There’s an article in The New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner on female sexuality.  Researcher Meredith Chivers showed men and women videos of apes having sex, male heterosexual intercourse, lesbian sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked and a nude women exercising.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

Under discussion: Honor: A History by James Bowman (Encounter Books, 2007)

What happened to honor in the West? And without honor -- or at least an honest understanding of it -- are we capable of facing the challenges of the 21^st Century?

In Honor: A History, Bowman places these questions in a political context, as a clash between the old honor culture of the Islamic world and the anti-honor culture of the modern West. In this sense, his question is similar to the one Mark Steyn asks in America Alone. If Islam has all the attributes of what Osama Bin Laden famously called "a strong horse," will the pampered and polite social democracies of the West be able to survive its galloping onslaught?

This horse race bookends a rare and worthwhile exploration of the concept of honor itself, which is a confusing topic in the contemporary West where honorable ideals have been discredited as anti-modern, and the word "honor" has been reduced to a mere synonym for neutered, universal, non-hierarchical values like "goodness" or "honesty" or "integrity." The bumper sticker banality "honor diversity" renders the word honor a substitute for the verbs "value" or "esteem." While you can certainly follow the dilution of honor's meaning here, this is a world apart from a word once closely connected to glory won in battle.

The May/July issue of Foreign Affairs has a long article on "The Global Glass Ceiling," written by women's rights activist Isobel Coleman. The author calls on international corporations to join the fight for female empowerment in the developing world. Coleman hopes to convince those trying to turn a profit in emerging markets that their future gains depend in great part on making sure women are being educated and joining the workforce.  

The article proceeds to provide evidence that this is already happening. Goldman Sachs, for example, has put forward $100 million towards educating women entrepreneurs in Third World countries. The CEO of the company declares that programs like this are a good way of "manufacturing global GNP."  Walmart is taking it upon itself to increase female literacy in countries in which it operates. If they can be convinced to rely on women-owned businesses for one percent of their supply of goods, Coleman tells us, billions would go into women's empowerment, far more than what international agencies are able to provide towards the same ends. 

One of the most proactive of the Western corporations in trying to further the goals of Third World feminism is Nike, which set up the Nike Foundation in 2004 to address gender gaps in developing counties. Thus far, the organization has spent $100 million on education, health and "leadership" programs for poor young girls. The famous shoe and apparel company has also made use of its marketing skills, creating in 2008 a video called "The Girl Effect," which, we are informed, has "gone viral."

What else is new? some paleoconservatives may ask. Years ago Samuel Francis denounced the triumph of Economic Man in a piece on the controversy over the Confederate flag in Georgia in the early 2000s. He lamented the fact that blacks were able to put monetary pressure on the state by threatening boycotts if Georgia decided that a design based on the symbol of Old Dixie belonged on the current state flag. Francis wrote elsewhere that he disagreed with neoconservatives and rightist libertarians in that he saw capitalism as a destructive enemy of tradition.

At first glance, there seems to be something to this view. After all, corporations and businessmen in general would benefit if there was a way to double their available labor supply. Under a purely free-market system, a traditionalist may argue, the interests of capitalists and feminists converge. It's little wonder that Nike, Goldman and others have become supporters of progressive causes.  

Oh ye of little faith in human nature! Such an argument underestimates the natural differences between men and women. It is based on the assumption that putting money towards educating women is bound to pay off. If one looks at the top 10 college majors that women choose, at least six are absolutely worthless when it comes to creating wealth while the most lucrative undergraduate programs are known for being disproportionately male. Because the state to a large extent funds higher education through grants and subsidized loans, the disincentives to spending four years in school not developing any marketable skills are mitigated.  

Corporations hoping to educate girls in their own self-interest will be disappointed when they find that few are suited for leadership or high-paying positions. They would then give up paying for the training of those least likely to benefit from it, assuming that the culture they're operating in is neutral towards feminism. That's not to say corporations always rationally act in their own self-interest in the way understood in classical economics. Those companies mentioned in Coleman's articles are simply hoping to receive some good publicity and/or buy into egalitarian myths themselves. Whatever the case may be, the problem is the myths themselves rather than the economic system.

As science shows that women are more suited for lower-earning fields and tend to value money less than men when they decide on a career, it may make good business sense, ignoring PR considerations, to try to train large amounts of women to be retail clerks and secretaries but not engineers and investment bankers. One of the main problems with feminism is that it pushes for government policies in the hopes that women will eventually earn more relative to men, making the sexes less attractive to one another. The free market doesn't tend to lead to such results, especially when it's not operating in a sea of poisonous ideas, which, we must admit, would still be there under a more statist system.  

