Category: Sex

Restoring the Patriarchy

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I think it would be a good idea. Oh, not the legal aspects of it: with two narrow exceptions, I think men and women should be treated the same under the law. Rather, I think we should restore the cultural aspect of patriarchy, the idea that the father has a special authority and a special responsibility within the home, and that men in general have special obligations within society.

Men are, in general, more powerful (by which I mean more powerful than women; all the comparatives here refer to men relative to women, because there are only two kinds, male and female). Men do most of the creating and most of the destroying, impose most of the structure, cause most of the mayhem. Men are the principal actors in society by virtue of their greater drive and aggression and strength, their lesser interest in people, their greater interest in things and in the manipulation and control of things.

Biology made us that way. We don’t have to like it, but not liking it doesn’t make it untrue.

The problem with pretending that men aren’t more powerful than women, or that this isn’t an intrinsic quality of masculinity, is that by ignoring this reality we necessarily ignore the responsibility of managing it. Pretending that little boys aren’t, by their very natures, more aggressive than little girls discourages us from teaching little boys to channel that aggression into positive and productive pursuits. The aggression doesn’t go away, as the mean streets of Baltimore and Chicago sadly attest every single day.

We know how to discipline young men, how to shape the expression of their growing power. We do it by imposing a beneficent authority upon them, an authority that they can look up to and respect, that itself exhibits the kind of self-control and nobility we wish to see them express.

What does that authority look like? It looks like a father — a father, or the martial surrogate for a father represented by the military. Most pointedly, it looks like a father who embraces his role as the primary leader and disciplinarian.

Our culture is moving in the wrong direction as regards the sexes. It encourages men to be ashamed of their strength, women to be ashamed of their vulnerability, and both to deny that these traits are natural and intrinsic to the respective sexes. Under the illusion of freeing men and women from artificial constraints, it urges women to behave with less caution even as it erodes the cultural constraints on male behavior that served to keep men in check.

We are in denial, and would be better served by greater honesty about the fundamental differences between the sexes, and the unique role fathers play in raising rough boys to be gentle men.

It’s Time for Feminism to End

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Feminism began with goals that were both laudable and achievable — and it achieved them: women are today the legal equals of men. For decades now, since that legal equality was achieved, feminism has been harmful to women.

Feminism has always had its destructive aspect, its misguided insistence that women adopt male practices that, for reasons of simple biology, work against women. The sexual realities for women are different — completely, ineluctably different — from those for men, and encouraging women to disregard those realities harms women. Women aren’t men, and they can’t act with the casual disregard for responsibility and consequences that nature has gifted to men as an unfortunately viable option.

There is another, more subtly corrosive quality to feminism. In an era when people talk of “safe spaces” and worry about “micro-aggression,” feminism has unwittingly removed the cultural safeguards that made it possible for women to comfortably coexist with men in public spaces. The quotidian gestures of male chivalry — opening and holding doors, walking on the street side of the sidewalk and the down-side of the stair, refraining from vulgarity and profanity in mixed company, etc. — have long been resented and denigrated by feminists as lesser examples of toxic masculinity. That’s a mistake, and one with consequences: these gestures serve as an assurance to women that men are aware of the differences in physical power between the sexes, and choose to harness that power in token acts of protection.

Has feminism made women safe from men? No, as the “me too” refrains make clear, it has not. Human nature in the realm of sex is deeply wired and impossible to change quickly, if at all. What is possible is the accretion of social patterns of behavior that create safeguards for women, patterns that encourage safe behavior by both men and women. Feminism, having achieved its legitimate legal goals, has left as its only purpose the destruction of femininity and, along with it, the social safeguards that protected women.

It’s time for the feminist movement to accept victory and go home.

Woman… with an asterisk

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Let me offer a couple of factually incontrovertible statements, and then assert what seems to me an ineluctable conclusion based on those statements.

Only people born female are able to become pregnant and have babies.

Only people born male are able to impregnate females.

Given these simple truths, it follows that “women” who were born male are really not women in the same sense as women who were born female. They are, at best, women with an asterisk.

(Of course, I would argue that they’re simply transvestite men, albeit, in many cases, highly motivated overachievers in that regard.)

