Willful incompetence

Sans Game, it is impossible for men like this British doctor to understand the firm and determined failure of women to have a realistic perspective on men, although Dr. Theodore Dalrymple makes a better stab at it than most:

My patient was intelligent but badly educated, as only products of the British educational system can be after 11 years of compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World War took place in the 1970s and could give me not a single correct historical date. I asked her whether she thought a young and violent burglar would have proved much of a companion. She admitted that he wouldn't, but said that he was the type she liked; besides which—in slight contradiction—all boys were the same.

I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery—that, as I knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends, unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days, I had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of, "Die, you bitch!"

"I can look after myself," said my 17-year-old.

"But men are stronger than women," I said. "When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage."

"That's a sexist thing to say," she replied.

A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular.

"But it's a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact," I said.

"It's sexist," she reiterated firmly.

A stubborn refusal to face inconvenient facts, no matter how obvious, now pervades our attitude toward relations between the sexes. An ideological filter of wishful thinking strains out anything we'd prefer not to acknowledge about these eternally difficult and contested relations, with predictably disastrous results.

I meet with this refusal everywhere, even among the nursing staff of my ward. Intelligent and capable, as decent and dedicated a group of people as I know, they seem, in the matter of judging the character of men, utterly, almost willfully, incompetent.

The women's incompetence is not almost willful, it is willful. They simply don't wish to admit to the reality because doing so would inhibit their ability to "have fun" and act on the basis of their sexual desires to the extent permitted by the current strictures of the local herd to which they belong. It's not very different than the case of the young man who drinks and drives too fast. He understands intellectually that he is taking a risk, but he denies the existence of the risk in order to permit his actions to be in harmony with his emotions.

This is why one need spare no sympathy for most women who are in "abusive" relationships. They knew perfectly well what they were getting into. They knowingly chose to take the risk in order to reap the benefits of a relationship with a dangerous man rather than forgo them in choosing a relationship with a man they found less exciting. The fact that they pretend otherwise only makes them dishonest, it doesn't make them innocent victims.

For those who feel sympathy and wish to help them anyhow, it must be understood that they cannot be helped on the basis of a false paradigm. To pretend that they are not actively seeking these relationships is playing into the willful incompetence and it should not be surprising that most such efforts to help these women fail. They are bound to fail because they are based on a false model of human behavior.

You can give a woman a CS degree

But you can't make her program. A woman in technology observes a dichotomy in the current push to get women more involved in programming:

When people talk about supporting women in tech, they look at Girls Who Code  and Black Girls Code, both of which I’m sure are very worthwhile programs. What troubles me, though, is the assumption that we need to focus only on young girls – in short, we, the oh-helpful ones, are the mentors and the solution to increase the representation of women in technology is 5 or 10 years out when these girls finish college or graduate school. WHAT ABOUT THE WOMEN WHO ARE HERE NOW?

If you are overlooking the women who are here now, what does that tell the girls you are supposedly bringing up to be the next generation of women in tech that you can overlook 15 years from now? Why do we hear about 16-year-old interns far more than women like me? If it is true, as the New York Times says, that in 2001-2 28% of computer science degrees went to women compared to the 10% or so now – where are those women from 12 years ago?

They dropped out. They dropped out because programming demands single-minded focus, mathematical skill, logic, and most of all, individual accountability. They dropped out because they didn't belong in the field and encouraging them to pursue it was doing them a serious career disservice. As a general rule, women don't like competitive jobs where they are held to an objective standard, particularly when they cannot easily pass off their work to others and still take credit for it.

Throw in the fact that male programmers tend to be competitive and socially graceless, which means that relatively few of them are inclined to do a woman's job for her in return for the well-practiced flash of a big smile and a few smug coos of appreciation, and it should be no surprise that even intelligent and well-trained women don't tend to last long in the industry.

(The stark contrast between the sweet expression presented when a woman is attempting to convince you to do her work for her and the rage-filled one that inadvertently appears when she hears you tell her to "do your own fucking job" can be hilarious.)

There were two female programmers at my first place of employment after college. One was attractive, athletic, married, and competent. She wasn't a star, but she calmly went about getting the job done. The other did literally nothing for two years. She never completed a single job, rotated from task to task on a regular basis, passed off her work onto others, and somehow managed to stay employed until her complete lack of productivity finally caught up to her.

Both women had CS degrees. I very much doubt the latter is still employed in any programming capacity.

