Feminism’s New Marketing Strategy

“Feminism’s marketing strategy for it’s Sex-Positive Product, a basket in which they have many eggs”

There is one underlying assumption that is the sole enabler of all those eggs: men. Those rarely-mentioned agents of female “sexual liberation;” always there, always ready. Nice neat interchangeable and raring to go!

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“After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the outgrowth was feudalism, which wasn’t as “bad” as slavery, but it was a condition for everyone. It wasn’t too bad, you’d work for the Lord basically a week a year or something like that.”

Then came the Black Death, which wiped out 1/3 of the population.”

You kind of missed a step called the “High Middle Ages” there.

It had something called “burghers”. And sons of *shoemakers* could become *Pope* (Urban IV).

Basically Technology+Church+Feudalism = Boom Times!

“In the 11th century, agriculture expanded into the wilderness, in what are known as the “great clearances”.[4] During the High Middle Ages, many forests and marshes were cleared and cultivated.[4] At the same time, during the Ostsiedlung, Germans settled east of the Elbe and Saale rivers, in regions previously only sparsely populated by Polabian Slavs.[4] Crusaders expanded to the Crusader states, parts of the Iberian Peninsula were reconquered from the Moors, and the Normans colonized southern Italy.[4] These movements and conquests are part of a larger pattern of population expansion and resettlement that occurred in Europe at this time.[4]

Reasons for this expansion and colonization include an improving climate known as the Medieval warm period allowing longer and more productive growing seasons; the end of raids by Vikings, Arabs, and Magyars resulting in greater political stability; advancements in medieval technology allowing more land to be farmed; reforms of the Church in the 11th century further increasing social stability; and the rise of Feudalism, which also brought increased social stability and thus more mobility.[1] The bonds of serfdom that tied peasants to the land began to weaken with the rise of a money economy.[1] Land was plentiful while labour to clear and work the land was scarce; lords who owned the land found new ways to attract and keep labour.[1] Urban centres began to emerge, able to attract serfs with the promise of freedom.[1] As new regions were settled, both internally and externally, population naturally increased.[1]

The population of England, around 1 million in 1086, is estimated[by whom?] to have grown to somewhere between 5 and 7 million.[1] France in 1328 (which was geographically smaller than France is today) is believed to have supported between 13.4 million people[5] and 18 to 20 million people, the latter not reached again until the early modern period.[1] The region of Tuscany had 2 million people in 1300, which it would not reach again until 1850.[1] “

A far better use of our time would be ignoring the 20% who are probably well-suited to casual sex and career ambition, while supporting the women who already reject feminism’s admonishments.

Agreed at the moment, but they aren’t going to ignore you. My impression is that the reason for these articles is because “Feminism” has a never-ending series of demands and wants to prepare itself for yet another offensive, and is trying to line up the troops.

The troops are exhausted and want to go home to their husbands, while the Feminist Overloards shout “ONWARD TO STALINGRAD!”

To the honorable Han Solo, I suggest we take our advice from the only French General worth listening to, and not interrupt our enemies while they make their mistakes!

Winter is coming…

Han: I think another part of the victory of feminism is how many of its tenets are just accepted by people who wouldn’t call themselves feminists.

J: Well, yeah, but I for one would not want to go back to the days when so many of the things women take for granted today–the ability to drive, vote, live alone, chose a spouse, get an education, own property, go out without a male relative–were prohibited or rare. Nor would I want to live in a part of the world where those rights are still denied to women.

SW: First, if you ask people if they are egalitarian, the number jumps to 65%. I count myself among them. Egalitarians believe strongly in education for women.

J: I too would call myself egalitarian in that sense, but I do think we have to acknowledge the good done by first wave feminism is securing the rights/changing the social climate in the ways I detailed above while condemning the crazies.

I do think that some mothers that had crushed dreams of career success might had pushed their daughters too hard on that direction thinking that there will always be plenty of males for the picking once they had the accomplishments they let go, YMMV.

True enough, thought there were many women in my mother’s generation who regretted marrying young. My mom married at 19 and felt she would have made a better choice had she grown up a bit first.

@ Susan

Thanks.

Disappointed in this response to the NYT article. You are too invested in your frame and making everything fit it at this point. I thought the NYT piece was well-done and resisted making easy statements about how women cope with the conditions of their lives; meanwhile, your piece goes for all the easiest tropes. Reducing the political movement to end male ownership of women to a conspiracist marketing campaign is a new low, regardless of what you think of feminism or its unintended social consequences. Many of these social consequences, as commenters have pointed out, have something to do with other economic/social conditions.

The playing field has changed a lot recently and you have to evolve with it rather than just trying to apply old tactics. It may not make sense to settle early for all of the reasons described in the article, such as location. Nevertheless, a truly special, attractive girl can have guys texting/fb/keeping in touch for years after school ends begging her for her time. It’s no longer about locking them down in college – it’s about making them want more while you know them there. Casual sexual encounters can be a part of that strategy if you’re not sloppy about it.

I am confused. I cannot even consider abandoning my significant other for 4-5 months in order to “live” in another country for purposes of living in another nation. It’s mind-boggling.

It’s even more mind-boggling than one night stands. I actually understand those, especially under the influence of alcohol.

A sober, long-thought out, rational decision, to deliberately abandon the person you love for months, so you can have a vague “experience,” strikes me as sociopathic.

Getting back on topic, the problem with a lot of feminism is the apex fallacy. It tries to take the exceptional or strange and portray it as something the typical can easily attain (“having it all,” casual sex with no attachments, etc.)

