I Love You, Camille Paglia

THIS, A THOUSAND TIMES OVER:

In your view, what’s wrong with American feminism today, and what can it do to improve?
After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women's advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives. If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today's young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system "street-smart feminism":  there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility.

The Anita Sarkeesian Business Model

One of the brilliant — if frauds can be so described — things about the dot-com biz in its earliest days was just how you could get away with almost limitless grift if you had the moxie, sociopathic nature, and right connections to pitch a fabrication that ended with "on the Internet". Pets.com, eToys.com, Go.com —all it seemingly took was the majikal suffix, and you were golden. I find myself getting the same sense about Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" business model, which appears to be an incremental improvement over the infamous Underpants Gnomes in that it has a middle step:

1. Hold the right opinions, ideally with a built-in and vociferous enemy eager to engage
2. Possibly make video
3. Launch Kickstarter = profit!

That is to say, she is just the modern (if more singular) version of what a think tank does, save for the scope of fundraising. Inevitably, this model would naturally expand to other entrepreneurially-minded individuals, and so we arrive at Femsplain, which for a time was a staff pick on Kickstarter, a featured position on their front page. They somehow plan on "chang[ing] the way women are perceived", which I presume means they will emit more clouds of the same women's studies gas that causes tenure in academia, and chronic unemployment elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, they appear not to have found the kind of troglodytes opposite that makes Sarkeesian's gig so rewarding. Whoever Amber Gordon is, she really needs to give serious thought to finding the right enemies first.

Represented By Choice

Scott Alexander has yet another great essay on the nominal subject of black underrepresentation in polyamority, but really, it's a sermon on the subject of "how do some people cluster to some groups and not in others?"

Some people try to explain the underrepresentation of blacks in libertarianism and the Tea Party by arguing that these groups’ political beliefs are contrary to black people’s life experiences. But blacks are also underrepresented in groups with precisely the opposite politics. That they make up only 1.6% of visitors to the Occupy Wall Street website is no doubt confounded by who visits websites, but even people who looked at the protests agree that there was a stunning shortage of black faces. I would have liked to get current membership statistics for the US Communist Party, but they weren’t available, so I fudged by looking at the photos of people who “liked” the US Communist Party’s Facebook page. 3% of them were black. Blacks are more likely to endorse environmentalism than whites, but less likely to be involved in the environmentalist movement.

Some people try to explain black people’s underrepresentation on Wall Street by saying Wall Street is racist and intolerant. But Unitarian Universalists are just about the most tolerant people in the world – nobody even knows what they do, just that they’re extremely tolerant when they do it – and black people are in Unitarianism at lower rates than they’re on Wall Street.

 "[N]eighborhoods and churches tend to end up mostly monoracial through a complicated process of aggregating small acts of self-segregation" he continues, and while we know that redlining was a real thing, it's also not 100% responsible for various neighborhoods' racial makeup. People's individual choices have consequences en masse, which brings me to the next item: a research paper by Maria Charles at UC Santa Barbara (PDF) with a number of fascinating findings, on the subject of women's economic progress.

International trends lend considerable credence to evolutionary arguments. Public tolerance for discriminatory policies has declined sharply since World War II, and principles of procedural equality and nondiscrimination have garnered near-universal affirmation in national and international forums. As most of the world’s governments have formally recognized the human and civil rights of women, legal barriers to female employment, education, voting, and property ownership have been largely eliminated. [emphasis mine -- RLM]

Despite the spectacular scope and speed of these egalitarian trends, it is well known that certain forms of gender inequality remain firmly entrenched. In labor markets, educational systems, and households around the world, women concentrate in female-typed occupations and fields of study and perform much more than an equal share of unpaid work. It is becoming increasingly evident that changes in women’s status occur not through the sort of across-the-board degendering of social institutions that is implied by evolutionary accounts, but rather through processes of partial, domain-specific equalization.

