Sixteen Volts

In my previous posting "Some rhetorical follies of feminism", I picked apart some standard rhetorical tricks that the feminists like to use. I will now continue to do the same for many other feminist canards that I remember having repeated often enough. After all, there is probably a very good reason why men didn't invent feminism while they were in power, so at least the default hypothesis should be that feminism is not really that good for men. It is therefore important for men to understand and be able to counter the feminist talking points.

Perhaps the number one feminist hypocrisy is their hatred of and opposition to Western science and rationality, instead opting for "women's ways of knowing", horoscopes and other New Age pseudosciences. This memetic entanglement is so strong that I bet that no reader can point me to even one acclaimed feminist thinker who supports nuclear energy. The feminist hostility to science, evident from the distribution of academic feminist to soft sciences and various resentment studies, is so totally misplaced because even though men have created essentially all scientific, technological and cultural achievements, these achievements disproportionately benefit women and make even the feminism itself possible in the first place. Despite all their mythical longing for their pastoral matriarchal societies of the Neolithic era in which there were no wars, men knew their place and fat women were worshipped as gods, feminists ought to understand that in any primitive low-energy society the strongest tend to rule without mercy, and the strongest always happen to be the men when it really comes down to it. But if the feminists really insist on not boarding this train, be my guest: it will only guarantee that men will continue the rule in the future.

One of the foremost of the feminist idiocies is the whole concept of "patriarchy". This silly term is never exactly defined, and it seems to be conveniently very fluid depending on the rhetorical needs of the moment. Most certainly, this word is never used according to its own feminist definition. In reality, the word "patriarchy" simply refers to all aspects of economics, sciences and the rest of the objective reality that feminists happen to dislike: as far as I have been able decipher, this word simply has no other meaning. For example, the free market sets the wages based on how difficult it is to get a competent employee to that position, instead of The Central Committee of Wise Women evaluating how "important" each job is from feminist principles and settings its wage based on that evaluation? Patriarchy. Men behave as if they desire women sexually more than the women desire men, and they desire young slender women more than middle-aged obese women? Patriarchy. Alternative medicine doesn't really work in presence of skeptics? Patriarchy. And so on.

When somebody points out some aspect of life where women have it much better than men (and there are many), and the feminists can't deny the existence of this aspect or deny it otherwise (for an illustrative example of these denial strategies, compare the standard leftist explanation why women live longer than men to their standard explanation why white people live longer than black people), they are quick to claim that this disparity is due to "patriarchy" and would magically go away if the feminists were in power and got their society so that the "patriarchy" were done away with. This tactic kind of reminds me of the Finnish stalinists, who also liked to try to make allies with other groups by explaining how the problems of that particular group were due to "capitalism" and were either already solved or a moot point by design in Soviet Union. Hopefully, most people are able to see right through it.

"Patriarchy hurts men too!" the feminists proclaim in an effort to make men more friendly towards the idea of women having power over them. What the feminists usually forget to mention is that women, including the feminists themselves, are the strongest maintainers of patriarchy, with their very own choices and actions. Correct me if I have misunderstood something here, but it's rather hypocritical to first shower all your attention, admiration and favours to men who succeed in various socially relevant competitions to get to the top of the male hierarchy, and then complain that men are so "competitive" and tend to form "hierarchies". The power to stop this behaviour of men is therefore to a significant extent in women's hands. They just don't seem that eager to go against their basic sociobiological programming to use that power. Even the feminists who generally malign patriarchy usually find short men sexually worthless, as The Danimal once quipped.

One somewhat related way that feminists like to establish moral inferiority of men is to mention a study in which men and women were asked what they fear most in the opposite sex. As everybody knows or can guess, women answered that they are afraid that a man will kill her, whereas men answered that they are afraid that a woman will laugh at him. The story usually ends here, and somehow it establishes the moral superiority of women without further ado. But does it? Let's look at the situation closer and see how it is.

First, if there is one thing you can trust to be infinite in any group of people, it is their capability to turn necessity into virtue. Of course women don't typically get violent towards men: they are so much weaker that if they did, they would get their asses kicked pretty badly. It would be pretty silly for a man to answer that he is physically afraid of female violence. But this doesn't make women morally superior to men any more than it makes a bunny rabbit morally superior over other animals.