But when they start nearing their 30s, they desperately look for a man to marry. They have to go to college just to get a chance at a job, and they end up with a heavy debt load.

Despite all the rah-rah about women getting more degrees, it may prove to be a hollow victory. They’re groaning under debt, can’t find work, and because they waited too long, potential husbands are thin on the ground.

We need a better way of assessing the mental fitness to do a job. College should be relegated to directly teaching skills that will unambiguously lead to employment. The way the college system is structured is like a giant con game.

@Mireille:

The student loan debt is my theme. Mostly because it’s clearly delusional.

It has nothing to do with women, except for my suspicion that more women than men are being saddled with non-dischargable debt that acts as millstones around their necks.

However, I blame the government (conservative thinking – the virtue of repaying debt = good!) and the higher education system (liberal thinking – more and more education = good!), not women.

I’m going to make a comment on point in this post.

Since feminism is something that is marketed and sold, it does best in an era of credit expansion (paying for the present with future money).

Now that the bill is due (because we can’t seem to re-ignite the economy using credit because we’ve already borrowed everything from the future that we coud) feminism, particularly the aspects that are most incompatible with the lived reality of many women and therefore needed the most marketing to sell, is no longer attractive because people have more important things to worry about than social issues like feminism (particularly now that women can enter any profession they feel like, thereby eliminating a major driver of feminism) will go by the wayside.

@JP, I disagree that real Feminism, not merely sex-positivism will go by the way side. The fact is even if most women don’t think of themselves as hardcore, they are grateful for the work and advances made by the pioneers of the movement and are attached to keeping this progress alive and functioning. I’m really alarmed to here everyday in the US about the repression of women reproductive rights, and just because of that I will put myself in the 5% each time until these issues are resolved. A lot remains to be done.

makes sure to have a full portfolio of patronizing “white man’s burden”-esque photos taken with the indigenous people.

Wow, that’s cynical. Really?

Nothing patronizing about taking photos with people from the country you’re visiting.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the continued bifurcation of the female population, which is feminism’s real legacy.

I look forward to the followup. It looks very interesting.

And when that article comes, I’ll avoid my usual righteous anger about the institution of marriage, even if marriage comes up in the discussion.

@Susan

The women perpetrating the wage gap myth are the radfems, so it’s not valid to extrapolate their views to all other women. The article serves to set the record straight, similar to the way I approach these topics here.

Sadly, I haven’t found this to be true… I hear the wage gap claim casually mentioned all the time amongst my peers… even worse, it’s males making the claim just as often as females. And honestly, I’d classify very few of them resembling anything close to radfem.

It’s a meme that has bled into our general culture.

In the past I’d politely point out why those claims were false, but it just got a bunch of blank looks, or responses like “You probably think women should be barefoot and pregnant.”

As Bastiat has often said on here, socially speaking it’s best to just pay lip service to feminism while knowing better than show any actual opposition. in today’s world

@ADBG

To judge if something is hypogamous or hypergamous you have to look at all the factors that determine someone’s sexual or marriage value, not just one factor like education.

@Susan

I think that the way to fight radfem (and other) untruths is to point out the facts. That is more or less how I perceive myself fighting them.

Another way is to point out how they claim to want equality but then point out the ways in which men are less than equal and are not being championed by the supposedly equality-seeking feminists and often there’s even gloating about female superiority.

So by fighting, I’m not saying to just call radfems a bunch of c@^1$ but to point out the real facts and use studies, like I did in pointing out how the numbers of rapes have decreased a lot and also showing how radfems will twist the truth like I did by showing how HuffPo misquoted the original article which itself is likely exaggerating things to begin with.

I am against men raping blacked-out women, of course. And I agree that decreasing binge drinking would be a very good thing.

Women are free to choose relationships, yes, but many of the university goers do feel some level of pressure to put sole focus on career and will be shamed a bit if they have a reln, as we see in the Atlantic article and now this one. Obviously, not all women feel that pressure but it’s kind of there, lurking in the minds of some, not there at all in others, and strongly there in some.

And it starts at an early age like the little girl that was pressured by the teacher to say what career she wanted to be and that her saying she wanted to be a mom when she grew up wasn’t good enough.

Let me be clear. I’m for women’s freedom to choose, be it career or family or both, and subject to their ability to do such things. What I don’t like is how feminists and even some egalitarians pressure women into not really choosing for themselves but following the narrative of putting career as higher priority than those women actually want, and at the sacrifice of other worthwhile goals like relns and children.

Thoughts on radio this morning and “feminism” or “equality” or whatever you like.

Radio Host mentioned that now single women are buying more houses than single men.
Women co-hosts:
“that’s good”
“you go girl!”
I have a feeling many women would agree with this, although this is not a position of “equality,” this is a celebration of superiority.
As a social con, this doesn’t make sense. I like hispanics and blacks buying houses: yay social integration and stability!
Singles buying houses? Like….what?
It also brings into men “so what are the men doing….?”
I guess I will bring this up at lunch and see what some friends think of it.

Other thought?
A woman dental assistant was fired in Iowa. Made the rounds a while ago because the Dentist fired her for being too attractive and a threat to his marriage, agreed upon by his wife. Became a court issue, Iowa Supreme Court unanimously said it was okay, twice.
To me this is open and shut. At-will employment? Okay, bye-bye!
Radio hosts: ALL MALE JURY ENABLING MALE OPPRESSION! MAN CANT KEEP HIS PENIS IN PANTS! SHE DOESNT LIKE YOU ANYWAYS!

