For example, one slider might represent "Is exempt from being sent off to foreign lands to be shot at." Historically this slider was set almost 100% in favor of women. Some went, but none were forced, and none could be forced...by law. Another slider might be "Has ready access to corporate movers and shakers." In fact not many men qualified for this, but we could fairly say that until recently, this slider was set virtually the opposite of the other one, almost 100% in favor of men. Another one might be "People actually give a damn if anything happens to you." This slider has historically, and continues to be, set nearly 100% in favor of women. This author is the perfect example, asking us to ponder the horrors inflicted on Pvt. Jessica Lynch, in the very week that a mere male had his throat slit and his head held aloft for the cameras. Yeah, he got his 10 minutes of fame, but like Daniel Pearl, he will be forgotten soon enough... while cute little Jessica will continue to be waved in our faces forever as a symbol of this or that. So we have all these sliders, and collectively they represent a sort of social contract. "Men will do these things, women will do those things, men will have these advantages and women will have those advantages." It is a truism that bad deals do not work. If the basic "deal" between men and women (which I have represented by these sliders) were not basically fair, our society would not have worked as well as it has. It is simply a fact that societies where people see their lot in life as a "bad deal" do not perform. See Cuba. See the Soviet Union. See most Arab countries. Life is never fair, but when the deal really is stacked against people by force majeure, whether an elected government or a dictator, people stop performing. They know they're screwed, so the air goes out of them. Starting about 30 years ago, we became the proud owners of something called a feminist movement. No one was sure what that was, but the noises it made said that it was in favor of "equality." Oh, OK, who could be against that? Except that it wasn't about equality, it was about moving all the sliders in favor of women. Do grammar school girls lag in math and science? Well, then, let's spend a trillion dollars. Do boys lag about equally in reading and writing? Who cares. Let men start a masculist movement if they care about boys. Same thing with athletics, scholarships, right on down the line. Now we have no recess, no dodgeball, and college graduating classes that are 65% female. Put the "education" slider waaaaay over to the women's side, and thank you feminists for that. Between the feminists and the chivalrous guys like Jack Engelhard here, we have messed now with pretty much all the sliders from education to corporate access to political access to health care to human males becoming disposable parents, and we end up with something like this:
OK, now back to the thread. I sort of agree with this article. I'm in favor of what works. I look around the world, I don't see the conquering army from the land of women, and I attribute that to all the countries that tried women in their army getting their butts kicked. All the countries left after thousands of years don't do that. OK, I can take a hint. Here's what we have to stop doing. We have to stop treating each of these sliders as individual items that we can screw with at whim. There is a balance to be maintained. Our society is not maintaining it. There weren't any masculists countering the feminists, and we've allowed virtually all the sliders to get pushed one way, some of them (like drugging boys and telling them they can't play games) to ridiculous extents. Chivalry is nice. It's a pleasant fiction that makes life more enjoyable for all. But when the chivalrists are all pushing one way, and the feminists are all pushing one way, and nobody is pushing the other way, we screw things up. We create a bad deal. Then our society stops working. Birth rates fall. Marriage rates fall. The fundamental business of keeping the human race going — which is the deal between men and women — falls off the tracks. In case you haven't noticed, we have a train wreck in this area. If you're in favor of pushing the "women in the miltary" slider back to zero, what slider are you willing to move the other way? It's time to start asking that question.
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I would like to be rude, and use this thread as an excuse to ask people to think about this same issue, but on a bigger scale. believe that we are subtly destroying our society and our culture with this stuff. We are doing this to ourselves, on purpose, because we mean to be doing good.
I would like to use the equalizer from Winamp, over on the right there, as a metaphor for a sort of social contract. We have a number of social factors, represented by sliders, which can be adjusted individually so as to produce a kind of advantage or benefit for men or for women as groups.
This is a bad deal. Without even knowing who is on which side, we could safely predict that one side will not perform in this deal. It looks tremendously advantageous to one side, but it isn't. It's like a buyer who has cleverly made a contract to buy new automobiles for fifty cents each. It's a contract, and we might even see a judge say it's enforceable. But guess what? There won't be any cars delivered, judge or no judge. You can negotiate a deal that's so good, it's bad. The other side won't perform.