Why I Am Not a Feminist. Part n+3: Men Will Always Be Boys

Incels, single men, and philanders have been catcalling women since birds learned to sing.  Women have been ignoring them since then if they are not interested.  Some women take a catcall as a complement and respond with a non-inviting flirt move.  Some women may actually check out the catcaller to see if he might be interesting and if so make an inviting flirt move.  She may even look up and smile.  This is behavior that can be observed in all sexual creatures.  

 The campaign claiming that this demeans women is totally worthless.  Women are sex objects.  So are men.   But whatever attracts his interest the man must make his interest known to the strange woman in order to have any chance of meeting her at all.  Women are expected to be more subtle, but if she sees a stranger that may be a desirable sex toy or a sugar daddy she will certainly find a way to make it known.

 "If a man stops looking lustfully at a woman, bury him he is dead."  The feminist insistence that there is something wrong with a man who appreciates the physical differences in the women he meets when women are flaunting those differences in every encounter are not only making feminism look ridiculous but expecting men to not be male mammals.

There must be limits. It used to be that there were universal social signals that were respected and enforced by both genders.  A man at a bar who touched a woman who had just turned her back to him risked anything from a physical attack by some other man, to ostracism, to somebody of either gender to loudly commenting "Leave her alone, go jack off in your own back yard."  These signals seem to be still evolving in this more permissive and equal opportunity "Hook-up" culture, but among reasonable people seem to be known and agreed to.  The rape culture is fighting back, but then rapists were never reasonable people.  One can't help but wonder if the wolf crying in the first paragraph has not decreased sensitivity to actual abuse.     

Why I Am Not a Feminist. Part n +4: No Action on Women's Work

Feminism seems to be unconcerned about women and men doing "women's work" other than insisting that they have non-gendered titles. They are too busy trying to get equal pay in "men's jobs" to pay any attention at all to getting equal pay in "women's jobs"

• The caretakers: Nurses, Physician Assistants, teachers, child care workers, etc. 
• Doctors in family practice, pediatrics, and similar. 
• Servers and retail workers.
• Interns and secretaries. 

They all have more flexible hours and generally shorter work weeks that allow time for people to be: Stay at home moms that get their children to school, go to PTA and school board meetings, get them to practice and lessons, in short making sure that the next generation becomes useful citizens.

They also have universally shitty pay plans that insure that a man that wants to support a stay-at-home mom will choose "men's jobs" that pay more and demand more:  more hours, less flexibility in scheduling and location choice, and frequent short notice time away from home. 

Women who chose "men's jobs" and to be a parent must have a partner to share in being mom in exchange for her being dad as needed. Much of the joint income will be used to contract those housekeeping and child care jobs that have less parenting associated with them.   

Why I Am Not a Feminist. Part n +5: Breedig is Sinful

Perhaps I am not up to date on modern feminism and am locked in the mommy wars of the late 20th century, but I have yet to find many feminists of either gender that are not permanently physically and philosophically non-reproductive.  They seem to have traded the benefits of active sexuality and material success for the bonding necessary for parenting. 

Once they have achieved the good 'prick job' and the reproductive drive is satisfied with casual sex they seem to have settled for delegating the breeding to others less successful and therefore less able to provide the necessities for the next generation of leaders in any occupations let alone the 'prick jobs.'  While I do not object to any human breeding, the cream will rise from any population; I still want to scream at a well bonded couple with a successful female partner "Knock her up, humanity needs her genes."  As Heinlein noted, "Nobody owns his genes, he is merely their custodian."  Successful homosexual bonded couples solve the problem by having or adopting children.  I have heard of one lesbian couple who worked out an arrangement with a gay couple to have children naturally with both two dads and two moms.  Similar to a shared custody agreement, although at the time impossible to formalize. 

One of the issues feminists' apparently still have with Heinlein is that all of his intelligent, strong, competent, successful women were breeders.  They actively searched out intelligent, strong, competent, successful men and got pregnant as soon as possible.  Even most of the juveniles had strong female characters that were scheming to be breeders.  One would think feminists would celebrate conservation of the genes of such women, but it seems not to be the case either in fiction or in real life.  

Toxic Masculinity

https://t.co/DddqnZtP67

Toxic masculinity teaches that men cannot assert their own manhood absent sex with a woman that they alone possess

Being brought up male in a few tweets.  Storified by miniver.

