Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Ars Derbica.

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Monday, June 10, 2002

Father’s Rights Now.

Ding Dong the Don is Dead.

Attack of the Killer Eighties!

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Sunday, June 09, 2002

One I shall read often. Somebody needs to be watching the Cant, and it turns out somebody is (click here).

There was an interesting discussion yesterday about a post by Steven den Beste on girls in string bikinis. Eric Olsen of Tres Producers - who incidentally wrote an insightful response to my American Times post - jumped on den Beste, Instapunditjumped on Eric, and here I am arriving late to the party as usual, just in time to see the last guests filing through the door. On the other hand, both Instapundit and Eric said things which I think need responding to, so here goes.

First up, Instapundit:

I usually agree with Glenn's opinions on sex, and I agree with most of the things he says here, which is why I really have to say: Dude, what is up with this????

Which goes to the other part: men are genetically programmed to find young women appealing, just as women are genetically programmed to like men of higher status. It's perfectly natural for men to feel that way. It may or may not lead to successful relationships, but hell, most relationships are unsuccessful. I find women in their teens and early 20s to be (usually) rather immature for my taste; I felt that way when I was in my teens and early 20s myself, and my opinion hasn't changed with age.

So men are genetically programmed to find young women appealing, but these same young women don't appeal to Instapundit. Is it that Instapundit doesn't fit into the category men? If so then the statement about Instapundit's preference is wholly irrelevant to the statement about older men liking younger women. Or is it that only some people who fall into the category men also fall into the category liking younger women. If that's the case then the claim is contentless and doesn't support anything. I, for instance, have a thing for guys with glasses. Almost all the guys I've liked/ gone out with have worn glasses. I may well be genetically
programed to like guys with glasses. If so, then some women are genetically programmed to like guys with glasses, which doesn't amount to a whole hell of a lot, since, guess what, some women hate guys with glasses.

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me all this shows is that whether they get their preferences from genes, God, or life itself, people are individuals, and it is therefore impossible to lump all men or women together into one set of attitudes or preferences. I think Glenn is basically in agreement with that point, which is why it really beats the heck out of me why he thought he had to bring in biological determinism. Or maybe the biological determinism was simply to show that the liking of older men for younger women is entirely natural, and that there is, thus, nothing wrong with it. If so, then double ouch.

Ouch 1. Your hemlock might be entirely organic, but if you brew it up into tea and drink it, bad things will happen. This is why the equation natural=good is a fallacy.

And

Ouch 2. Some people might be genetically programmed to be serial killers. It might therefore be "natural" for them to be serial killers, but to me, at least, this does not make serial killers good, or make serial killing any less wrong.

None of this is to say that I think guys looking at girls in string bikinis is wrong. Which leads me to Eric Olsen:

Eric makes some good points, but this one is just flat out dumb:

Which brings up the next point: women are people. Everyone wants to be thought attractive; there is nothing wrong with responding to another person's attractiveness, but it is degrading in both directions to interact with real people only on this level. "Girlwatching," like the entire spectrum of pornography, drains the humanity from all involved. It's a second-person activity, one which precludes any actual interaction.

The point is dumb because it ignores the fact that there are different kinds of interaction. Not every type of interaction has to be personal to be satisfying. If you're reading this weblog, you're interacting with me, and I with you, but neither of us is interacting personally with the other. If you read a book, you're interacting with the author, who may well be dead, and with whom you will never have the possibility of "actual interaction." Listen to Beethoven's 9th, and you're certainly interacting with a dead guy. In fact, I would wager that a significant part of your life is spent interacting with people with whom you have no contact and certainly no personal relationship. If the only meaningful interaction is one which involves "actual interaction," then you can give up your Kant, your Beethoven, and your Spinsters.com. Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't think reading books, listening to music, or looking at girls in skimpy swim wear are any of them life draining activities, nor do I find them meaningless. I'm writing this so that you'll read it. If you do read it, then that's my pay off for writing it. If you enjoy it, then that's your pay off for reading it. And although I've never worn one, I'd imagine it's the same with string bikinis.

I have to admit that I don't consider my ass my best feature, and thus have never felt the need to prominently display it to the world. On the other hand, if I were to wear a string bikini, it would be because I was proud of my ass, thought it looked good and desirable, and wanted to show it off to other people. It would give me pleasure, if men found it and consequently me, attractive and, yes, sexually desirable. There is pleasure to be found in one's body and its beauty. Like any other compliment, praise of one's physical appearance is gratifying. And this isn't selfish or egotistical, because the pleasure others give you in their admiration is recompensed in the pleasure you give them.