Second, the story implicitly assumes that being laughed at is not really that big a deal. Well of course not, assuming you are Jim Carrey, but that's not what we are talking about here. I know that women can't really understand this, but every man knows that he is constantly ranked and competing in a very real competition in which ending up at the bottom really is not that very nice place to be. Kee-rist, just look at the men at the bottom (they are not that hard to find if you look around a bit) and see if there is anything in their lives that you envy. Or if you are lazy, just compare the suicide rates between sexes. And the women wield the frightening power to decide which men end up in the bottom without any pity or possibility of appeal. Men know that women's malicious mocking laughter is their way to indicate to other men and women which men they want to socially demote to the dung heap from which it is hard to get up. So please explain this to me, women: why is it that men should not be afraid of women's malicious, mocking laughter?

This difference between men and women is probably why men find it so difficult to understand why women consider it so offensive that men rank them based on their looks and treat them accordingly. For men, rankings in many zero-sum competitions are their daily bread and feel as natural as water does to a fish, since men are perfectly accustomed to the fact that the treatment that they receive from their environment greatly varies depending on their ranking. A man who couldn't mentally take being constantly ranked and judged could not even function in our society. (Again, there are many such men and they are not hard to find, and not very many women would want those men anywhere near their lives.) Women, on the other hand, mostly expect to be mollycoddled and therefore hate the idea of any kind of objective rankings. Is it really any wonder why men tend to rule?

Feminists naturally deny the existence of all differences between sexes, good little social constructivists and blank slaters that they are. Feminists have to totally deny evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, since accepting either one would make the house of cards that feminism is collapse just as surely as accepting Old Earth and evolution makes the fundamentalist Christianity collapse. As a consequence, feminists claim that despite our lying eyes, women don't really desire men sexually any less in short-term relationships than men desire women, but the patriarchy (there's that word again) forces them to behave this way. This is also, of course, the core belief of every date rapist, which makes me wonder if women really were better off if men started believing this. But perhaps both men and women reading this can think about their own life experiences and then decide what they choose to believe. Men tend to learn this particular life lesson much earlier since nothing happens unless they actively try to approach women, but for some reason I can't really comprehend, a woman who has the luxury of just being herself and filtering masses of potential suitors typically has to go through much longer in life for the concept of sexual asymmetry to fully coalesce, at least in the conscious level. In the subconscious level... well, I doubt that very many feminist mothers will teach their attractive teenage daughters that most men find them as unattractive as they find most men.

In their further effort to drive a wedge between men and women, combined with their leftist airhead ideas of there being no differences whatsoever between social classes except that the oppression sometimes makes the poor and the underclass do bad things out of necessity, feminists happily argue that all men are wholly unpredictable, so that, for example, there are no statistical indicators whatsoever that could be used to predict whether a man might later become physically violent towards their wives. To further foster the chaotic distrust, feminists claim that all women have an equal probability of becoming victims of rape, and eagerly tout the extremely rare cases of a 80-year-old rape victims to prove this. In the self-consistent politically correct and inclusive leftist thought, all women must be afraid of all men everywhere since nothing can ever be used statistically predict anything at all. Even if the feminists themselves instinctively understand that they would much rather walk through an upper class suburban neighbourhood full of tacky McMansions than a vibrant and diverse underclass ghetto during a hot summer day, especially if they were attractive twenty-year-olds and dressed appropriately for the hot weather.

The excellent article "Tough Love" by Theodore Dalrymple wonders how on Earth women can be stupid enough to believe this nonsense, since in the course of his work the good doctor has learned that he can pretty well almost look at a man and predict his propensity for future violence. And it's not just the stupid and slow underclass women who deny this reality, but also the college-educated nurses who really ought to know better. In reality, the rates of domestic violence differ enormously along the class divisions, just as they do with all other violent crimes. For example, the web page "Abuse of Spouse or Partner", explains that

A partnership also has a higher chance of becoming violent if one or more of the following risk factors are present.

• At least one partner has committed child abuse before.


• At least one partner has not finished high school.


• At least one partner has problems with drug abuse or addiction.


• At least one partner is a blue-collar worker.


• At least one partner is between the ages of 18 and 30.


• At least one partner is unemployed.


• Each partner has a different religion.


• The couple lives together but are unmarried.


• The couple has poor living conditions.


• The male partner saw his father hit his mother.

When two of these factors are present in a relationship, the risk of violence doubles. A couple with seven or more of these risk factors is 40 times more likely to have an abusive relationship.

