Sunday, December 30, 2012

The futility of fat acceptance

A fat man losing weight explains why there is no point in attempting to make the unacceptable acceptable or the undesirable desirable through propaganda:
[T]he upshot is that I realized that in my day-to-day life, when I’m interacting in person with other people, I’ve always — always — had a subconscious awareness that I was fat, and that being fat was disgusting, so therefore I was disgusting. I suspect this may have had some impact on my confidence in social situations.

Of course, I always resented that, and always resented the efforts to shame me into losing weight, which is one reason why I hate calling this change in my eating habits a “diet”.
What this reveals is that all the "fat acceptance" talk is a lie.  It is pure propaganda.  The fat people know, much better than the slender people, that fat is disgusting.  They feel it.  They live it.  To talk around it and pretend otherwise is a lie and it really doesn't fool anyone.

Now, does this mean getting in a fatty's face and telling her to stop being such a disgusting pig?  I don't know, maybe.  I don't know the best way to help a food addict kick the habit.  The only thing that is certain is that whatever approach is currently being utilized in the USA really isn't working.

Friday, December 28, 2012

Alpha Mail: too hot for New York

JG informs us that Alpha Game is too hot and spicy for the tender, innocent, and easily influenced minds of the employees of the State of New York.
Alpha Game blog is trash according to the web filter utilized on State of New York computers. I attempted to go AG only to find it has been blocked under the same category as pornography even though there isn't much explicit discussion on "sex" to be found there:

Content blocked by your organization
Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Sex.
URL: http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/
I am definitely citing this the next time I am informed that I need to loosen up and get a little more with it by some urban hipster.  Fortunately, the employees of the SEC will still be able to visit here, assuming they can tear themselves away from their regular porn.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

The accidental imperative

Dalrock has an excellent post on the female imperative and the passive-aggressive manner in which women who won't admit to it will nevertheless ferociously defend it:
The seeming passivity of women in the process of rewriting social norms to the exclusive benefit of women is what is throwing Sunshine Mary off.  She can easily test this by coaching one of the boys to suggest that the girls show some reciprocal form of deference to the boys during a future celebration.  Perhaps the girls should serve the boys refreshments during their next celebration, as Anonymous Reader suggested:  

One way to damp down the entitlement princess training just received by the boys / young men deferring to the girls / young women would be to cause the girls and young women to defer in a different way to the boys and young men. For example, at some future time you might consider having the AH girls serve the Boy Scout boys, perhaps by seating the boys at table and having the girls bring trays to the tables.

If this is suggested the lie of the girls’ passivity will come out in force.  It won’t come out in the form of a logical reaction, even if on the surface it appears to start that way.  For example, they are likely to bristle at the idea of having their moxie damaged by deferring to the boys, and make a feminist argument for equality.  However, if this is simply about equality one could then propose that instead of serving the boys the girls have the boys go first through the treat line, and agree to take turns at this from here on.

At this point the reality of the feminine imperative will become evident, because while the girls were seemingly passive when everything was going their way, any deviance from this will be met with emotional outbursts.  Whoever proposes either true equality or simple reciprocity will become the object of great irrational anger, and at this point the passivity turns to aggression.  While the girls (and their mothers) won’t know why they are so angry, they will know that whoever proposed such a thing is a terrible person.
The artificial and non-accidental nature of the female imperative is inadvertently revealed by female attempts to police it, quite often with the help of their usual white knights.  What I want to point out in particular is the way that emotion, particularly anger, is the most reliable weapon in the male arsenal; an angry woman can almost always be provoked into volunteering unsolicited the sort of secrets she would otherwise endure torture to avoid revealing.  This isn't a new revelation; Agatha Christie even mentioned it in one of her Poirot novels.

Encouraging the passive-aggressive to reveal their underlying desire to control and dictate the actions of others can be tremendously revelatory.  Just keep in mind that you may be in for the same sort of shock that men who are forced to recognize the nonexistence of the pedestal upon which they'd been placing women for all these years must endure.  Seeing the black heart and long red fangs of what you'd always assumed was a gentle sheep can be more than a little startling, but any time you see irrational anger arise on the part of a perfectly reasonable request or suggestion, you can be relatively sure there is a font of aggressiveness hidden beneath the apparent passivity.

Getting back to the imperative, Dalrock's post was particularly insightful in observing how the female imperative is transformational; this effect can be seen in everything from medieval chivalry to the current NFL.

"The feminine imperative took the original idea of chivalry – a code of honor amongst men – and attached to it a code of acceptable conduct for men in relating to women. In doing so it effectively remodeled chivalry to benefit the feminine and limiting the power men held over them by enlisting other men to participate in regulating it."

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

An excursion into the rhetorical

This Twitter exchange sheds further light on the difference between the dialectically and the rhetorically minded, particularly with regards to the dialectically challenged among the latter.  Below is an excerpt, the whole exchange is posted on Vox Popoli.  For the purposes of this discussion, ignore the subject matter and focus solely on the various dialectical and rhetorical devices utilized by the two primary parties in the discussion.
voxday: Don't be stupid. You can't compare absolute numbers between nations of vastly different sizes. Look at per capita....

mushadamama: The numbers I've given ARE per 100k population. Perhaps the stupid one is one who doesn't read fine print....

voxday: No, you stupid, stupid woman, they are not. The USA is #4 in absolute terms, #27 per capita....

mushadamama: Yes, my chart is total gun murders @ 9369. Does not count accidents or suicides. US ranks 4th! My crime rate chart was per 100k.

mushadamama: Your chart, however, uses some kind of fuzzy math to come up with that ridiculous #. I can only assume it is more of a probability.
For the record, the mysterious "fuzzy math" used to produce "more of a probability" was the following equation: 9,369 divided by 311,591,917, multiplied by 100,000.  Now, if you're a woman, think about how often you dig yourself into similar positions and how many women of your acquaintance you can confirm to be capable of producing a similarly remarkable argument.  Then perhaps you might understand why men tend to regard many, if not most, women as being fundamentally irrational creatures, incapable of logic and ineducable by reason, math, or even the most basic facts.  It should also underline the supreme importance of not behaving in this manner on those occasions when you feels tempted to do so.

Keep in mind that saying "well, I was really upset" justifies these occasional lapses into complete unreason about as effectively as a man saying "well, I was really horny" would mitigate his occasional rapes of the babysitter.  It may explain them, to a certain extent, but it is unlikely to change his fundamental opinion of your character and capabilities.