Not much I can add, but this tweetstorm is a must read for all males in especially dads of male children.  Sports must not be the only acceptable outlet for the male need for human physical contact other than sex, spouse abuse, or rape.  

 5/10/16

Heinlein's Women and Their Pricks.

If the universe has any purpose more important than topping the woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I’ve never heard of it. - Lazarus Long - Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein 1973.

Lazarus Long was a prick.  A prick with an uncommon respect for and admiration of competent women for his time, but as Galahad noted "...he has remained canalized by the primitive culture he was brought up in." Not surprising as Heinlein was canalized by the same primitive culture.  Woodie Smith 1912, Heinlein 7/7/7 (1907.)  In Christian America where men were men and women were baby breeders. Feminism was on the not to distant horizon, with some closet feminists trying to break the Kinder, Küche, Kirche track for women.  But until the mid-20th century and reliable contraception a working mother was of necessity rather than choice and "proper" mothers were expected to stay at home until the youngest child was in Kindergarten which effectively eliminated a career in a well paid profession. The options were volunteer work, teaching and service occupations.  

The early feminists tacitly accepted this culture, and advocated non-breeding for professional women.  At worst, a long delayed first and generally only child long after becoming established in a career.  Women who chose to breed in their 20s and still fight the misogyny of most professions were viewed by feminists as outlyers and not "real feminists."  The men who supported their choice of career and parent, were occasionally labled "enablers" of a dysfunctional choice for their wives.  Never mind that they too payed the price of parenting in their careers, less than women due to privilege but nevertheless choices had to be made that limited career opportunities.  But this mind set still lingers in the feminists who despise Heinlein for writing about women who intend to be mothers among other things.  



The problem feminists have with Heinlein women seems to be that all those intelligent, competent women were interested in propagating  their genotype and realized that an intelligent, competent man was a necessary adjunct in that endeavor.  Since Heinlein men are basically pricks one must appeal to the prick to get the genes. 

Make no mistake.  According to the prevailing misogynic social ethos of Heinlein's formative years, especially the military ethos, all his male characters are pricks.  See The Number of Beast where the pricks are going to go gallivanting around the multiverse while the ladies stay in Safe Harbor to have babies. Even late in his career his basic canalization was that men were gallant protectors of their women, but in general he was able to overcome this and substitute support and partnership for gallantry and most of the families had at least equally competent and frequently more competent women at the head.  
 
Heinlein was raised and socialized in a society where sex meant having babies.  (Disclaimer: I was raised in the same social ethos by feminists whose mantra was make damn sure you have sex only with a carefully chosen women who will be a partner in a good family. Recreational sex was not an option.) The difference in his later books was that recreational sex was an option, and the women knew they could manipulate pricks by effective use of recreational sex.  But in accord with Heinlein's early socialization he created few male characters that were immune to such manipulation.  I can only think of one male protagonist that was comfortable with non-manipulative recreational sex as the line marriage structure depended on it.

 https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2017/07/31/robert-a-heinlein-the-man-who-loved-women/

On Feminism, Activism and Isms

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/09/social-justice-less-elitist/

But sometimes those same activist cultures can be unnecessarily exclusive – and worse, inaccessible and elitist. I even feel myself doing it sometimes:

 Or why I abandoned the "Feminist movement" in the'70s in spite of being a milk feminist. My first mistake was suggesting that an attack on "man/men" as generic was a mistake. That they should have promoted a gender specific noun for males corresponding to women, something like heman or heeman. Nope. We got to get rid of man in chairman, workman, "All Men are created equal." etc. Look how well that worked several decades later.  Well, it is a fact that all the chairs are no longer chairman of this or that and that all of the significant chairs still have men's butts glued to them.  It is also a fact that "All people are created equal" unless they are female, or non-Caucasian.  (At least they changed the box from Caucasian to white and then fucked that up by including "Hispanic" for all non-Caucasian whites.)

Over the years I have discovered that anything that appears to be a meeting of anything resembling believers is almost certainly not user friendly for anyone but the organizers and true believers.  I find it much more useful to let others attend and read the blogs and reports of the attendees, which are either ignorable dogma or tales of exclusion, prejudice and harassment. Even "freethinkers" like skeptics and atheists are surprisingly dogmatic.  In discussing paranormal phenomenon I have lost count of the times I have heard that "Randi's million dollar prize proves that the paranormal cannot exit." Atheists are not content to ignore God and gods in their daily lives, they must prove that gods necessarily cannot exist for anybody and that all religions are horrible abusers of believers.   .  

