The Most Important War: The War Between The Sexes

“I am opposed to the women’s libs.” – Revenge of the Pink Panther

If I write a novel about the different shades of the color blue, is that cyans fiction?

Note: No podcast tomorrow. I’ve got a work thing that will take me right up until showtime, so I won’t have time to create the quality notes that drive the show, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until next week for the podcast that listeners describe as “usually punctual”.

While we spend a lot of time reading about the war in Ukraine or the war that Israel is involved in and realize that right now the only winners are Raytheon®, Boeing™, and Lockheed Martin©. I mean, it must be a relief for Boeing™ to try to design something that’s supposed to experience kinetic failure at high impact killing dozens. Sadly, their new Nerf™ ClusterBomb© isn’t having the combat impact they had hoped for.

I think, however, that those wars distract us from a much more important war: the war between the sexes.

This is Wednesday, so obviously we’ll be talking about the economic costs as well as the social costs, so we might as well start talking about that right now:

The root of the problem is that women are working. This was seen back in the day as a mechanism to get more cheap labor for business. Oh, that wasn’t the main point of Women’s Lib, just a nice byproduct. No, Women’s “Liberation” was first and foremost a tool of the GloboLeftElite to try to break apart the true atom of society, the family.

My brake pedal, though, wants therapy. It’s tired of being depressed.

And it worked, swimmingly. They knew it would, of course. When Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to get more women to smoke, he paid a lot of women to smoke during one Easter Day Parade in NYC. He tipped off the press that women suffragettes would be smoking “torches of freedom” and they took it from there. 99% of women over 45 at that day and time didn’t smoke.

Thankfully, for Marlboro®, the women were very susceptible to propaganda.

Just like at work. The progression went from, “get out and work” to “you don’t need no man” to “go to college and get an education and make big bucks”.

Now, as the meme goes, women are taught that devoting themselves to a husband and their children is slavery, but going to work at a faceless corporation for a man, which is, I guess, empowerment.

Women can be very capable and driven, so those that apply themselves early in their career (like men used to be taught to do) and push the long hours can reach success, in many cases, more easily than a man. And there are multiple problems embedded in this.

When women are working fifty-hour weeks, regardless of if they’re in a relationship, they defer having children. When they defer, that often means that their window of fertility closes without even a FedEx® envelope showing up marked, “Urgent, your chance to have a baby expires in 28 days.”

I hear that AOC occupied a fertility clinic. Being a communist, she wanted to seize the means of reproduction.

I recall one article I read about a fortysomething who had frozen a plethora of her eggs in anticipation that one day she’d have enough, that she’d be where she wanted to be to have those children that she had neglected to have when she was 23.

Oops. I can’t quote it exactly, but she talked about “raging, screaming like an animal” when she found out that her frozen eggs were about as viable as a Bernie Sanders presidential run. Although I’m not completely evil, I did enjoy a bit of epicaricacy at the thought. I know, it’s a bad habit, but in this case I was hoping that some 23-year-old read the news and decided to not become a regretful wine aunt.

But just the mechanism of women wanting to have great jobs is killing them. Women are (as far as I can see) programmed to find men that are better than them. They want a man who makes more money, but they also want to be high powered corporate lawyers, which takes, at minimum, enough effort to push to and through 35.

And those men that make more money than the women? They’re not looking for 35-year-old lawyer women, they’re looking for a 23-year-old Stacy who isn’t cynical after spending over a decade climbing the ladder. Women in that position have rendered themselves simultaneously undesirable and incapable of finding a man.

This one woman said she was a trophy wife, but her ears stuck out and the previous winners’ names were all tattooed down her back.

The Mrs. and I were having a conversation. Her thesis was that women were monogamous – they just had to find the right man. That would make sense. Again, from the newspaper, another 40 something woman (there are a lot of these stories), blows up her marriage of fifteen or twenty years. Leaves it to find and reconnect with the man that had been The One that she had dated for a month or six before she met her husband.

In my favorite version, the man has no, absolutely zero, recollection of the woman. She is an Alpha Widow, forever pining for that Alpha she had back in the day.

The probability that a woman becomes an Alpha Widow increases with every sex partner that she has. Whether or not The Mrs. is right, the facts show that if a woman spends her 20s in dissolute sex, the chances that she’ll be psychologically able to remain faithful to man number thirty or sixty plummets to zero. For women who view that their sexual worth is not determined by massive numbers of partners, I’d ask who wants to buy a pair of shoes that have been worn by 126 dudes?

Almost any woman can have an Alpha for a night, but the problem is that once they’ve had one, they feel that’s what they deserve.

