Tolkien on intersexual relations

JRR Tolkien explores the mistaken avenue of chivalry and the backwards nature of pedestalization.

There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition still strong, though as a product of Christendom (yet by no means the same as Christian ethics) the times are inimical to it. It idealizes 'love' — and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, 'service', courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity – of the old-fashioned 'his divinity' = the woman he loves – the object or reason of noble conduct. This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion (as long ago it was, producing much of that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God's way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion) it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman. Yet I still think it has dangers. It is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly 'theocentric'. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. (One result is for observation of the actual to make the young man turn cynical.) To forget their desires, needs and temptations. It inculcates exaggerated notions of 'true love', as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose. (One result of that is to make young folk look for a 'love' that will keep them always nice and warm in a cold world, without any effort of theirs; and the incurably romantic go on looking even in the squalor of the divorce courts).

Women really have not much part in all this, though they may use the language of romantic love, since it is so entwined in all our idioms. The sexual impulse makes women (naturally when unspoiled more unselfish) very sympathetic and understanding, or specially desirous of being so (or seeming so), and very ready to enter into all the interests, as far as they can, from ties to religion, of the young man they are attracted to. No intent necessarily to deceive: sheer instinct: the servient, helpmeet instinct, generously warmed by desire and young blood. Under this impulse they can in fact often achieve very remarkable insight and understanding, even of things otherwise outside their natural range: for it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male. Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him. But this is their natural avenue to love. Before the young woman knows where she is (and while the romantic young man, when he exists, is still sighing) she may actually 'fall in love'. Which for her, an unspoiled natural young woman, means that she wants to become the mother of the young man's children, even if that desire is by no means clear to her or explicit.

The cost of N=1

As if the marriage failure rate for women with moderate sexual experience weren't bad enough, now genetic science has revived the possibility that merely being a non-virgin may be sufficient to taint a woman's subsequent genetic line with her first lover's DNA:

Telegony is the belief that the sire first mated to a female will have an influence upon some of that female's later offspring by another male. Although the reality of telegony was acknowledged by such authorities as Darwin, Spencer, Romanes and many experienced breeders, it has been met with scepticism because of Weismann's unfavourable comments and negative results obtained in several test experiments. In this article, alleged cases of telegony are provided. A search of the literature of cell biology and biochemistry reveals several plausible mechanisms that may form the basis for telegony. These involve the penetration of spermatozoa into the somatic tissues of the female genital tract, the incorporation of the DNA released by spermatozoa into maternal somatic cells, the presence of foetal DNA in maternal blood, as well as sperm RNA-mediated non-Mendelian inheritance of epigenetic changes.

This could have severe societal repercussions if telegony turns out to have a solid basis in genetic science. It should be fairly easy to confirm too, by comparing the DNA of a woman's children to that of the man to whom she lost her virginity but was not the father of her children. It would certainly renew the value of a woman's virginity.

I suspect there will be tremendous pressure to not explore these hypotheses due to those potential repercussions, but the concept is too fundamentally interesting and important to remain unexplored for long.

Lena Durham's fake rape

Apparently she isn't getting enough attention for her show that no one watches anymore, so Lena Durham belatedly recalls being "raped" in college:

'I think I had just felt that something was very wrong,' she said. 'I had felt that something had happened and I remember thinking "Can I ever be the same?"

'I was at a party, drunk, waiting for attention -- and somehow that felt like such a shameful starting-off point that I didn't know how to reconcile what had come after. But I knew that it wasn't right and I knew in some way that this experience had been forced on me.'

But she did have a good friend to talk with about the experience: 'When I shared it with my best friend and she used the term "you were raped" at the time, I sort of laughed at her and thought like, you know, what an ambulance-chasing drama queen,' Lena said.

'[I] later felt this incredible gratitude for her for giving me that, giving me that gift of that kind of certainty that she had,' she continued. 'I think that a lot of times when I felt at my lowest about it, those words in some way actually lifted me up because I felt that somebody was justifying the pain of my experience.'

The remainder of the actress' college life was marked by the trauma: 'I didn't really go to anymore parties. I just stopped going… I basically didn't have a drink for the rest of college… I really removed myself from that world. I don't know if I would've told you at the time, "Oh, I'm doing this to keep myself safe," but obviously in hindsight… I basically removed myself from the social world as I'd known it.'

How much would you want to bet against anyone who attended college at the same time she did being able to explode her retroactive narrative with ease? Notice that Dunham doesn't name her "rapist" or bother contacting the authorities, because she's obviously just trying to generate press for her new book.

What a repulsive creature, both inside and out. The troubling thing is that she may indeed be the female voice of her generation, which is enough to make Sharia look good in comparison.

The gamma factory

John Cleese, of the notoriously bad decision-making with regards to marriage, traces back his well-known problems with women to his mother:

“I don't want to get too dark and depressing but she was emotionally difficult. She was a tyrant.” In an extract of his new autobiography, So, Anyway, published in the magazine, he wrote: “It cannot be a coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women.

"My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years."

Cleese married his first wife, Fawlty Towers co-star Connie Booth in 1968. The marriage lasted ten years and the couple divorced in 1978. He married his second wife, American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981; and his third wife, American psychotherapist Alyce Eichelberger in 1992. The comedian married his fourth wife, Jennifer Wade – who is 31 years his junior – in 2012.

Notice the connection between "ingrained habit of walking on eggshells" and his multiple failed marriages. The lesson: never be conflict-avoidant with a woman. If she's looking for a fight, then give her one. Better yet, give her one that will make her conflict-avoidant in the future. The old martial arts rule applies: start nothing, finish everything.

