What’s Wrong with the World

Steve,

I remember the Oz Conservative commenting on this video and I'm glad you linked and commented here, but just to warn regular readers (and I think folks have done this in the past, so forgive the repitition) there is a reason you use the adjective "dreaded" to describe "Roissy". He really is way too vulgar than he needs to be and certainly way too vulgar for good Christian women and men. I used to check him out but realized that there is truth in the idea that we need to protect our eyes and minds from vulgarity, even when that vulgarity contains some truth.

I liked this comment by Oz Conservative:

What all this means is that the men who refuse to become demoralised are likely to find themselves a much sought after commodity.

Wow, amen. Those non-demoralised men, if they are good Christians and good guys, should find some way to get to know all the young Christian women who would really like to meet them.

For most, though: non-demoralized = decently employed.

On the fact or claim that in present-day America, 3 women get college degrees for every 2 men who do -- and those decrees would be in what sorts of fields? For the most part, these are parasitical fields, by which I mean fields in which if one *does* manage to land a job relevant to one’s degree, one’s work does not generate wealth, but actually merely consumes wealth generated by others.

On the fact or claim that in present-day and near-future America, “in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two are dominated by women,” what is the dominant *fact* about these “professions?” Aside from that many (or most) of them will be parasitical, as mentioned above, most of them are projected to grow precisely because of governmental interference in society and the markets society creates. There is no *natural* demand for “social workers!”

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These sorts of silly women who like to imaging that *they* are taking over the world are forced, in maintenance of their fantasy, to ignore reality: they are *still* being sheltered by men. It’s just that rather than a single identifiable man (father, husband) who shelters them, it is the faceless “man” of government and bureaucracy sheltering them.

But, what is not sustainable cannot and will not last. And an economy built “social workers” -- an economy which consumes, but does not generate, wealth -- is not sustainable.

When she was talking about South Korea's move to push women in to the workforce, she sounded positively Maoist -- with his proverb that "Women hold up half the sky", which Kristoff and WuDunn praised in their book, "Half the Sky".

Blech.

Kamilla

On the claim that in China and India, families are no longer so strongly preferring "first-born sons" ... that's not feminism-in-action-and-domination, that's economics: both nations have widely publicized wild imbalances of sons over daughters -- because they have been murdering their daughters for a generation -- and *new* prospective parents are beginning to realize that unless they are very wealthy, such that they can afford to attract a wife for their son(s), if they have only sons, but no daughters, the chances that they will ever have grandsons becomes vanishingly nill.

The other odd thing about the South Korea example: she talks about the change in preference from having boys to having girls over the last 20 or 30 years, but the graph, which starts at 1985, starts with girls ALREADY preferred by about 2%. This is "an extremely patriarchal society" that is changing? Well, the stats don't back it up.

Golly, this talk picks up a handful of trends towards an improvement of females' chances of being economic successes but never asks whether (a) women want primarily to be economic successes as the cost of traditional family roles (or social meaning generally), or (b) these trends have other, offsetting limits or countervailing forces to slow them down, reverse them, or otherwise play hopscotch with the trend. It is, once again, a presentation of a picture of change as if the trend itself identifies meaning and goodness.

She's pretty much on the money with the facts as I understand them. A good summary overall despite her insufferable gloating. Her social interpretations are debatable, however. As I see it "the end of men" is the result of a perfect storm of coalescing trends:

1a. New social attitudes (including feminism, secularism, careerism, consumerism, contraception, divorce, cohabitation, and so forth).

1b. The ideological push to eliminate male "domination" in all fields.

2. Economic and technological changes that favor female aptitudes and skills.

3. The improved education level of women.

Which of these, if any, is the most powerful ingredient? I have listed them in what I believe is their order of influence, although items 1-2 are running an extremely tight race.

My prediction is that #1 is going to disintegrate, but not in a coherent way. After its disintegration some new things will emerge in its place, one of which is the barbarian patriarchy - now underground - which I have been discussing for the past several years. The other components might include Islam, a resurgent traditional Christianity (hopefully with some militancy and backbone), and a new fanatical and aggressive secularism. It's anybody's guess as to which of these might dominate. But #1 as a convergence of attitudes is not long for this world.

The economic and technological situation will probably continue to favor female strengths and skills, short of an economic collapse. So, even if the changes in #1 result in more favorable attitudes for men and an end to the polices of #1b, it's still going to be an uphill climb economy-wise.

It's too bad the "End of Men" has yet to impact Islam.

I didn't watch the whole video. Did she ever talk about that?