Men, keep this exchange in mind when you are attempting to convince a woman of something.  Once you have successfully established that she is not, for whatever reason, capable of rationally discussing a specific matter in the circumstances, understand that there is literally nothing within the realm of the dialectic that you can do to convince her to change her position.  However, this does not mean she cannot be convinced, only that she will have to be convinced in a rhetorical manner, using a rhetorical device.

What are the rhetorical devices?  As always, the instruments that can be used most successfully on another individual are those preferred by the individual himself.  We all give away our weaknesses by our attempts to exploit the weaknesses of others.  The scientist who goes right to academic credentials can be easily trumped by an appeal to superior credentials.  The woman who quickly resorts to name-calling is susceptible to being called names.  The statistician can be won over with statistics.  It is the Bill Belichick strategy: attack the strength of the defense.

The discussion begins with a feint, a false statistical appeal.  But the seeds of its rhetorical nature are already there in the first woman's use of sarcasm, which in this particular example is a passive-aggressive device.  By the second post by the second woman, it is already clear that this is going to be a rhetorical discourse due to the  irrelevant questions aimed to discredit the other side.  Note especially her attempt to shut down the debate by the use of declarative statements; she shows her sensitivity to the suggestion of her stupidity by referring to it and ineptly attempting to turn the suggestion around.

Notice too that after being repeatedly hammered on that point, both overtly and implicitly, she begins her retreat into her tortoise shell, but not before revealing that she is entirely impervious to the very facts to which she falsely appealed in the first place.  Now, some less sophisticated observers will argue that it is a mistake to come down hard on the rhetorical, that if the reasoned argument is disguised in a sweet manner it will be more likely to prove persuasive.  But this is simply not the case, the whole problem is that the dialectically challenged are fundamentally incapable of following reason, either because their cognitive capacities are insufficient or because their emotional attachment to their position is too strong.

As I've pointed out in the past, dialectic is always preferable to rhetoric because it is more objective and tends to be more honest.  But unless the dialectically capable are going to treat those limited to rhetoric as mindless animals and place no more significance on the noises they make than we do upon the barking of dogs, we have no ethical option except to speak to them in their rhetorical language.  This may at times appear cruel, it may even be cruel.  But it is necessary, if we are to grant them any intellectual value as human beings.

Those limited to the rhetorical level of discourse are the Rabbit People.  They cannot be reasoned with any more successfully than one can cure a rabid dog of rabies through discussion.  All one can reasonably do is mitigate the damage they do to those around them by putting them down as soon as they show themselves to be a carrier.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Holidays: Ignore the experts

This is the Alpha Game Holiday Survival Guide part III.  Regarding gifts, here are several "helpful" suggestions offered by the experts on women in the mainstream media:
  • Anything that suggests that the recipient is anything less than perfect will go down worse than Frankie Boyle at a kid's Christmas party.
  •  Never buy a woman an iron for Christmas unless you want to get hit over the head with it.
  •  Guys, this is 50 shades of WRONG. Don't even think about it - or anything else tenuously linked to 50 Shades of Grey for that matter.
  • Nothing says "I don't really think that much of you" quite like a handbag by 'Louis Vilton'. If you can't stretch to a designer bag, better to opt for the (genuine) perfume.
Translation: don't buy a woman anything that might be sexy, affordable, useful, improving, or popular.  Only gifts that are rare, expensive, and useless will be appreciated.  Except, as we already know, buying the perfect gift is the worst thing you can possibly do since it will create an unwanted sense of obligation.

It's fascinating, too, that apparently physical violence is deemed a reasonable response to an unwanted gift.  I wonder what the reaction would be if it were suggested that a woman should not buy a man a tie unless she wants to get strangled by it?  Does anyone suppose that the average man wants yet another tie any more than the average woman wants a new iron?

So, ignore the experts.  If she said she wanted X at some point during the year, then buy X.  Don't overthink these things and stop striving for the nonexistent perfect gift.  Remember that presents don't fix relationship problems.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Holidays: postprandial labor

This is the Alpha Game Holiday Survival Guide part II.

The holidays are a time of tremendous stress for women.  They feel a pressure to perform that is driven by the media, their own expectations, and their awareness that they will be judged on their performance by other women.  After all, how is a woman supposed to compete with the Martha Stewart clones who are baking special cinnamon cakes in the shape of each of their family member's faces using spice they personally flew to Sri Lanka to harvest by hand?

Throw in the decorating, the wrapping, the cookies, the meals, the entertaining, and the prospect of having to put on a smiling face for family members they don't particularly enjoy being around, and it should be no surprise that the holiday spirit can prove burdensome to women.  But there is one thing self-respecting men can do to ease that burden, if only a little, and make the holidays more happy for everyone, since there are few things that will spoil them more thoroughly than everyone having to tiptoe around a woman boiling over with holiday rage just waiting to explode.

Don't bother offering to help with anything.  You're not going to be able to do anything her way or to her standards.  Besides, she's going to be judged on her performance, so even if you are a competent cook or gift wrapper, any assistance on your part will not count and thereby is rendered invalid on its face.

But someone has to do the dishes and this is an opportunity at which you should leap.  First of all, your tackling clean-up lets a woman kick back and actually enjoy the meal she's prepared with everyone, without feeling the burden of clean-up looming over her shoulder.  Having gone to the effort to provide such a feast, shouldn't she be able to enjoy it in peace?  Second, it permits you to politely escape the postprandial conversation that, unlike most conversations of the holiday season, necessarily involves the "participation" of both sexes seated at the table, which in practice usually involves the women repeatedly interrupting each other while the men sit in silence wondering when they can escape the performance art and turn on the game.

(Do you think I'm exaggerating?  This Christmas, I challenge you to time the male silence if there are at least three women at the table.  The record thus far stands at 15 minutes of complete silence on the part of the men.)

This is a device I learned from that man among men, the Marine's Marine, my grandfather.  I used to marvel at his selfless generosity, and the way after every holiday meal, he would quietly excuse himself and disappear into the kitchen.  By the time everyone had left the table, the dishwasher would be running, the kitchen would be spotless, and everyone was happy and well-loaded with alcohol.  Including, of course, my grandfather.  When I asked him why he felt he needed to do the dishes, when at his age he deserved to take it easy, he laughed and pointed out that while he'd been happily cleaning up, watching the football game, and polishing off the rum, I'd been sitting there for 20 minutes, nursing my wine glass, staring into space, and listening to people ramble on about other people I couldn't identify if my life depended on it.

