A manly look at feminism Pt2

We all have cherished beliefs that we can't really defend and we all get defensive and angry when we are called on to defend one of these positions. Ann Althouse hit one of those limits last week. She expressed a lack of sympathy for men who end up paying child support and got a whole lot of pushback in the coments at her blog and elsewhere. And this was her argument in response:

You are free, you need to think about how you use your freedom, and don't just think about your own perspective as you make arguments that law and society ought to be arranged to facilitate your choices. I'd say I'm being quite libertarian. And as for social connishness, I support abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and — it's right there in my quote — I'm not out to punish those who decline to channel their sexuality into committed relationships with child-rearing. I'm just defending legal and political decisions that center on protecting the interests of children rather than the ability of males to avoid the consequences of procreation, consequences that occur even though the male power over reproduction ends — because he controls only his body and not the woman's — at an earlier point in time than the woman's.

She's more interested in "protecting the interests of children rather than the ability of males to avoid the consequences of procreation"? I don't believe that. I suspect she believes it but that is because she isn't being honest with herself about this.

Her problems starts with the line "... consequences that occur even though the male power over reproduction ends — because he controls only his body and not the woman's — at an earlier point in time than the woman's." Let's spell this out. A man controls reproduction by either using contraception or not having sex in the first place. The woman on the other hand has those options plus the additional option of having an abortion if she gets pregnant. In fact, she can have an abortion for any reason at all. She can get pregnant intentionally, change her mind and get an abortion.

So, here is the first question, why should he feel any responsibility for a child that she can unilaterally kill or not at her will? It's not his child anymore once you make that step. Yes, it will become his child if he helps raise it but up until the moment of birth, you can't hold him responsible for something he has no say in.

Imagine what would happen if we gave the man the option of signing off. It should be the woman's responsibility to inform the man that she is pregnant and he should be given the option of signing a form saying, "Yes, I accept the responsibility for raising this child," or "No I do not accept the responsibility for raising this child." And the form should also include an option for his accepting on the condition of a paternity test.

That would even things out. It wouldn't limit her "rights over her own body" in any way. She can still have the child or not. He isn't forcing her either way. (I suspect that one embarrassing consequence of such a step would be a significant drop in the number of accidental pregnancies.)

But that's only the first step. The next problem is no fault divorce. because she can end the marriage any time she wants and be relatively certain that she will get sole or shared custody rights. Plus she gets support payments enforced by law but (and this is very important) she is in no way accountable to him as to how she spends those support payments. In Canada, he isn't even allowed to ask for an accounting which means that in cases where the "support" payments are very large, the woman can spend it on spa visits or a vacation with her new boyfriend.

The point being that the incentives for marriage for men have been severely reduced. Not surprisingly, men are taking this into account in making their life choices.

It's interesting by the way, to see how different groups are responding to this. Men I know who are over the age of 40 or so are often quite angry about it. They grew up with a certain set of expectations and now the carpet has been pulled out from under them. Interestingly, this has effected men who embrace traditionalist values least. They have tended to marry women who embraced the same values as they do. But others can be quite bitter about it.

Younger men, on the other hand, seem to be quite enjoying it. There is a guy we know who lives in a van. He travels all around the country being a photographer. He even has gotten arts grants to do this. There is woman here in the neighbourhood he stays with for a few weeks every summer and winter on his way through. She's a massage therapist, which I expect makes her pretty good in bed—sex and a massage. I doubt very much that she is the only such woman on his circuit.

It's a pretty good deal. You may say, "But it won't last forever." That's true but when he gets to be old enough that he is going to have to settle down he is going to be in a stronger bargaining position that any of the single women available to him. He'll probably be able to marry a woman younger than the ones he is having sex with now.

More likely, he'll just move in with her

And it's hard not to suspect that is why Ann Althouse is a little touchy on this subject.

You are free, you need to think about how you use your freedom, and don't just think about your own perspective as you make arguments that law and society ought to be arranged to facilitate your choices.

That's true enough but if you change the basic social contract, even if you do so for the best of reasons, you have to expect that there will be multiple effects and that you aren't going to like some of them. And don't turn around and try and beat us into submission with a lot of talk about the interests of the child. Between abortion and no-fault divorce it has been made very clear to us that we have no say in those interests beyond paying court-ordered support. Don't expect us to care.