 Nothing in this paper is more important than the finding that women opt out of STEM programs at a rate weakly and negatively correlated to national GDP (r=-0.48):

If it's true that "American girls who aim to 'study what they love' are unlikely to consider male-labeled science, engineering, or technical fields, despite the relative material security provided by such degrees", perhaps we should be asking what their priorities are, and why a misguided egalitarianism isn't liable to change that.

Jessica Valenti's Wall Of Delusion

It's true that lunatics seek power, and power tends to draw in lunatics, so I found myself not too surprised that Jessica Valenti chirpily dismisses any damage her preferred due-process-lite proceedings might do to men.

No one wants to see innocent people accused of horrible crimes, but there is a distinct lack of evidence that young men on college campuses – even the ones who have raped women – are suffering any harm due to the increased focus on ending rape.

When I first read this sentence, I turned about fifteen shades of purple; hasn't she heard of the Phi Kappa Psi house vandalized in the wake of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's journalistic malpractice? Or of Paul Nungesser (whom, conveniently, she does not name at all)? Why, of course, but Emma Sulkowicz (whose name she misspells) is the real "victim". "How did the system fail him, exactly?" she asks, coyly. Meanwhile, Sulkowicz continued to lug that mattress around after he was found not responsible, publicly slandering Nungesser, and more ominously, even getting face time with a United States Senator because of her supposed victimhood. I presume Valenti has never been in trouble with the law, and yet it's pretty clear she never attempted to hear Nungesser's side of things. Indeed, she calls anyone with an interest in determining the verity of charges a rape "truther", as though false charges could never occur.

But after I got over my initial fury, it occurred to me that in one sense, she is right, because of a peculiarity in Title IX law: the proceedings are secret, not public, which means even if she wanted to find such falsely accused men, she would have a terrible hard time of it. The public courts are another matter, of course, and there she could have found 58 cases against universities filed by men (many of them John Does) claiming injury under the system. Valenti's refusal to do any research whatsoever is a testament to her utter lack of concern for men; they simply don't matter in her universe. False accusations can't and don't happen, and if they do, they are consequence-free for the accuser.

This veil will come off shortly, I expect; such a flood of lawsuits will eventually yield one against Title IX itself and its expansive, unconstitutional overreach. Valenti's delusion that there are no men injured by her secret tribunals bereft of due process proceedings can last only as long as they stay secret.

We Need Feminism Because We Need Censorship

So, uh, remember this?

tell me we don't need feminism pic.twitter.com/kz4rDzQbHY
— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) February 7, 2015

There was a great deal of hand wringing about Google's autocomplete results when one put in certain leading phrases, such as "women should", "women shouldn't", and so on. As the UN ad campaign these came from was launched back in October, 2013, I was curious to see whether things have changed since then. Running a test on all the phrases, not one of them autocompletes anymore.

I have no proof of this, but one does wonder whether these weren't lifted as a result of pressure on Google to stop these completions. Or, maybe they just have a general policy of quietly silencing controversial (and possibly even criminally-minded) autocorrects, and these are some they've shut down. But if this is controversial, it is controversial precisely because it was drawn out as an algorithmic proxy for the zeitgeist — a questionable assertion:

While the autocomplete restrictions may imply that Google is masking just how bad things are, there are also causes for hope. The top search results for “women shouldn’t have rights,” if you type it in completely, are now dominated by pages about the ad campaign. [Note: autocomplete no longer works on this phrase as of this writing. — RLM] The sheer volatility and self-modifying nature of the Web makes it difficult to pin down prevailing notions for any great length of time. Autocomplete and search results are very sensitive to so-called “freshness,”—all the better to pick up sudden trends—so they use less long-term hysteresis (the dependency of a system on its past states) than you might think.