The excuse for all the sins of the activists is that they are raising awareness, and that in order to do so the message must be focused and consistent, that is reflect the narrow and exclusionary views of the promoters.   

But it taught me a valuable lesson: the best way to support any -ism or activist is to walk their talk. It is not surprising as we see in the article, how many of the -ists don't.  I wonder how many people or corporations who wear pink ribbons on their persons or products have ever done anything at all to help with treatment or research into breast cancer except to throw some chump change into some charity without even running a Navigator on the charity?  Have the GLBTQ activists done anything but create reaction and hate for their GLBTQ neighbors walking their talk by living working, raising children, and proving to their neighbors and churches that they are simply human?  Does posting your Black Lives Matter vid of police brutality on the web do anything but insure the Police, their captive prosecutors, and the media will insure justice denied? See: what to do with your arrest video.

Activism works, but it does not involve going to meetings and talking tactics.  Get a bunch of your friends together go to the city council meeting, the planning commission meeting, or if you have a lot of friends to Washington DC (Social media helps coordinate things but use email and secret groups on Facebook.  It won't stay secret but it is hard to disrupt.) While you are there making sure all of your friends are registered to vote, and will do so if only to vote the incumbents out. 

The other form of activism is using any position of privilege you might have to affirmatively support any challenge to injustice you know about.  If your significant others are challenging the system make sure that you use your LinkedIn network to help even at the cost of burning some of your own bridges. If you have that video of brutality or bullying on your thumb drive, don't just tell the victim it is there, tell them you will appear on their behalf.     

The Incels are Restless

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/04/1427765/-The-Shootings-are-not-Senseless?detail=email#

Today a growing segment of young adult males will not achieve the material and social success necessary to be attractive mates and form households. By way of comparison, a generation ago in his mid-20s my father had a house, a wife, two kids and a stable job things I was unable to achieve until my ’30s. ...  Today Increased economic opportunity and higher educational attainment for women has removed the economic need to be tied down to undesirable dudes. This is a good thing for almost everyone. But for those on the outside, however, it turns social awkwardness and the tail end of the achievement bell curve into a prison planet of isolation. And that generates rage.

 note: "Incel" a name they call themselves, meaning "involuntary celibate."

Perhaps the rage comes from the tail end of the curve.  The more concerning issue is that the middle of the curve for males is incel. (This may not be a new phenomenon.)  Women now have control not only of not only who they will have a baby with but who they will fuck.  Women it seems have little incentive to have sex per se, hence scriptural admonitions to "pleasure" their husband once a week. 

The cost of sex historically has been disproportionally high for women.  Instinctively, killing a baby is not an option, and abortion was never socially acceptable and the cost both physically and monetarily was high.  So perhaps the sin of Eve was discovering the "apple" method of contraception:  Place an apple between your thighs and hold it there.  That is a woman can choose not to have sex.  This apparently worked fine in Eden, that is a stable agricultural or hunter gatherer society.  Women could choose successful men to father their children, and space them naturally using the apple method until the child was weaned and productive.  Much of this is speculative as stable agricultural and hunter gatherer societies by definition balance consumption and production, with not much left over for kings, priests, and exploitation.  Thus they are easily victimized by kings, priests, and despots with plenty of warriors. Therefore few remain to study and all we have is oral history.  

The invention of exploitive societies demanded a ready supply of warriors.  That is incels who substitute male bonding, possibly with voluntary or involuntary homosexual sex, and killing for sex.  Men get used up rapidly in traditional warfare. In order to produce the required warrior/incels it was necessary exploit women as baby factories.  Women became the property of successful men that is those who were not used up in war or those powerful enough to not have to go to war. Women's choice in such a society was to breed or starve. Encouraged both by social and religious pressure.    
In the west exploitive societies seem to have been invented by Abram's tribe, or perhaps his invention of God as the underlying justification for exploitation was the most successful.  It has certainly been successful and threatens to take over the entire globe.  However it has run out of people and things to exploit, and revolts by those exploited have begun to be successful.  

The most successful revolt has been enabled by contraception, which allows a woman to choose between being a breeder of incels/warriors for a successful man or pursue some other path to social success which may or may not include reproduction. Note that prior to reliable female contraception career paths for women involved avoiding sex as they did not pay enough to support a family: Teaching, nannying, and other service occupations.  