@ ADBG

And what is most pernicious about the “just desserts” justification for female privilege is that when the mythical time comes that “everything has been made up for,” both sexes will be relentlessly oppressed in all ways so as to maintain the “equality.”

Liberty becomes a distant memory, an enemy of “all the gains we made throughout history” or somesuch.

Remember, feminism is about vengeance, not equality. Poor social outcomes for men are a feature, not a bug.

“I fucked, hear me roar.” Comment of the month candidate…?”

Its real. These feminists really do equate premarital cock to liberation. Its become a sick twisted pandemic. These poor dudes just wanted to get laid.

http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/feminism-and-desire-the-i-fuck-hear-me-roar-debate-517834212

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They are legion at every level!

Start with one you’ve described a lot, the way that primary and secondary ed have been reenginneerd to favor girls at the expense of boys. Then work your way upward and onward through life.

@ADBG:

“That is how ideologically Americans understand it, but it is still not how insurance operates. Higher deductible plans are become increasingly common, even in employer-based insurance, and it is part of the reason why health-care costs are bending.”

If you have a truly severe medical condition that results in disability, people normally ultimately bypass health “insurance” entirely and use Medicare or Medicaid.

In fact, hospitals hire organizations to get people onto Medicaid so they can get reimbursed for severe medical conditions.

“Re employment, I can’t speak to how the government handles this, but in my experience, I had an advantage as a female because publicly owned firms felt it was in their best interest to hire and promote women. Perhaps that’s because women do 80% of consumer spending. Or because the company wants to be able to promote itself as a good citizen. Whatever the reason, it’s the free market at work. AFAIK, there are no quotas in the private sector.”

This is true for legal work.

Corporations expect to see a certain percentage of women and minorities staffing cases and you are at a disadvantage.

In addition, some law partners only want to hire attractive women because they want to look at (and possibly enjoy) the attractive women.

I know of a firm that will never, ever hire a woman as an attorney again, so it cuts both ways.

The free market–backed up by the administrative state, the regulatory apparatus, and the lawsuit industrial complex. Not to mention the aforementioned ideological underpinnings that no one questions and that most are unware of. To use that DFW metaphore that you like, feminism is part of the water of modernity.

BTW, there are no quotas in the private sector in the same way that everyone denies there are quotas anyhere, only timetables, goals and the like. But there is explicit action to favor women, and this is seen as a good thing, for the reasons I mentioned, for the reasons you mentioned, and for many other reasons, many of which contradict one another. The core reason, however, is feminism even if most of the practioners don’t realize that and even if some of them would be in that group who answers the survey question with “I am not a feminist.”

“So, money still talks.”

Yes, the Davos class is no less capable of hypocrisy than anyone else. They believe in AA/quotas for thee but not for me. They are happy to “diversify” the middle levels of their companies out of ideological commitment, a genuine belief in fairness, compliance with law and regulation, etc. But when it comes to the top rungs and big transactions and the like, well, then it’s important that the best man win. After all, there are no quotas so that fact that senior management looks pretty white and pretty male is just the result of fair competition. As is, of course, the more diverse composition of the lower tiers, but with the assistance of HR …

Not that they feel OK about the top being all white and male. But neither do they want to compromise standards (overmuch). So what happens is that the competition for the non-white, non-male talent who can truly hack it up there becomes super fierce. The same way that that top HS grads in certain groups every year are insanely courted by the Ivies. Everybody wants that talent, and a big part of the reason is for how it will look in the group photo.

“Taking on feminism in this environment isn’t storming the Bastille, it is invading Russia during Winter. Better to let evangelical feminism collapse on its own and discredit itself and THEN make policy changes.”

The only things that even look like they might “collapse on it’s own” are the wealth pumps of the current American Empire (really world leader hegemon of the West).

“The US consumes 25% of the world’s energy with a share of global GDP at 22% and a share of the world population at 4.59%”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

That’s what’s enabling all of these make work jobs, for men and women, (FIRE economy) in the first place.

I don’t think women do want girls to receive preferential treatment, at least not if they have sons.

Perhaps young women will start questioning why fewer men than women are attending college.

I do. I think women (as a group) are hard-wired to exploit men for resources. They will take everything that men let them take. NAWALT but most are.

Most women don’t express concern about the lack of well being of men until it affects them, either directly or indirectly through a family member or a close friend. Women don’t notice the status of men until their sons are falsely accused of rape or they can’t find an educated husband. Right up to that moment most of them favor preferential treatment, resources and protection for women.

You can’t blame feminists for all the collective exploitativeness of women.

@SW

I mean what are the privileges? What is the preferential treatment?

You’ll get little in the way of specifics from that gentleman. It’s beneath him.

Rhetorical question: Would you consider affirmative action to be preferential treatment in favor of women? If so, I’ve found a doozy of a study… cuts right to the heart of the M/F college ratio. My brain turned over after I read through it. The conservative boy’s club @ HUS certainly won’t like the implications…

Re: AA. I know that on my campus—small, private liberal arts school, 60/40, etc.—there are more female than male applicants. Apparently as fem-centric gender imbalances on a given campus increase, fewer males apply. As you can imagine, colleges freak out about breaching 60/40 and form investigative committees.