Let me repeat that last line: 40 times more likely to have an abusive relationship. Remember this the next time some feminist tries to tell you that there is no way whatsoever to predict beforehand if a man is going to be a good loving husband. The feminist herself has probably been providing free sex to "bad boys", wondering why they don't seem to be that eager to commit or remain nonviolent especially now that she is getting older (of course, in her own mind she is just growing better, not older, and thus should only increase her demands for men), and has then grown to hate the whole male sex for her own stupid choices. Bernard Chapin has explained this particular phenomenon pretty succinctly in his "Quagmire of Older Women" series of articles, and also in his many articles about the certain well-known feminist columnist of the New York Times.

Speaking of women growing older, it is funny how feminists constantly deride and belittle the normal sexual desires and preferences of men. Of course they have to, since the masses of men tend to validate sociobiology over social constructionism and blank slatism every time, to a great annoyance of feminists. For example, there is absolutely nothing in the way that porn and prostitution work that Economics 101 and Sociobiology 101 wouldn't fully predict and explain. And even more importantly, the same goes for the standard feminist arguments in opposition of these phenomena. Women who oppose porn and prostitution simply try to extract more from their position of being a target of greater aggregate sexual demand than men and thus oppose the low-cost inferior substitutes. (For the benefit of feminist readers, the word "demand" is used here in the economic sense, but please go ahead and establish my earlier point by saying that the patriarchy makes men believe they can demand sex from women. Or that the patriarchy causes men to desire women sexually and try to fulfill this desire by competing for women's attention.)

Many feminists have come to slightly regret the Sexual Revolution, that is, releasing the male libido from the constraints that used to be there to protect women, so that lawyers today have to fill the role that repression and chaperones once did. The Sexual Revolution benefited perhaps the top 5% of men and the certain subset of attractive women (but note to readers: Samantha Jones is a fictional character concocted by gay men, so she can advertise her sexuality without never having to reject the hordes of hopeful men that she is not interested in) while the rest of the men pretty much just ended up footing the bill for the party, with little to gain from it for themselves. For example, if you leave out the top 5% of men, I would bet that the number of sex partners that the average man has is not higher today than it was 50 years ago.

At this point, a small side hint to fellow antifeminists: feminists usually find it especially offensive when men dare to think that attractive women making out with each other is sexy. I don't know how to use this, but perhaps you can think of some way to creatively culture jam with it, since that whole issue messes up at the same time so many feminist memes and ideological talking points that it is to feminists almost like the cross is to Dracula. An anti-feminist really could not ask a better example of the feminist thought control than their hysterically angry reactions towards this particular aspect of male sexuality.

For some reason, feminists also consider it highly offensive when somebody suggests that women have to compete with each other and satisfy certain beauty norms if they want to monopolize a good man from the top 10% of men. You almost get the impression that they believe that every woman is entitled to a "good man", assuming that she even wants one (gee, I wonder where that particular meme originated), without there being any kind of responsibility on her to be similarly "good". (I actually remember relatively recently reading some feminist argue that women should not even try to make themselves beautiful, since men want and need them anyways and will work to give her and the kids a 5000 square feet house, totally oblivious to the fact that only a very small percentage of men can do this, and few of those men ever settle for fat and hairy feminists.)

Mathematically, this is of course totally impossible, as every woman can simply see by making a list of attributes that would expect from a man and then making a ballpark estimate on what percentage of men actually satisfy all attributes in that list. And you might think that feminists themselves would be the first to understand this, since it pretty much follows from their very own doctrine that the majority of men are disgusting scum that no woman should ever even look at. For example, most men are sexists, harassers and rapists, according to the central feminist ideologues. When you consider how immense the competition for these few good men must be between all women, the feminist enthusiasm of convincing other women to let themselves go and balloon to morbid obesity suddenly starts to look like a perfectly rational strategy!

Perhaps this is enough for one posting: I'll go through more issues about feminism later when I think of them. But there is one more point to make. When feminists counter anti-feminist criticism, you usually notice that the main point is never whether this criticism is true or not, but the emphasis is on how it makes the feminist feel. In addition to being extreme social constructivists, feminists are also extreme intellectual hedonists, essentially conflating the truth of a claim and the good emotions that the claims brings out in them. For this reason, the truthfulness of the anti-feminist claims has little effect on feminists. After all, feminism is a totalitarian ideology of thought control, and in a totalitarian system, truth is never a defense.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 1:08 PM