The man was a genius.  I've since added my own spin to it, which is first making sure that everyone's wine glass is full.  If you do it right, you'll have everything done before anyone even notices you've been missing from the audience.  Women seldom appreciate it, perhaps because they realize on some level that you're doing it for yourself, or perhaps because it makes you look too subservient to others and thereby lowering their own perceived value, but that's irrelevant.  Everyone is happy, everyone wins.  Be a little Christmas miracle.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Holidays: the gift-denigration ritual

This is the Alpha Game Holiday Survival Guide part I.

A significant amount of male stress over the Christmas season can be eliminated by keeping in mind one simple fact: women do not feel gratitude in the same way men do.  This is why they so often receive gifts in a manner that men find irritatingly ungrateful.

How many times have you seen this happen on Christmas?  A woman receives a gift from someone, anyone, and immediately begins to explain what is wrong with it, why it isn't exactly what she wanted, or that she really would have preferred something else.  If she's polite, she'll preface this with a broadly smiling "thank you".  If she's not, she'll launch directly into what men tend to hear as the "here is how you fucked up even though you bought me precisely what I said I wanted in November" speech.  Every single man I know has found himself, at one time or another, thinking "Merry fucking Christmas, why the hell do I even bother?"

It is understandable that men tend to find this superficially ungracious response to be dispiriting, if not soul-killing, which is why most men absolutely hate, hate, hate buying anything for women at any time.  Those guys you see out on December 24th aren't necessarily idiots or procrastinators, (although they may be), they may simply be putting off what they know from experience to be a painful and humiliating experience as long as possible.

However, it doesn't have to be that way.  Enduring the ritual female response to receiving gifts is a lot easier to bear once a man understands that women see gifts as being, first and foremost, obligations.  Think about how a woman responds whenever another woman gives her a gift.  In most cases, she immediately starts talking about how the gift wasn't necessary and promises that she will somehow do something for the gift-giver in the future, presumably because she knows if she doesn't respond in kind, she loses a point in the eternal game of woman versus all women on the planet.

Think about that.  What man ever responds to an unsolicited gift by saying that it wasn't necessary?  Of course it's not necessary, says the male mind, that's why they call it a gift and not a debt!  Why would anyone even imagine that I HAD to buy it?  No one pointed a gun at me and said: give her that there tweed coat or die!  But that's logic, and we're dealing with feelings here.

The promise to repay the newly imposed obligation is one tactic, but it is one that isn't applicable on formal gift-giving occasions such as Christmas and birthdays.  Hence the reliance on the alternative tactic, which is to verbally reduce the perceived value of the gift of to nothing, thereby eliminating the sense of obligation that the woman feels.  I posit this as the source of the ritual gift-denigration; once a man recognizes this pattern at work, it can be tremendously amusing to watch a woman desperately try to find a way to somehow disqualify a gift so that it doesn't count as an obligation on her.  In fact, the truly generous man will always buy women gifts that he knows are imperfect in some way; this will make it easier for her to disqualify the gift and thereby make it possible for her to enjoy it.

It is important to understand that this behavior has absolutely nothing to do with you or your choice of gift.  It doesn't even have anything to do with her per se!  The gift-denigration reaction is sub-rational and instinctual; most women are appalled and embarrassed if they ever come to realize that they are habitually behaving in what appears to be an ungracious manner.  So relax, don't let it faze you, don't let it irritate you, and by all means, don't try to argue with her when she starts nonsensically babbling that although the Porsche you bought her is her favorite color and she really loves it and she doesn't know how to drive stick, she really wanted a manual transmission because this would have been the perfect opportunity to learn how to drive one.

(Of course, if you had bought her the car with a manual transmission, she would have complained that you clearly don't know anything about her, since she doesn't even know how to drive stick.  Women can always find a means of disqualifying a gift; they can be geniuses in this regard.)

The good news is that the fact she's denigrating a gift means that she feels a sense of obligation from receiving it.  So, the ideal response is to smile and say "I'm glad you like it."

Friday, December 21, 2012

Reject the lies

A reformed involuntary celibate points out the need to reject the lies that women tell men over and over and over again:
Feminism taught me a lot throughout the 80′s and 90′s. It taught me not to question women’s sexual choices. It taught me to treat them with deference and respect. It taught me not to accost them for sex aggressively, but to treat them as human beings. It taught me that i MUST control my shallow, greedy, dangerous impulses but allow a woman the right to indulge in hers. It taught me to be nice for the sake of being nice and not expecting sex in return. To give all my emotional and platonic ability and not dare ask for intimacy in return.

It taught me everything i needed to be creepy, unattractive and doormat ready.

And it was re-enforced by EVERY woman i talked to.

What i SHOULD have been told is “hit the gym, build some muscle, guys with muscles are hawt” – “get braces now, you’ll smile a lot and we love guys with big smiles” – “go see a dermatologist, we love sexy skin on a man” – “cut off your long hair, you don’t look like a rocker, you look like a hippy. crew cuts are sexy, you’d look good in one” – “learn a skill and become good in it. become confident in it. we love confidence”

What i got instead was a constant drumming of “you’re such a good guy, just wait, someone else is out there for you” – “you don’t have to change a thing, you’re a wonderful person, just keep being yourself” – “you don’t need muscles, only jerks care about having big muscles” – “there’s nothing wrong with you, you just need to be a bit more confident that’s all” – “confidence comes from the inside, not from the outside“

Patent fucking lies all of them.
"It is better to marry than burn" writes the Apostle Paul.  There are men given the gift of celibacy.  But even the Bible points out this is a gift, and one that is not given to most men.  Women cannot tell men what they find attractive because they do not know themselves.  They only know what is considered socially acceptable to find attractive.  That is why men should not listen to them concerning these matters.  It is important to understand this.  The consequences of not doing so can be brutal.

Don't take my word for it.  Find a woman who is attracted to a man you know.  Make a list of his most attractive qualities.  Ask her what she finds attractive about that man, then compare her list with yours.  In many cases, what she says she finds attractive will not be what is actually attractive about him.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Depravity and dominance

This news certainly puts an appallingly sinister new spin on one of my favorite videos:
Ian Watkins, 35, of Pontypridd, appeared before Cardiff magistrates facing six charges relating to sexual offences against two young children.  He faces a charge of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child under 13 and four offences relating to possession and distribution of indecent images of children.... A 24-year-old woman has been charged with the same offences as Mr Watkins, while a 20-year-old woman is charged with five of the same offences but not conspiracy to rape.
Setting aside all the caveats about innocent until proven guilty and so forth, as well as the usual moral posturing, what I find interesting about this is not that a reasonably successful male rock star should prove to be a complete sexual deviant, but rather, the way in which a presumably dominant man is able to coerce women into his moral degeneracy.