One suggestion was that the cost-benefit of an expensive liberal arts education vs. the debt load incurred to gain said education may be crossing the Rubicon and that non-STEM campuses have generally failed to keep up with revolutionary 21st century tech like 3d printers, etc. So we may have the potential for men to go into high-tech, high-value manufacturing jobs that they would probably find fulfilling, but the needs of these jobs are not being addressed by *most* campuses. Men may be responding rationally to emerging economic realities, but this is obviously speculative stuff.

A less optimistic argument is that elementary and high schools are screwing boys over and that this is systematically affecting their college readiness levels.

I had two fairly low-end 3d printers and I decided to donate one to my local high school and one to a college club rather than using them for to design and prototype boomerangs or sex toys or whatever I would have ended up doing with them, and my understanding is that female students have about as much interest in them as they do video games (i.e., very small %).

In terms of AA as a policy tool… On 60/40 or higher campuses, male applicants get somewhat favorable treatment (from what I have seen) because they are relatively scarce and most colleges don’t want to go to 65/45 or 70/30. Among other problems, they lose viable athletic programs and this of course effects alumni relations, etc. An exception would be Asian men on elite campuses—Asian men are sort of discriminated against in the sense that they are under-represented at H/Y/P given their academic performance.

The point of college right now (from the college administration’s perspective) is apparently to vacuum in as much “free” government debt as possible.

With every passing year, this problem is getting worse.

However, I don’t expect the system to break or anything major to change anytime soon. I don’t see a reason for it to change.

I simply expect it to keep getting worse for some time.

The students are clearly functioning as excellent sources of tax revenue (now at 6+%), the colleges are happy (free $$$), parents are happy (college is good! education is good!), and students are happy while in school (look at these perks! We have a spa! the government is giving me beer money! Yay!!!).

I also expect the median wage to continue its punctuated decline (in real terms). I expect that the next recession (whenever it hits) to drop this lower.

http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2013/household-income-real1-13a.gif

The system seems to be solidly locked into making things worse because there are enough people who are getting what they want at the moment.

“So if something systemic is “broken”, it appears to be broken between high school and college, in the relative girl/boy college applications rates.”

The entire education system is “broken” because it isn’t really “designed” for actual people.

It’s designed for somebody’s conception of what people are.

Some fairly conservative estimates place the number of young males in the US school system being prescribed ritalin at 10-12%, With young girls catching up rapidly.

Frankly I think we are pathologizing not just normal boyish behaviour but childhood itself, irrispective of gender. I believe the differences we see in college enrollment numbers are not necessarily due to some gender based discrimination in grades 1-12, But due to young men acting as a sort of canary in the coal mine.

I think most educators would tell you that young boys require more positive reinforcement than girls do. And are more sensitive to both criticism and praise. In a dysfunctional school system advantage accrues to the girls not because of some nefarious gender war shit, but because young boys are simply more vulnerable to the negative effects.The US (and Canadian) school systems are highly dysfunctional and are failing all children, we are just seeing the most overt effects in young men.

Yes, she does feel that Harvard was not worth it, which is not to say that she feels education or even a BA is not worth it.

I went to a public school so I paid a lot less (acutally, in both cases our parents paid, no debt, yay!) and while I retain much nostalgic affection for the place, I can’t honestly say it was worth it either. Overall, I was taught a lot of dreck. However some stuff was decent and I might say that the entire experience was redeemed by one spectacular professor who opened up a whole world for me. He’s the one who taught me what to study, where to go for grad school, etc. That was invaluable. He died a couple of years ago but I had a chance this summer to have dinner with two of his best friends and I got to tell them how much he meant to me and how much he did for me, which was sort of gratifying.

It’s somewhat confusing to me how you could think that my “values” conflict with education, considering that one of the beefs against me here–from you sometimes and from MM all the time–is that I am a pedandic bore who goes off on OT philosophic tangets constantly, I mean, is there anyone here who is more openly and avowedly pro-education and learning than I am?

@ADBG:

You need to get the Work Authorization License, just like you need a Drivers License.

Looking at feminism as if it’s for and about women may be limiting.
Tammy Bruce, conservative commentator and ex-NOW biggie, said that organized feminism exists to further left/prog goals. If a women’s issue will help, they’re all over it. If not,forget it. See their concern for the Duke lax hoax vs. Katie Rouse (aka “who?”). For the women victimized by Bill Clinton.
Tactics and strategy to combat feminism should be thought out with Bruce’s point in mind.

Escoffier, that’s surprising about your daughter, given your and your wife’s backgrounds. One would think there’s at least some genetic or upbringing influence. I know when I was a kid, I really loved playing with medical instruments and both my parents were doctors.

I also loved philosophy but knew I couldn’t make a real living at it, and besides that, I was not really lifelong academic material. I actually enjoyed Plato and Socrates much more than stuff like Pride and Prejudice or Beowulf, because I felt more of an immediate resonance.

About educating boys, I think there is too much regurgitation and memorization in education today, which cater to feminine modes (do and say what the teacher wants you to do and say) and alienate masculine modes (challenge what the teacher has to say, even if it is older and established).

My high school political science and history teacher was one of few who understood the masculine mode of student-teacher relationship. He ran his classes like debates, encouraging challenges from students and engaging them as an “opponent.” The guys all thought he was really cool, and they would hang out with him during lunch and outside of class. They would continue their heated debates, and I would often just watch.

