Sixteen Volts

It's been a few weeks since we last took a look at the feminist blogosphere, so it might be educational to see what the Brides of Stalin are up to these days. Such a glance is always easy to create a funny post when you don't have anything else to write about. With the seventeenth edition of the Carnival of Feminists available and the other usual suspects chugging out new screeds of their femo-socialist man hatred, there certainly is no scarcity of material for me the work on.

First, of course we often try to downplay this but as everybody knows, a man's place in the social hierarchy is pretty much determined by the quality of women that he can sexually attract. We can debate the direction of the cause and effect, but the general principle should be pretty obvious to anybody with two working eyes. For example, Trish Wilson, while taking a break from begging money for her basic living expenses, explains this principle for the benefit of the slower readers in her post "The Losers At Stand Your Ground Can't Get Dates". Once again, as I so often like to quote, when chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to the mountains, losing the sight of the big picture for some trivial momentary gain. This is also a good reminder of what feminists really think of the loser males, making me a bit suspicious about their "patriarchy hurts men too" appeals to transfer power to feminists. Most gamma males should probably take their chances with the present system.

Speaking of losers, the post "Except for the Coke Habit, Mom, Everything is Fine" at the new but apparently very appropriately named PunkAssBlog provides one more data point to my observation that the grander the schemes for total reorganization of the whole society, the less ability there can generally be found to successfully manage even one's own life. Somebody else (I already forgot who, sorry about that) recently linked to Mark Goldblatt's opinion piece "Liberalism, on the Couch", in which he observes that

The first factor I’d suggest in the causal chain that leads liberals to their politics is abject failure. People who are frustrated by their lot in life are often drawn to liberal ideas because modern liberalism’s contempt for the free market jibes with their efforts to rationalize their disappointments. This thought was driven home for me last year at the Small Press Book Fair in Manhattan. As you climb the stairwell at the Small Press Center on West 44th Street, moving from small presses on the first floor, to even smaller presses on the balcony level, and then to presses-that-exist-only-to-publish-the-press-founder’s-screed upstairs, you move progressively leftwards. Talk to any author on the upper floors, and he’ll swear that he’s been driven to self-publish because he refused to sell out. He wouldn’t compromise his message for the sake of wealth and success, unlike fill-in-the-name-of-a-popular-writer. Corporate capitalism beats down the true visionary, he’ll tell you, and he’s no company hack. What greater proof of his bona fides than the fact that no mainstream publisher was interested in his work?

So true, although I will again restate my objection of using the word "liberal" to mean "leftist". These are two different things, and no matter what the Americans say, I will never give up this linguistic battle, dammit.

Many men are stuck to the lower rungs of attractiveness so that women deem them defective. In the merciless system of assortative mating, these men then have to settle for undesirable pigs that no man who has an actual choice would ever stoop down to. To maintain their face, some of these men try to tell us that stooping low was actually their real preference all along! For a recent example, see the article "Big love" in Salon. What, this outfit still isn't bankrupt? You mean there still are venture capitalists out there who believe that web magazines and online advertising could possibly make money? Salon breaks its usability by trying to make you watch ads, but heck, that's what tabbed browsing is for.

For most men who can do no better than to marry an overweight or an obese woman (and these days this numerically has to be the majority of men in USA), this is one "choice" that they tend to feel deep shame and disappointment for. Even the fat men are mostly attracted to slender women (as is amply evidenced by their choices of media and porn), further excaberating the problem. But very well, a tiny majority of men might actually be fatty humpers in the sense that they feel sexually attracted to fat women and would reject otherwise similar slender women, given a free choice between the two. After all, this wouldn't be the weirdest fetish that men can have. For example, I once read that there is a small, about 2% minority of men who feel no attraction to women at all, but consider other men to be sexy. Go figure.