It's not unusual for a liberal woman to become more conservative as a result of marrying a Republican husband and it's almost a cliche for a good conservative girl to become a bad girl as a result of involvement with a bad boy.  But, if we assume that this conspiracy was both real and driven by the dark desires of the man in question, it is remarkable that female malleability should be observed to extend even to the outer limits of depravity.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Playing the long game

An interesting aspect on a female relationship tactic that more or less corresponds with Game theory:
For years, she argued, family therapists and counsellors had encouraged the wronged wife to blame herself (and, by default, the “other woman” to console herself), with the belief that men stray only when they are trapped in unhappy marriages. This, Shirley Eskapa maintained, was nonsense. Men have a built-in predisposition to wander, and a happy marriage is no guarantee that they will not succumb to erotic stimuli from outside. Whether this ends in the breakdown of a marriage, she believed, depends to a great extent on the cheated wife....

Some wives, she found, became so stricken by anger, jealousy or guilt that they unwittingly helped their rivals. Many women, however, managed to manipulate the situation to win back the errant spouse, either by pretending not to notice and waiting for the “crisis of ecstasy” to burn itself out, or by mounting a subtle campaign of calculated revenge, with the aim of “diminishing the Other Woman without diminishing the man”.

In one case a wife arrived at her husband’s love-nest, where she left their four young children and badly-behaved cross-bred Alsatian, along with a note containing elaborate instructions for their care and the declaration: “I’m going to Los Angeles. Like you, I am following a thing bigger than me.” After three weeks, the other woman was screaming like a harridan at the children, the dog and the husband. “She surrendered unconditionally,” Shirley Eskapa recalled. The husband duly returned to the marital home, not merely repentant, but supremely grateful. 
This is an interesting illustration of one of Roissy's more controversial assertions, which is that the effects of male infidelity are different than the effects of female infidelity.  The subsequent relationship effects, mind you, not the level of moral offense.  The point is not that men get some sort of free pass for cheating, only that a woman stands a pretty good chance of keeping her husband if she wants to and is willing to play her cards correctly.  Obviously, not every woman would want to do so, but the option does appear to exist in at least some cases.

Men, on the other hand, are pretty much toast if things reach that point because the female inclination to wander is usually predicated on the death of her attraction to her husband.

Monday, December 17, 2012

The bar is so very low

This one is for those who doubt the socio-sexual hierarchy.  Now, if you still can't understand the way that voluntary male submission to female expectations kills attraction after reading this, there really isn't any hope for you.
I need feminism because I broke my friend’s heart by courtship-zoning her when she just needed shelter from the storm, and then adding to that storm when she was understandably unsure and overwhelmed. I alone am responsible for the ensuing craziness and friendships lost. I need feminism because the so-called “men’s rights” movement seeks to trivialize experiences like hers and feed men’s entitled rage, whereas feminism seeks to dismantle the very patriarchy from which I internalized the toxic attitudes that made me an asshole in the first place.
Men like this make it so massively easy for those who have taken the metaphorical Red Pill of Game, it's almost sad.  You don't have to be a High Alpha or a Supersigma to clean up when women are used to being "courtship-zoned" by these sad specimens of male humanity.  One can't reasonably call them men.

But I need feminism too.  I need feminism because I need humor in my life and feminism never ceases to supply an ample quantity of it.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

It's her tragedy

Doorstop makes an perceptive observation in the comments:
I've noticed number of women emoting with variations of "Heartsick and crying my eyes out, and just want to hold (children's names) and never let them go." Another example (albeit harmless) of female solipsism? 
Precisely.  This is further evidence that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that female solipsism cannot take and make about the woman who stands at the center of life, the universe, and everything.

It can actually become rather amusing to watch the clash of solipsistic universes, as women - and a number of men as well, don't think they don't - posture in an attempt to one-up each other concerning who feels the tragedy more closely.  This is why you'll see all sorts of comments concerning how the events of yesterday struck so close to home because their ex-boyfriend's cousin once had a niece who attended a school that played a softball game against the junior high into which the elementary school concerned feeds.

There are few things the solipsistic love to do more than wallow in the emotional pain of others and pretend it is their own.  This explains a good deal of the nature of female-oriented television.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Intersexual relations and shootings

I don't know what the connection between intersexual relations and the recent school shooting in Connecticut is, but given that the shooter killed his mother in her classroom as well as her students, it is almost certain that they are involved in some capacity.  They were definitely involved in the recent murder-suicide in Kansas City, where the paternity of the NFL player's girlfriend's child was apparently in doubt.

It's easy to sneer at people because they're losers in the sexual marketplace, because they were rejected, because they get cheated on, because they were blue pill chumps burned by the opposite sex.  But it is a terrible, terrible mistake, because sometimes, the losers decide to share their pain with the world.  I'm not condoning their actions in any way or minimizing the gravity of them, merely noting the observable fact.  Pain feeds on pain. Pain often breeds more pain.

It is customary to posture and declare that the killer must have been insane or a coward.  This is both silly and dishonest.  Cowards are easy to deter.  The insane are seldom stable enough to plan their actions successfully. But sane individuals whose pain is so great they would rather die than live are very, very dangerous and nearly impossible to deter.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The incompetence of third wave fantasy

SF writer John C. Wright takes my previous point concerning the literary need for what is customarily termed sexism and runs with it, introducing the term 'retrophobia' to describe the modernist disease that has infested modern fantasy, ruined most of it, and reduced the genre as a whole to an even less serious, more derivative literary ghetto barely more literate than the third-rate television dramas derived from it.
Modern schoolboys, for a variety of reasons, none of which bear too close an examination for anyone with a queasy stomach, are far more poorly educated than their fathers, and far more indoctrinated into a particularly parochial and past-hating view, which I hereby dub ‘retrophobia.’