Towards the end of my stay in Germany a friend of mine was going to Croatia for a vacation. She had been assured by the girl who invited her that every Croatian man was a ten, and that all the beautiful guys would be sunning themselves on the beach, tanned, oiled, and scantily clad. I could not have been more jealous. I wouldn't have wanted to sleep my way around that beach, and she didn't either. It was just the prospect of the view that was entrancing.

I would imagine it is the same with men and string bikinis. The pleasure afforded a man by a string bikini is both aesthetic and erotic. It's the pleasure of seeing, the pleasure of apprehending beauty, and of the desire awakened by that beauty. Granted you need relationships with people too, and if your entire sex life involves looking at scantily clad women, then you should honestly consider the personal ads. Yet, there is pleasure too in looking, just as there is pleasure in being looked at. Neither of these pleasures is inferior or degrading because it involves no actual contact or relationship. Like so many of the things which make life meaningful and joyous, both are a silent exchange of value, which does not lose its importance by the fact that it is silent.

According to the Spiegel, bin Laden's spokesman, Abu Gaith, turned up on this website, threatening more attacks on the US - this time with chemical and biological weapons. Why? Because al Queda has the right to kill four million Americans, including one million children, due to the actions of America in among other places Bosnia.

Excuse me. Bosnia???? I don't believe in killing people, but if the penalty for outright blatant stupidity were death, Mr. Abu Gaith would already be in the ground. The whole thing is a stupid argument, but saying that al Queda has the right to kill Americans, because Americans committed the crime of saving Muslims, really just blows my mind. I suggest everyone go over to www.alneda.org and post really, really nasty things on their board. At least on the internet you have the power of instant response.

The Bible and Theory.

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Saturday, June 08, 2002

Is that you're always perfectly willing to say it all again. Fundamentally laconic/ lazy people like yours truly, however, tend to avoid overly long responses to things bearing the title "Introduction" in the hopes that their objections will be answered later on in the actual argument. That and they see no reason to say the same things twice; so if the objections aren't answered in the argument itself, they - the lazy people - will only have to raise them once. Fortunately, however, Lee Ann is neither lazy nor laconic, so we have the very long treatise below, which being the big, fat lazy swine I am, I'm not going to respond to - redundancy costing too much in time and words.

I am, however, going to respond to the theology part, because I don't at this stage plan to say a lot more about the Garden of Eden. I don't have a Bible handy, however, so that'll have to wait until tomorrow. Contrary to what Lee Ann may believe, sometimes atheism is an advantage when interpreting the Bible; freedom from theory imparting the freedom to see the text as it is.

If I were a torture device, I'd be the...

A person was tied to you, then weighted down onto the impaling spikes or beaten with sticks. Yeesh. Go overboard much when you're upset?

What torture would you be?

That it was theoretically possible for someone to tap into your hard drive while you were on the Internet, and see the contents of your computer. Yet, it somehow seemed incredible and far-fetched to me, and thus entirely outside the realm of real possibility. Yes, like falling asteroids and terroist attacks, having my computer rumaged through remained comfortably "theoretical;" then I surfed over to Michael Kielsky's site, Uncommon Sense, and saw the contents of my computer displayed on his side bar.

Gena, Back on the Crack Pipe Again.

The Gena Mystique.

Ring Out Wild Cheers.

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Friday, June 07, 2002

Where, oh, where has my response to Lee Ann gone? Remember I promised to respond to Lee Ann and to demolish feminism. You've probably forgotten, and if you haven't, you probably think I've given up on it. But you're wrong. It's just that responding to both feminism and conservatism, requires a much more complex, in-depth and integrated argument then you can bang out in thirty minutes at 2 o'clock in the morning. So I'm going to serialize this thing. I've done the introduction, and posted it below. When I write the first piece of the actual essay, I'll post it too, and so on. I've also made a separate page for the whole thing, where you'll be able to read the text in its entirety. You can find it by clicking here, or by clicking on it under my links section. Let the assault begin.

Introduction

Well, the monsters have come out, and as Lee Ann says, some people in America are having an "intelligent" debate about whether a woman's place is in the home, the pièce de résistance of which is a salad of statistics saying women's fertility falls at age 25 - or was it 27 - and that they are correspondingly happier getting married as young as possible. In other words, if you're 22 and don't have a husband and twelve kids, you're doomed; paradise is lost, and you're condemned - to what? Wander through the desert? Wrestle with the angel? Find your own meaning to life; make your own mistakes, compromises, and find that the person staring back at you in the mirror is capable of things you would rather not confess to, and the world she lives in is - appearances to the contrary - not a shiny, happy or safe place. The most cliched phrase in all of philosophy is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and yet an examined life is by definition not a happy one; for it is an endless confrontation with oneself and the world, a confrontation which doesn't allow for a separate peace. I'm not saying marriage, even young marriage, precludes the Socratic life, but that the result of a good life is not happiness; or if it is happiness, it is happiness of a much more complex order, than the kind yielded by saftey, the satisfaction of desires, and tranquility. If young women are happier getting married earlier, it is because they have traded the desert for the Garden, and that is not a good trade.