So far as I'm concerned, the gist of the talk comes from about 6:35 to about 7:32, and runs as follows:

"The economy has changed a lot. We used to have a manufacturing economy which was about building goods and products. And now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy. Those two economies require very different skills, and, as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been. It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills and, you know, with the help of a union you could make yourself a pretty good middle class life. But that really isn't true any more. This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength, which is what's helped men along all these years. What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills. You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people, and operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. And those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing."

Is any of this obviously wrong?

For the most part, these are parasitical fields, by which I mean fields in which if one *does* manage to land a job relevant to one’s degree, one’s work does not generate wealth, but actually merely consumes wealth generated by others.

I think I know what you're trying to say here, but it can't seriously be argued that all non-wealth-creating work is "parasitical" - unless wealth is the only point of work. Which is obviously false, at least from a Christian perspective.

Parasitical work is work that does not contribute, in some way, to the common good.

Is any of this obviously wrong?

Sounds exactly right to me. Where traditionalists differ with her and with most conservatives, however, is that we don't believe in meritocracy.

It was frustrating to see Rosin act like the economy just happened to change, without acknowledging the massive social engineering that has gone into changing the economy this way.

For instance, right now the IMF in Ireland is pushing for more women in the workplace despite women's lack of desire to enter the workforce and despite an already high unemployment rate.

Also the U.S. economic stimulus package was rigged against men by feminists who objected that it was helping non-women-dominated professions too much.

I'm also not sure the "service economy" is sustainable.

One thing I am sure about: most men won't like this new order, and most women won't be happy with its products as soon as they hit their thirties and really, really need a reliable husband.

If I'm a young man stuck in a job that won't let me sustain a family, I'll either waste my life playing video games or I'll decide to join up with a movement that gets its fun from tearing down the new feminist order.

I second Kevin Jones's comments. Affirmative action in the U.S. is a huge thing and did not arise as "by an invisible hand." In the academy this is particularly clear. The only reason that women aren't already more than half of the philosophy professors in the profession is because not all that many women are interested in entering the profession. If they did, they'd be hired and promoted beyond their merits and over clearly better qualified male applicants. Anyone who has known the behind-the-scenes situation in academic hiring knows this. In English the only thing that trumps affirmative action is the perception of a candidate as "conservative," so that a woman perceived as a "conservative" scholar may be disfavored vis a vis a male candidate who does more trendy material. Otherwise, every department pushes for females, and departments are sometimes told by higher administration or by outside reviewers that they should deliberately advertise in areas like feminism in order to get more females to apply. The one thing that has helped move us away from the bad old days of completely insane affirmative action preferences in Michigan is the passage of the MCRI several years ago, but this helps only if departments or at least members of departments are willing to step up and invoke it and if enough otherwise AA-minded colleagues then back down.

Has this changed economic calculations made by individuals trying to get into academic disciplines? You bet. Did it arise in a purely economic fashion? By no means. It has been ideology, pure and simple, and anti-meritocratic ideology, too. And I would not be surprised if it affected the lives of my own children later in concrete economic ways.

Dear Hanna,

This has "be careful what you ask for" written all over it.

XOXO

You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people, and operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. And those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing.

In general, yes I disagree with this. I don't know how much Steve or Jeff have worked with women in an office environment, but let's just say the triumphalism of above crashes to reality when witnessed.

The open communication of above is typically either gossip or the type of psychological warfare that women excel at. Assign two groups, one all men and one all women, the same task in a meeting and I bet you get more blunt discussion than anything the women do. In mixed company it becomes a lot harder because many men have been taught to be polite to a woman. Although it is changing, not many are going to tell a woman "you're an idiot" where they wouldn't hesitate to tell a man that.

Yeah, fluid workplaces are the height of productivity. Fluid workplaces tend to be ones where little gets accomplished other than constant rearranging. It's the equivalent of constantly changing and repainting the living room. It might be nice, but doesn't add a whole lot.

Finally, I don't believe that women are more intelligent than men. Maybe in the social context. But, when it comes to hard and fast tasks (programming, construction, etc.), men are generally better.

Back in the late 90's someone did a worldwide study of who women would rather work for, a man or a woman? Except for India, women preferred to work for men. Why? Male bosses, in general, are more task oriented. They don't care about all of the interpersonal items that women do. Therefore, women will tend to find a male boss to be fair while with a female boss will have a tendency to pick people based on who she likes.

For the other comments, yes the "intelligent" people have messed up this country with their service economy nonsense. Instead, they should have been working for a balanced economy that meets the skill distribution of the populace and provides, at a minimum, a steady path to good wages.

I don't know how much Steve or Jeff have worked with women in an office environment, but let's just say the triumphalism of above crashes to reality when witnessed.