The particular quality of retrophobia is that everything about the past is despised. This includes the  remote past, say, AD 50, as well as the near past, say AD 1950.  Some things are despised in  a condescending but admiring way, as one might look upon a child, as they are looked upon as the larval forms of enlightenment which will burgeon into the glorious present day, such as the career of Julian the Apostate, and others are despised in a hostile way, as one would look upon an enemy, or a disease which, after long bouts of fever, one has finally thrown aside, such as the witchhunts of the Reformation Era. The sole exception to the first category is that if the advance toward enlightenment was done by Christians for explicitly Christian reasons, it is either to be ignored, such as the abolition of slavery in the Middle Ages, or is to be used as an example of villainy or absurdity, as the Crusades, in which case its fate is to be not only ignored but misrepresented.

Now, logically, one cannot write fantasy for an audience suffering retrophobia. The painted savages of the Sioux and Apache do not exist in the imagination of the retrophobes, only the kindly Indians, now miscalled Native Americans, such as are portrayed in DANCES WITH WOLVES and Disney’s POCAHONTAS. The modern schoolboy has never read a Norse saga, but he may have seen HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON. He has certainly never read any story where a Christian is thrown to the lions by the Romans, but he knows about gladiatorial games from Russell Crowe. Gladiatorial fighting is like a Pokemon match, except with humans!

The second generation of fantasy was not based on history, it was based on Howard and Tolkien and Lovecraft and other authors of the first generation. Those were the images and tropes alive in the imaginations of the audience. Michael Moorcock and Fritz Lieber are still drawing, to some degree, from first generation sources, but Kane of Old Mar is John Carter, and Fafhrd the Barbarian is Conan. Roger Zelanzy inverts the tropes of fantasy in his Amber books by having his main character be a film noir antihero straight out of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and having him thrust into a multiverse-wide Elizabethan revenge drama.

The third generation, I can say very little about, since it was about this time that I lost interest in fantasy, or it lost interest in me. There are occasional exceptions, like THE SORCERER’S HOUSE by Gene Wolfe, or the “Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher, but, for the most part, I cannot slog through something like the “Wheel of Time” series by Robert Jordon or THE DEED OF PAKSENARRION by Elizabeth Moon, and not because there is anything wrong with the writing or even the world building  (heaven forbid I criticize authors more skilled than I at my chosen vocation!) but only because the cultural and social assumptions and axioms of their worlds are too close the modern axioms, where the assumption has no reason why it could exist. It breaks the spell of the suspension of disbelief.... the Third Wave of Fantasy, as far as I can tell from a distance, do not have imaginations filled with images from real history, as I do, but instead are filled with an earlier generation of fantasy images, Eowyn dressed as Dernhelm riding to her doom, or Red Sonya dressed in a chainmail bikini.
This theory of literary retrophobia explains why so many mediocre writers like Terry Brooks, JK Rowling, and John Scalzi, and even genuinely entertaining writers such as Charles Stross, exhibit such a powerful inclination for rewriting the works of earlier, more original writers, not only mimicking their styles, but downright strip-mining their works for ideas, settings, and even basic plots.

For example, I enjoyed The Sword of Shannara when I was in high school, for example.  Yes, it was a mediocre imitation of Tolkien, but it had its moments and it was a preferable alternative to re-reading The Silmarillion for the third time.  But after struggling through The Elfstones of Shannara and only making it about a chapter into the third book in the series, I gave it up.  I tried again about twenty years later and didn't even make it that far.

The reason, I belatedly realized, was that without the benefit of working from Tolkien's template, Brooks simply didn't know how to write a fantasy tale capable of holding the reader's interest.  He's not a bad writer; his Demon books weren't bad.  But he simply didn't have any of the deep roots in history or myth that the great genre writers of the past did, and the shallowness crippled the quality of his storytelling.

Despite her vast sales success, it must be remembered that Rowling is a largely derivative writer of Wright's third generation.  She simply took the juvenile English boarding school, of which P.G. Wodehouse was a past master, and inserted conventional fantasy magic into it.  There is a reason Harry Potter was rejected so many times by so many publishers; it isn't a very good book and Rowling isn't a very good writer except for her ability to create fairly memorable characters.  She is entirely incapable of building a coherent world, as the rules of Quidditch alone will suffice to demonstrate.  None of that mattered when it came to selling vast quantities of her books, of course, but then, I have yet to hear anyone claim that Katie Price is one of the greatest living authors by virtue of having published more bestsellers than Rowling, including no less than four autobiographies by the age of 34.  The increasingly inept nature of the  Harry Potter series became more and more evident over time, until by the end, the books were virtually unreadable.  This was no surprise to me; I expected as much after slogging through the third book.  As those who read George Martin have learned, the larger the story grows, the more difficult it is for the author to keep under control.

Now, I always enjoy laughing at the antics of John Scalzi, who has been a vocal opponent of ever mine since some of the screechers in the SFWA were having a hissy fit about this WND column in 2005. But that's not the issue here, more important is the way the SFWA president is, almost literally, the poster boy for the inevitable consequences of retrophobia.  Even more than Rowling, he is a quintessential third generation writer, as his works are pale shadows of Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, H. Beam Piper, and now Star Trek, of all things.  He is a stunt writer; attempting to provide clever spin on X is his basic modus operandi.  He doesn't even try to write anything that isn't derivative, presumably because his hopelessly PC ideology and audience combines to prevent him from being able to draw upon any ideas or events from the past that will not pass muster with all of the various activist groups and their highly prejudiced - and often competing - views of history before which he must genuflect.

But whereas Scalzi's mediocrity means that his inability to write original material is no great loss to the genre, what is more troubling is the way retrophobia cripples the careers of genuinely creative talents such as Charles Stross and even Neal Stephenson.  Now, I admire both writers, I own most of their books in hardcover, and I consider them to be among the finest writers of our generation.  I consider myself fortunate if I ever happen to write novels that are as good as I believe many of theirs to be.

