A Narcissist Misses Erin Pizzey's Big Story

The Atlantic, to which I have been a diffident subscriber over the years, recently ran a piece on Erin Pizzey, a British domestic violence advocate (h/t Janice Fiamengo). As it turns out, Pizzey is a complicated and interesting figure whose violent and verbally abusive mother sparked her subsequent political interests — ones which sometimes aligned with institutional feminism, and sometimes did not. That story, a much longer and better one, is told in her autobiography This Way To The Revolution, and also in the links Helen Lewis' Atlantic story provides. Particularly, her responses in this interview are enlightening:

Dean: So, you have recently, in the last year or so, published a book called This Way to the Revolution: A Memoir from Peter Owen Publishers. What can you tell me about that book, Erin?

Erin: I’ve always tried to tell the truth about the beginnings. I was one of the first people in England to get involved with the Women’s Movement and what I saw there, I knew perfectly well was going to be extremely destructive. And, when I began to stand up at these great big Collective meetings—and interestingly enough there were a lot of women from America who came over with initial instruction to show the British women how to be radical feminists. They’re a pretty frightening crowd and I got screamed at a lot partly because I said many women like myself, who are married, with or without children are perfectly happy to have the choice to be able to stay home. So, in the end last year actually … it took me 10 years to get this book published, it was turned down by every major publisher in this country. ...

Pizzey's father worked for the British Foreign Office in Tientsin at the time of the communist revolution, so she had an up-close look at their methods:

[The communists] had marched up the driveway and [her parents] were arrested. They were very lucky, my parents, because they were just under house arrest. Most of the others were put into prisons. ... So, I had no love of Communism from the very beginning. From what I saw when I was in these great big collectives was really Marxism. We were all organized into groups in our own homes and told that we must have consciousness-raising sessions. And I remember the woman who came to our [feminist] consciousness-raising and when she finished, I said this has nothing to do with women, this is actually Marxist. I said so we’re supposed to go to work full-time and put our children into care provided by the state—like the Communist government—and why are we calling this liberation? And so very quickly I was booted out and went off to open a community center for mothers and children. ...

So the feminists of that era drew a lot of their playbooks directly from the communists. It's an interesting story, but to Lewis, it's mainly a story about Lewis:

Reading [This Way To The Revolution], I could feel the familiar grooves of the arguments about feminists versus “ordinary women.” There has long been a tendency to depict feminism as an elite project, and university-educated women are more likely to describe themselves as feminists.

Finding herself promoted deputy editor at the New Statesman, she got caught in the maelstrom following the publication of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman, with now long-established patterns of insult and magic words hurled like so many hand grenades: "privileged", "transphobe", "white feminist", and on and on. She receives a Twitter pile-on that didn't really end until ... wait, whose story is this? It could be worse, but it could have been a lot shorter, too.

Transgender Desister Sues The UK's Tavistock Clinic

Yes, it's the Daily Mail, but interesting times in the UK as a (biological) woman taken in by the infamous Tavistock Clinic for sex reassignment claims she was given experimental puberty-blockers at age 16, when she did not have legal ability to consent. She is now suing the clinic. It will be interesting to see how this proceeds.

On a related note, I'm adding Transgender Trend to the sidebar. They first came to my attention because of this post about the exponential increase in children sent to the Tavistock clinic, and the astonishing graph therein:

I really hope they win this battle; it seems to me that medicalization of young people needs to be delayed until they can make these sorts of decisions on their own.

New Sidebar Link: New Discourses

 It brings me great pleasure to add New Discourses to the sidebar, a product of the merry pranksters Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. Particularly, I wanted to mention their social justice encyclopedia section, with an excellent definition of "good white":

...Social Justice Theory is particularly harsh on “white progressives” (that is, good whites), who it insists are the most complicit in causing and perpetuating racism. In plain language, this supports the hypothesis that the more woke one gets, the more intensely one will be criticized by the woke. This makes it very difficult to avoid concluding that critical whiteness studies done by white people are hardly more than the masochistic projections of the theorists engaging in it (and reveals a particularly sadistic component to the same when done by people of color).

 There simply isn't enough of this sort of thing in the world, and it needs praise at every turn.

Administrivia: Sidebar Cleanup

Dumping a few things that no longer work (including, surprisingly, judgybitch.com, Janet Bloomfield's old site; it went dark last year, and is now redirecting to femoid.com. Adding some not-quite-new websites, but things that definitely deserve to be on the list, most of which are in the new section on Biology and Women's Sports.