Why women judge "sluts" negatively

There are lots of studies out there on the number of sex partners people have in a lifetime. If you look at the serious ones only (and you have to be careful because there are a lot of studies that are obviously completely bogus) you will find that median of what women typically report is four sex partners in a lifetime and of what men typically report is seven.

So where are men finding the three extra partners that women don't report? Now, it is possible that those numbers are honest even though they don't line up but it is highly unlikely. Other studies have been done in which men and women are asked a series of questions, including one about number of sex partners twice, the difference being that they are told they are hooked up to a lie detector for the second round. These studies have found that everyone lies but women lie by a greater margin than men. A pretty reliable guess is that most people have between five to seven partners in a lifetime.

Which brings me to my main point: even though we had a heavily advertised sexual revolution roughly forty years ago, things just haven't changed that much. Your mom and dad and your grandmother and grandfather probably had sex before marriage and they probably had more than one partner in their lifetime. Yes, they probably had fewer partners than is common now but that is most likely a function of the fact that people used to marry a lot earlier than they do now.

Things haven't changed that much! Go write that 100 times on the blackboard Bart Simpson.

Which brings me to this telling quote from Amanda Hess.

And as UCLA sociologist Jessica Carbino recently told Ann Friedman at The Cut, “men and women both agree that men should actively pursue female partners and that women should be passive recipients to their advances,” and that “when women do not adhere to these scripts they are viewed negatively.”  

The key phrase here is "men and women both agree". Both Hess and the woman she is quoting, Ann Friedman, clearly think that men and women should not agree to this. And it's important to keep that in mind as we move on to this next line from Ann Friedman:

We all get that the rules of traditional courtship — in which men make every single advance and women demur or acquiesce — are dead, but we haven’t replaced them with a new standard operating procedure.  

Because that is a lie. The problem is that all attempts to replace the rules of traditional courtship have failed and Friedman's own piece makes this point. The title to her magazine piece is "When Women Pursue Sex, Even Men Don't Get It."

There is an odd double argument here that is typical of progressives: on the one hand, they claim that world has changed and that the old ways are no longer valid while, on the other hand, the bemoan the fact that the world has not changed. The problem is human nature. It doesn't change so the old ways remain valid. Perhaps they can be improved, but they can't be replaced. Progressives try to ignore human nature, or pretend that it is infinitely malleable, thus they end up at this impasse over and over again.

What does it have to do with "slut-shaming"? Well, let's go back to that teaser quote I gave you yesterday:

 The study found that women—even women who were more promiscuous themselves—rated the Joan with 20 partners as less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who’d only boasted two.

Courtship is all about getting to sex under conditions that you want and when we study that the issue is competence. It's a skill. If you are man, you have to engage a woman and develop a relationship without making your pursuit of sex so blunt that it turns her off. But you have to be careful not to overdo it for if you are too indirect she'll file you under "just friends" and you don't want that. A woman, likewise, has serious challenges. She uses sex to entice men (look at how women dress before you even think about challenging this)  but she wants to play her cards, especially the one that treats sex as an actual possibility, close to her chest. If she is direct about her desire for sex, then she will be filed under "just for sex" and she doesn't want that. That's what human nature looks like.

Now go back to the assessment of Joan above and you can see that the real reason women don't rate her highly is perceived lack of competence. All the things listed are valuable personal relationship skills (competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant). Women don't want to be close to sluts not because they judge them as tainted but because they think they are losers and we all prefer to associate with winners so that we can learn to be like them. Thus even women who are promiscuous themselves would prefer to associate with non-promiscuous Joan.

And men, as boringly conventional as this may seem, admire men who seem to be successful at talking women into bed because that is a competence they want for themselves. And they want it even if they don't want to have a lot of sex partners themselves, which is the case for most men. (Hooper in Brideshead Revisited wants to see action in battle but not a lot, "only enough to say I've been in it" One hell of a lot of men feel that way about seducing women; the desire to feel competent, of knowing that you can do it, is more important than having a whole lot of partners.)