I've noticed over the years that many women repeatedly test a man's willingness to put up with her bad behavior. They will ratchet it up slowly, almost undetectably, until one day the man's friends suddenly notice that she never speaks to him without her voice either raised in anger or dripping with contempt.

The solution for nipping this in the bud is pretty simple. Up the ante every time. She resorts to contempt, you reply with contempt and vulgarity. (This is especially effective in public; women seem to find it humiliating when men openly swear at them in front of other women.) A calm "I don't give a fuck what you think" or ominous "watch your fucking tone now" will usually deflate the assumed Queen Bee attitude with alacrity. If she decides to raise her voice, you raise yours right back; most women instinctively cower before a man who is addressing them at volume with some bass in his voice. This is basic Skinnerian programming, which means it is also advisable to be sure that she's being positively incentivized when she brings things to your attention in an appropriate manner.

In other words, if she asks you to do something politely, then do it right away, don't put it off until she's irritated and nagging. Make the effort, don't be lazy.

Another option is to simply end the evening if you're out in public and she gets obnoxious. Refuse to be seen with a woman who is openly disrespectful. If she can't be civil, then you're simply not going to take her out into civilization. Women are PERFECTLY capable of controlling themselves, the primary reason so many of them don't is because the men in their lives don't expect them to do so or hold them accountable for their behavior.

The injustice system in action

#GamerGate continues as the notorious gamewhore Zoe Quinn continues to spread her self-serving lies, this time in court:

ZQ filed and was granted an ex parte 209a order against Eron in mid September and on Tuesday it was extended for a year. Note that this is a physical abuse prevention order. It is meant to protect victims of physical abuse, not victims of internet harassment (you want a 258e for that).

The reason you haven't heard anything about the case is that the order contains a written in PRIOR RESTRAINT ON FREE SPEECH, which is absolutely absurd (ZQ reported his participation in this KoP stream to the police as a violation of the ex-parte order, so now he also has to have a hearing for that). I however, have no such restraint, and thus it is entirely within my rights to discuss public court hearings and public court documents. And should any overly litigious public figures with questionable ethical principles think about changing that, I'd recommend they take a look at Nilan v. Valenti first.

My memory is mediocre, so take my version of events with a grain of salt.

Her: Eron posted personal information about me online. As a result, people online have threatened me with physical harm. Eron continues to engage with the mob that is harassing me with no regard to my personal safety. Specifically, Eron threatened to release more information on his gofundme page.

Eron's attorney: I will speak on my client's behalf, and then acquiesce to my client. Zoe Quinn is a public figure and criticism of public figures is protected free speech (with the specific example of criticism of her interaction with TFYC). ZQ was already receiving harassment before Eron's blog post. Eron has never threatened ZQ with violence and has never encouraged anyone to threaten ZQ with violence. The zoepost was a story about Eron's life experiences and did not even include ZQ's real name.

Eron: [Did not get to speak at all because the judge cut his attorney off to ask more questions of the plaintiff]

The judge didn't really say much and started writing half way through the arguments.

• He did not allow Eron's attorney to cross examine the plaintiff
• He did not allow admission of Eron's evidence
• He refused the Attorney's first amendment objection to the gag clause
• He mentioned nothing about his reasoning besides a vague reference to ‘intimidation’.
• Order extended until x/x/2015

The US court system is an utter joke. It is, quite literally, an Injustice System and if the trend continues, vigilante violence will eventually become the only way to pursue actual justice in the future. It also demonstrates the importance of not warning people or giving them a chance to mend their ways, because doing so will only be spun as a "threat".

Alpha Mail: Sex in orbit

Roger with six "r"s points out that orbiting is an effective sexual strategy, it's merely not an efficient one:

Orbiting/white-knighting is not just an occasional behavior of weak beta males. It is one of the key sexual strategies of the human male. It works. These guys will get laid now and again.

This is absolutely true. I have a friend who once dedicated three years to orbiting the same girl until finally she broke down and went out with him; they lasted less than half as long as a couple as he had spent orbiting. And this was a successful outcome!

The point isn't that orbiting never works, but rather, that it comes at a tremendous opportunity cost. I can't even imagine how many opportunities of equal quality my friend let pass because he was so fixated on that one woman, but it was probably over a dozen. Orbiting is the exact opposite of the abundance mentality; no man who subscribes to the concept of the Girl Tree will tend to find himself caught in orbit for very long.

Science discovers orbiters

Once more, science is catching up to Game theory:

Half of all women have a ‘Plan B’ - in the shape of a man whose arms they can run into if their current relationship turns sour.

A study carried out among 1,000 women found a substantial percentage have managed to keep another man waiting patiently in the wings should they end up single. And, worryingly, married women are more likely have a Plan B in the background than those who are merely in a relationship.

It also emerged the Plan B is likely to be an ‘old friend’ who has always had feelings for the woman in question.

This isn't problematic or worrisome in the slightest. It's no more surprising than the "news" that Alpha males have a virtual stable of women with whom they will probably get involved in some capacity in the event that they find themselves single. Indeed, one reason that women tend to be much less likely to leave higher-status men is due to Dread Game implicit in his status; she knows that if she walks, it will be for good because he'll have a replacement, and quite often a younger, prettier one, in a matter of weeks, if not days.

If your wife or girlfriend doesn't have a few delta and gamma orbiters, she probably isn't very attractive.