Drop all the doctrine and take the Bible as it is, and it is a fascinating book. What does it mean to create life and what is life, particularly, in relation to its creator? Those are the central questions of the Old Testament, and they begin with the Garden of Eden. God creates man because He wants an image, and yet an image should not be and is not the original. That last part sounds like a tautology, and yet it is precisely the problem. Adam is not God. Adam is Adam. For God this means that although Adam physically resembles God, he is not God; for Adam lacks the properties which make one "like us," that is like God, namely immortality and knowledge of good and evil. Adam is meant to exist in terms of God's will, and the only condition of life in that condition of bliss is that Adam not question his existence. He will live in the Garden, and he will die there, not knowing that he will die. The Garden is portrayed as a Paradise, and rightly so; for all is provided to Adam, and though Adam will die, he will live unencumbered by that knowledge.

Lies, all of it, completely false, and yet, paradisical. This is how it should be: Adam as Adam, like God, but not God, and the problem is that this does not and indeed cannot mean what God wants it to. If Adam is Adam, then Adam is Adam, in the full complexity of what that means, and Adam cannot exist in terms of God's will, for his existence is defined in terms of himself. Life is autonomous and exists outside the will of even he who created it. Adam doesn't understand this, and yet, somehow he is incomplete. God sees this and creates Eve, which is, of course, a big mistake. Adam is supposed to identify with Eve that he identify more closely with God. It doesn't work that way, however, because the more he identifies with Eve, the less Adam identifies with God. Where Adam was created as an image of God, and his primary identification is with God, Eve was created from Adam, and is identified primarily toward Adam, and only secondarily, if at all, toward God. When the serpent shows up and reveals the big lie, Eve has no trouble reaching for the fruit, and Adam takes the fruit from Eve. God realizes what has happened, and throws Adam and Eve out of the Garden, as punishment for their transgression, but also because the Tree of Life is still there, and God will be damned if they're going to get their grubby hands on it, and live forever. Knowing good and evil, Adam and Eve have already "become like us" and should Adam and Eve become immortal, they would be us. Consequently, the last thing Adam and Eve see of the garden is a great big flaming sword revolving around the Tree of Life and a company of cherubim guarding it. What follow are pages and centuries of God trying to impose his will on man and man trying to fulfill it, and both of them failing miserably. And there is the ever present yearning for the Garden, the longing of those out hacking away at the hard soil of the earth, and the memory, the memory of a paradise where all was provided and the bad things were hidden away, and all that was asked was submission and existence in terms of another's will.

Everyone agrees that women should have rights, but what rights should they have and why should they have them? Do they have them because they're women? Or because they're individuals? Do they have the right to happiness, safety, and peace, or to determine their lives for better or for worse according to their own talents, inclinations, and abilities? Do they have the right to the Garden or to the Desert? Is it in Eden or east of it? Where is the good life, and how should we live it?

Feminists and traditional values conservatives rail at each other, but it is a yelling match orchestrated to the beat of boulders clashing in Hell; for sworn diabolical enemies that they are, feminists and conservatives are really one and the same. Both see women as a group, and both apportion women rights and obligations according to the rational of happiness. The only requirement is that women submit: to the family, the husband, the children, the institution, the law code, the academic, and the literary theorist. To James Tooley and Helene Cixous, Andrea Dworkin, and Jonah Goldberg, to ten thousand other promisers of paradise out to make sure women get it. If you are a woman you can be happy, so long as you don't deviate from the twelve step plan, so long as you not assert that your life is your own to live as you will for better of for worse.

And the result of all of this is that women are martyred on the altar of theory or of virtue; the terms change, the meaning's the same. And women accept, so many of them, too many of them. They accept, and cast their freedom aside, for the same reason people have said yes and bowed their heads to tyrants from the Soviet Union to the Empire, throughout history and forever. Freedom is hard, the moral responsibility for one's own life grueling and endless, often debilitating, sometimes sad, and almost always lonely. The Garden is quieter, and it is so much easier to lay it all down, to not think anymore, to not suffer repudiation and blame, to be loved and to live and to die in peace. Who would not want Eden or the dream that you can live there. Even if it is a dream, is it not one we should strive for?