This is why Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code will fail, just like every other women-in-technology initiative before it has failed. Eventually, all the training has to come to an end and the trainee has to go out and compete with the self-motivated young men who have been coding like banshees since they were in their early teens. And remember, these are smart women, so it is little wonder that they take one look at their prospects for competitive success and promptly go in for marketing, human resources, and management.

Programming is like writing. If you CAN be discouraged, you SHOULD be discouraged.

I think I see the problem

Michael Seville contemplates the intellectual equality of the sexes:

You can’t go on forever saying “The game’s not fair,” when the game has been played ten billion times, under a billion different circumstances; at least, if you are rational you cannot, unless you are prepared to say in just what way it is not fair… Just what is that factor, common to all or most past history, which has interfered with the exercise of the intellectual capacity of women?

Some people love just stringing together anecdotes: women were prevented from exercising their intellectual capacity by this obstacle in Periclean Athens, by that obstacle in Confucian China, by the other obstacle in seventeenth-century France, etc. But an equality-theorist must do more than this. He has to offer some definite explanation of why the intellectual capacity of women has so consistently met with obstacles it could not overcome, and his explanation must be one which is consistent with the equality-theory. It would obviously be no good, for example, if he were to say, “The main interfering factor has been the aggressiveness, sexual exclusiveness, and superior cunning of males.”

This suggestion, considered in itself, is by no means without merit: aggressiveness, sexual exclusiveness, and superior cunning are definite and detectable things, and I at least believe that they actually do operate in males, and do impede, to some extent, the intellectual performance of women. But of course the suggestion is not one which an equality-theorist can adopt, since to ascribe superior cunning to males is to contradict the very intellectual equality for which he contends.

Ockham's Razor suggests that the reason women are perceived to be intellectually inferior to men is that they are intellectually inferior to men. The fact that so many women cannot follow this train of thought tends to lend itself as further evidence in support of the idea.

The primary problem here is is that most people confuse intellectual inferiority with inferior value. This simply isn't the case; if nothing else, it should be obvious that the vast majority of women place superior sexual value on intellectually inferior men. The quarterback is more highly valued than the chess club champion. And young men often do the same; the cheerleader tends to be more highly valued than the valedictorian. So, why is it suddenly so upsetting when someone observes the obvious?

It is simply bizarre to claim that the sexes are equal in cognitive capacity. They are not, and the intellectual liberation of women and the vast increase in the numbers women receiving advanced education has resulted in precisely what one expect: absolutely nothing. Where is the vast flowering of human intellectual achievement we were promised by doubling the number of human geniuses being liberated from patriarchal repression and given free rein?

Well, we have 50 Shades of Grey. And Girls. So we have that going for our society.

After forty years of feminism, it should be stone cold obvious why women are intellectually inferior; the smarter a woman is, the less likely she is to have children for various reasons, including hypergamy. And our society is arguably breeding smart women out of existence faster than ever before in human history.

How, precisely, is that intelligent?

Don't accept neutering of yourself or others

Matt Walsh points to behavior that has become increasingly common in our generation:

I certainly can’t read their minds, and I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, all I know is that the husband couldn’t seem to utter a single phrase that wouldn’t provoke exaggerated eye-rolling from his wife.

She disagreed with everything he said.

She contradicted nearly every statement.

She even nagged him.

She brought up a “funny” story that made him out to be incompetent and foolish. He laughed, but he was embarrassed.

She was gutting him right in front of us. Emasculating him. Neutering him. Damaging him.

It was excruciating.

It was tragic.

It also was, or is becoming, pretty par-for-the-course. The respect deficiency in our culture has reached crisis levels.

Now, some of us are fortunate enough to have wives who understand how awful this sort of behavior makes them look to others. Some of us are fortunate have wives who simply wouldn't do this out of the decency of their own hearts, or perhaps even out of respect for their husbands.

But many men don't.

So, I have two pieces of advice. One is for the men whose wives behave like this. Gentlemen, life is too short. The sex isn't worth it. Don't put up with this. Don't permit anyone, much less your wife, to treat you this way. Call her out. When she nonsensically contradicts you, crush the contradiction and make her look like a fool. When she tries to play belittlement off as a joke, tell her "it's not fucking funny to me."

The other is for the men who witness it. Gentlemen, don't sit there in uncomfortable silence. That sort of woman views silence as acquiescence to her bullying. Call her out. Ask her if her behavior is appropriate. Ask her if she isn't embarrassed to treat her husband like that. Alternatively, agree and amplify. Take the scorn she is pouring on her husband and add to it with apparent glee.