Francis failed to consider that blacks are not the majority in Georgia or the United States. Nor do they have much purchasing power relative to their numbers. If this smaller and poorer population is able to flex its economic muscles and push around whites, it's certainly not capitalism's fault! Southern whites, and whites in general, are willing to vote to maintain their heritage, but seem unable to organize to use economic levers to get their way. There's no economic reason why this has to be the case.  

Traditionalists unhappy with the world tend to blame any force that has power for what has gone wrong: the education system, the media, the state or the market.  While without question all have had some negative societal effects, the last is the only one that naturally moves towards fulfilling human desires and there is no way to fulfill human desires without a consideration for human nature. The reason Bill Gates is an anti-white multiculturalist isn't because he's a capitalist; it's because he's an educated Westerner at the start of 21st century. Bad ideas are bound to be pushed upon the rest of society as long as they're held by the vast majority of our civilization's brightest individuals and thus accepted by any potential elite. Finding ourselves in such circumstances, the biggest enemy is the coercive and unaccountable force of government.  

I recently took part in a "males only" workshop at a local private high school. It was an unlikely opportunity for an advocate of traditional masculine ideals, especially given the fact that the workshop was part of this fairly liberal school's yearly "Diversity Conference." I was thankful for the chance to get across some countering viewpoints. I shared the floor with a veteran leader of men's groups, and I knew we had different aims from the get-go, but I had the first hour.

To begin, I played the guys my favorite scene from The Outlaw Josey Wales -- the part where Wales rides up to the Comanche chief Ten Bears and bargains for peace.

There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see. And so, there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.

There is iron in your words of death.

This is how civilization happened.

Agreements between men, backed by the threat of violence.

This is how men made this world.

Christina Hoff Sommers recently wrote about "Equal Pay Day," the day feminists have set aside to moan about the fact that women earn on average 78 percent of men's pay. Among other things, she wrote,

Excuse me for interrupting, but this holiday has no basis in reality. Even feminist economists acknowledge that today's pay disparities are almost entirely the result of women's different life choices -- what they study in school, where they work, and how they balance home and career. This is not to deny that some employers will try to pay Jill 78 cents and Jack $1.00 for an identical job. But our strict laws give Jill the right to take that employer to court. The claim that American women as a group face systemic wage discrimination is groundless.

So, what determines the way in which women's lifestyle choices, including "what they study in school, where they work, and how they balance home and career," differ from those of men. Answer: to a large degree, hardwired sex differences, the product of millions of years of evolution, specifically in the differential effects which reproduction has on men versus women.

From The Occidental Observer.

I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

With shameless and shocking gall, Syrian-American author Alia Malek provided cover for domestic Jihadis by blaming American boys and American masculinity in her recent op-ed for The Christian Science Monitor.

Malek has admittedly made a career for herself as a left-wing apologist for Islam, exploiting Civil Rights Movement sentimentality to sweep anti-Islamicization sentiment under the rug and, one suspects, to prime America for the kind of "submission" to Mohammedans currently practiced by multiculturalist European governments. She begins with a brazen statement, based entirely on anti-male feminist propaganda:

American Jihadis are not a product of Islam. Their emergence is connected to issues of gender and a growing acceptance of violence in America.

It has been said that feminism is ultimately about female empowerment, not gender equality. The subtle difference being that feminists aren't trying to stand on equal ground with men, but taking as much as power as they can to boost their public influence. Regardless, I think there's a much more central point to be made about feminism: it thrives on empowerment, not self-empowerment. Follow me to understand why this is such a big deal.

I mentioned in a recent podcasted conversation with Richard Spencer that the way forward for men was for them to start saying "no." A "hard, paternal no" was the exact quote, I think.

Welmer from The Spearhead riffed on a similar theme today with "The Exaggerated Danger of Speaking Your Mind."

I know a guy who did time for felony weapon-dealing and then won a Marxist, Latina social worker to his side in a custody dispute. The kicker? This guy had a swastika tattooed on his back in prison and was a known gangster. He won custody, too! And then he proceeded to knock up another girl and father four more babies in addition to the two he already had. Despite heavy drinking and cheating, he's still got a devoted wife - and a successful business.

I've also known guys who were decent, honest, hardworking and careful men who got hauled into DV diversion programs despite never having laid a hand on anyone - man or woman - in their entire lives. Men who innocently compliment coworkers get dragged before HR on sexual harassment complaints. The men who follow the rules consistently get nailed. They are hated for being obedient, polite and compliant.

The men who let women push them around and dictate the rules of engagement aren't necessarily being rewarded for it. In fact, women may terrorize them like Helots -- to remind them of their servile position and keep them in line.

A real sea change in the state of contemporary gender relations will occur when even the nice guys, the average Joes, start standing up for themselves and making their own terms.