WWII used up enough men that women were introduced to "real" work to produce the war machinery, famously by Rosie the Riveter.  Their success enabled different aspirations for some girls, who could prepare for careers other than the traditional service occupations and many chose to do so.  Boys were still being conditioned for warrior/unskilled labor and generally discouraged from pursuing the "college track" except as athletes.  Which leads us back to the incels perhaps as a majority in most of the west.  The demand for warriors has dropped significantly recently, and unskilled labor no longer supports a family even the current norm of one or two children so the support for sex trade-off no longer works for a large segment of the male population.   

Toxic Masculinity

https://t.co/DddqnZtP67

Toxic masculinity teaches that men cannot assert their own manhood absent sex with a woman that they alone possess

Being brought up male in a few tweets.  Storified by miniver.

An Atheist Feminist Shouts Bullshit.

beliefnet

Atheists like most arbitrary groups tend to reflect the dominant mores of the society in which they are embedded.  I suspect that male feminists are as unusual in atheist groups as in any other that doesn't have misogyny as a central group tenet. 

Atheists generally have weak belief systems, and therefore might be influenced more by advocacy groups with a useful message.  Many won't listen, even weak belief systems are hard to counter, but I suspect that feminism will generally find fertile ground in the rapidly growing atheist and secular part of the overall society. 

And you're basing this on survey and polling data, right? Not just on anectdote and making shit up?   Fematheist

False dichotomy.  In any event survey and polling data finds whatever the constructor of the survey or poll wants to find.  See any partisan political poll.  Did you ever hear of or write a "push poll?"  If not why not?  You claim to be a social scientist, you must have been taught about them in something like Surveys 101.

Unbiased observation of convention activity, social functions, and comments of members of a study group are much more reliable than any poll or survey unless you have access to the actual questions asked in the poll, the demographic of the polling subjects, and the bias of the poll constructor.  Got any?  Or are all your observations and data biased by feminist activism?

I am sorry, are you suggesting that because some companies polls do push calling that gives you the right to just make bullshit up on these boards and pass it off as reality? Is that SERIOUSLY what your argument is?  Attacking bad polling instead of defending or evening acknowleding the bullshit you just MADE UP?

I would call that a fundy evasion tactic there, JC.Fematheist

You can call it anything you like from your social science ivory tower.  I am not talking about company or think tank push polls, I am talking about the biased polls and surveys from proper respected academic departments in economics and social science, two areas of interest for me.  I do read past the popular articles in the news to the published data and read the protocols and the questions themselves.  Some good, some garbage. 

In any event I have been living atheism and feminism for many more decades than you have been alive and I am not a convert to either.  Before you sling your projection of fundy on me you should at least identify the fundamentalism I allegedly identify with.  What is it? A convert's fundamentalist anti-theist beliefs?  A feminist activist's fundamentalism that all men are pricks?

I am a trained scientist and scholar although not working in either field I am able to observe behavior from a scientific POV generally without bias or belief based conceptual blocks.  It is a fact that I am a feminist man living in a male dominated world, and an atheist in a Christian dominated culture, but I do observe without bias how both of those positions of privilege affect me and the others around me. 

Shouting about making bullshit up does not make the assertion true. One must in academia or in the real world, take the bullshit apart and demonstrate that it is wrong.  So far you have done neither.  

To be fair to Fematheist she is promoting a feminist atheist channel on YouTube (Search Kristi Winters) that is well worth subscribing to if you are into Video.  I skip to the references to see whether the transcript is worth reading. 

Feminists Hate Moms?

beliefnet

I find it ironic that feminism is supposed to be about women being able to choose their lives, yet so many actual feminists get mad when women make choices that the feminists don't like.IronLDS

I suppose it would be ironic if that is what they did.  While there are probably extremists who will personify their attack on the system that supports this choice and indeed forces it on many women.  But they are really mad about the system that in some influential religions conditions women from birth into the brood mare role, and justifies higher pay for men because "they have to support their brood mare."

These days being a brood mare for a "financially secure man" is a cushy job at least until he is unable or unwilling to support his family, or decides that a more attractive brood mare will advance his career. 

At that point his brood mare becomes a "welfare queen" as she tries to support his kids with no help from him, and no educational tools to support anything but minimum wage service jobs which in most states are inadequate to support a family without government assistance and in any event do not give her the time necessary to raise her kids to be anything besides cannon fodder in one war or another: the war on drugs or a foreign war if she has the connections to get her kids into the military. 

