Oh, you ladies, why do you even bother getting educated – sorry, “educated?” Don’t you know that if you get too educated you might end up marrying some dude who is less educated than you, which is apparently contrary to the laws of nature? Or maybe you’ll end up not getting married at all? The horror.
On The Spearhead, guest poster Lyn87 explains how he dropped some “red pill” knowledge on a buddy of his during a recent outing:
One guy has teenage daughters that he’s planning to put through college. I could not resist inserting some red pill into the mix, so I mentioned that 60% of degrees were going to women, and that women prefer to marry up. Since “educated” women don’t often go for “uneducated” men, a lot of women of his daughter’s generation were on their way toward spinsterhood for lack of “suitable” mates.
So women with education are only “educated” in scare-quotes. But men who are “uneducated” also get the scare quotes, because presumably they are wise beyond their years of formal study.
Alas, Lyn87’s friend wasn’t convinced by this brilliant argument to reconsider his decision to put his daughters through college, which leads Lyn87 to consider the possibility that “that some malevolent group of “Jezebels” is dissolving blue pills into the supply of drinking water.” Lions and tigers and malevolent Jezebels, oh my!
Consider his daughters. I’m sure they are good kids who would make any parent proud. But they don’t live on an island – they live among their peers and within the confines of biological and demographic reality. Even if EVERY one of their male college classmates marries one of his female classmates, a third of those young women will not find a male age-peer who is even her “academic equal,” much less someone with a higher level of education. But not every male graduate will marry a female classmate. Some will marry down. Some will choose not marry at all. Then subtract out the guys who are “creepy,” gay, or otherwise unsuitable, and we are left with a generation of “educated” women who are barreling toward a demographic wall at high velocity.
So women marrying guys with less education, or deciding not to marry at all, is somehow the equivalent of careening into a brick wall at top speed?
Marry up? My buddy’s daughters will be lucky if they can marry “across.” Many women of that generation will face hard choices: supply and demand in the adult world doesn’t much care how “empowered” you were in college. The women of that generation may be able to marry down, but few will want to. They may not marry at all and become wards of the state when they bear bastard children. They may become involuntary childless spinsters. They may go for much older men, but many of them have been through the Family Court meat grinder and must devote much of their effort to paying their exes’ bills.
Or they could end up like a friend of mine, happily unmarried at the age of 40 and dating a dude in his twenties. Or like another friend of mine, also 40, in a happily open marriage with a man a few years her junior and with several regular partners on the side. Or in a committed lesbian relationship.
And why assume that any single woman older than, oh, 25 is “involuntarily childless?” Most of the women I hang out with don’t want kids. They really, really don’t.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Lyn87, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
We know the score here: the degrees these girls are getting cluster in the “Who are you trying to kid?” category. They are not truly superior to the guys of their generation, but that degree in “You Must Be Joking!” makes them think they are. Most emerge from college with a pile of debt, no marketable skills they didn’t already possess in high school, and a few laps around the carousel – older but no wiser, and blissfully unaware that half of their years of prime beauty and fertility are already in the rear-view mirror.
Ugh. This again? At the age of 22 or so, “half of their years of prime beauty and fertility” are gone? Really? Their biological clock starts ticking at the age of, what, 16?
So instead of going to college, girls should be getting hitched before they even graduate from high school, so as to maximize their prime years of beauty and fertility? Sorry to have to break this to you, Lyn87, but that’s a recipe for disaster — even by “traditionalist” standards. According to a 2001 study by the Centers for Disease Control, nearly half of those who marry before they’re 18 divorce within ten years; that’s twice the divorce rate of those who wait until they’re at least 25.
Lyn87, somehow I suspect your buddy with the teenage daughters is doing a better job of looking out for their best interests than you are.
Some, er, “highlights” from the comments.
Kendoka seconds Lyn87’s concerns:
I question the popular wisdom of fathers relinquishing custody and authority over their 18 year old daughters by putting them through an institution designed to indoctrinate and create entitled promiscuous feminist careerist harpies and not loving wives and mothers through marriage.
A Father’s work is not complete until he has guided his daughter directly into marriage with his authority transfered to her husband. “Careers” can wait. Family cannot.
DruidV shares his less-than-fond memories of life in the 1980s, and offers a note of optimism for the future (for dudes anyway):
Way back in prehistoric times, say around 1985, I used to find myself very depressed when I would take note of all the foolish and desperate males I knew, who were jumping through impossible hoops for fickle females that just would let the poor bastards continue to keep right on jumping through those hoops, apparently just for their own entertainment. These twats seemed to take an almost sociopathic delight in this ‘sport’. The males were simply trying to be accepted.