No, it is not. Explaining why it is not shall be the subject of this essay, which I've called the Anti-Feminist Manifesto, because I believe that feminism itself has become fundamentally oppressive of women, that in the name of happiness, it has taken away their freedom, and that in the name of freedom, it has taken away their dignity and their rights. I don't believe that feminists are against women's rights, although I do question whether all of them, especially the academic ones, really care about the cause of women as it exists outside the cause of the feminists' own careers. Most feminists are for women, but that is precisely the problem.

Contemporary feminists have embraced the idea of women over the reality of individual women, and having done so, they have defined safety and happiness as the goal, and taken steps to ensure them. Since many of these steps are at least policy oriented, when not downright legal, women have come to live in a protective prison of other people's expectations. In doing so, feminists have not only become oppressors themselves, they have threatened almost every gain women have made toward social equality since the 19th century; for once you define women as a group, assign them characteristics on the basis of that group, and decide that what would really be good for them is to be happy and safe, you necessarily remove them from the social, the political, and the intellectual sphere. Life in the real world is harsh. Other people are often mean, and they are often rude. They will oftentimes challenge your insights, your intelligence, and even your character. And sometimes, they will be right, and that is the worst thing of all for the ego and your sense of self. Learning you're wrong is crushing; it leads to self-doubt, and a diminishment of your own sense of worth. Sometimes, however, the world may rail at you because you are right, because you are seeing and saying things others are perfectly content to live without acknowledging. If that is the case, you must endure criticism, attacks, even ostracism, and sometimes imprisonment or even death. And then there are those who will attack you for no reason at all; who simply do not like you; who may be even prejudiced against you, and who may really be out to get you. Life isn't a garden, and reality bites.

The approach of feminists and of contemporary feminism has been to stage a grand and not entirely quixotic campaign against life's danger and harshness. Feminists have sought to make life safe, and yet they can never escape the simple fact that life is not safe, and that people actively living it are often in pain. That is where the James Tooleys of the world come sliding through the door, and what they have to say is, "Duh." If you want women to be happy and safe, the solution is to remove them from life. Create a place where they will be sheltered, protected, affirmed, and loved. Only you don't have to create it; it already exists. The solution to the woman problem is to send women home.

And that is bad, bad, bad; and it's the reason I'm writing this in the first place, because thanks to contemporary feminism, we've lost the vocabulary for why it's bad, and far worse and more importantly almost no one is making the argument. The summary for why it's bad is simple; the argument itself is more complex, and shall no doubt occupy many a post, and encounter many an objection. Put simply it is bad, because women are individuals, because as individuals they should be free to determine their own lives, because the promise of a Garden is inevitably a lie, its conditions unfulfillable, and because even if a Garden were possible, it would still be impossible to fully live a life within it. There's a final reason this is called the Anti-Feminist Manifesto, and that is that feminist thinking has led to the vilification, slander, and out and out legal oppression of men. Yes, men: stupid, inarticulate, brutish, sex-obsessed, oppressive men. Feminism was supposed to liberate both men and women, because it was supposed to free them once and for all from the ideology of the group. I intend to carry out that promise, or at the very least to try.

Literarium Update.

Skakel Guilty!

Missionary Murdered.

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Thursday, June 06, 2002

Just the Facts, G-Man.

Down With Girlie Books!

Literarium Update.

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Wednesday, June 05, 2002

R. Kelly, R&Busted.

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Monday, June 03, 2002

Gotta Love the Maasai.

Bypass the Times.

Heil Hilliard!

The Anti-American Ivory Tower.

Nota Bene.

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Sunday, June 02, 2002

Dude - I know this is going to make you angry - but what the freak???

"Here’s where she seems to be talking to you directly:

“Here is one of the great ironies of contemporary feminism: ...Women who need people (especially men) feel this need as an admission of weakness, a failure of nerve. The properly independent woman abandons sexual partners as readily and heartlessly as any Victorian roue. For elite, educated young women, to admit that you want husband and children -- or worse, to actually go out and seek them -- feels unbearably retrograde.”'

To me? I never said women shouldn't get married or have children, just that the responsibility for the family shouldn't fall solely on them. Sending women to the kitchen deprives them of an identity outside the family, while simultaneously reducing the husband's identity within it. Who's going to be the more important figure in the children's lives? The woman who is with them 24/7 or the man who drags in dog tired at 6 pm. I don't think such a situation is fair to either gender, and I certainly don't think it's good for the children, if for no other reason than children grow up, and twelve years of less than complete parental presence is better than seventy of preordained roles and circumscribed opportunities. As for Catherine Millet, I never endorsed her lifestyle, or said it in any way resembled mine; all I said was that it would be fun to watch people's reactions. And well, um, Lee Ann ... It's always nice to see a goat that's been gotten.