Thursday, January 24, 2008

F. Roger Devlin again

Mr Devlin had written a very cogent article about Men, Women, Relationships and Sexual Utopia a while ago for The Occidental Quarterly.

Recently I got a MassMail from him with an article he wrote that was rejected from publication even by those chaps. Too controversial apparently.

All the same, for those among the the readers of this should-be-updated-more blog who enjoyed the his Sexual Utopia article, Ive got a link to his new one (File Name 'Shalit').

This time he reviews books of a female author, Wendy Shalit, who wants to turn back the clock on feminism - and amusingly enough, even among women like her who would like to get rid of todays depraved 'culture' - they have some amazingly large blind spots when it comes to their own behaviour, and their assumptions of mens behaviour and what the ultimate cure would be. The books reviewed are called Girls Gone Mild and A Return to Modesty.

A few excerpts...

A Return to Modesty was greeted with outrage from predictable quarters, such as pornographers and feminists. Baby-boomer reviewers accused her of “trying to turn back the clock,” the New York Observer printed a front-page caricature of her dressed as an SS officer, and she received death threats (p. 5)....

...The most interesting personal experience she relates involved an invitation, following on the success of her first book, to appear on a PBS program called “If Women Ruled the World.” While preparing to interview her, “the producer began to explain what he wanted me to say: that a certain second wave feminist had saved womankind and that I, as a young woman, was grateful to her.” When she expressed reservations about the woman’s ideas, “the producer began to get impatient: ‘What you’re saying,’ he sputtered, ‘isn’t in the script!’” (p. 19). In the end, she was not interviewed.


And...

Here is my conjecture. It is an old observation that sexual morality is most strict among people of moderate means; looser behavior occurs among the very rich (because they can afford it) and the very poor (because they do not calculate the consequences). The worst possible situation arises when the poor become artificially “rich,” by their own standards, through welfare payments. Now, the elite white brats who pioneered the sexual revolution on campuses in the sixties were able to draw upon the capital laboriously built up by parents toughened in depression and war. Low-intelligence underclass blacks, at the opposite extreme, get their babies subsidized by taxpayers; they are actually rewarded for not having a male breadwinner. You will find even less sexual fidelity among them than among white college kids or the Hollywood glitterati. Shalit, however, did not plumb the social depths of the housing projects...


And the negative...


It is remarkable that a woman with such traditional ideas about marriage, modesty, and feminine decorum never condemns feminism per se. Instead, Shalit claims to have perceived a “fourth wave” of the movement characterized by the rejection of pornography and casual sex. This reviewer is not sanguine about the possibility of an eventual Nth feminist wave coming along to solve all the problems created by waves 1 through (N – 1). Shalit does better when she acknowledges that feminism has “become a sort of Rohrschach test: the word itself has become almost meaningless—and can refer to diametrically opposed ideas” (p. 208). The young self-described feminists she quotes do sound extremely confused. They say things like “I don’t think the first feminists wanted us to be more like men” (p. 218) and “feminism has always been about valuing home life” (p. 222). Some are simply using “feminist” to mean feminine (p. 121).

and...

During their nubile years, many women are at least as concerned with turning male desire off (i.e., telling the 99% to drop dead) as with turning it on (getting Mr. Alpha to commit): they get more offers of attention than they have time to process. Cunning feminists, many of them lesbians, have exploited this circumstance to the hilt, convincing naive young women they are being “harassed.” Quietly observing the furor over so-called harassment during the past two decades, I wondered how these women could fail to realize that the men of whom they were complaining constituted their pool of potential husbands and that they could not afford to alienate all of them. Clearly, I overestimated their intelligence. And Wendy Shalit does not distinguish herself in this respect either; she uses the term “harassment” as freely and uncritically as any man-hating feminist could wish.


Once again, big article, but well worth the read.


UPDATE: All three articles are up. Probably best to read them in order of publication.
1)Sexual Utopia in Power

2)RotatingPolyandry - and its Enforcers
and...

3) The Feminine Sexual Counter-Revolution and its Limitations (filename: Shalit.doc)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Cool Map!



The United States GDP as compared to other countries. Interesting post and commentary here.