But that leaves a key question unanswered: Are women right to think more promiscuous women are less competent at work, life and love? My experience is that, yes, they are right. I can't prove that although I suspect that if researchers looked for such evidence in an open-minded way, they would find lots of it. (My experience has also been that amount of sex experience has nothing at all to do with how good a woman is at it. Any virgin could figure out in the first few months of her first sexual experience anything and everything that the woman with twenty partners knows. And the odds are that "Joan" probably isn't very good at connecting with another human being, the principal evidence for this being that she has gone through twenty different partners without settling down into a meaningful, loving relationship by her early twenties.)

For now I'll just note that there are one hell of a lot of articles out there by women who went to New York or some other big city looking to live the Sex-and-the-City lifestyle and then get married who are finding themselves single and wondering why.

The rest of this series:
Wednesday: The truth about slut-shaming
Thursday: Why women sit around talking about the real or alleged promiscuity of other women

Caveats and other bullets:

•  The numbers four and seven will seem low to you if you read a lot of breathless pieces about our hook-up culture. That's the impact of media who have to have something sensationalist to report and, therefore, create the impression that everyone is doing it.
• As I hinted in an earlier post, choosing the number twenty for promiscuous Joan strikes me as a bit much. With statistics suggesting that most women report just four sexual partners over an entire lifetime, Joan having twenty by her early twenties is way off the scale. As is the case with most things, there are degrees of sluttiness. (and this remains true even if most women are lying about having had only four.)
• If the previous bullet hurts your feelings, I don't care. Go find someone else to complain to.
• Related to the above point, notice the interesting verbal fudging in this report on the study from Science Omega: "Even when the female participants themselves reported a high number of sexual partners or liberal views on casual sex, the preference they expressed for less permissive friends was constant." It's one thing to say you have "liberal views" on casual sex and another to see a woman who has been logging as many partners per year as most women claim in an entire lifetime.
• I think that there is a period in many women's lives when they will befriend a slut. You might call it the Samantha Jones phenomenon. When you're in an experimental phase, it's helpful to have a buddy who goes just a little too far to contrast with your own behaviour. (By the way, if you're a guy and your girlfriend or wife suddenly befriends a slut, look out, she's about to start cheating on you.)

Women sit around and discuss the sluttiness of other women

They do! Everybody knows this but it doesn't fit the feminist narrative in any way shape or form. Why not? Because any feminist narrative at all has to be based on an assumption of solidarity among women or, at least, the possibility of solidarity among women. That cannot be the case if women have a propensity to undermine other women for not living up to complicated social norms regarding sexual behaviour and sexual presentation.

And that is why the study I discussed yesterday is so dangerous to the feminist cause; for it shows us a deep-seated psychological tendency in women. Thus the rather desperate tu quoque response from Amanda Hess in Slate's XX blog.

Slutty Joan is just another statistic tossed onto the mounting pile of evidence of girl on girl crime, in which sexism is inflicted on women by other women. But lately, the public fascination with female infighting has threatened to let men—and really, the society we all live in—off the hook for hating on ladies who get around.

Only if we keep the focus on men as the source of the problem can there be feminist solidarity and, thus, any evidence that women do this as much or, in this case, more than men do will cause panic.

"Joan", by the way, was the name assigned to the woman whom women participating in the study were asked to evaluate. They were given near identical profiles of "Joan", the significant difference is that in one profile she'd had more than twenty sex partners while she'd had only two in the other. The details of the different responses are interesting but I am saving that for a little later. The key thing to note here is how determined Amanda Hess is to keep the blame on men and not women.

The American Association of University Women is equally determined:

But lost in the overwhelming amount of discussion surrounding these incidents is the fact that this is not a women-hating-on-women problem; the problem is that our entire culture hates on women. It is not that women are catty and men are not. It’s that culture teaches us women should be a certain way, and any woman who dares fall outside those guidelines is fair game. 

The problem here, as I suggest at the very top is  that everyone knows that these issues play out differently among men and women. Don't believe me that everyone already knows this? Well, take a close look at how Amanda Hess parses the issue:

That finding could be interpreted as evidence that men engage in social policing of sexual behavior less than women do. But it’s really just that they’re saving their judgment for women like Joan instead of for each other.

Hess grasps the problem fully and gives it a name: social policing. Then she tries to diffuse it with a tu quoque about men. The problem is that she is describing two different behaviours. For "social policing" means collectively judging people and that is not the same as individually judging "Joan"; sitting around talking about people, which is what women tend to do, and individually judging them, which is what Hess describes men as doing, are very different activities. I'm not saying that one is better than the other but there is no denying that social policing will have broader social implications, that being the whole point of social policing in the first place.