All of this, together, is what I call The Big Lie that women have been told.

I weigh a fraction of what I did in school. An improper fraction, but still, a fraction.

This has consequences. The first is that the average Alpha loves it. He can get as much sex as he wants, when he wants it. The Beta, though, is getting wise, and having an Alpha Widow isn’t what he’s interested in.

The consequences are lowered male investment and engagement in society. Women expect to be protected by men on the subway, but elect the District Attorney that turns the rapists back to the street, and sit on the juries that convict men attempting to protect them.

Additionally, men are shying away from doing the things that make them high value. Why engage in those behaviors if they can’t attract the attention of a decent woman? Despite modernity’s challenges, what men really want is a marriage and children. That’s it. It’s wickedly simple.

Women ask, “Where have all the good men gone?” The answer is simple. They’re either married to someone else, or the men never chose the path of radical self-improvement required to make them better. Why work fifty hours and then work out when the prospect of a family is raising Chad’s kid with Chad’s Alpha Widow?

Yup, that’s an Alpha Widow.

Outside of the political consequences, this has also created a sharp political divide. The younger groups are skewing away from each other, based on sex. Women seek the party of least responsibility so they can kill babies at will and thus make the big bucks making PowerPoints™. Men are tired of the game, and are seeking what has been lost to them, which they see being fulfilled through nationalism and populism.

It’s a train wreck ready to happen.

Again, the good news is we always win this one. Will it be horrible and difficult? Yes. But it is a battle that has been fought for centuries, and always, the family ends up winning in the end.

Otherwise? None of us would be here. Which will also be the outcome if someone doesn’t stop Boeing®. Seriously. These guys need to be stopped before . . . oh, too late.

Distractions, Pascal, And Postman

“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club

I then started a summer camp for people who wanted to be plastic surgeons.  Arts and Grafts was very popular.

Distractions.

Blaise Pascal wrote about them in his book Pensées, which is French and means “reflections” and is pronounced “Hamwich” because the French never properly figured out that sounds in words should be connected in some fashion to the letters used.

Pascal was a mathematician, a physicist, and invented the laptop computer, which was initially a plank of wood.  In reality, he did some of the foundational work that showed that atmospheric pressure varied with altitude, even has a unit named after him.

Pascal was also a philosopher, and thought a whole bunch about Christianity.  This was back before the “let’s get a cappuccino and listen to Pastor Dave talk about why God wants lesbian ministers” type of church, and instead when there were debates on how salvation occurred and if free will was a thing.

Thankfully it didn’t take them too long to clean the kettle out, though they did ask me where I got six gallons.

Pascal wrote:  “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries.  Yet, it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.”

And, although he’s dead, Pascal was entirely correct.  We see it all around us right now.

Distraction is seductive.  I remember we were on a family vacation and stopped at a Denny’s® to get breakfast.  There was a line, and about 30 people (mainly families) were waiting.

As I looked, every eye was focused on a phone – 30 people sitting next to each other, yet distracted by whatever it was that they were looking at.  They had escaped reality, and also escaped talking to each other, almost as if they were addicted to the distractions coming to them over their iPhones®.

In reality, many of them probably are technically addicted to those phones.  Much of the internet, even back then, was built on the premise of stimulating dopamine to create engagement with the phone, and not with the world surrounding us.

Such a wonderful society we have to take pills to deal with it.  Meme as found.

Were those people worried about their bills, their jobs, or their immortal soul?  Nah.  They were distracted by flappy bird games or Faceborg™ or InstaChat©.  They were allowing the moments of their lives to drain away into that sea of distraction rather than confront reality.

They did have bills.  Their jobs sucked.  Their immortal soul was in peril.  But that’s difficult to think about, so it’s much easier to look at pretty colors and cat videos for ten seconds before flipping to the next infotainment bite.  The distraction was total.

Is it any wonder that coping skills have been drastically impacted in the generation raised on the distraction of phones?  Kids can’t cope because they’re never forced to confront themselves until the stakes are high.  This creates a group of victims.

I hate victims.  A lot.  They’re whiney and they suck every bit of energy out of the room, like psychic vampires.  Oh, wait, I just described The View.  Huh.

If you ever feel uninformed, remember that some people get their news from The View.

Absolutely, there are people who are in situations that are far beyond their control.  And, absolutely there are people who don’t deserve what fate has given them.  However, when I look at people who have self-control, who have looked fate in the eye and said, “Yeah, so what?  I’m still standing here, chump,” I feel admiration.