I think boys tend to enjoy the friendly conflict and competitiveness in education much more than girls, who tend to emphasize harmony and following the teacher’s lead. In Asia where boys often are top performers in academics, test scores and grade are posted publicly for all to see, kind of like top scores in a video game. Maybe that contributes to why young boys like video gaming more than school nowadays…

I learned a great deal in college, and its utility as a “work permit” is undoubted. But, except for improving composition, I’ve not used in my work anything whatsoever I learned in class.
My life is enriched–presuming that it would not have been enriched in another way if I’d gone without college–and I had a number of experiences not available otherwise. But classroom stuff…. Not so much.

Parents also require subsidies.

Indeed. We moderns tend to see the family as mainly nuclear, but grandparents are a major source of support, free child care, etc. for most families. I found it interesting that in the article you cited never married middle-aged men provided support to families in the form of meat and other resources. Given what we read in this corner of the net, one wonders why these are MGTOW? Obviously their place in the tribe gives them an investment in other people’s kids.

I guess I could see women a long time ago being in relationships where they didn’t like the man that much but stayed with him to have a provider/protector and offered sex

I think that happened a lot, Han. What I don’t understand is men who view these as the good old days. I would imagine DH likes knowing he’s more than an ATM to me.

I’d really love to see some data on this. Taylor is very vague about these 60 women and what they actually said. She only quotes a handful in the whole article. For example, I recently found a survey that Georgetown conducted about sex on campus, and 64% of those students who had sex within the past year did so in committed relationships. (Lest you say that Georgetown is a religious college, it is not true of the student body, which is more than half non-Catholic, and strongly opposes the church’s teaching on sex and reproduction.)

We know from other studies that 87% of women graduate from college having been in a serious relationship. Clearly, most are willing to go against the narrative, though I do agree that women (and men) should be supported in their desire for relationships, not thwarted!

I’m gonna start calling getting one’s undies in a twist over articles like this the Nadir Fallacy. Sure this phenomenon exists, but I too question the extent and would love to see hard data. While my youngest is only about to start college, I do know a lot of college girls. Most have had some sexual experience by graduation, but I don’t know any carousel riders. Because I’m the neighborhood “cool mom,” I’ve heard a few “I wish I hadn’t done that” stories, but very, very little hard core sluttery and lots of “I want a boyfriend” or “I’m sad that my relationship broke up.”

Also let me reiterate that I’ve shown articles about the hook-up culture to these young ladies and expressed my worries about my sons’ social life in college. The near universal reaction is, “Well, yeah, you can get drunk and hook up if you want to, but that’s not all there is. People who don’t want it, avoid it. Avoid the frats and the bars; hang out with people who have common interests or go to the various campus religious organizations and you’ll be OK.”

J, I suppose you’ve partially answered this with the “cool mom” comment and such, but isn’t it possible or even likely that they simply aren’t telling you what they are/were up to? I never told any adults about my (rather mild) collegiate escapades, nor do I know anyone who did.

To anyone thinking their daughter would be better off with further education after high school please let me give you my perspective.

My parents felt that it was not necessary for girls to go to college because “women don’t need to support a family”. So while they helped my brothers through college, I was expected to get a job and learn to support myself until I got married. There are a couple of problems with this:

1. It can be very hard to make a living wage without a degree or specific skill. I was too small and mechanically-challenged for the better paying jobs like welder, auto mechanic, etc. There are now waiting lists to get into get into schools for dental technician, etc. How will your daughter be able to support herself if she doesn’t get married? She’s going to be competing in just about every job with college grads and they have the edge. Yes, Bill Gates and Mark Z made a fortune without a degree but they dropped out of Harvard. Most of us are not smart enough to get into an Ivy in the first place (HUS readers excepted).

2. How will your daughter meet a man who makes big enough bucks to support a family on just his wage? When I went to work I was in a pink-collar ghetto. I went to night school and it was other women and married men. It can be tough to meet these high-income earning men and if your daughter does meet them, will these men want a woman with only a HS degree? I remember one poster on HUS mentioning that he had a friend who was dating a girl who was the night clerk at a motel and his friends laughed about it and looked down on her. It may be ugly but I can tell you from my own experience that this really happens.

3. Will your daughter be resentful that her parents have a degree but that she doesn’t?

Sorry, I have more to say but the boss is calling….

@SW re degrees of rape

Wirth both kids on various college campuses this summer, I gave the “Don’t fuck drunk girls” lecture several times and then had DH give it as reinforcement.

@Esco

I’ll give a read later as I’m gonna run soon. I’m not so sure “liberty” is a man’s highest value. Most men IME experience want to be part of a relationship. Lately, research has been showing that men are more excited about commitment than women are.

@Lok

Because the man who is getting nothing would be much happier as a well laid ATM then a single, never been laid loser.

I can see that.

How you cannot comprehend that a man losing today would prefer a system in which he is a winner is beyond me…unless you only consider it from the woman’s POV which in all honesty is good for her, she doesn’t have to sleep with someone she doesn’t like.

I do find it hard to see how a guy would enjoy being with a woman who is merely tolerating him. Perhaps the problem is I’m using DH as a frame of reference. While relatively low N, he was rarely without a relationship, so he CAN demand to be more than a wallet.

The idea that you thought we opposed sending our daughter to college makes me giggle.

J, the point of that Hume quote was the following. That, where there are no clearly marked easy exits, people are better able to make peace with their circumstances and be happy in them.

So, the suggestion you made–that lots of people were trapped in unhappy marriages–is not necessarily true to the degree you assume. Hume’s point is that those very constraints in fact are conducive to happiness. If you don’t see an easy exit, you work on what you have. I would also bring in her Aristotle’s concepts of habituation and “sexual friendship” between husband and wife.