Pathetic, really.Nowadays, I look about and see that young males are sick, tired, disgusted and jaded with these soulless cunts. Make no mistake, the hoops are still there, firmly in place for the males to jump through, but they are seeing less and less traffic every day.
I for one can easily see the females of generation z growing old alone, but for their cats and dying that way too and from what I’ve seen, these bitches can forget about marrying up, or even across anymore. These asshole entitlement whores won’t even be marrying down, in the not too distant future.
YAY!!!
Keyster presents a similarly optimistic scenario for the future — if predicting the apocalypse counts as optimism, which it generally does in MRA circles:
We have a perfect storm brewing of women working, men not, and each one rejecting marriage. In case no one noticed the Feminists started the gender war, and they won. Present day we live with the spiraling consequences; societal decline. Upon the collapse women will be the victims, AGAIN. The survivors will be men with only their own self-interest in mind. The last remnants of white-knightery will struggle to protect and provide, but will be ill-equipped to handle the guilt of failing.
Days of Broken Arrows isn’t quite so dramatic. He merely predicts that the dad planning on sending his girls to college will end up regretting this decision:
[N]ow instead of his daughter someday marrying the guy she met at 18, he’d prefer [her] to be using every orifice when she’s a fucktoy for a line of Alpha males who’ll pump and dump her. And he means that he doesn’t want a son-in-law or grandchildren. Well, I guess that’s all well and good, so long as it’s not “the way it used to be.”
Huh. Do colleges even have classes any more, or is it just one long orgy? How do these Alpha males have any time to study?
Cassandra I’m echoing newspaper articles. I don’t know if it is about what you prefer more as what you are prepared to do. Women may prefer exams, but if they are prepared to do coursework even if they hate it they will outperform men who aren’t. This works on the very sexist assumption that men aren’t prepared to do coursework and women are. The idea men aren’t prepared to has been echoed by so many male commentators in newspapers, my dad and some male friends so I feel wrong to disagree. The idea women are prepared to is because the girls I knew at school would have done almost anything to get grades for university.
Actually, since we have another teacher here…Ithiliana, want to chime in on the whole gendered learning styles thing?
I don’t think he’s said anything along those lines exactly, but he was going on the other day about how he was breaking apart our fragile perceptions of reality and shit like that.
Almost looks like he’s trying to prove how “edgy” he is, doesn’t it?
@ Pear-tree
That’s part of what I mean, though. I half-assed all my coursework, but did so well in exams that my overall grades were fine anyway. A system heavily weighted towards coursework would have been terrible for me. This is actually part of why I decided not to pursue grad school, because I knew that the structure would change to one that doesn’t work well for me.
Going back to what you’re saying, though, men as a group seem to do just fine with grad school once they get to that point, thus once again making the whole gendered learning styles thing look like nonsense. And if men as a group aren’t willing to put in that effort then (shrugs). I took a realistic look at my own preferences and decided that grad school wasn’t for me precisely because I wasn’t willing to put in that kind of work. I don’t see any good reason why other people can’t take the same responsibility for their own choices.
(And, once again, this is not why young men of color are doing badly in school relative to their peers, because if it was all about gender white boys would be doing just as badly.)
Before I went off to university, I graduated from a small town high school. There were 32 of us. 10 of us were on the honour roll, 9 of us were females. While in an education course, made up of probably 90% of women, one of my classmates said that all small town girls want babies and husbands. Of our grad class, 8 of us were in that university. Four of them were in engineering, I was in education, another was in her first year gearing up for pre-med, and one was in nursing. The other was going for her BA. When I argued the point, I was told by almost everyone that my entire grad class was an anomaly.
All of us graduated. All of us found spouses and are still married to them. All of our spouses are educated.
As for me, I met my wife when she was getting her masters of library science when I was a teacher, but now I’m focusing on writing and she’s the associate director of our city’s library system. So she was marrying up, but now I am. But if I become a best selling author, does she marry up again, or how does that work?
@Argenti Aertheri
“Shorter, less math-y, version — math scores have been pretty stable, reading scores have, overall, dropped for men, but have been level for white men while dropping for non-white men — the problem here is racism, not misandry.”
Since feminism is the ideology that’s running the school system for the past 40 to 50 years, feminism must be held accountable for it’s racism as well as it’s hatred of men. The ghetto wasteland created by feminism in the black community clearly indicates the racism inherent in feminism as well.