Neil Postman was a professor and writer, but then he died.  Perhaps his best-known work is Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985.  The Mrs. introduced me to it not long after we met, and I knew she was a keeper.  In it, Postman talks about the impact of amusement.  Amusement is close enough to distraction for our purposes and both Postman and Pascal are dead, so they can’t put up too much of a fight.

Again, Postman wrote about this in 1985, well before the every distraction, every place, all at once monster of the smartphone appeared.  In it, Postman identified television as a drug.  If so, it’s a gateway drug like aspirin, and the Internet is heroin.

Part of distraction is that it discourages the formation of complete thoughts.  I think at least partially that’s part of the inspiration for this place, since I want to create and bring forth ideas that people might not think about, or might have forgotten in all frenzy of flashing lights, free porn, and distractions of Instabook© and Facegram™.

If idiots could fly, TikTok® would be an airport.

It’s a world where, “Excuse me, I’m talking” becomes a replacement for actual thought and people thinking deeply about issues like old Pascal becomes rarer and rarer.  A side effect is that the information we get becomes information we can’t take action on.  Want to complain to your congressman?  How would you even contact them?  How would you get their attention?  Hell, getting the attention of an HOA is nearly impossible in some subdivisions.

Instead, you’ll complain to your neighbor.

Worse, though, is the impact that’s happening to our youth.  The lesson that bad crap is going to happen to them so they need to learn deal with it simply isn’t taught because they just distract themselves away from the Truth they don’t want to consider.  It’s not their fault – their brain is optimized to live in villages, and we distract them with the hardest hitting drug in history:  the smartphone.

Failure is an option.  And failure is a teacher, but when the teacher is fired and replaced with social media?  The lesson is muted or ignored.

I bought a book called “How to Hug”, but it turned out to be volume seven of an encyclopedia.

How did Pascal manage to deal with being a religious philosopher, a mathematician, and a physicist?

I guess Pascal was good at avoiding distraction and dealing with pressure.

How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?

“It was O-Ren Ishii and her powerful posse, the Crazy 88, that proved the victor.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

My friends always made fun of me in high school for having an imaginary girlfriend.  Of course, the joke was on them:  they were imaginary, too.

One of the comments on a post a few weeks back asked a pretty good question:

“How did we get so crazy, so fast?”

The answer actually involves several intertwining threads, mice, Soviets, and gasoline engines, so let’s see of we can weave a web that covers at least a chunk of what has made us so crazy, so quickly.  This is a distillation of the last seven years’ worth of study and writing, so some of it might be pretty familiar.  Also, it’s not necessarily complete yet, but here are the major threads that I see that have led to what Heinlein called The Crazy Years.

First:  Societal Malaise Due to Abundance

I’ve written several times about John Bumpass (that’s his real middle name according to the Internet) Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment, see immediately below this paragraph for links to two previous posts.  The short summary is Dr. Calhoun asked a crazy question:  what would happen if you gave a population of mice everything they could want:  food, water, freedom from predation, space to live, bedding material, and places to make nests.

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

The result?  The mice died out.  At a certain point they stopped mating, mother mice stopped taking care of infant mice, gangs formed, and some mice (the “beautiful ones”) just spent their time grooming themselves and not really interacting.

If this sounds like Reddit® or TikTok™ or the Democratic National Convention, well, you’re right.  For a certain subset of the population, abundance has ruined them.

My friend told me I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic” which was ironic because it was Tuesday.

I think it started in the 1960s.  I’m just guessing.  I like to blame the hippies, so they’re likely the early-version.  It then continued into the wildest era of abundance the world has ever seen:  the 1990s.  If you look at any time lapse, that’s when the United States started leading the world (it has spread now, literally) in having obesity, not hunger, be the bigger (pun intended) health problem.

I think this started to manifest itself, big time, in the music of the 1990s.  We went from Warrant singing about Cherry Pie to Kurt Cobain mumbling about how living in the suburbs with all the Pop Tarts™ his fat face could eat was killing him.  Turns out that shotguns are even more deadly than Pop Tarts©.  Who knew?  We had a generation that was lost because they had everything.

I think a candidate for the hallmark phrase of this Crazy Cause is:  “Why are we even here, dude?”

Never take diet advice from a fat guy, and never take life advice from Kurt Cobain.

Second:  Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges

I recently made the comment on X® that a lot of people would e better off if they had been bullied as kids.  Was I serious?  Yeah, I was.  One response was, “Why do you want to make things worse?”