The IAAF Still Can't Spell "Male Puberty"

The International Amateur Athletics Federation has lately released a new version of their eligibility regulations for female classification (PDF, h/t Cathy Young). It is superior to the IOC's eligibility requirements in one respect only: it actually contains references to scientific papers. Particularly, the IAAF document rests on the fulcrum of an October, 2018 Endocrine Reviews paper, "Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences In Athletic Performance" by David J Handelsman, Angelica L Hirschberg, and Stephane Bermon. The concluding bullet point of their "Essential Points" section reads (emboldening mine):

Based on the nonoverlapping, bimodal distribution of circulating testosterone concentration (measured by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry) with 95% references ranges of 7.7 to 29.4 nmol/L in healthy men and 0 to 1.7 nmol/L in healthy premenopausal women—making an allowance for women with the mild hyperandrogenism of polycystic ovary syndrome, who are overrepresented in elite athletics—the eligibility criterion for female athletic events should be a circulating testosterone concentration of <5.0 nmol/L

This of course fails to explain the results from the Karolinska Institute, which showed M2F transsexuals still retained the majority of their muscle mass (PDF) even after testosterone suppression therapy.  Handelsman et al. at least have the good sense to mention male puberty:

The strongest justification for sex classification in elite sports is that after puberty men produce 20 times more testosterone than women (4–7), resulting in circulating testosterone concentrations 15-fold higher than in children or women of any age. Age-grade competitive sporting records show no sex differences prior to puberty, whereas from the age of male puberty onward there is a strong and ongoing male advantage (8). The striking male postpubertal increase in circulating testosterone provides a major, ongoing, cumulative, and durable physical advantage in sporting contests by creating larger and stronger bones, greater muscle mass and strength, and higher circulating hemoglobin as well as possible psychological (behavioral) differences. In concert, these render women, on average, unable to compete effectively against men in power-based or endurance-based sports.

They later have the guts to bust out with an obvious truth: "If sex classification were eliminated [in sporting events], such open or mixed competitions would be dominated almost exclusively by men." But in the end, this is so much lip service. They have no way of explaining the Karolinska results without also taking into account the advantages of undergoing male puberty. It is not enough to suppress testosterone.

Update: Reminder that the IOC knew or should have known that testosterone suppression was inadequate back in 2016 when they cooked up that document. Dr. Antonia Lee last year asked several people involved in the process to comment now that there have been a significant number of M2F transsexuals beating biological women in various athletic events. Particularly interesting is the section on professor Arne Ljungqvist (note, I have added hyperlinks to the footnote):

In 2005 and writing in the Lancet (5), Ljungqvist, in a basic review of the literature commented, “…after one year of therapy, male-to-female muscle mass remained greater than that observed in the comparison female-to-male group…”. In other words, he was previously aware of at least one retained physical advantage as shown in one study that had informed the IOC’s former (2004) and more demanding participation guidelines. In the same Lancet piece, Ljungqvist also says, “Ultimately, the number of transsexual athletes who can successfully compete in open international events is likely to be small, in accord with the estimated incidence of gender dysphoria of one in about every 12 000 men and one in about every 30 000 women”.

The IAAF document looks, in this light, increasingly a product of an engineered process designed to arrive at a conclusion already decided upon.

The Non-Invisibility Of Elizabeth Warren

I have previously written about the cesspit that is The Root, particularly its perceived profitability versus sister G/O Media outlet, Jezebel. Unless you like stale intersectional dogma delivered with a heaping helping of snark, there’s little inside that dank cave for anyone searching for fresh insights on racial matters.

Recently, a new essay by Michael Harriot on the subject of the Democratic primary generally and Elizabeth Warren hove into view, "Elizabeth Warren Exists". This one is so bad that it may have actually lowered my already basement-level opinion of Harriot as a journalist.

At this point, we need to take a brief detour into Harriot's recent coverage, and one story in particular. Harriot, you may recall, was late to writing about the Sarah Braasch "napping-while-black" non-incident; The Root's first installment came from Anne Branigin, a story that mostly pulls from the Yale Daily News piece. Harriot's first piece on July 20, 2018, "Woman Who Called Police on 2 Black Yale Students Says She's 'Done Absolutely Nothing Wrong' in Whitest Tweets Ever", manages to be both snarky and uncharitable to Braasch. (By contrast, Cathy Young's report covering the incident and fallout in The Bulwark gets the details that Harriot missed or refused to learn: that Braasch called campus police on a black non-resident in the dorm, Lolade Siyonbola, napping in a common room that was off-limits to outsiders. Siyonbola had a reason to extract revenge on Braasch for earlier calling police to break up a loud party on her dorm level. It was not, as Harriot and much of the outside press insisted, simply a matter of Braasch calling the police on a black person in the wrong place.) For reasons only he knows, he later called Braasch a "swamptwat", which is of a piece with former Gawker Media properties: if you can't be good, be snarky.