In either case, remember that women are MORTIFIED at being called out in front of the herd. It is their kryptonite. So use it when they get out of line.

Chivalry is dead, ladies

You killed it. It's dead. You can vote and you can work and you can divorce now, so shut the hell up and stop expecting men to protect you, provide for you, or even bothering to lift a finger for you. You wanted "equality" and you got it. So, stop whining about it already:

Has anyone ever helped pop my bag up into the overhead compartment? Nope. Have I seen any other woman helped? Nope. This week, an engineer in his 50s just stood there in the aisle, his hands clasped, as I played Olympic weight-lifting with my suitcase right in front of him. Just stood there, looking intently at the sticky carpet. Probably afraid to chip a nail or something.

Has the women's liberation movement really scared the bejesus out of men this much? When did it become chivalrous to steadfastly look away and not bother to help? If a 6am flight is anything to go by, you'd think the concept of a gentleman was well and truly dead.

I promise you, I won't get angry or defensive or give you attitude, I'll in fact be super-grateful and flash you an extra-big smile despite the lack of sleep.

Which brings me to the final dismount. Even before the seatbelt sign goes off, the jackets get put on, the suitcases get territorially placed in the aisle, and the competitive rush to get off that plane begins.

Of course, I'm left to struggle with my own bag. It's not that I expect help, it's just the harshness of it all I find a bit surprising.

I do not help single women in any circumstance in which I wouldn't help a man. I do always help mothers with young children, which can be a little amusing on those occasions when you find yourself standing on a train with a stroller and a baby while the mother is on the platform wrestling with her other kids, very much hoping that the train doesn't pull away before she gets on board.

But I don't help other men stow their luggage, so why on Earth would I help some perfectly healthy young woman who professes to be not only strong and independent, but my equal?

As Instapundit correctly noted: "Chivalry was a system, which imposed behavioral obligations on women as well as on men. Women were happy to cast their obligations off, yet seem perennially surprised that men haven’t stayed exactly the same."

Ray Rice is the perfect image of equality in action. Based on the police summons of both the Baltimore running back and his fiance, his fiance hit him and Rice promptly hit her right back. Is that what feminists wanted? Because that's what they got, and they damn well deserve it too.

Ideologies have consequences.

If you're fat, it's your fault

This should suffice to shut up all the people who attempt to argue that fatties are suffering from anything but a surfeit of food and a dearth of exercise:

A new study suggests that obese women get just one hour of vigorous exercise a year, while obese men don't do much better at fewer than four hours. The findings startled the researchers, whose main focus was finding better ways to measure how much exercise people get.

"They're living their lives from one chair to another," said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "We didn't realize we were that sedentary. There are some people who are vigorously active, but it's offset by the huge number of individuals who are inactive."

The researchers found that the average obese woman gets the equivalent of about one hour of exercise a year. For men, it's 3.6 hours a year.

"The data was there, but no one looked at it and parsed it the way we did," Archer said. In the big picture, "there is a great deal of variability; some are moving probably a fair amount. But the vast majority [of people] are not moving at all."

It's not that hard. Seriously, it's just not. I lead the sedentary life of a lion. For 23 hours of the day, I do nothing at all. Not a damn thing. And for one hour a day, I run, I lift, or I bike. That's all it takes. 4.2 percent of your time. 4.2 percent.

Divorce greed

Some women have to learn the hard way that marriage isn't a lottery. But from the male perspective, it's nice to know that some ugly stories have happy endings:

It is a decision she surely regrets For Mel Gibxon's ex Oksana Grigorieva has filed for bankruptcy less than four years after knocking back a $15m child custody settlement offer from the Braveheart star.

Her biggest problem is her legal bills, for she owes five lawyers a mammoth $250,000. During her bitter custody battle with the Mad Max actor she sacked more than 40 lawyers. At the end of it all the Oscar-winning star was ordered to pay just $750,000 to Grigorieva, which he is stumping up in installments.

The 2011 decision came a year after she turned down a rumoured $15m offer of settlement.

Regardless of whether one is talking about divorce or a business matter, a reasonable settlement is almost always wiser than going to court. Of course, convincing a greedy gold-digger that she'll do better to accept the settlement may be impossible; some people are always going to shoot for the Moon no matter how low the odds are.