The truth is, for me, that bullies actually helped me build my character and my resolve.  And, believe it or not, sometimes the bullies were right and the things that they bullied me about (second graders can be assholes) were things I needed to fix to be a better person.  Did I lift harder to get stronger because of it?  Yes.  Did I develop the internal resilience so that the people who (rightfully) bullied the smarmy second grader that I was eventually earned the respect of the bullies?

Yes.  Males, even young males, need to develop a hierarchy and understand their place in it and why they are inferior to Chuck Norris.

No child is born perfect, and it is the challenges in life that help define and develop character.  Without challenge, development is stunted.

I think that today’s twentysomethings have the problem that they look into a future that certainly looks grim to them, yet they’ve never had a chance to develop their character and are told again and again how perfect they are and how their choices are important.

Newsflash:  the choices of a second grader generally deserve about as much attention as the choices my dog wants to make.  Both will eat all of the cake in the house if you let them and make messes everywhere.  It’s our job as parents to not care what they think when it’s important to develop character and virtue.

Chuck Norris can recite pi backwards.

As a society we face many of the same problems:  what is it we stand for and what are we trying to accomplish?  We don’t have Soviets to fight, we’re actively encouraging invaders into our country to replace us, and we don’t have any cool national purpose like the Apollo program.

I think a candidate for the catchphrase of this crazy cause is:  “Why am I so worthless?”

Third:  Societal Atomization Due To Tech

As humans, we have minds that are built around smaller social systems, mainly.  The big move from rural to urban happened in the west only recently.  Our legacy social structure is (mainly) to live in a town for a very long time, put down roots, make friends, make a reputation.

Most people aren’t leaders, they’re followers, and want to be led.  Why else would sane people want zoning regulations?

The good news is I can have up to six Eldrich Abominations without asking for a zoning variance request.

But now, put us in a constantly churning urban landscape where we don’t know the next-door-neighbor in the apartment building?  Who do we turn to?

Well, whatever latenightjokeman says or whatever TikTik™ says or whatever InstaFace© allows to be printed.  People are defining themselves on how YouTube™ says Europeans feel about Donald Trump.

They are also allowed to pick whatever gender they are.  How do I know tech is driving this?  Back when COVID made everyone homeschooled, transgenderism dropped.  Why?  No one to identify to – which is why “transwomen” with no girl parts get offended when gynecologists won’t give them appointments.

Yes.  That’s a thing.

The iPhone™ is a big driver.  It puts connections in the hands of kids.  I talked with one Millennial, and he said that at the start of his high school career, kids “cruised main” looking for other kids.  By the end of high school, it was all phones.  Friendships dropped, and dating dropped.  Mix that with the first two causes above, and it leads to fewer kids.

Dating sites magnify this, and make every girl “4” think that she deserves a Chad ranked 9 or higher because one time a drunk Chad had sex with her.  This leads to Chads being happy, but girls being sad and hollow inside.

I think a catchphrase for this Crazy Cause is “Who or what the heck am I?”

When I was a kid I thought my dad was Superman®.  Later, I wonder why he put a cape on after drinking bourbon.

Result of these interacting strands of Crazy are a large number of people who:

  • Stand for nothing
  • Have no examples of virtue other than seeking money in their lives
  • See no point in anything other than the present moment
  • Are distracted
  • Think they’re too good for PEZ™
  • Are filled with the combination of anxiety and narcissism
  • Do and feel whatever the media tells them to do
  • Haven’t built social circles of any particular strength – clubs and churches are on constant decline

There’s good news.

All of this is self-limiting.  We’re not mice, and plenty of good humans haven’t fallen into Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink.  Many of those same people have overcome challenges sufficient to shape their character for the better.  Finally, there are enough of us that don’t follow.

We lead.  Or we choose our own path.

And?

We’re gonna win.

Gen X, Gen Z, And The Crisis Of The Soul

“And then we’ll all have a Christening for Rosemary’s baby.” – Last Action Hero

They call me “The Exorcist” at the liquor store.  After I leave, all the spirits are gone.

The kids today have a lot of challenges.  Generation Z and Generation Alpha have had a very significantly different childhood than most people reading this post.

For me growing up as a Gen X kid, we were very, very free.  I regularly came home to an empty house when I was in kindergarten.  The first time I let myself into my house with my own key, I was in third grade.  The first time I stayed overnight by myself (in winter, no less) I was in fourth or fifth grade.  By the time I was in high school I didn’t even see a parent three or four nights a week most weeks since I was going to school in an apartment about fifty miles from Wilder Mountain.

I certainly didn’t raise myself, but Gen X was pretty free range.  We left the house when we got up, and got home, dirty, muddy, and sunburned when the photodetector turned the yard light on because that was Ma Wilder’s definition of ‘dark’ in the ‘be home by dark’ direction.