Men are, of course, aware, often painfully so, of the fact that others judge them and of how they judge the women they are with. I knew a guy back in university who could never introduce the women he had relationships with to his friends because of the way he imagined they might judge her This, not incidentally, gave all the rest of us a powerful hint about how he judged our girlfriends but, and this is the important thing, it was a hint because we didn't sit around discussing these things. The importance difference is that men don't spend nearly as much time sitting around evaluating men or women as women do. Look up a typical male site on celebrity women and you will find something like Esquire's Women We Love, a site that singles out exceptionally attractive women. Do the same with women's sites and you will land on something like Go Fug Yourself, a site that spends most of its time mocking women for making bad clothing choices.

Of course, as I have been claiming all along, this is no surprise to anyone.  This is what women do, which is not to say that all women do it or that no men do but that this is a much more common trait amongst women than amongst men. Because it is.

Why? Any answer is going to be circular. The simple answer is that women and girls sit around socially establishing norms of behaviour because they have a deep need to know what the social norms of behaviour are. That's circular because it is the discussions that create the social norms in the first place.

You can see this most obviously with clothing. Right now we are just reaching what I suspect is the end of the fashion for skin-tight leggings. A woman can wear these right now and receive no criticism for doing so. If, however, a woman had appeared wearing such leggings in 2004, she would have been dismissed as a total exhibitionist slut for doing so. On the other hand, having your thong show above the waist of your low-waited pants was perfectly acceptable in 2004 and would be regarded as cheap and slutty now.

And you can see the next stage coming in that the most fashionable women are leaving leggings behind and moving to a softer, more-romantic look. The woman who still wears leggings a couple of years from now will be seen as desperate for attention. That is how "social policing" works. It requires a constantly shifting set of criteria because the social clique needs this to maintain its power. If, as the case with men, styles of fashion remained roughly the same year after year (despite a lot of effort on the part of the fashion industry to change this), then the cliques of women who do the social policing would lose all power.

It's interesting in this regard that the people doing the study chose to give promiscuous "Joan" twenty notches on her bedpost. To me, that suggests that standards of promiscuity have changed over the years because the researchers obviously felt they needed to go quite high*.

I'll end with a teaser for tomorrow. You might think that the problem with promiscuous "Joan" in the eyes of other women was that she was cheap or easy. You'd be wrong. Women saw her as lacking in "virtue" in the Aristotelian sense,

The study found that women—even women who were more promiscuous themselves—rated the Joan with 20 partners as less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who’d only boasted two.

Those are competencies of various sorts rather that what you might guess the case against "sluttiness", however defined, might be. And that is interesting because it might just line up with mens' attitudes. For men don't hate sluts, however much Amanda Hess wants to insist they do. They just don't want to be ion love with one.

The Cornell study itself didn’t rate male attitudes about promiscuous women (or vice versa), but as lead author Zhana Vrangalova told Science, that’s partly because “study after study has found that sexually permissive women are discriminated against by potential romantic partners.”

I started off talking about different standards of rationality and how behaviours that can seem irrational can, if we do a little detective work, turn out to be supremely rational. That is what I am going to suggest is the case with women's harsh assessment of promiscuous Joan in tomorrow's post.

The rest of this series:
Wednesday: The truth about slut-shaming.
Friday: Why women judge "sluts" negatively.



* To a point that is getting a little ridiculous.  If someone becomes sexually active between the ages of 16 and 20, to get to more than twenty partners by your early twenties is quite a pace. Most reliable statistics indicate that the vast majority of people will have fewer than ten sex partners in their entire lifetimes.

The truth about slut shaming

One of the worst things you can do in the modern world is to come up with a study that runs against the narrative. For example, hundreds of thousands of women took to the street in "slutwalks" a few years ago now so that must be because "slut-shaming" is something men do to oppress women. Right?

Well, no, of course not and anyone who has gone to high school should know that slut-shaming is primarily something women do to other women. But women can't be the problem. Men have to be the problem. (You will, of course, meet men who will condemn this or that woman for being "a slut" but it's almost always because they have some personal grievance, however fantastic, against her. It's primarily women who will sit around in a group talking about "what a slut Shelley is," even though they have no other reason to dislike her.)