When there are clearly marked easy exits, then suddenly things that might have been bearable seem intolerable. Also, the temptations of what lay beyond those exits become more tempting because now they are more plausible of attainment.

It’s not as simple, therefore, as “Today since marriage is totally optional and easy to get out of, people are happily married whereas in the bad old days, people were unhappy.” There are very good reasons to believe that people were happy then too. Above all the oft-quoted stats about declining female happiness. If all those “bad old days” marriages were so bad, why were women happier then?

Makes sense to see different kinds of rape as different kinds of rape.

There was a time when expectations of men were higher, and these “soft” rape situations–screwing drunks, taking advantage of the young and stupid, lying about marital status and other things to get sex–were huge breaches of honor. Men who did them were disqualified from future relationships, not lionized as players. No one called these activities “rape” because there were other laws and social standards that protected women–like breach of promise laws and exclusion from good society. I see these attempts to reiterpret rape to include “soft” rape as a way of restoring that balance.

And to open up another can of worms, I cringe when I read of PUA techniques for “overcoming last minute resistence.” It seems to me that this is opening one’s self up to a charge of “soft” rape. I noticed that there is a lot poking fun a the idea of “enthusiastic consent” at SSM’s lately, but frankly I discourage my son’s from trying to convince girls who may feel taken advantage of the next day. If something will feel wrong in the light of day, it shouldn’t be done in a drunken stupor the night before.

@J

Well, it’s too bad that happened with them. But it doesn’t really get at the question of what % of men or marriages were like that. I don’t doubt that abuse happened but I also don’t doubt that feminists exaggerate the negative sides of the patriarchy for women and the positive sides for men.

I guess people should become Mormons where the patriarchy doesn’t beat their women. /sarc (though I’m sure you can come up with some bad stories amongst Mormons; in fact my great grandpa hated my great great grandpa because ggg was a “miserable son of a bitch.”)

I am a pedantic bore who goes off on OT philosophic tangents constantly, I mean, is there anyone here who is more openly and avowedly pro-education and learning than I am?

If education excludes natural science and social science,

But I have no objections to philosophy, being a communitarian at heart. Everything has it’s place in the discussion. The beef here is deliberately misstated. My equal opportunity objection is to any know-it-all who cannot or will not give frank answers to direct questions.

For example, declaring that the clinical definition of binge drinking used by a team of MD/PhD researchers from various countries who specialize in studying alcohol abuse is “stupid” and “wrong”. Without reason or qualification.

Those kinds of weird reactions aren’t philosophical. They’re political. Or just lazy.

@ Susan

Assortative mating being what it is, I would generally assume that a high N woman would end up with a high N guy.

I just made this point in the new post. A., the woman at Penn who has sex like a man, is very likely to wind up with a man who has had even more sex than she has. And that’s fine – a feature, not a bug.

Women love men that get romantic attention from a lot of women. Preselection at work.

It’s why women usually insult men with some variant of “you’re a loser who can’t get laid” — men without options are repellent to women.

Third paragraph should have read:
“abolished race, gender, and ethnic preferences”

“”casual sex is a perfectly fine way to spend your time until the market gets better”
–Amanda Marcotte

.

@Susan

“Is that why you are moving to Korea?”

No.
There are multiple reasons the apocalypse not being one of them.
On another hand I did consider the possibility of a zombie apocalypse…Canada wins

Mostly it is to be closer to her family.

Oh, also you apparently missed an exchange between BB and me in which we both acknowledged that there appears to be no appreciable AA for females in university admissions and has not been for a few decades.

“I will say however that in the culture my dad came from what I describe was a feature, not a bug. Nor was the typical dad in my working class, ethnic neighborhood any Ward Cleaver. DH grew up in a different working class, ethnic neighborhood–same story.”

Why didn’t they think that these actions were profoundly wrong on some level?

“@J

FLDS is a completely different beast from the Mormon church. Lots of abuse in FLDS land.”

Don’t listen to him J!

He’s a Jack Mormon!

They can’t be trusted!

Please, please, contact your local Bishop instead and explain your questions and concerns.

He will be able to address your issues in an appropriate manner that is fully consistent with LDS current doctrine with respect to what is being characterized as the “FLDS”.

J “Hope, have you ever read Norma Lorre Goodrich on the Arthurian legends? Very cool stuff.”

I haven’t. Thanks for the suggestion!

Susan, The Mists of Avalon sounds very interesting, too! I’ll have to add that to my Amazon.

@JP

Am I missing something here?

No, see my hypothesis in #263. I’m just looking for evidence of the claim (by others) that college women have benefited from any kind of institutionalized preferential treatment.

Female enrollment surpassed male enrollment in the late ’80s, probably due to AA (in part). Their enrollment has continued to increase relative to men in the absence of AA, at least in large states like CA, FL, and TX.

Opponents of Prop. 209 back in the late ’90s said that it would hurt young women and minorities. They’ve since stopped mentioning gender and now only focus on race, but it’s white, black, and Hispanic men (mainly) whose enrollment rates have dropped:

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/15/affirmative-action-student-diversity/

You’re probably right about women’s test scores and grades coming out of high school. But it’s quite ironic; conservative thought has always prized merit-based systems, not outcome-based ones. These data suggest that young, non-Asian men need some kind of AA of their own in order to advance and excel in college at the same rates as women.

Is that a 180 degree turn or what?