Life is like a warranty – it runs out at the worst time possible.

I certainly used several of my free hours to do things that were things my warning label said not to do, and certainly would have voided my manufacturer’s warranty had I goofed up.

We were also pretty awful to each other, at least in middle school.  I have long maintained that kids in middle school are the worst people on the planet:  they have learned how to bully people by digging at their deepest insecurities, but they haven’t learned enough empathy to not do that.  See?  Absolute worst people on the planet.  I know, I was one of them.

I won’t dwell much on my specifics for this post – this isn’t about me, but about a generation that was given great independence from the start.  Many, many generations had it far worse than Gen X, since at no point when I was 8 did Pa Wilder seriously mention selling me off to the mines to move explosives so that valuable miners wouldn’t be injured.  Again, he may have mentioned it, but not seriously.

You’d think that being the first generation born after the pill was invented and abortion was entered into the sacraments of the Left, that Gen X would have been the most wanted generation in history.

No, not really.

What’s Gump’s password?  1Forest1.

Many parents that were often more interested in themselves during the “Me” decade of the 1970s.  In fact, Gen X was born at the intersection on a great societal upheaval of Woman’s Lib convincing women they didn’t want to be mothers.  Or wives.  That was also the beginning of the cult of the no-fault divorce as well.

Society’s feelings are often transmitted in the media, and let’s look at the roster of Gen X villains:

  • The baby from Rosemary’s Baby was a Gen X baby.
  • So was Damien from The Omen
  • So was Regan The Exorcist.
  • Although Michael Myers from Halloween was technically a Boomer, when he first appears he’s a kid, the same age as Gen X at the time. Same with Jason Voorhees.
  • Who opens the door in Poltergeist? Gen X.
  • The vampires in The Lost Boys? Gen X.
  • Everybody in Scream.
  • Oh, and when we grew up? The Faculty.
  • I think the shark from Jaws was a Boomer, so we’re off the hook on that one.

I started downloading Jaws the other day, but my computer keeps dying after one megabyte.

I don’t know what it was about Gen X that made people think of Satan when they thought about us.  I’m pretty sure that other kids weren’t quite as bad as I was.  Except Damien.

I can’t speak for other generations, but I’m not going to complain about my experience being a part of Gen X.  Yes, I was bullied, but I got tougher.  Yes, my parents gave me a lot of freedom, but Pa Wilder missed very few wrestling matches and rarely missed a varsity football game, even when a three-hour drive was involved.  I knew I was loved.

Coming out of high school, I felt (and still feel) that the limiting factor to my life is . . . me.  I feel the ball is in my hands.

From observation, kids today (on average) don’t have near the opportunity to be free range that we as Gen X did.  And, at least around Modern Mayberry, they aren’t bullied.  People are nice.  The kids are nice.

Maybe . . . too nice?

The best thing about taking money by bullying kids is you can buy yourself something nice.

We have created a fundamentally different generation with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.  Heck, what’s the best way to ground a member of Gen Alpha?  To make him go outside and hang with his friends in real life, away from his electronics.

I sense (and I could be wrong) that a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha has never had to face real adversity.  Instead, they’ve lived their lives with a sense of impending dread and massive confusion amidst the greatest material and information wealth the world has ever seen.  Starvation in the United States, and, for the first time ever, in the world, is virtually unknown.

World hunger?

It’s a solved problem.  There is more than enough food for everyone in the world right now, and the only starvation that occurs happens in war zones or is politically motivated.

Yet the GloboLeftElite has put into the minds of the kids today that the world is doomed.  They’re feeling higher levels of depression than kids from the Great Depression.  Suicide is their second highest cause of death.

Gen X had “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have “All Good Girls Go To Hell”.

Yet, my generation had Mutually Assured Destruction while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have Climate Change.  At least the Soviets were the bad guys in MAD, but in Climate Change?  Every human is the villain, oh, and we’re deeply in debt, robots and immigrants are going to take their jobs.

Gen X is so old our Social Security number is in Roman numerals.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been taught to hate themselves and humanity, and it’s so bad that they don’t want to have kids.

More than anything, this is a crisis of the spirit.  My generation was vilified as the Anti-Christ incarnate, and we responded by getting married and having children and getting by in life.

Did we make it?  Yes, I think we did.  Will they make it?  I think so, though, for many, their road is tougher than ours.  Weak men make hard times, and I think that’s where we’re at.

But, hey, think of all the great memes they’ll make!