Of the top results that aren’t about the UN Women ad campaign, not one of them unequivocally promotes an anti-woman position. Some are websites attacking the anti-woman positions, such as an atheist blog on Patheos that quotes and ridicules a Baptist preacher’s misogynistic sermon at great length. Others are debate websites that tend to come down on the equal rights side. One is a Yahoo question, “Reasons why women shouldn’t have equal rights?” posted by a high school girl looking for anti-woman arguments for a school debate. (“Being a girl, I obviously don’t agree with this.”) Most of the respondents say they’ve got nothing. The worst it gets is a troll-infested forum on bodybuilding.com, which, despite being described by poster KingOfChaos as “heavily populated by males who like to think of themselves as 'alpha' or dominate over women,” still has a number of sentiments such as “IRL most sane ppl think that women should have equal rights.”

If the point of feminism is meaningful equality between the sexes, learning what people think of women is important, offensive or not, and shutting off such knowledge is ultimately counterproductive. Whether Google has taken this step due to external pressure or internal desire to silence a controversy, we are the poorer for the outcome.

A Response To Maggie McNeill: On Heinlein And Sexual Outliers

So, this happened:

@AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 ...a lot of men as being like a real-life Heinlein woman.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) February 8, 2015

@Maggie_McNeill @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 *Do* such creatures exist in the wild? Always hated Heinlein's female characters.
— Rob McMillin (@scareduck) February 8, 2015

@scareduck @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 Of course they do. I'm one and so was his wife, Virginia, on whom they were patterned.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) February 8, 2015

@Maggie_McNeill @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 Sure, but rarer than hen's teeth. Heinlein's female characters always (1/)
— Rob McMillin (@scareduck) February 8, 2015

@Maggie_McNeill @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 struck me as male fantasy. Nothing like any women I knew. (2/2)
— Rob McMillin (@scareduck) February 8, 2015

@scareduck @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 I'm not sure if the implication that I'm a male fantasy is a compliment or an insult.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) February 8, 2015

A few words there. First, it's not unreasonable to assert that Robert Heinlein's female characters are entirely rare (to the point of near extinction) amid the universe of women. Women have consistently lower sex drives than men, taken as a population, and form two-thirds of asexuals. It's not so much that outliers don't exist as their extreme rarity. Heinlein's obsession with such women did a good deal to turn me off of his fiction as entirely too implausible.

Take insult, if you wish; none was intended. Life, for any real grownup, is about learning to live with things as they are, not as you wish them to be. Obviously, your experiences are real, and happened, and denying them would be pointless and silly. But for most men, the sad reality is they must contend with women for whom sex is a thirteenth or even thirtieth priority, and its place in line goes down even further upon becoming a mother, and with age more generally. Humans are a package deal; you don't get to pick the exact set of flaws and virtues you're going to live with in a spouse. So, yes, for a lot of men, a woman of equal libido is a grand fantasy — but there it remains, mostly.

Is Shanley Kane The Feminist Alex Jones?

I don't know the answer to that, but she does seem to have checked off the "paranoid lunatic" box:

We need an extensively funded trained security group to handle threats against women in tech.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Hey, um, interesting. I wonder who would staff such an outfit? Ninja women? Well, we know who she wants to pay for it:

And the fucking venture capitalists need to pay for it.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Shanley's approach for dinner tabs must be a hoot!

Look: bullshit apps that provide no value to humanity are getting tens of millions. where is the funding to protect our lives?
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

We are dealing with a group of people who want women in tech to actually fucking die and where the FUCK are the people w/ money & power.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Probably driving their Ferraris and ignoring squeakers like you!

Oh that's right because the people running silicon valley don't give a FLYING FUCK if we die.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Meanwhile, habeas corpus?

Men are like WHAT CAN WE DO. RTing us is not fucking going to save our lives. actual action and organization needs to happen.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Hmm...

The big prize remains ahead:

I DO NOT WANT THE VCS to "invest". i want them to hand over millions of dollars with no strings attached, no ownership and no influence.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

i want no strings money from VC because they have profited from marginalizing us for YEARS and that is how they have their wealth.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

A deranged mind is a terrible thing to waste! Maybe I was wrong likening her to Alex Jones: this is more like the ravings of a trustafarian.