The only positive aspect of feminism is it’s parasitical nature ensures it can’t last more than three generation once it’s persued in earnest. Between the destruction of the family, negative birthrate, promotion of every kind of perversion, incitement of animosity and sheer cost of privileging women over men, that society will collapse not only economically but socially as well.
“Alternatively you could argue (as often is in newspapers) men are incapable of long term projects.”
As a general rule, Men (as opposed to women) live for the present rather than the future.
http://wwnh.wordpress.com/tag/men-live-in-the-present/
Boring trolls are boring.
And oh yeah, misandry still isn’t a thing.
I like how Nameless’ choice of language betrays his misogyny. According to him, women are “allowed” to go to college — whereas men, in whatever numbers they go to college, don’t need anyone’s “permission”. Plus that whole bullshit about “having it all”. Notice how men aren’t required to “have it all”, or brow-beaten for not achieving some ridiculous level of perfection. Perfectly acceptable for a man to be a blue-collar guy with a family, or a bachelor with a PhD. But a working-class woman with kids is an academic failure (and a leech if she’s a housewife), while an educated woman or one with a career is deemed a spinster whose accomplishments means squat because she hasn’t reproduced.
The sad thing is that I’ve seen the “if women get too awesome they won’t have male superiors to ‘marry up’ to, so they’ll be forced to remain single and then they’ll all be sorry they were awesome!” argument made in supposedly reputable publications.
Fuck, I can’t find it now, but I’m pretty sure FF/PP/IR/whatever-the-fuck-sock said we “can’t handle the fact bombs this truth poet is dropping” (and everyone laughed at him, that part I’m sure of).
indifferentsky — “ahh argenti, so “poisoning the well” might be “you associate with rad fems” People do that on you tube all the time. It depends on the audience, I’ve noticed what kind of poisoning the well fallacy is used. Sometimes in arguments on YT merely stating that a person a religious is supposed to be code for “idiot”. ”
Partly poisoning the well, partly guilt by association —
Association fallacy (guilt by association) – arguing that because two things share a property they are the same
Depends whether the contestant on Spot That Fallacy!! is claiming that the person is an X and thus should be ignored, or is associated with X and thus should be ignored (the latter being guilt by association).
Amused — Mr. No Name commented earlier tonight that he hates women (in very nearly those exact words).
TRANS PEOPLE ALL NEED JOE TO SPLAIN FEMINISM AND TRANSPHOBIA TO US AND ALL WOMEN NEED NAMELESS TO SPLAIN TO THEM WHAT EDUCATION THEY NEED
@CassandraSays: gendered teaching style thing.
ACK! I honestly don’t know, but will babble a while, and maybe we can talk more!
On a theoretical level, I’m somewhat dubious about the claims that there is a single/specific male or female (or masculine or feminine?) style just as I am dubious about the claims (whch were part of my TA training in the early 1990s) that there’s a single/specific “Black” learning style, or “White” learning style–that is, while I think there are a number of different learning styles out there, I’m not at all sure that one can so clearly identify a style along one axis of identity.
I also suspect a certain amount of bias giving that the definition of these learning styles all comes out of educational/pedagogical disciplines dominated by white people, and a lot (but not all) of the evidence is done on college students. Yes, there are studies done in the classrooms for younger students, but still–the idea that the studies can control for ALL the variables is one I’m more and more dubious about the more and more dissertations I sit in on (here, the graduate school sends an outside observer to every dissertation defense, and there are a shitload more in education and psychology than in humanities here).
I think that the different ways any person learns is incredibly more complicated than splitting it up into gender, or race, etc.
I think there are major problems in the factory-line approach that US education was built on and which, despite a lot of challenges, still seems to predominate a lot of public schools (don’t even get me started on fucking standardized testing).
Some of the stuff on success in same-sex schools, as people noted above, showing success in the single sex environment is probably more likely connected to economic class.
I also have a major fear of separate but equal: too many people are too happy to jump at the idea of splitting up girls and boys, but if it’s done entirely (as opposed to some classes at certain ages), what are the odds that despite all our charming troll dudez’ claims that the girls’ programs are likely to be given less support?