This is a pattern with Harriot, who fancies himself a connoisseur of what he labels "wypipo" (white people); he once made a defense of this racist expression of contempt which boils down to, only power plus prejudice can equal racism. As the Twitter account @neontaster once put it, "If you can't be racist against white people, then why are you trying so hard?" The answer to this question is that there's coin to be made, albeit not as much as women trying to plump their victimhood scores, which latter is over half again more profitable. Writing about matters racial with snark and verve doesn't have to be an exercise in unalloyed hate, something Gustavo Arellano showed us with his syndicated "¡Ask A Mexican!" column; he gave back as good as he got from racist idiots, but the genuinely curious (and polite) received thoughtful replies in Spanish-infused English. It is a model Harriot plainly rejects in favor of intersectional pugilism.

So, back to Warren. Warren, we learn, is invisible in the media, by which I presume Harriot means the TV punditry. A recent New York Times story expanded on this, mentioning her absence in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll as well: the poll asked about head-to-heads with other leading candidates versus Donald Trump — but not Warren. To some degree, Warren has only herself to blame for this state of affairs. Despite being fourth in overall fundraising among Democratic candidates (and second if you omit self-funders Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg), Warren badly trails both Steyer and Bloomberg in ad spending — but also trails Bernie. What is she doing with her war chest? Saving it for Super Tuesday? Running a sham campaign so she can guarantee her reelection as senator from Massachusetts?

But of course the main reason why Warren might prove invisible is her showing thus far, winning a grand total of eight delegates. Of course, this is after only two states have rendered results, so it's hardly a representative sample. Warren hasn't drawn the same level of interest as Bernie, either, at least if you count Google searches:

Looking at news results, Google News shows 72,600,000 for "Elizabeth Warren" versus 107,000,000 for "Bernie Sanders", which is maybe more encouraging, but also broadly tracks the Google search results as well. What accounts for this state of affairs? I don't know, but I would speculate it's a number of things:

• She has Hillary Clinton's technocratic iciness, although I do think Warren's a better politician. Both had or have very long and detailed policy lists that can be off-putting.
• Warren hasn't had to win a state outside cobalt blue Massachusetts, so her success elsewhere is open to question. (But then, so is Bernie's.)
• Warren's virtue-signaling. This is an absolute guess, but her bid to give a veto to the Secretary of Education to a transgender kid smacks of political grandstanding she has no intention of implementing in office. Likewise her wealth tax that Peter Suderman called "probably unconstitutional" and a "stunt policy" that Sweden and most other countries adopting it eventually repealed when it failed to produce the promised revenues. She would also pursue a flatly unconstitutional program threatening social media companies for permitting protected speech on their websites.

Overall, things are not looking up for Warren. Recent polling shows her with less than half of Sanders' totals (24% to 6% in South Carolina, and 30% vs. 12% in Nevada) in the next two primary states. Even a Sanders/Warren unity ticket would not work, as national polls together show they don't make up even 50% of Democrats. It's a long road to November, and there's a strong chance Warren won't even complete the run of primaries. Harriot, incurious, fails to ask why black voters pulled the lever in greater numbers for Trump in 2016 than for Romney in 2012. Absent a historic candidate, it seems likely an enervated black electorate (and the presence of someone like Mayor Stop-And-Frisk) might possibly not change matters much.

Why Do Feminists Keep Claiming Women Lack Agency?

It's too common anymore to think it's anything but intentional: a feminist sees an outcome in the world she doesn't like, and then blames this state of affairs on men, i.e. the patriarchy. Differences in the numbers of men and women in STEM fields? Didn't get the job she wanted? Must be men. Income inequality between spouses? Men again (never mind that women have demonstrably higher income standards than readily exist in the real world).

So now Ellen Lamont in The Atlantic has discovered (again) that the New Feminist Woman has largely not arrived on the scene. Surprise, surprise: women want men to pay for things, among other unapproved behavior (emboldening mine):

And yet in a throwback to an earlier era, many women I spoke with enacted strict dating rules. “It’s a deal breaker if a man doesn’t pay for a date,” one woman, aged 29, told me. A 31-year-old said that if a man doesn’t pay, “they just probably don’t like you very much.” A lot of men, they assumed, were looking for nothing more than a quick hookup, so some of these dating rituals were tests to see whether the man was truly interested in a commitment. A third woman, also 31, told me, “I feel like men need to feel like they are in control, and if you ask them out, you end up looking desperate and it’s a turnoff to them.”

On dates, the women talked about acting demure, and allowing men to do more of the talking. Women, they said, were more attractive to men when they appeared unattainable, so women preferred for the men to follow up after a date. None of the women considered proposing marriage; that was the man’s job. “I know it feels counterintuitive … I’m a feminist,” the first woman said. “But I like to have a guy be chivalrous.”

As ever, the problem with such articles is the lack of actual data rather than anecdotes. Yet finally, we are talking about women's choices as much as men's. Do they not matter? Are we talking about equal outcomes or equal opportunities?