It is the system that is broken, not the women who are brought up to exploit it if they are fortunate. 

To the extent that it stays within the church culture and the church culture takes care of its own failures I have no real issue with the system.  It is just another business model.  Mormons and to a lesser extent Jews and Catholics are business cultures more than churches, and as such have the right to compete in the larger society just like any other group.  I think eliminating half their population from productive work in a technological society is a losing business model, but that is a testable hypothesis which may or may not prove to be true. 

Growing Up Atheist and Feminist

beliefnet
I grew up as a secular feminist male in a Sunday Country Club society.  Everybody went to church but nobody took it very seriously.  At the university few went to church and so few took it seriously that I had to travel to a nearby Jesuit University to get a good religious discussion.

Nevertheless the echoes of male dominance and sexual entitlement were everywhere. Even the women at the university seemed to think that the Mrs. was as important as the BA.  The way to the Mrs. was universally understood as submissiveness in everything from academics to sex. 

There were a few women on campus that would whup yer ass in anything ya tried to compete in including finding them on top in sex. But the word on campus was that they were failures as women destined to a life of loneliness and frustration.  It generally didn't work out that way as there were some men in the academic world that respected that attitude and were looking for a partner rather than a "wife" and lived happily, if not ever after, long enough to propagate their genetic line. As might be expected their kids were awesome.

Here is a question, what would a gender equal society look like?

beliefnet 

Almost any Heinlien novel including the Juveniles.  The women characters are almost always more equal in brains and competence than the men.  The only problem feminists have with Heinlein is that the women generally are interested in contributing their more than equal genes to the gene pool.  Nothing unusual, most of the women I know about who are in the feminist trenches being more competent than the average man in their chosen work are interested in contributing their more than equal genes to the gene pool as well.  They generally choose men who have been brought up to be partners rather than "husbands" and who use their male privilege to support their partner. 

Case in point: A well educated, extremely intelligent and broadly competent man (brought up by a dual career couple) did odd jobs throughout his partner's US military supported medical training, required service in a base ER, and residency; fathering and parenting 2 children in the process.  The doctor took over a small metropolitan area family practice, which needed a practice manager as well so that odd job fell to the partner.  Those of you from the yellow boards on this forum will appreciate knowing what gooddogma-sit and Tarakyan have been doing since they got too busy to post here.  Yep.  True story.

Men and Women are Different

beliefnet

Feb 2, 2015 -- 11:28PM, A Creationist wrote:

Your male-nurse-counterpart, would recognize some other differences, though.  [Women] have body parts which complement [which have different functions from him,] and [women] were designed for reproducing offspring. [Along with most other human activities.] Your body produces eggs, monthly, and you menstruate, monthly, and his produces sperm, continually.  Your breasts were designed to suckle a baby [and women have] in a womb which he doesn't have.

The two brains differ; the types of thought processes differ; the body structures differ; the emotional reactions differ; the topics of conversation differ....

If the designs differ, why fight the roles and functions, associated with them?

[Minor edits in red].

In the ERSSG with which I identify women are generally smarter and more competent at anything they choose to do than the men.  The men are smart and competent as well, the SSG selects for intelligence and competence, but the women seem to be slightly higher on both curves than the men.   Evolution selects for smart, competent women because smart, competent women produce smart, competent children of both genders which are valuable assets in the reproduction of the species. 

It is true that the women gestate the children.  It doesn't seem to slow them down much, as their men pick up the slack.  One scientist I knew was in the lab at 10am went to a scheduled medically indicated induction for her second child at 2, and was back in the lab the next day. Something about a grant application that was inconveniently due about the due date of the child.  Dad picked up the slack at home with the first child, he took a week vacation (before paternity leaves) in anticipation of extra work at home due to the grant and anticipated birth.  He also handled the middle of the night feeding: get up when the baby cried, hang the baby on the teat of the sleeping mom, change the diaper when indicated, and tuck the baby in the crib.

Home chores are usually more equally divided with men taking the more equal half.  The men take the more equal hit on accommodating their careers to the needs of the women as well.  Only proper as they are the privileged ones.  A white male MBA changes jobs and careers like underwear anyway, doing so to stay near the woman's workplace is no problem.  The only racism in that statement is in the larger society, the non-white males have more difficulty changing jobs and careers for any reason.  

Religious Persecution

I doubt you're being persecuted.  Why do you play the victim?