Pride Month and Father’s Day

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Today is Father’s Day. June is Pride month. Until a few years ago, I’d have found nothing particularly incongruous about that conjunction: there is nothing about the celebration of one’s sexual preference, however odd it may be to call that “pride,” that precludes, obfuscates, or undermines an appreciation of the role fathers play in the lives of their children and their value to society.

But times change, and not always for the better.

Today, the LGB community — those people who are, to varying degrees, attracted sexually to members of their own sex — has chosen to associate itself with a distinctly different group, those who embrace one or another form of gender-identity fantasy or delusion. That’s what the T in LGBT refers to.

I’m sympathetic to homosexuals, as we used to call people who experience strong same-sex attraction. (I think it’s no longer considered appropriate to use the term, but I’m nothing if not no slave to fashion. Parse that at your leisure.) Attraction, whether to members of one’s own sex or the more quotidian kind, is what it is, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that it isn’t something one can change even if one wishes one could. I’m glad that being gay or lesbian is legal, tolerated, and accepted.

I’m sympathetic as well to those who suffer one or another form of gender dysphoria, who imagine or wish themselves to be of a different sex, or who are so confused about the nature of sexuality as to imagine that there’s a meaningful category of human sexual identity that is neither male nor female. People suffer all kinds of emotional and psychological troubles, and their suffering is real.

But the so-called trans movement is nonsense — the self-righteous pouring of gasoline on to the sputtering psychoses of true gender confusion. That it has been elevated to the level of a fad, and given a patina of the same victimhood status to which the homosexual community could once lay legitimate claim, is a sign of the narcissistic unseriousness of our time.

The gender identity movement — the trans movement — is a self-contradictory celebration of inchoate and childish urges, of the desire to make it so by wishing it so. Pursuit of its confused fantasy of sexual mutability, of parallel universes of ever more contrived sexual identity, necessitates the abnegation of the simple truth of sexual reality: that there is male and female, man and woman, and — barring a handful of ambiguously and unfortunately malformed individuals — nothing else.

The world can not gracefully accommodate both physiological reality and gender-identity fantasy — and neither can the culture. Unfortunately, the levers of popular culture are in the hands of deeply unserious people, and so the tide of opinion favors the fantastic over the actual.

Which brings us to Father’s Day. The point of this holiday is the recognition that being a father matters — that men have something unique to offer, that masculinity is distinct from femininity, distinct and valuable. That claim is incompatible with the spiraling nonsense of the trans movement.

My favorite band will play at my favorite bar this week in celebration of Pride month. I’d go, if it were merely an LGB event. But the trans thing is stupid, is on the march, and has to be opposed by people who think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are acknowledgements of something non-trivial.

The Absolute Right to Choose Your Own Pronouns

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I believe both in the right of individuals to express their personal pronoun preferences, and in the right of other individuals to ignore them. It’s the same right in each case, the right of freedom of expression. And it’s a right I hold dear.

I understand that some folks in the trans movement would like to tell other people which words they can and can’t use. I don’t approve of that, because I really do believe in freedom of expression: the same freedom that lets a guy put on a dress and say “I’m a woman” lets me chuckle and say, “yeah, no. But let’s agree to disagree.”

Live and let live. I know there are some men who like to dress up like women. There always have been. And I know there are people who are deeply confused about who and what they are. That’s too bad, but hardly new: troubled people have always been with us.

What is new, and what I can’t abide, is this insistence that I go along with their fantasy. Everywhere else we disagree in this wonderful country, we stop short of telling other people to use our words, to profess our beliefs. We let people think differently, and we tolerate their expression of their ideas, of their differences, even if we find them odd, off-putting, or offensive.

I believe that people are born either male or female and stay that way their whole lives, regardless of what they wear or what treatments they get. I think the trans movement is a silly, often destructive fad, and a way for people to avoid the stress of living up to their sex in a confused and sometimes challenging cultural climate.

But, as I said, I respect the right, if not necessarily the choices, of people to express themselves as they wish — while retaining my own right to choose the pronouns I’ll use when referring to them.

We don’t have to agree. We can just tolerate each other. I’m okay with that.

Let’s Talk About [Trans] Sex

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Male and Female

Humans are mammals and, like all mammals, propagate the species through a process known as sexual reproduction. Each human is of one of two sexes, male or female, and the sex of any given human is readily and unambiguously identifiable at birth based on obvious anatomical distinctions.