Richard Aubrey, I’ll also check out Sword at Sunset. Thanks!

Well I’ll have to come back for you later then.

What is the evidence of the bubble?
I ask because economic policy often turns out like a sort of French Military Strategy, IE, always fighting the last war. The Great Depression produced an extreme fear of unemployment, which created the 1960s and 1970s inflation, which in turn created the fear of inflation which has led to hyper-restricted monetary policy (which has created the “jobless recoveries” we all know and love).

And my fear is that our experience with “bubbles” is now going to create an extreme paranoia of “bubbles” that causes us to go out with our hammer and smother them with undue reason.

The raw economics of the bubble need to be separated from the financials. Over-investment in a capital asset, say, building factories you don’t need, is a “bubble,” and reduces living standards, but it doesn’t cause the extreme calamity of the housing bubble.

That comes only with the financing mechanisms. If your economy is running huge internal debts to finance this bubble, THEN you are screwed, because when the bubble goes belly-up, the whole system of finance and currency goes belly-up with it.

Woops!

The student debt “bubble” does not appear to resemble this. On average, going to college is still a wise economic decision, as Mega has pointed out. College grads, on average, still make more money, have lower unemployment, etc. The question is whether they can repay the debt, and in most cases I would say the answer is yes.

If they can’t pay it back, my impression is that the federal government insures a large part of it as well.

Plus I do not believe it is quite as integrated into the financial system as the mortgage debts were.

I could be wrong, but I do not picture this blowing up like the mortgage debt bubble.

Rather, I see this as a sub-optimal economic process that will compound other negative problems. “Sustainability” is dependent on external pressures, too.

Ex: Was the USSR “unsustainable”? The answer should be obvious, it collapsed!
Yet multi-ethnic empires based on oppression have survived for centuries! What happened?!!!

The USSR was facing the strongest coalition of nations to ever exist, not only NATO but also China, Japan, etc. They had far more economic potential and Reagan was ramping up the pressure. The USSR felt that they needed to compete, and introduced some processes that led to their collapse.

In a closed system, the USSR could have continued forever. I suspect that our feminism, college-educated bubble could also continue forever.

The question is what external pressures will push the system in what direction?

ADBG, re: bubbles. You make very good points, as always. My quick addition would be that in a truly free market you would normally see a see-saw relationship between savings and interest rates—if savings rates were high, banks would be flush with “real loanable funds”, and interest rates would be low as consumers were revealing a longer time-preference horizon.

If savings rates were low, banks would be starved for real funds, and interest rates would be high as consumers were saying that they wanted to consume RIGHT NOW, did not want to save, and needed to be well-compensated for delaying consumption.

When you get very low savings rates and very low interest rates at the same time due to top-down planning, look for various distortionary effects and perhaps generalized bubbles (as opposed to specific and idiosyncratic bubbles in individual assets). Allowed to continue over time, balance sheets will become more and more vulnerable because, obviously, transactions will be largely debt-financed (low cash savings available for initial equity positions, low interest rates signal cheap credit availability, etc.).

The sensitivity of this particular system to interest rate shocks is unknown. The political independence of the Fed to deal with any inflationary unpleasantness by raising rates is unknown—the Fed is currently maintaining both zero % rates and de facto injecting over $1 trillion annualized into risk assets. The Fed’s balance sheet is now 20% of GDP (vs. historical norms of about 5%). How you unwind this position without severe market impacts is apparently anyone’s guess. In fact, how you even “taper” QE—let alone normalize the balance sheet, let alone ever tighten rates again—without market impacts is apparently anyone’s guess.

BB,

Good insights. I’ll ponder this at my meeting about company surveys or something like that.

@ADBG:

Once you understand that the Fed has no actual idea what it is doing at the moment, while maintaining absolute confidence in itself, this entire experience becomes much more comprehensible.

Yes, they really are that stupid.

Yes, they really believe their models.

Because modern economics is basically medieval *astrology*.

And, no, I didn’t use the wrong word in the previous sentence.

MM, I wish I could confidently address your very valid points and concerns, but I can’t. Some of the alternative explanations seem to be:

1) College admissions being biased against men. I agree with everyone that this is not a serviceable claim at this point (with the exception of Asian men and some athletes ((such as wrestlers))).

2) Men just suddenly becoming lazy or ignorant. Not a serviceable claim, unless we assume that men primarily went to college to become more eligible bachelors in order to attract women and to obtain sex. Incentives, cows, milk, free, and all that.

3) A “crisis in masculinity” that is affecting male academic performance due to systematic demonization of the provider male, etc. A more negative version of #2, in which a lot of guys are just becoming fatalistic about what women want and giving up. Maybe something to this, I guess, but it’s vague and unsatisfying.

4) Men responding rationally to some aspect of conventional college educations and their attendant costs and benefits. Maybe something to this, but it is hard to pin down because on paper a college education is still (generally) a worthwhile investment at this price.

5) Single-Parent Households. Perhaps, given child-custody norms, daughters w/in single parent households do better than boys do. Perhaps daughters tend to have positive gender role models in these situations and young males don’t. I guess this could be linked to #3.

6) Biases against boys in the pre-college educational system. I think that there is something to this and that Roy Baumeister believes it to be a core cause, but as you noted it would have to be subtle. I suppose we’d have to find stereotypical school activities that boys tend to particularly enjoy and see if these are less encouraged now than they were in the past—perhaps this would be evidence of a “feminization” factor at work.