Because "me" would be in fact persecuted by any religion she is being asked to respect.  In fact "me" would be persecuted in any culture dominated by any religion she is being asked to respect.  Could "me" go to Saudi Arabia on business, rent a car and drive it in western clothing? Could "me" go to the good old USA and visit Planned Parenthood without being harassed?  Could "me" go to Paris and publish an article on child abuse by Muhammad?

Now tell me again from your position of male religious privilege why "me" should not play your victim?  Please be specific.  Tell "me" what respect atheist women have from you that they should respect your religious views. 

Homemaking is Hate?

beliefnet
If I infer correctly you are holding up the following as an example supporting your religion is hate thesis.

A radical feminist quoted:

You know what? She needs to be working on breakfast. She needs to be working on lunch. She needs to be working on dinner. She needs to be working on homeschooling the children. And teaching them, and cleaning, and that’s enough work.  "Pastor Anderson"

For most of human history this was a necessary reality if the human race was to continue.  When child and maternal mortality was in significant double digits women had little choice if they were to get their 2.3 replacement offspring to puberty but to provide for the man who was providing external resources to the family, keeping the home sanitary, feeding the family, and educating the children to be productive citizens of their community. 

As late as the early 20th century my own grandmother had 7 children two of which were stillborn, and died in childbirth with the 7th.  The family was well off and well-educated, so four of the five surviving became productive adults.  The two women although independent, well-educated feminists were still relegated by their society, not their church, to homemaking. The fifth was incapacitated with childhood diseases and became a ward of the family. 

I am not arguing that modern medicine and contraception have not changed the equation and that religion should drag itself into the modern world, but religion is very conservative, and a significant portion of the world population is still locked in the septic, hidden estrus world that is our genetic heritage. 

You may rail from your position of privilege that religion should be changing.  That is what positions of privilege are good for.  I have done my share from my position of privilege, but accusations of hate, misogyny, and bigotry as if that is all there is, are in my opinion counterproductive. 

WEPC, Morality and Humanism

beliefnet

In my opinion, preaching the innate superiority of Western European Protestant Culture as he is doing skirts very close to fascism.amcolph

You realise that you are insulting the majority of atheists who post here, amcolph?  For them, morality is mere fashion, and Twenty-First Century Western Liberal Culture (which is a not-very-developed development of "Western European Protestant Culture") is the zeitgeist which molds their fashion, so it must be "superior".  Thus, for example, they frown on slavery because Western Liberal Culture considers slavery to be "bad"; but in the rest of the world, slavery is the norm. Thus, again, they consider women to be full members of society, equal to men; but in the rest of the world, women are chattels of men.Lavengro

The morality of many of the atheists who post here is humanism which is complete and utter repudiation of the elitist "Western European Protestant Culture" (WEPC).  The WEPC is being dragged, kicking and screaming, to a more humanistic morality. 

Humanists oppose slavery, all forms including wage slavery, as slavery only benefits the fascist elite and the syncophant WEPC priests/preachers/pastors/vuvuzelas who provide God's moral blessing on the fascist elite in exchange for a tithe.  But as one of the elite warns, the pitchforks are coming. Here as well as the rest of the world.  In the immortal Janis Joplin line "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

The rest of the world is finding out that women as chattels of men is not working too well as women gain control over their fertility.  Hobby Lobby notwithstanding.  That minimum wage slavery is easy to buy into and an independent nuliparous woman can use it as a springboard to personal fulfillment while working men's egos for pleasure and additional support without a care about hosting some prick's seed.  She may choose to do so but the choice is hers in the US as well as India, China, and much of the western world.  So much for WEPC misogyny.

Dual Careers and Sex

Excerpt from Amanda Hess in Slate

Gottlieb’s story relies heavily on a 2012 study (PDF) published in the American Sociological Review that found that when men in heterosexual marriages performed chores that are traditionally coded as feminine—like “folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming”—the couple had sex less frequently. But if the husband performed traditionally masculine chores, like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash, the couples “reported a 17.5 percent higher frequency of sexual intercourse”—and the wives were more sexually satisfied, too. The data on which the study is based was collected 20 years ago, when the husband who cooks dinner or does the dishes was still an anomaly, but Gottlieb cites one contemporary couple she’s treated in her psychotherapy practice as further evidence of the trend. The couple came to her looking for help distributing their career and household duties but found that once their responsibilities were balanced, their sex life suffered. The wife claimed that she was highly sexually attracted to her husband ”when you’re just back from the gym and you’re all sweaty and you take off your clothes to get in the shower and I see your muscles,” but that desire turns to irritation when the husband tossed his dirty clothes onto the floor, sparking an argument about his failure to vacuum the house. “So if I got out the vacuum, then you’d be turned on?” the husband asked. “Actually, probably not,” she replied. “The vacuuming would have killed the weight-lifting vibe.”