I also am in a university setting–and also mostly online these days–found a couple of studies on gendered learning styles in online settings I am going to have to read
http://www.odeluce.stir.ac.uk/docs/Gendered%20Learning.pdf
http://eec.edc.org/cwis_docs/NEWS_ARTICLES_JOURNALS/gender%20differences%20in%20asynchronous%20learning.htm
On a personal and practical level–I have worked with students from age 16 to age 83. I have men and women, GLB and straight, mostly from fairly low-income backgrounds (very poor rural county here), but some from urban environments and some from suburban with a fair amount of class privilege. US and international, and a range of ethnic backgrounds. I do not *see* any common gender characteristics that I can identify in my 25 years of experience–and of course now I am teaching primarily graduate and upper level courses (because I earn too much to make the university money if I teach the first and second year introductory courses which receive much less funding for student credit hour production), so I’m working with a self-selected group, mostly women (planning to be teachers), but quite a few men as well–but they’re mostly English majors which means they tend more toward the textual/verbal learning styles, i.e. reading and writing. (I still remember math majors getting frustrated in required humanities courses because you couldn’t work out the right answer–and this was true for the very small percentage of math majors who were women!).
So, I just don’t know.
Even if these women didn’t go to college they wouldn’t be stupid enough to date these guys.
Here’s the thing: I understand that a lot of parents of boys are upset about the fact that boys seem to be doing less well in school than “before.” But the reasons they complain about are just ridiculous.
For example, I see arguments that “schools prefer girls because they insist that pupils sit quietly and listen to the teacher. Girls are good at that. But it’s biased against boys, because boys need to jump up and yell and disrupt the class and shout the teacher down. Any school that prefers quiet, obedient students is anti-boy!”
Do any of these nuts have any idea of how incredibly, even violently, strict discipline was imposed on boy children in all-boy schools, from hundreds of years ago to just 30 or so years ago?
How can anyone sane suggest that educational culture has just recently started to favor obedience, following rules, sitting still and listening in class, etc., when all those requirements have been firmly in place since hundreds of years before girls were even allowed in school?
I would really be interested in hearing why schools are just recently so terribly biased against boys. I’m not buying it.
“I also have a major fear of separate but equal: too many people are too happy to jump at the idea of splitting up girls and boys, but if it’s done entirely (as opposed to some classes at certain ages), what are the odds that despite all our charming troll dudez’ claims that the girls’ programs are likely to be given less support?”
Yep, this. My own single-sex school experience was great, and in some ways I think that’s true of most all-girls academic environments (I was there from 11-17). On the other hand, like I said earlier, we weren’t in any way a group that was representative of the population overall. Ethnically mixed, yes, but uniformly at least upper middle class, and in some cases we’re talking actual aristocracy. Plus there was an entrance exam, so students who either weren’t all that bright or were already suffering the results of shitty education in primary school just didn’t get in. Average class size was anywhere from 5 to 15, depending on subject. There was no way to get out of doing homework, because that time was built into our schedules and it was mandatory. There’s just no way to take the results you get from that sort of environment and generalize them to the overall population, and no realistic way to duplicate them without massively increasing education funding.
I will note that from everything I’ve read about supposed gendered learning styles my school was not operating on what’s typically considered to be a girl-friendly system. No warm and fuzzy teachers and desks in a circle, no prizes for everyone, not much praise – it was harsh. Which going by the results works fine for at least some girls.
Shaenon- If we’re so awesome, won’t that just inspire everyone else to be awesome too?
I always assumed that if you force more than 50% of the population to not read, or to apply themselves, while that would by default make the rest of the population look smarter, it would make humanity as a whole less awesome and advanced because we’d be only working at a fraction of our capacity as a species, and a good percentage of us would be bored as hell (hysteria, anyone?).
The whole idea that women will get smart and awesome and have tons of stuff going for them and be able to fulfill themselves however they wish and because of that, they won’t stoop down to marrying some Homer Simpson boorish moron asshole because they won’t be forced to do so…well…what exactly is so wrong and bad about that?
I’m still waiting for a really good argument for this one.
“The whole idea that women will get smart and awesome and have tons of stuff going for them and be able to fulfill themselves however they wish and because of that, they won’t stoop down to marrying some Homer Simpson boorish moron asshole because they won’t be forced to do so…well…what exactly is so wrong and bad about that?”
It means that nobody will be giving Homer blowjobs on demand or washing his underpants and making his dinner for him. Which obviously is just terrible.
@Cassandra- OH NO THE HORROR! You mean gross abusive assholes won’t have someone to take advantage of?
Why can’t they just buy those blow up dolls/ Real Dolls they keep going on about being perfect replacements for “real women” and leave us the hell alone?
Homer can learn how to make his own dinner and there’s this thing called lube and a fleshlight that he can use instead.
I’ll be off over here enjoying awesome adventures and shit.