So there is a lot of aji and friction here for a smooth operator to benefit from. As every profeminist man knows, there are few better ways to establish your credentials and earn applause from feminists than stating that you are attracted to all body types and that you believe that fat women are beautiful. How very enlightened, especially since in the modern leftist tradition, words are more important than actual actions. Hey dude, don't hog all these fat chicks just for yourself, the post "Loving large" at Feministe and the commenters therein seem to be saying. The post then goes on to criticize the "market theory" of sexual attraction, as summarized by one commenter of the original article thusly:

Men obtain (customarily and usually) the most attractive woman that they can afford (what their income and net worth will attract). Women get the best (income and net worth) man that their looks will allow them to. This is true, most of the time. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

It's hard to argue with this, but I guess that feminists would have a big problem with this. Feminists seem to have a more... romantic theory of attraction, so that anybody can fall in love with anybody else pretty much randomly. I disagree with this idea (but I will certainly agree with it the moment that some supermodel marries a homeless midget), but if you really want to have it this way, then I would certainly expect to never again read one more complaint of how sitcoms in which a fat working class husband has a hot slender wife are somehow "unrealistic". There are a lot more fat working class schlubs out there than there are successful handsome men, so even a very attractive woman would be more likely to end up with the former type of man, yes?

And if attraction truly is random with no observable trends or correlations, fat women would not have to routinely write stuff such as

Dating when you’re fat is just fraught with little self-esteem landmines. I do much of my dating through online sites, and it was only recently that I ventured into specialized sites for (and, gah, I hate this term) BBWs. Prior to that, I’d been on sites like Nerve (before it changed its format and pricing structure and fell into suckitude) that feature all kinds of people. I went to the BBW sites mostly because I’d been getting so many hits from people who apparently had not read my ad and noticed that I checked “ample” or whatever to describe my body type. Granted, I didn’t have any full-body shots in my ad and my face is not a good indicator of the size of my ass, but you hope that someone who bothers to write a relatively thoughtful message to you referencing stuff that was actually in your ad bothered to read that part. It hurts to go through all that and see the shock and disgust in someone’s eyes when you show up for the meeting.

I figured I’d avoid that problem with the BBW-specific sites, but that just provided a home for the chubby chasers, and it just got exhausting going on dates with guys who swear that it’s a preference, la la, and have them make little comments or smack my ass in a proprietary way and realize that it’s more than a preference.

As I have noted a few times, it is funny when a feminist makes herself unattractive to men, and then the men she has to settle for confirm all her bad ideas about men. Was that extra donut really worth it, fatty?

Now that we are in this general topic of what people find attractive, I have occasionally wondered whether there has ever been a study in which a representative sample of women of the same age cohort of similar backgrounds (perhaps all women who graduated the same year from some particular college) were somehow ranked for their physical attractiveness at the time of graduation, after which this attractiveness was correlated with their husbands' current wealth and income. Such a study might yield interesting results if it was ever executed. If I had to guess, I would guess, purely with the stetson method and going with my gut feeling, is that this correlation would be about 0.3 for the whole population, but much higher in the elites.

Biting Beaver explains in her post "A rose by any other name" what she expects of men. It is always good to see explicit demands enumerated, and I wish this happened more often. The very first item in this list tells us that

1. No means No: I take this one very literally. She says "No" you stop. Period. No begging, no harassing, no arguing, no guilt trips, no nothing. All attempts at sexual behaviors stop here, at this one little word. If the word "No" escapes her lips at any time during the activities it is YOUR cue to a full stop. No more "if you loved me you'd do x" No more excuses, no more bullshit. No means No. Get it? Got it? Good.

Get that, guys? After the first "no", there is nothing else that you can do than to back off forever. As the Dworkinites have been constantly telling us, a woman's "yes" that was achieved by negotiation does not really mean that she consented, since all women live under the threat of patriarchal oppression and rape all the time. Fair enough, I can see how you could make this argument, in a way analogous to the problems that there are in people consenting business offers made by Tony Soprano. But in that case, the leftists need to seriously start following this same principle when it comes to the wallets of the productive people. When the leftists keep begging and demanding more handouts and wealth transfers, each "no" just makes them more eager in their demands, instead of making them take a hint and back off. Eventually the productives give in a little bit more, knowing full well that they live under the implicit threat "If you don't give your money up voluntarily, we will take it by force, oh yes, we have locked you guys up in gulags before and will do it again" of the omnipresent leftist privilege of violence that leftists refuse to acknowledge. It's either that we give up the money, or spend that same money on building defenses against the unproductives.

(I have lost count of how many times the welfare state is defended with the explicit argument that without it, the poor would start robbing and killing the rich. Seeing that welfare state hasn't existed for most of the written history, and that in the modern world the countries with the least welfare tend to be growing the fastest, it gets pretty hard to see why welfare would be "necessary" in any meaningful objective sense of this word.)