7) Positive feedback loop at work. We hit 55/45 and young women see the writing on the wall that there won’t be enough college-educated men for them to be able to rely on, so more women go to college. But as a consequence we hit 60/40—now more women see the writing on the wall and they feel they *really* have to go to college now. So another wave hits. Then we hit 65/35 and…

Probably something to this one.

I am surely missing a few. Thoughts…?

@BB

#5 is certainly true.

It’s basically a psychological requirement than a man have a functional father or father figure.

Because that’s the nature of the cultural transmission in humans.

It seems to be some sort of evo-psych-ish rule.

Absent that, you basically have some sort of incoherent misdirected bifurcated masculinity that either results in over-feminimisation (mamma’s boy) or over-masculinsation (amoral thug).

So, you should see a steady degradation in masculinity as a whole in if you increase the number of single mothers with no father figures with sons.

I expect that this problem is not present in lesbian couples because one of the women is essentially the “man” in the relationship.

JP,

Economics is one of those things that are complicated

My broader point is that I don’t want people just pointing at the student debt bubble and screaming “bubble!” like it’s the housing or commodity or dot-com bubble.
All three of those are DIFFERENT kinds of bubbles with different kinds of effects.

In this particular case, the student debt bubble is a $1.2 trillion outstanding debt, $1 trillion of which is owed to the federal government. A COMPLETE student debt default isn’t trivial, but it is adding $1 trillion of debt to the US fed gov balance sheet in the out-years, say, 2030, and the US is already going to assume substantial debt by then.

Even then, US is a currency issuer, can ultimately print its own money to run. A student debt bubble burst, therefore, does not necessarily mean depression, but hyper-inflation (in the absolute worse case)

Basically in terms of financial collapse, student debt bubble is a non-starter for the cause. Perhaps a contributing factor.

It also means that the US college bubble by itself is sustainable for the foreseeable future.

The interesting thing becomes what you do with the low interest rate, low savings rate env that we have now with our advanced, mature economies.

It appears we have what has been described as a global savings glut with significant interterritorial imbalances. The US in particular has been operating like a hedge fund, collectively borrowing money at fixed debt rates and buying up equities overseas.

Of course that masks a lot of variation in the US. Some people own lots, some people own nothing, some people owe lots, some people are OWED a lot.

What appears to be the likely outcome is this:

QE will continue (periodically or continuously) until something breaks.

What is likely to break is some sort of significant inflation in oil or other major commodity.

I suppose a really hard landing in China could make QE easier to sustain for longer.

Wage in inflation is not an issue at the moment like it was during the 1970’s.

The really bad case, at least for the long-only crowd, is a sovereign debt bomb in which debt/GDP continues to deteriorate on the cheap-liquidity fuel, and *then* an interest rate shock occurs later. The interest rate shock is the proximate problem…I repeat for emphasis, the interest rate shock is the proximate problem. The explosive compound is sensitized by the aggregate debt/GDP level, but the interest rate shock is the blasting cap. This can happen more quickly than most people realize.

An example: a 300 basis point shock in Japan’s weighted-average cost of capital would mean that they might be unable to PAY EVEN THE INTEREST ON THEIR DEBT WITH 100% OF TAX REVENUE. In other words, we’d have the very real potential for a sovereign default within the G7 (it would no doubt be called something else—a “restructuring” or a “maturity-enrichment opportunity” for their largely captive audience of bondholders). I don’t need to explain how bad this scenario would be—it would be a monstrous CDS trigger event and institutions holding JGP would suffer catastrophic balance sheet impairments (via “financial repression”, major Japanese savings institutions have been forced to be blind purchasers of JGP). Some would blow up.

Some pundits have argued that a default like this could not happen because the BoJ would just print yen and risk wild inflation in order to monetize a huge, one-time Ponzi debt issuance designed to both roll-over the previous debt and cover years of future deficits. Sure, anything is possible, but then again everyone knows this game and would demand compensatory yields to cover it, or would just get wiped out through another form of default (inflation + financial repression). In the US, you’d probably see the smart(er) money flood to TIPS in order to prevent being fucked by a rabid printing-press enthusiast on this side of the Pacific.

The Fed’s “Operation Twist”—variations of which have been tried before—is obfuscating any market signal that an honest yield curve might have provided.
What we have is a kind of giant macroeconomic Jack-in-the-Box in which a nasty “predictable surprise” in the form of an interest rate shock could occur without much warning.

J: “There was a time when expectations of men were higher, and these “soft” rape situations–screwing drunks, taking advantage of the young and stupid, lying about marital status and other things to get sex–were huge breaches of honor. ”

I don’t disagree, but you’re missing half of the equation here. Weren’t there higher expectations of women as well? And are you willing to enforce those? Replacing that “date rape” as you suggest, merely transfers the liability onto men, as Susan notes. So we’ve moved from a shared social sanction to a one-way risk for men.

Though, I think the risk of false accusation is overrated, even by the evil hate-o-sphere. I’ve had plenty of drunk sex, and zero accusations of rape. It helps to get to know someone before you have sex. (OK, OK, except for those two times in college…)

Telling people to avoid drunk sex is a bit like insisting they never drive 67mph, even when the context is good, like on the highway in rush hours. So many people do it that the risk really is low. A few people who are unusually unlucky (picked up by a grouchy trooper, randomly), or unusually stupid (empty road in front of a cop), or both… get nailed. You can spend your life always following the letter of the law, but I guarantee you this is the road the chumpdom.