[I’ll say this once and then not mention it again: this is a discussion of normal humans. Just as one can say that humans are born with two arms and two legs, one can say that humans are born as one or the other of two sexes. A small number of humans are born without the normal number of arms or legs, and a small number are anatomically ambiguous as regards sex. But normal humans, and that’s the vast majority of humans, are as described.]

There are distinctive physiological characteristics associated with male and female humans. Males tend to be larger and stronger than females; only females can give birth to offspring; males tend to be more aggressive than females. These are traits that humans have in common with many other mammals, and derive from biology, from the effects of various hormones on the male and female bodies during development.

Males and females play distinctly different roles in reproduction. In particular, the physiological investments made by males and females is quite different: for males, reproduction has essentially no cost associated with it; for females, reproduction is costly both in terms of time and physical investment. It follows that the mating strategies of males and females will likely differ: because reproduction for them is inexpensive, males will seek to reproduce as often as practical and with a wide variety of females; females, for whom reproduction is costly, will of necessity reproduce less frequently, and will tend to be more selective in their choice of mates. This will inevitably lead to different and characteristic behavioral patterns for the sexes.

Beyond those characteristics attributable to physiology and evolutionary pressure, there are additional sexual traits that may be essentially random, not readily explained by biology. These so-called cultural distinctions may, unlike differences rooted in biology, vary from culture to culture and change over time.

There is a constellation of traits which we associate with sex. Those which we associate primarily with males are referred to as masculine traits; those associated primarily with females are referred to as feminine traits. While the sex of any given person is either male or female, the degree to which the person exhibits qualities considered masculine or feminine may vary quite a lot.

A male who exhibits qualities normally associated with femininity is still a male: no matter how feminine he may seem, he does not ovulate, and he can not give birth. Similarly, a female, no matter how masculine, remains a female: she does not produce sperm and can not fertilize an egg.

Gender Diversity and Trans Movements

Gender diversity is the idea that there are more than two sexual states for humans. Gender diversity attempts to assert a quasi-sexual dimension, “gender,” independent of, and not constrained by, biological reality. Humans are male or female, distinctions rooted in biology: other so-called genders are expressions of whim, fantasy, confusion, or sincere but mistaken belief in non-existent human variety.

The trans movement asserts that humans can change their sex, either through pure volition (whim), or as a result of drugs and surgery. In fact, people can alter, to some extent, the degree to which they express typical masculine and feminine traits, but they can not change their sex: males remain males; females remain females.

Identity Versus Quality

Both the gender diversity movement and the trans movement are sexual identity movements. That is, both are founded on the assertion that one can claim a sexual identity, and that making the claim is itself sufficient to assume the identity — and, importantly, that no challenge to the legitimacy of the claim is possible. In that sense, such claims are metaphysical, untestable, divorced from biological reality, divorced from qualities of masculinity and femininity.

It is important for these movements that they make claims of identity, and not of qualities. Claims of masculine and feminine qualities can be evaluated objectively. Claims of identity are essentially legal or political claims which, if left unchallenged, grant individuals status which their inherent qualities might preclude.

To pick a topical example: a man who declares himself to be a woman, and who is then given the same status as a woman and so allowed to compete against women in athletic events, will have an enormous advantage, because he possesses essential masculine qualities of bone size and density, connective tissue, muscular development, etc.

False claims of sexual identity — men claiming to be women, women claiming to be men, anyone claiming to be neither man nor woman — should be rejected. If we wish to accommodate claims of special status based on measurable physical traits, on objective qualities of masculinity and femininity, that is a different issue. But false claims of sexual identity are a way of assuming a status predicated on sexual qualities while precluding any evaluation of those qualities. This will inevitably lead to problems, including the kind of athletic cheating currently in the news, and to needless confusion and ambiguity.

Shocking Ocasio-Cortez Scandal

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I just heard about this, and I am astounded that it could be true — and totally appalled by it.

Apparently, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has had her staff give her boyfriend a house.gov email address, claiming that he needed it for access to her calendar.

Yes, you read that correctly — and I suspect you are as surprised and shocked as I am.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a boyfriend!