And yet, their works are hollow at the core.  There is a pointlessness at the heart of their works that tends to undermine their creative visions, a moral vaccuum that leaves even the most admiring reader feeling somewhat cheated.  No amount of literary pyrotechnics or creative brilliance can entirely obscure this.  They are merely very good and very entertaining when they should be great.  That may be why the works of China Mieville, for all his servile Marxian incoherence, retains a certain depth and power that is more remniscent of the second generation writers than his peers; his moral sense may be warped and he may hide his forbidden influences under a thick veil of New Weird, but he is still connected to the living heart of the genre, pumping life through its mystic connections between the writer and the true myths of history.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Alpha Mail: calling out Diogenes

Diogenes, aka Matt, continues to press his eloquent and insightful case that Alpha Game is an echo chamber and doesn't at all engage in the usual Rabbit People name-calling and attempts to shut down debate:
Is the puppeteer's hand so far up your ass that you can't pause to discern the difference between expression to discover and promote the truth and expression to curry favor with certain purse-mouthed audiences? Are you only familiar with the latter because that is what motivates you? Get out of my sight, you prickly little lifeless urchin.
Anyhow, because I am always happy to take on all comers in the interest of heterotopic discourse, I'm quite content to give Matt the opportunity to take me on concerning one of his apparent areas of disagreement with me.  Looking at his voluminous comments on the most recent post, it appears the debate could concern any of the following:

  1. Precisely how far is my hand up various commenters' asses?
  2. Has my egomania driven other writers and dissenters away?
  3. Is my egomania cartoonish?
  4. Is Matt genuinely "Diogenes with a lamp, searching for good opposition"?
  5. Does Matt truly care not a whit for the esteem of combox warriors and self-regarding bloggers?
  6. Was Athor, in the very moment he wrote his comment, encouraging a "sensitivity-driven" discourse?
  7. Does Athor not understand that, in the very moment he wrote his comment, you were encouraging a "sensitivity-driven" discourse?
  8. Is any man who uses what "anyone else" thinks as an argument a man not engaged in the argument but rather its superficial side effects?
  9. Is this forum stale?
  10. Would no man of merit mention a group to which he belongs? 
  11. Did I create an entire lexicon for purpose of dismissing dissent?
  12. Do people of no humility and utterly convinced of their automatic rectitude regard dissent as dangerous to their pristine (and preposterous) image?
  13. Would dissenters regularly comment here if I did not shut them down?
  14. If you aren't producing intelligent backlash does that prove you aren't producing an argument of any substance?

I invite Matt to select one of these important topics that he has so thoughtfully brought to our attention so that we can then engage in the very heterotopic discourse that he denies exists here concerning the matter.  I'd also be interested in seeing what sort of dissent he believes should have been expected from the recent posts here.

Who among the readers, one wonders, did he expect to defend the literary merits of EL James's bestselling masterpieces of Mommy Porn?  Who here is a prospective champion of female cognitive integrity or wishes to argue for the illegitimacy of the female perspective?  Is there no one to assert that sexism is NOT a literary necessity in the historical and fantasy genres?

Monday, December 10, 2012

Intellectual Game

Even in intellectual discourse, the rules of Game apply.  Alastair's Adversaria considers the difference between male and female forms of debate and explains why the female form is intellectually crippling and prone to dishonesty and logical absurdities:
This ‘heterotopic discourse’ makes possible far more spirited challenges to opposing positions, hyperbolic and histrionic rhetoric designed to provoke response and test the mettle of one’s own and the opposing position, assertive presentations of one’s beliefs that are less concerned to present a full-orbed picture than to advocate firmly for a particular perspective and to invite and spark discussion from other perspectives.

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue. Those familiar with such discourse will be accustomed to hyperbolic and unbalanced expressions. They will appreciate that such expressions are seldom intended as the sole and final word on the matter by those who utter them, but as a forceful presentation of one particular dimension of or perspective upon the truth, always presuming the existence of counterbalancing perspectives that have no less merit and veracity.

In contrast, a sensitivity-driven discourse lacks the playfulness of heterotopic discourse, taking every expression of difference very seriously. Rhetorical assertiveness and impishness, the calculated provocations of ritual verbal combat, linguistic playfulness, and calculated exaggeration are inexplicable to it as it lacks the detachment, levity, and humour within which these things make sense. On the other hand, those accustomed to combative discourse may fail to appreciate when they are hurting those incapable of responding to it.

Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement, sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect. Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be sharply attacked. Unable to sustain true conversation, stale monologues will take its place. Constantly pressed towards conformity, indoctrination can take the place of open intellectual inquiry. Fracturing into hostile dogmatic cliques takes the place of vigorous and illuminating dialogue between contrasting perspectives. Lacking the capacity for open dialogue, such groups will exert their influence on wider society primarily by means of political agitation.

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.

Granted immunity from this process, sensitivity-driven and conflict-averse contexts seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers. Even the good ideas that they produce tend to be blunt and very weak in places. Even with highly intelligent people within them, conflict-averse groups are poor at thinking. Bad arguments go unchecked and good insights go unhoned and underdeveloped. This would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing. 
This is precisely why smart women like Susan Walsh are correct to be reluctant to permit their sensitive female readers, who have been steeped in an educational culture of sensitivity-driven discourse, the "safe haven" of criticism-free conversation they desire.  It is also why those who habitually engage in sensitivity-driven discourse, of which John Scalzi's blog is a prime example, are uniformly so inept whenever it comes to arguing.

The Rabbit People have three weapons and three weapons only.  The first is to demand submission to their terms by virtue of the sensitivity imperative.  If their interlocutor is unwilling to do that, they quickly move to the name-calling and the inevitable psychological analyses, again in the hopes of the interlocutor's submission.  (This, by the way, is where most people crumble and permit themselves to be sidetracked into defending themselves against the charges that they are a raciss, sexiss, homophobiss rapiss.)  Their final weapon is exclusion, which can be seen in the way feminized atheists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, (unlike Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens), shun debate with potentially competent opponents, and in the way gamma bloggers like Scalzi habitually attempt to attack people and arguments without so much as identifying them or even providing links to the arguments they are attacking.

This is why men should never permit those who are inclined towards sensitivity-driven discourse a foothold in their families and organizations.  The Rabbit People instinct is to attempt to surround themselves with other rabbits as fast as possible and drive out the scary heterotopics.  This is why you'll often see rabbits at HUS begging for crackdowns on other commenters, while the rabbits at Whatever harbor genuine affection for the aptly-named Mallet of Loving Correction.  Although they claim to value dialogue and seek discourse, nothing could be further from the truth.  They actually want to dictate their mindless consensus and have it accepted uncritically by everyone; they fear intellectual competition.