Since women tend to be net drains on the welfare system, they support it more than men. Compared to having to find a good husband to support you, using the welfare state as a virtual boyfriend is a much better deal for women who don't feel like working, since the welfare state just gives them money and never asks them for anything in return, unlike a husband. Speaking of finding good husbands, having an excess of marriageable males might initially sound like a paradise for women, since this way women wouldn't have to settle for loser males but could laugh them off as "fags". Unfortunately, the news that we keep hearing from India and China (and the Middle East, where the exact same effect has been achieved by polygamy instead of ultrasound) seem to be telling us that this isn't exactly how it would go. The post "Tell it like it is" at Indian Writing gives us a simple economic lesson of supply and demand and the opportunities that lie therein. Ugh, put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.

For almost half a century now, rock has been the official soundtrack of rebellion. (As Tommi might casually deadpan it at this point, "Rock yeah.") This rebellion and "breaking all the rules" is fun when you get to be the edgy rebel, but it's not as much fun when you find yourself on the side of the hegemony that is being rebelled against, as LonerGrrl has observed in her post "The sound of misogyny". Apparently the white boys have now learned that putting bitches and hos in their place can be used to sell records successfully to the seething underclass and precarity who haven't historically put that much weight on women's rights. So what, now you leftists suddenly think that misogyny set to a catchy beat is a bad thing?

I recently noticed that one of the Charlie Brown made-for-television movies was titled "Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown", but I doubt that this film was about, uh, you know, sex trade. In "Congressman Accuses Germany of "Complicity in Promoting Sex Trafficking"" we learn that some Americans dislike the way prostitution and brothels are legal in Germany, an issue that has again come up with that soccer tournament that is going on there and all. As the demand tends to create its own supply, women from poorer countries, mostly from the East Europe, are brought in to fulfill those needs. It is pretty funny to watch Western feminists squirming about this, as Vox Day has recently noticed in his posts "She will look beautiful in chains" and "The brothel or the burqah". Since women need men as much as a fish needs a bicycle, by all means let them sort out this problem themselves without the help of males.

Few things especially are as funny as the feminist complaint that life is bad for women who live in the former Soviet block. Excuse me, now who do we get to thank for that misery? A feminist complaining about life being bad in the socialist countries is just like the guy in that joke, you know, the one who shot his parents and then pleaded mercy from the court because he is an orphan. Of course, I can imagine how the feminists reading this will now haughtily scoff at this and say that the problem with Soviet Union was that it was ruled by men. If only the feminists could run the socialist system, then it would be a paradise and everybody would be happy under the loving gaze of Mother Sun.

As a staunch atheist, I tend to disagree vith Vox's ultimate solutions to social problem even when I agree with his observations about the existence of particular problems. Even so, I can't deny that for the bottom 95% of the Bell Curve, some peaceful form of mainstream Christianity might actually be the best way to keep them in order and prevent them from rampaging. Hey, it worked for Leo Strauss and his followers. I recently noticed that some feminists have got their panties in a bunch for Raving Atheist's announcement in his post "More than words" that neither Christ nor Christianity shall ever again be maligned on his site. I think that somebody has jumped the gun here, since I have myself seen enough of similar Swiftian parodies and declarations by RA to guess what this one will soon be followed by.

By the way, it is especially humorous that PZ Myers (whose basic schtick in the blogosphere is to comfort other leftists by assuring them that genes and IQ are meaningless, in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould) and other leftists would have a problem with RA's promise not to malign Christians any more, since in practice, they already themselves follow this exact same principle when it comes to Muslims! For example, see the post "Myers on the Muslim Caricatures" where Ed Brayton calls Myers on this hypocrisy. Similarly, you can look at even the angriest radical feminist website that is ready to jump on Western men for even a slightest infraction against feminist ideals, and find that outrage against Muslims who are objectively at least a thousand time worse violators (there is a good reason why the last week's Pride Week parade was organized in Toronto instead of Teheran) there is in a rather short supply, except perhaps in the rare cases when the situation can be somehow used to blame white men. Kettle, please allow me to introduce black.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, June 26, 2006 at 9:36 AM