Anyway, the study established that women don't want to be friends with promiscuous women. (Promiscuous defined here as having had twenty or more partners by your early twenties, which strikes me as a pretty good definition, although I would have said ten myself.) I don't think anyone who isn't completely absorbed in the feminist narrative will be surprised at that.

What might strike a few people as counter-intuitive is this:

Head researcher Zhana Vrangalova says: "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships – these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support."

The theory the researchers came up with was that women worried the social stigma of the promiscuity woman would rub off on them if they befriended her. That's probably not completely crazy but I suspect it misses something more profound.

Before we get to that, however, let's turn to men and see how they respond to promiscuous men.

Men's views, on the other hand, are less uniform – favoring the sexually permissive potential friend, the non-permissive one or showing no preference for either when asked to rate them on 10 different friendship attributes.

This is one of the reasons that men tend to think of themselves and other men as "rational", we tend to pride ourselves on judging each case based on the particular facts we think apply in that case.  In fact, you could just as easily argue that have a general policy towards everyone else, as women tend to do with regards to promiscuity, is equally rational. Either way what makes a behaviour rational is that it is consistent and can be explained in terms of some reason or reasons. Although the person doesn't have to have that reason in mind when they make the decision to be rational. The rationality behind actions (even our own actions) is often something we have to dig out.

What I find most significant, and no one else seems to have noticed this. is that promiscuous men respond to other promiscuous men in a similar way to that which promiscuous women respond to other promiscuous women. Which is to say, they didn't want to be friends with them. Unlike the case for promiscuous women, however, the researchers provided a reason why the men might feel that way,

Promiscuous men favored less sexually experienced men, however, if they viewed other promiscuous men as potentially interested in stealing their girlfriends.

Why wouldn't women act this way for the same reason? What are we to make of that? Is it crazy to think that women, especially promiscuous women, might worry about competition from other women? No, I don't think that's the whole explanation but I suspect it's part of it. I do know this: any time you meet a woman who is sometimes intensely jealous of other women, you can be relatively sure that she has "stolen" at least one man from another woman.

But why do I bring this up at all, you ask, if I don't think it's the explanation? I mention it because I think it points at the real reason; it points at the thing that doesn't fit the feminist narrative and that is that most people want a particular kind of relationship. They want:

1. A relationship based on trust and commitment and that implies monogamy.
2. And they want a relationship in which the man takes the lead sexually.

I know, I know, according to the feminist narrative they aren't supposed to want these things. But they do!

No, I can't explain it, at least not completely but I think there is lots of evidence that it is that way and I will discuss that the next two days.

The rest of this series:
Tomorrow: Why women sit around talking about the real or alleged promiscuity of other women.
Friday: Why women judge "sluts" negatively

An interesting link

There was a link to the article below on the Mad Men main site. The article is an evisceration of Elizabeth Gilbert. Someone at Mad Men thought it might spur people to make comparison's with Betty and Don Draper.

Is it fair? I say no. Not because it has it's facts wrong but because of the tone. Everything the post says about Gilbert is spot on but the author could have turned the anger down a notch.

On the other hand, it is an accurate representation of the way a lot of men now feel about women and divorce. If someone ran a poll of men on whether they agree with the paragraph below I suspect the numbers would be enough to give most women the chills.

In fact, divorce stats paint a clear picture to the contrary. In marriage, it is women who go stone-cold at the drop of a hat, turn off their empathy with no effort, and do extraordinarily cruel things to a spouse without a trace of remorse. Sure, men sometimes screw around, but they are usually conflicted and sorry when they do so. In my entire life, I have never – not even once – heard a woman express regret or contrition for betraying her husband or boyfriend, but I have heard many men do so.
(Read the whole thing here.)

Just recently I was writing about the perils of telling girls and women that they are morally superior beings. Elizabeth Gilbert's angry little book is a good example of this.

By the way, Elizabeth Gilbert's idea isn't even original. A few years earlier a woman named Laura Fraser wrote a book about a voyage of discovery after her divorce called An Italian Affair. She, however, actually deals with so profound ideas instead of lot of touchy-feely nonsense and, for the most part, does not trash her ex. And she didn't make nearly as much money out of it as Gilbert.