J'C rant here:

To the lady for whom the weight lifting vibe was turned off by vacuuming: Get out of that business suit, buy a Victoria Secret's maid uniform, do the vacuuming yourself and be ready when he comes home from the gym after a hard days work sucking up to the boss to pay for the secret.

As one who has been there, and done that with two high powered jobs and two high maintenance kids in the household, sex frequently was a cuddle in bed before sleep.  If we both had any energy left the cuddle might get more active, but the sexual attraction in either case was two multifaceted jobs at work and at home well done for the benefit of the family. 

Having to be turned on by some socially mandated "vibe" misses the point of sexual equality in the first place.  If one is a sex object on either side of the bed.  Forget the equality, you will never understand.  Go buy the maid outfit and find a partner that can afford it in exchange for sex. 

Socially Responsible Humanism

Thad Yep, J'Carlin. That's my sense of "prick", too. And I reiterate: unfortunately, any prick can be a father, too. "Father" is not some noble vocation, unfortunately, and neither is "parent". In the U.S. today, the terms seem to be increasingly confused with "unpaid juvie officer". ...
 
Thad J'Carlin, you're doing a lot of generalizing there and in my experience, that sort of thing doesn't work very well. "Humanism" is also a grand phrase that's devoid of any practical meaning. What does one do if one is a humanist? What does treat everyone as if they had inherent worth really mean, in practice?

As my virtual friend Stream Angel well knows, I believe that it's quite easy to make these great sweeping statements about justice and equality and human worth and what not. What I think is difficult is to actually boil those down into concrete practices.

It's all well and grand to talk about "good parenting", for example, but what does that really mean in terms of practices? Some people will tell you a good parent needs to swat their kid's rear end occasionally. Others are horrified by the very idea and feel no compulsion against dropping a dime on a parent who'd do that.

Is it "good parenting", for example, to take a child to a brothel? Be careful: the question is a hell of a lot more tricky than you might expect.

 I may be generalizing, admittedly a harder row to hoe, but cherry picking specific examples, what we call in Bible arguments prooftexting, is really worthless in any argument.  For any shit you sling on the wall I can find different shit to cover it up.  The only result is a shitty wall.  
 
 The takeaway is that it is all solved by the principles of humanism (lc h) that is all people are humans.  Not men, not women, not children, not Christians, not Jews, not [whatever.]  Simply humans. Not all the same humans certainly, humans are all different, but if you put "human" before the [whatever] it really does change the way you think about and look at people.

 If it is a human body builder does it really make a difference which costume the human is wearing?

If it is a human dancer does it really make a difference which costume the human is wearing?

If it is a human CEO does it really make a difference which costume the human is wearing?

If it is a human street person does it really make a difference which costume the human is wearing?

or for more difficult cases 

If it is a human bigot does it really make a difference which -ism the human is wearing?

If it is a human criminal does it really make a difference which suit the human is wearing?

 Humanism does not mean noble or even not a prick.  But the assumption of inherent worth and dignity does change the way you think even of a prick.  Maybe a victim of bad parenting, or the wrong associations while an adolescent, or any of a host of factors.  Hesh is still a prick, a crippled human, but a human nonetheless.  

 Please note.  I am saying nothing about what a humanist society will do to protect itself from crippled humans.  It must do so.  Even humanist societies remove threats, but even threat removal must recognize the dignity and humanness of the threat. The current US paradigm of throwing the threat in a for-profit prison benefits no one as "prisoners" are by definition not human.  The Norwegian model of assuming the person temporarily removed from society is not only human but is a potentially good citizen if properly educated in the mores of the society.   

 Parenting is a different issue.  But the same principles apply.  A parent, that is a person or persons who chooses to accept a child into their family, also accepts the societal obligation to nurture and socialize the child to become a responsible human adult in the society.  The society will provide resources to help, but ultimately it is the responsibility of those who choose to parent to choose the most useful resources to supplement their nurturing guidance.  This is a joint effort of the parents and the society but parents have some choice in the society they wish to associate with, and even within the society they choose may make choices to emphasize certain mores vs others.