And it is why I provide sensitivity-driven discourse no respect whatsoever. I don't care if you were raped every day of the year and twice on Mondays by the family cat, after which your father killed you with a knife and danced on your grave. Your personal victimization, assuming it genuinely existed in the first place, grants you neither moral authority nor intellectual credibility, much less any form of veto on what others are permitted to think, say, or feel.  Alpha Game and Vox Popoli will always be strongholds of heterotopic discourse; think of them collectively as the Wild Hunt for Rabbit People.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Why you suck with women

Badger explains it for the STEM guys in the comments:
I think this is a big reason STEM guys are predisposed to be extremely bad with women. They (we TBH) live in a logically-scaffolded world where words, phrases and ideas have very concrete and stable meanings from day to day and environment to environment. It seems that is just not at all the way most women's worlds work, and we resent the guys who are good with women because we see them as having no cognitive integrity, having nothing of which we value. It's also a reason Game can be so dramatically effective for STEM-type guys - once you make them realize how different it is, and train them to swim in that emotional swamp, they can become very good at it because they are by definition very skilled and disciplined.
The key phrase is "nothing of which we value".  Despite the differing contexts, this is no different than the mistake that the Marxians make with the labor theory of value.  All value is subjective.  This is both a logically deduced and empirically observed fact.

Women don't value cognitive integrity.  Nor do most men.  So, it is not only self-defeating, it is illogical to behave in a manner assuming they do.  (See what I did there, STEM guy?  Stings a little, doesn't it. BAZINGA!) The point is that it is not only a complete waste of time to expect women to appreciate cognitive integrity, let alone be attracted to it, it is foolish to expect it from them.

Furthermore, and this is vital, their perspective is entirely legitimate in terms of human action. Moral integrity is a moral issue, cognitive integrity is not. While one may wish to utilize cognitive integrity as a display of dominance, (after all, it is child's play to make someone look a fool when they are willing to openly contradict themselves on the basis of their current emotional state), one should not feel bound to it when communicating with anyone, male or female, who neither respects nor values it.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

The dark pleasures of pig shit

The authoress of 50 Shades of Grey takes exception to the label of Mommy Porn.  A modicum of hilarity ensues:
“The difference between the way male and female fantasy is explored – it’s interesting. Look at male fantasies: Lord of the Rings, Batman, The Avengers. It’s lauded. Anything written by a woman, like Twilight, my huge inspiration, is derided. All female fantasy is derided. It’s an insight into how misogynist the world is.

“Take the phrase 'mommy porn’. It’s one of the most misogynist things I’ve ever heard in my life. It is derogatory!” She bangs the table for emphasis. “How dare they? It’s just a book, for god’s sake. A love story in which people have sex – and they do do that.
The difference between The Lord of the Rings and Twilight is that the former is a literary masterpiece of the English language and the latter is a ludicrous travesty.  The reason so much female fantasy is derided is because so much of is blatantly derivative and the very little of it that isn't sucks.  Very few female writers pursue excellence, and most of those who do are rejected by female readers.

Tanith Lee is one of the most beautiful wordsmiths in SF/F.  Her Secret Books of Paradys are fantastic.  Theresa Edgerton's novels have more magic in every chapter than there is in all of JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, and EL James combined.  But do women read them?  No, most of them don't.  They'd rather read complete drivel of the sort that James writes.  Or worse, Catherine Asaro's award-winning Strong Independent Women in Space novels.  That's fine, so long as it doesn't scare the children, horses, or literate people.  I'm not saying such readers should be taken out and shot or anything, but expecting respect for wallowing naked in literary pig shit and deriving sexual pleasure from the experience is a little rich.

James's attempt to pretend she is not a pornographer is downright risible.  It's like listening to Steven Hirsch angrily shout: How dare they? "Jenna Bangs the Universe" is just a film, for god's sake!  A love story in which people have sex!"

Someone needs to explain to the woman, presumably in short sentences consisting of monosyllabic words, that the reason her work is denigrated as Mommy Porn is not because it is schlock female fantasy, but because it is pornography for middle-aged women.  As evidence, I would point to the fact that Twilight is rightly viewed with contempt as the literary equivalent of teenybopper tunes, but it is seldom referred to as Mommy Porn.

Friday, December 7, 2012

"Sexism" is a literary necessity

What passes for "sexism" in the eyes of the equalitarians is absolutely necessary in the historical genre, even in the historical fantasy genre.  Somehow, Dan Wohl manages to completely miss the vital role that verisimilitude plays in historical fiction at The Mary Sue.
I think Game of Thrones is quite successful when it comes to portraying interesting, complicated female characters, and a good many of them, especially in its second season. You could even say that it’s impressive that George R. R. Martin, not to mention the actresses who play them, have managed to make characters like Lady Catelyn, Arya, Daenerys, and the awesome Brienne of Tarth as compelling as they are considering they’re members of a fictional society that is designed to minimize women’s power over the world and themselves. Plenty of less talented people have designed such societies and ended up with female characters that are accordingly marginalized.

What I question is the purpose of creating an imaginary civilization to be this way in the first place. I agree with Becky Chambers when she says that if female characters are pushed to the sidelines in a video game, “‘that’s just how it is in that world’ is not good enough.” I’d say “that’s just how it was in the real historical setting this is based on” is not good enough either—and I don’t see much beyond that when it comes to most sexism in fantasy.

In my opinion this applies to all historical fantasy, including that which turns the “history” dial up a lot higher than Game of Thrones does.
Being the author of a newly published epic fantasy that relies quite heavily on Roman history, (for those AG readers who don't read VP, my new novel, A THRONE OF BONES is now available on Amazon, so do feel free to support AG by picking up a copy), I have given this matter a bit more thought than most.

In Selenoth, human women have even less power over the world and themselves than they do in Westeros.  This is because in Roman society, women had one primary role, which was to produce heirs for the noble families and soldiers for the legions.  And they benefited greatly from being kept to that role, since Rome became vastly wealthy and featured lifespans that were not again witnessed until the last 50 years of the modern scientific era.

By contrast, elven women have considerable autonomy and their societies are demographically dying as a result.  Their long lives and powerful magic help mitigate this, to a degree, but the historical trend is readily apparent to Man and Elf alike.

The problem with what Wohl advocates is that by putting modern views on sexual roles and intersexual relations into the minds, mouths, and worse, structures of an imaginary historical society, it destroys the very structural foundations that make the society historical and the dramatic storylines credible - in some cases, even possible.  It's problem similar to the one faced by secular writers, who wish to simultaneously eliminate religion from their fictional medieval societies, and yet retain the dramatic conflict created by the divine right of kings.  However, it is more severe because the sexual aspect touches upon the most concrete basis of every society: its ability to sustain itself through the propagation of its members.