I’m not a teacher but I do a shit-ton of training, and honestly (anecdata here) I have never noticed a gendered difference. Some people learn better in groups, some do better with individual training; some like written documentation, others will never read it; some want to know WHY they should do things, others just want to know WHAT to do. I work with a relatively small pool of people, so I have the luxury of tailoring the training to the individuals — although it takes more work for me, I’ve found it interesting figuring people out and working with them.
It gives me a ton of respect for teachers, who don’t have the luxury of working with a relatively small group of people over an extended (multi-year) period of time.
@cloudiah, I moved from teacher to trainer and found absolutely no difference between men and women what-so-ever. But training adults past the age of say, 21 and teaching grade 9 are two entirely different skill sets.
Good point, Angela.
Once again they go on about how any woman over 20 is heading towards useless and slutty while the poor widdle beta-males do nothing to improve themselves. Like try to be more educated to appeal to these women (let alone have a better attitude.) And these beta-males say we’re the shallow ones.
@Carrie- to be fair, by their own behavior, they’re acting far more like “omega” males (that is, guys who have absolutely no social or personal worth whatsoever, who embody the slob with no good qualities persona to a “T”).
The whole whining about “beta” is the idea that some men are kind and generous and outright partner-y towards women because these traits encourage pair-bonding and social success in situations that require successful familial bonding. They aren’t necessarily “leader” types, but they foster communication and cooperation. The problem is that most guys who act like Nice Guys take this to mean that they have to act like spineless doormats and they will GET ALL TEH WIMMINZ LIKE A SUPER BADASS PLAYA YO.
No, just no.
Being a kind and cooperative person does not mean you have to be a doormat, and being an aggressive person does not necessarily make you a good leader (this is why I find it frustratingly obnoxious when heterosexual Nice Guys go on about how they want to act like a passive-aggressive doormat in the hopes that women will just melt at their feet and act like a besotted Slave Leia for them). And being kind and nice does not entitle one to a relationship.
But being a gross slob a la Homer Simpson has now seemingly become the “standard” for a man who is still entitled to be with some woman whose entire personality and purpose is to clean up after his man-child existence for as long as he shall live.
And they wonder why women don’t want to get married to them in the first place. Forget all the whining about divorce- they can’t even find decent people who WOULD marry them in the first place!!
I must also mention that even though I majored in a “useless” area of study (Modern Literature with a minor in Education), I am one of the only people in my group of friends who is making a decent, full-time non-retail wage with full benefits without having had to go back to school for a Master’s degree (which I couldn’t afford.)
I also got out of college with zero debt because I got a full-ride scholarship for my first two years at a junior college and my parents helped me pay the tuition for my last two years (which I did quickly and efficiently while also working two jobs to pay for my living expenses, in the timeframe- no dicking around because I didn’t have the money to do so).
I was lucky. But my dad still disparages because I didn’t major in something “useful” like SCIENCE or TECHNOLOGY or ENGINEERING. This despite the fact that most companies have outsourced most of these high paying jobs to other countries (which is why my Engineer dad was forced into early retirement in the first place), and the jobs outlook for MOST BAs is poor at best (even science majors come out competing for unpaid internships that require the skill level of a trained monkey and the pickings for getting into paid work are slim indeed).
I have done well in what I do because I always do my best, strive to add more to my workload (which is why in the last several years at my job starting out as a lowly reception monkey, I’ve absorbed several other important job designations and increased my pay grade significantly simply through sheer hard work). When I was in retail, I worked my butt off getting higher sales and making connections with customers to the point that we ended up getting regulars who knew me by name and patronized the store because I was there.
And yet, I still do see men being given promotions even though their work is lackluster and they often take credit for what other people do. I have seen my share of male managers who were just coasting and doing little to nothing or even doing outright bad shit (such as giving female floor employees the safe combo and looking the other way when she was embezzling money and stealing merchandise because she was flirty and sitting on his lap all the time), but seemingly never got in any actual trouble at all from senior management (male) while every tiny thing a female employee did incorrectly was blown up like a Huge Mess.
The problem isn’t that women are held to a high standard of behavior, it’s that men (especially white, heterosexual, cis men) generally aren’t. Their entitlement extends around them like a protective bubble and people make excuses and justifications where none would be used if said guy were a POC or a woman.
If I have to put up with this much shit from the workplace, then why the hell would I ever VOLUNTARILY put up with it at home?
I am lucky that I found someone as awesome as my husband. Without him, I probably WOULD still be single, because I am not willing to put up with so much entitled bullshit UNDER MY OWN ROOF just to have some guy around in my life.
If the only options to choose between for a “past her prime” woman are Shitty Heterosexual Marriage or being FREE, why the hell would anyone choose Shitty Heterosexual Marriage?