I've worked with - and for - women in many contexts. My last two employers were women. I've had several female supervisors. The HR person is always female. It always starts off extremely well, and always ends badly. I never know exactly why. It's probably my fault somehow. But I can tell you this: I couldn't keep up with these women, with the multitasking. They were extraordinarily productive. Their best performing staff members were also women. And the work environment was pretty much as Ms. Rosin described.

The open communication of above is typically either gossip or the type of psychological warfare that women excel at.

Oh, yes, their viciousness can be shocking. Somehow, though, they manage to keep up with the gossip and backbiting while being productive.

Assign two groups, one all men and one all women, the same task in a meeting and I bet you get more blunt discussion than anything the women do. In mixed company it becomes a lot harder because many men have been taught to be polite to a woman.

In my experience, when there is a critical mass of females present (30% or better), the men simply clam up and the women end up running the show.

Finally, I don't believe that women are more intelligent than men. Maybe in the social context. But, when it comes to hard and fast tasks (programming, construction, etc.), men are generally better.

In the superficial world of first impressions, sales and marketing, customer service, human resource management, etc., women do excel in the necessary relationships. You might call that a form of intelligence. Yesterday I attended networking event for local business people, and the crowd was easily 2/3 female. This in a region of extremely high unemployment.

Did it arise in a purely economic fashion? By no means. It has been ideology, pure and simple ...

I would say that the ideological component has been strong, to be sure, but it has worked in conjunction with other developments. The new economic and technological arrangements, however they came about, are better suited to female strengths than what they replaced. A female-led meritocracy is required to maintain its success.

, and anti-meritocratic ideology, too.

Yes, but those admitted through anti-meritocratic means converted the system to a meritocracy that favors their own.

Merit system = best man for the job.
Christian system = best job for the man.

I need to do a post on this.

converted the system to a meritocracy that favors their own.

There are still areas and disciplines, Jeff, where I can say for a fact that this is not so. Mathematics, for example, philosophy--a whole slew of academic disciplines. Physics. If I knew more about non-academic disciplines I wouldn't be surprised if I could name a fair number there as well.

If, of course, you take a previously valuable discipline and make it valueless in order to favor your own, it's an abuse of the term "meritocracy" to apply it to the resultant selection of people for doing valueless work.

There are still areas and disciplines, Jeff, where I can say for a fact that this is not so. Mathematics, for example, philosophy--a whole slew of academic disciplines. Physics. If I knew more about non-academic disciplines I wouldn't be surprised if I could name a fair number there as well.

Oh, of course there are niches here and there. I could name half-a-dozen myself. But I was speaking more generally. I agree with you about mathematics and physics, but I'm surprised to hear you say this about philosophy. It's not my world, but my impression is that philosophy as a discipline has been changed - corrupted, perhaps, but changed in a way that alters the criteria for merit. Is that inaccurate?

it's an abuse of the term "meritocracy"

I don't think so. Merit refers to something outside of itself. That "something" might be morally good, bad, or indifferent. One can "merit" a good position doing bad or useless things, because one does those bad or useless things well.

Steve Burton: I'd just like to say that I'm impressed at your reference, in the title of your post, to the now obscure tract of John Knox against the Catholic queens of his day. Did you have some sort of irony in mind?

Is that inaccurate?

It is inaccurate for analytic philosophy. Continental philosophy...shouldn't exist. ;-) I suppose a woman cd. be very "good" at...er...producing a ream of baloney that wd. resemble what is churned out by the postmodern paper generator. But then again, it's impossible to me to see how one wd. go about _ranking_ such nonsense so as to decide the person who is "best" at it. One might as well select a human postmodern paper generator at random.

Jeff C.: yes. I did.

Ah. Well, as evidence that the irony is more perceived than real, I offer these quotes from (protestant) Queen Victoria:

"We women are not made for governing, and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations. There are times which force one to take interest in them, and I do, of course intensely"

"I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection."

That's a great Queen Victoria quote, Jeff! (I like the Macbeth allusion...)

Glad you liked them, Lydia. (They are actually two quotes from separate occasions, so far as I can tell.)

Yesterday I attended networking event for local business people, and the crowd was easily 2/3 female. This in a region of extremely high unemployment.

As per your other statement, once you get so many women in the room, men either tune out (if they have to be there) or just don't show up at all.

I couldn't keep up with these women, with the multitasking. They were extraordinarily productive. Their best performing staff members were also women. And the work environment was pretty much as Ms. Rosin described.