A boyfriend. A boy. Male.

I mean, I just naturally assumed… you know. That she’d be more woke than that. Or something.

In Defense of Man-Bashing

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Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds links to a piece by Lisa De Pasquale entitled Why the Anti-Men ‘Galentine’s Day’ is Nothing to Celebrate. According to Ms. Pasquale, this recently invented February 13th holiday (another sitcom-inspired creation) has, at least in some circles, a decidedly anti-male aspect to it.

I understand her objection: men do come in for a lot of criticism lately, and young men — grade school boys in particular — are suffering from increasingly unhinged biases and hostility.

But I’m generally not very sympathetic to complaints about the mistreatment of men. We are, by our very natures, tougher than women, physically and emotionally stronger and less sensitive, less vulnerable. This is one of the reasons it’s so great to be a man, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Yes, I know men have a few legitimate complaints, mostly having to do with a lack of due process. But it’s still easier, safer, and just more fun to be a guy than a gal, so I don’t care to hear people whine about anti-male discrimination. (I do, on the other hand, feel a bit sorry for the little boys in the school yard who have to put up with misguided adult re-education efforts.)

Frankly, I think it’s kind of cute when women get together and pile on men and make fun of us. It’s like watching feisty kittens fight each other. I say, let them enjoy their sisterly solidarity.

This half-serious, casually anti-male feminism has a silver lining. These ladies, with their “The Future is Female” (and they’re half right) tee-shirts and their “male tears” mugs, are acknowledging that men and women are different. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but, after half a century of feminism’s relentless efforts to redefine women as men — first by jettisoning the bra, and ultimately by eliminating the act of motherhood itself — it’s nice to hear women talking about men as something inherently unlike themselves.

Because they’re right: men and women are different. And women, even when then they’re being feisty and cutely cantankerous, are adorable.

A Note to Young Men

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There’s a lot of talk these days about toxic masculinity and the problems men cause, both to themselves and to others, when they behave in classically manly ways.

Well, everyone has an opinion, and people are going to talk. But I’m going to share some things with you, man to man, and I hope you’ll remember them the next time a professor or a late night comic or a shaving company tries to tell you how you can “be better” than the sorry creature they apparently think you are.

First, women like manly men. They always have, and they always will. It’s the way we’re wired, no matter what the geniuses in the Gender Studies department try to tell you.

People like to pretend that women want sensitive guys who are in touch with their feelings, but the truth is that they like guys who are guys, guys who don’t whine, guys who spend more time working out or fixing something than they do getting in touch with their emotions. It isn’t just conservative, old-fashioned girls who think this way: most women, whether conservative or liberal, young or old, rich or poor, like a man who is in touch with his masculine side, not his feminine side.

Think about it. Think of the heroes of our popular culture, the movie stars past and present. Are they wimps? Do they fuss? Are they tentative and cautious, concerned about whose feelings they’re going to hurt when they save the girl (or the world)?

Nah, they’re guys. They do the heavy lifting, they take a beating without crying about it, and they don’t worry that people are going to think them insufficiently sensitive or empathic. They’ve been that way forever, back to the earliest recorded accounts. We all know what manliness is.

Secondly, men like manly men.

Men are willing to put up with quite a bit of … expressed concern … from women, because that’s part of the cost of enjoying the company of women. Women care — and care deeply — about things men barely notice, and women are likely to talk about it. Sometimes they’ll talk quite a lot about it.

That’s okay: women are the way they are, and we love them for it. Just shut up and let them talk; that’s often all they want.

But that kind of thing doesn’t look good on a guy. Women don’t think so, and neither do other men. If you want to be respected by other men, you should keep some stuff — a lot of stuff — to yourself. Men don’t need to spend a lot of time “unburdening” themselves, talking just to share their emotions and concerns. Guys will put up with that from women for obvious reasons, but there isn’t much benefit to hearing it from another guy. And, frankly, it’s embarrassing. So, if you really have to talk about it, cut to the chase: keep it short and to the point, and don’t whine.

Real man means something, and it doesn’t mean like a woman, or feminized, or vulnerable. It means what it’s always meant, and what it still means, even if a bunch of unmanly people want to reinvent it — reinvent you — as something weak and soft and compliant.

There’s nothing wrong with being a man.