed as pages.” Married to an insane, controlling man who sent her to a convent, she conspired to race greyhounds after dark, and terrorized the sisters in other ways before escaping. What a character!
• (Mostly) how not to shut down Internet arguments, from io9, whose stuff I mostly like. Of the list, only #1, #3, and #10 are really unobjectionable.
• #2 is a repurposing of the tired and false arguments used by Anita Sarkeesian, and actively implies that if you're not with the objector, you must be with the oppressors. Yes, it's a cartoon, but it's also a dishonest cartoon that steps just this side of endorsing collective guilt.
• #4 confuses chat rooms, online comment sections, etc. in which people belonging to different groups — say, ones that contain both men and women — with closed spaces containing only people belonging to those groups. The "sealioning" trope this apparently has started in some areas is completely disingenuous in that regard. This particularly awful Robot Hugs cartoon is a fine example of the delusion involved in this trope, and seems to precede "sealioning" by quite a bit. As well, it illustrates how a large segment of modern feminists just wish men would either go away or shut up altogether.
• #7: Why am I not surprised to see another Robot Hugs cartoon in this list? The way to determine whether some kind of abuse is widespread is to ask a lot of people at random, i.e. polling. As usual, the (apparently lesbian separatist?) author of Robot Hugs would rather get into pissing contests about the value of one party's experiences vs. another's (typically male). The point, of course, is principally about justifying slander ("Street harassment is part of a larger system in which men feel entitled to comment upon women's bodies") rather than making any empirical observations. Also, Robot Hugs is never funny. Ever.
• #8: the victimhood pissing contest. See also, Scott Aaronson.
• #9: male sexuality is more visually oriented than female, film at eleven. Men are a market, women are a market.
There's only three — #1, #3, and #10 — of any real value, with the rest serving principally to shut down heterodox political opinion.

 

The Foreign Land: Amanda Marcotte Describes The Lion

When I threw some daggers at the self-absorbed and vile Laurie Penny Monday, I did not really think it was possible to descend much lower at the time, but somehow Amanda Marcotte has sunk to the occasion. Riffing on the original Penny piece, she adopts as her essay's axis a feminist trope that bears broader examination, that of male sexual entitlement.

Penny is incredibly gracious to Aaronson in her response, so much so that I thought that his lengthy diatribe must be nuanced and humane on some level. Much to my surprise, however, it was just a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men. So, unlike Penny, I feel no need to be gracious about it. On the contrary, I think it’s time for a good, old-fashioned blog fisking.

Perhaps so, but it's Marcotte, who is one of the most reliably inhumane and willfully blind feminist authors out there today, who needs a proctoscope applied to her typings.

You write about tech conferences in which the men engage in “old-fashioned ass-grabbery.” You add: “some of the gropiest, most misogynistic guys I’ve met have been of the shy and nerdy persuasion … In fact I think a shy/nerdy-normed world would be a significantly worse world for women.”
If that’s been your experience, then I understand how it could reasonably have led you to your views. Of course, other women may have had different experiences.

Translation: I think  you’re lying, because my desire to believe that nerds are balls of pure goodness oppressed by 80s-style cartoonish jock villains cannot countenance the idea that nerd men could ever do anything wrong, ever. Never mind that the movie epitomizing the nerd/jock dichotomy I lean heavily on features a nerd raping a woman in an act of revenge, which is treated like a triumph instead of an act of violence.

Seriously! We're not two paragraphs into this and she's already relying on thirty-year-old movie stereotypes and accusing him of being a rapist or somehow siding with rapists? He never warranted that nerds are "balls of pure goodness", never only that he had different experiences than commenter Amy, and neither did he call her a liar (bringing Marcotte's reading comprehension skills into question). He did, however, remark that he would be "scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison" for entirely natural male sexual desire. Professor Aaronson goes on:

... to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

 Well, um, yeah, and duh, of course. One gets the very real sense that all male desire is so thoroughly alien to Marcotte that the line between rapist and nebbish is simply not possible for her to draw, so it's better to preemptively declare Aaronson — for whom she has literally no basis for this charge — a rapist, or a potential rapist, or a supporter of rapists. This, of course, is the point of employing the specious charge of sexual entitlement. Back to Marcotte:

Despite saying he’s steeped in feminist discourse, you will find that the only feminist whose name he appears to remember is Andrea Dworkin’s, i.e. a woman modern day feminists reference rarely (if ever) but misogynists tend to obsess over because they want her to be the spokeswoman for feminism.

It would be funnier if peculiarly anti-male views weren't so clearly on display in the writings of Marcotte, Laurie Penny, and a slate of others more modern and not-quite-dead. The misandrist Dworkin may never have outright claimed that, as frequently summarized by critics, "all heterosexual intercourse is rape", but she certainly opened herself to the charge.

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.

This is a critical passage, because it really lays out his thesis: That fear of rejection is a male-only experience, and one that is so awful that any suffering women have endured through history is a mere pittance compared to it. The possibility that women want love and attention and worry about being humiliated and denied simply has never occurred to him. I have some theories as to why.

This, of course, again, is Marcotte injecting words into Aaronson's mouth, building up straw men by the hay field; male difficulties with their own bodies, lives, and emotional states must be not only minimized but scorned, because, well, entitlement. Or something. The real entitlement here is Marcotte's insistence on orthdox feminism, which bears no deviance, and an abject refusal to even try to understand her subject. More straw men, this in reference to Aaronson's graf about sexual-assault lecturing:

Translation: I was too busy JAQ-ing off, throwing tantrums, and making sure the chip on my shoulder was felt by everyone in the room to be bothered to do something like listen.

And she knows this, how? She is, after all, criticizing events at considerable remove from the present day, to which she brings neither witnesses nor evidence. This brings something else up, too: the demand that men "listen" to endless harangue is one of modern feminism's principle features. No matter how baseless, scattershot, or irrational the charges, one must "listen", which seems to mean "quietly accepting your perpetual guilt, regardless of actual merit, and don't you dare defend yourself", something we saw frequently during the idiotic and reductive #NotAllMen/#YesAllWomen hashtag wars in the wake of the Elliot Rodger spree killing that quickly devolved into a solipsistic "let's talk about meeeee" madhouse. Rodger, of course, was fascinating for the exact reason that feminists were more upset about his misogynistic ravings than his homicide victims, four of whom turned out to be male. "Entitlement" again caught the blame, and maybe so, but not the kind they're thinking of.

I could go on; Marcotte does, for paragraphs and paragraphs. I suspect Aaronson, who deserves none of this slander, got this sort of vituperation is because he is a professor of engineering and computer science at MIT. In Marcotte's feminist Wonderland, he qualifies as a member of the largely mythical "brogrammer" species, supposedly the reason so few girls go into that field, rather than, say, a lack of interest in or aptitude for the subject.

The opposite sex lives in a foreign country to which Marcotte denies herself a visa; in that, she is like the medieval Europeans describing exotic Asiatic animals strictly on hearsay.

The Profound Unseriousness Of American Governance

At the suggestion of Conor Friedersdorf, I started reading James Fallows' Atlantic article about the weird and diffident relationship the US has with its military. It's well-written, as Fallows' pieces frequently are, but I wanted to pause along the way to remark on one graf (emboldening mine):

Outsiders treat [the military] both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

 Fallows is, largely, wrong here. This is, I would remind him, a government that has not passed a budget in years (since 2009, in fact), which rammed Obamacare through Congress using procedural trickery and deception, under the fantasy it would eventually become popular. Paying attention to the consequences of legislation is scarcely something Americans do, let alone actually thinking about life-and-death matters of shipping soldiers off to kill in wars of dubious or even negative merit.