The "sexism" of which Wohl and many of his commenters complain isn't cultural, it is simply the logical and inevitable consequences of biological and martial imperatives.  It can't possibly be cultural, because the division of male and female roles has been observed in nearly every historical culture; modern equalitarianism is not only a myth, it is a myth made barely credible only by the combination the illusion of societal wealth, technological advancement, and the imposition of relentless propaganda from an early age.  Even so, the imperatives of reality puncture that myth as soon as one stops to consider it.

Take "the awesome Brienne of Tarth", who I found to be simultaneously one of the saddest and most ridiculous characters in A Song of Ice and Fire.  Setting aside the sheer absurdity of her existence; any woman that big would be so slow that the Kingslayer could chop her into bits wielding his sword with his left foot, never mind his left hand.  (We have to excuse Martin this common blunder; he's clearly no athlete and has probably never flattened a female black belt or even punched one in the face.)  Now suppose that Cersei was cut from the Brienne mode.  Let's make just one simple change in favor of the modern equalitarian perspective.  Instead of being a conniving bitch working within the confines of a traditional female role, she's grown up to be a Strong, Independent Warrior Woman every bit as skilled with the sword as her twin and every bit as uninterested in propagating the species in the customary manner.

First, she doesn't marry Robert.  So, no alliance between Baratheon and Lannister.  With two childless children, Tywin's dynastic ambitions now rest on... Tyrion the Dwarf.  He is now concerned with finding an heir for his House, not seating his grandchildren on the throne.  We also lose all of the plot lines related to Cersei's children, so the sadistic relationship between Prince Joffrey and Sansa Stark is gone, as well as the protective one between Sandor Clegane and Sansa.  So too is the entire storyline in Dorne as well as the Dornese machinations with regards to Tommen.

No one cares about the nature of unmarried cat lady Cersei's unusual closeness with her twin anymore, so Jaimie needn't bother throwing Bran Stark from the window.  The conflict between Lannister and Stark doesn't ever erupt; in fact, since no one thinks Jamie's bastard is Robert's heir, no one poisons Jon Arryn, Ned Stark never goes south to King's Landing to serve as Robert's Hand, and neither King Robert nor Jamie and Cersei's incestuous escapades ever come within a hundred miles of Winterfell.

Notice how just changing a single woman from a medieval mother to a modern warrior woman would totally eviscerate the entire series and eliminate its raison d'etre.  Cersei would have to be one astonishingly compelling warrior woman to provide a storyline capable of compensating for all of the intertwining storylines that her equalitarian independence requires sacrificing.  And this specific example serves as a sound analogy for what attempting to remove the historical roles from women will do to most of the drama presently found in literature.

Do you want massive battles between civilized cultures?  Then most women had better be at home raising large families capable of providing the men for the armies and the societal wealth to support them.  Do you want dynastic conflict?  Then you need mothers married to powerful men producing those dynasties.  Do you seek the dramatic tension of forbidden love?  Then someone had better possess the authority to credibly forbid it.

The assertion may seem a little extreme at first, but if you contemplate the matter, it should rapidly become obvious that the insertion of modern equalitarianism into quasi-medieval fantasy is less credible and more dramatically devastating than giving the occasional knight an M16A4 assault rifle.  The assault rifle is merely ridiculous whereas the equalitarianism undermines the logical basis for the vast majority of most historical conflict.  And while there are ways to work around these issues, (the knight with the assault rifle is a time traveler, strong independent warrior women drop large litters of children by the roadside that are gathered by good-hearted monks and mature in six months), the point is that if they are not addressed in an intellectually competent matter - and they usually aren't - the result is doomed to be an incoherent, illogical mess that will have to be very well-written to even pass for mediocre.

One commenter, seemingly reasonable, states: "The way I see it – if I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief enough to believe in dragons, then I’m pretty sure it can extend to equal positions for female characters."

That sounds superficially credible, but it really isn't.  The absence of dragons is not significant to our lives today.  If they appeared tomorrow in their conventional fantasy form, most of our lives would be little different.  Intersexual relations are central, on the other hand, hence the interest in this and other Game blogs.  The difference can be seen in the way in which those inferior writers who blithely ignore the unavoidable consequences of "equal positions for female characters" refuse to address them in anything approaching a sensible way.  If an author wants warrior women and sizable societies, why not have her women simply drop children like puppies who can fend for themselves after a month?  Because that small change from observable biological norms would too severely violate the necessary suspension of disbelief, even for readers who are observably stupid enough to fail to realize that a medieval-era society featuring strong, independent, and equal women is unsustainable and would be wiped out in less than three generations.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Do you support women working?

Then, it logically follows that you also support more domestic violence.  It is Science:
Intimate partner violence is two times more likely to occur in two income households, compared to those where only one partner works, according to a new study.... The study found that more than 60 percent of women in two-income couples reported victimization, while only 30 percent of women reported victimization in cases when only the male partner was employed.
Why do you hate women?  Why?  Naturally, the researchers sail off into airy theories of female empowerment through work and concomitant male insecurity, but the fact of the matter is that if society wants to reduce domestic violence, female employment should be discouraged.

At this point, one has to seriously wonder about the sanity of anyone who actively supports encouraging women to pursue careers rather than family life.  In addition to being less likely to marry, breed, or be happy, a career will also cause a woman to die earlier, get divorced, get cheated on, have fatter, fewer, and less healthy children, and make her twice as likely to experience domestic violence.

I have the impression these statistics about the downside of female employment are seldom cited by high school guidance counselors.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Two different languages

Badger works through the difference between the male version of the "normal" man and the female version.  Ironically, the difference is actually greater than one typically sees between different languages like English and Italian:
Long story short, a “normal” guy is “an alpha who will play the beta game when I want him to.” A dude who is not deficient in some category she deems essential to her life path...Remember that despite being the ostensible “choosers” of the sexual marketplace, women view the men who pursue them as a mirror to their own value – it’s a compliment when a high-value man makes moves on you (even though he may be only angling for sex), it’s a scary proposition when a wimpy beta guy thinks you’re a good match for him because he may be right.
The lesson is this: don't be normal.  Be better than normal.  Be more of a bastard than normal.  Almost anything is better than nice and normal.  Remember, if a woman laments that she can't meet a "nice, normal guy", that is probably about the only thing you can be certain that she doesn't actually want.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Steel on target!

One has to admire an author who understands her audience so well: His to Dominate 01 - Spanked by the Billionaire by Ava Joy.

I can't help but notice the book isn't called Treated Well by the Nice Man, the first in the hot-and-heaving romance series, A Series of Mutually Respectful Relationships.