The military did a study once on why men and women crashed planes when human error was involved. It was found that men tended to forget some detail like running low on fuel. Women though were usually so absorbed in the details of flying the plane that they forgot to fly the plane.

My experience with female bosses has been that a lot of that productive multi-tasking is not centered on achieving corporate objectives. It's the type of stuff that most men would find to be irrelevant or minor.

Oh, yes, their viciousness can be shocking. Somehow, though, they manage to keep up with the gossip and backbiting while being productive.

Maybe some guy should complain about a hostile work environment. :-)

One nagging factor in all of this, is if women are so dang superior in this new economy and we have more women than ever at every level of business, why are we becoming so uncompetitive in the world economy?

Psalm 12:4 "By our tongues we will prevail; our own lips will defend us - who is lord over us?"

This is just silly. In a world where many countries have an excess of men due to population control idiocy, does Rosin really believe that women will save the day? The men who rule those countries will role over those women with tanks and keep on going. Oh, wait, she will still need men to fight those wars, so better keep a few around (men being disposable and all). Talk about a feminist who doesn't seem to understand what it means to be a woman (or a man)!

Basically, any technical field except computer programing is still massively dominated by men - okay, biochemistry is becoming more female-oriented, but the nice thing about science is that a chemical reaction doesn't really care if a man or woman is running it. The result is pretty much then same. Same with mathematics and physics. There are some gender-blind fields, at least in terms of results. The more masculine a field (and make no mistake, math and science are masculine fields even if the results of the experiments aren't), the less likely woman are to succeed in breaking through the barriers. There are many women string and woodwind players in symphony orchestras but few brass players (brass instruments being associated with war and hunting and string and woodwind with the Temple). In business, I suspect that woman don't really succeed until they start becoming masculinized (I will let those with more knowledge of the area speak to that hypothesis). In any case, I doubt Rosin has Christian sensibilities, otherwise, she would have to explain why God made them male and female and blessed them both.

The Chicken

By the way, a mathematician has told me that "math ed." is the feminist make-work pocket in his field and has burgeoned (like "feminist philosophy") as a way to "get women in the department."

Math ed. means teaching young kids math, not doing mathematics. It is a hybrid of education and mathematics and it uses very questionable theories (I am an expert in problem-solving theory, so I have some idea of what they are pushing) and is dominated by politics. I know this because despite the formation of these math ed. specialists, my students are less savvy, on-the-whole, about math than they used to be. A mathematician at the college level has to do research and publishing and I know many math departments and there are few women. This does raise an interesting point contra Rosen: to produce good mathematics requires intense concentration, focus on detail, and the amassing of a huge amount of background knowledge. As such, one would think that her prototypical woman would be better at mathematics then a man and yet study after study shows that women are better at computation, but not theorization. So, her idea about women being the detailed-oriented ones is hot air. It depends on what the domain is.

Clearly, there is nothing deep in what she says on this topic. Women will max out their contribution in the work place and men will slowly start to dominate, again. I say this because the whole situation is a result of the contraceptive society and nature cannot be fooled for long. She is reading the book in the middle and commenting as if it were the end. Her analysis of the similarities of the 1920 and 1960s to today is flawed because it wasn't the feminist movement that was propelling societal changes, but the youth movements and those do not exist, today because, guess what, we've shorted our supply of youth - good going, ladies. Women will continue to dominate the workplace for a while, but biology is a hard thing to overcome and without a stupid youth culture pushing unnatural ways of relating between the sexes, women will lose their dominance as the need for children become greater. Even using her arguments, men are not as skilled at mothering as women.

Why did I just waste 18 minutes listening to someone who needs to understand basic biology, better?

The Chicken

I believe the university this person was addressing was DePaul, and his implication was that there were women doing "math ed." nonsense in that department and publishing in that "field," which is, of course, a lot easier to do than doing research and publishing in, oh, group theory or something.

But they haven't ruined the field yet, nor many others. In any event, I continue to maintain that if feminists ruin some previously noble academic field and then hire more and more people on the basis of their being sufficiently political in their scholarship, to call this ridiculous endeavor "meritocracy" is confusing at best. English is a good example. There is nothing about doing actual good work--whether research or teaching--in the field of English literature that particularly favors women. To the extent that the field has been ruined and politicized and now is selecting for nonsense-talk, well, a) men are probably just as "good" at nonsense-talk as women and b) selecting for a willingness to engage in nonsense-talk in a discipline that has a full-fledged tradition and canons of valuable work _should not_ be called "meritocracy."

Is any of this obviously wrong?

Only the part about women being better able to sit still and focus. In not just my experience, men can focus on one task to the complete exclusion of all else, while women are always multitasking whether they like it or not.