BRENDAN writes:

You may be interested in Heather Boushey’s article from yesterday’s Slate/XX Blog, which attempts to minimize the recent study confirming that young women are, indeed, out-earning their male counterparts in America’s large cities. The summary: this isn’t a problem, because young women are better educated than young men. The main issue, for Boushey, is not that women are out-earning men, overall, but rather the supposed difference in pay between the women who are earning more money than men on average and the man in the office next door. In other words, it doesn’t matter that men in general are falling behind women in education and pay (in fact, that’s viewed as good … see below) — what matters is that the relatively few men who are highly educated are earning slightly more than women are.

The reason for this pay difference is that women tend to choose different jobs and also tend to work less when they choose the same kinds of jobs that men do. The Department of Labor study released during the final year of the Bush Administration (and which was suppressed almost immediately when Obama took office in 2009) confirmed these facts relating to the so-called “pay gap.” But that doesn’t stop feminists like Boushey from continuing to pound this misleading point in an effort to deflect attention from a much more troubling and substantive trend in the broader society: the decline of American men, in terms of education, work, pay, marriage, fatherhood and so on.

It’s fascinating to see how slippery feminists can become so that they can, in the end, maintain fealty to their policy objectives, whatever the circumstances may be. For example, feminism always (and still does) claim to be about “gender equity.” When women were trailing men in education, the feminist reaction was swift and strong: change the education system to make it more girl-friendly, which was done, following Carol Gilligan’s damaging book and so on. Now that the young women are “winning” the re-jiggered educational competition, of course this is not seen as a problem at all by feminism’s spokeswomen. In other words, “gender equity” in education is only a feminist issue when women trail men. When men trail women, however, this is not seen as an issue of “gender equity”, but rather is viewed as follows:

“But young women are earning more than young men because young women are acquiring more skills than the men are. Good for them. … If one group (women) has more workers with more education, then they should outearn the other group.”

Hanna Rosin, the writer who has written about these developments in a markedly triumphalist tone, piles on at the Double X Blog:

“The main engine fueling this change—the fact that for every two men graduating from college, three women will do the same—is not going to change anytime soon, which suggests that the next many waves of educated women will also out-earn men. And the men are not picking up the hint.”This generation [of women] has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the American economy better than their older predecessors or male peers,” says James Chung, author of the study published in Time. Or as he also puts it: The women are “clocking” the men.”

So much for Gilligan’s vaunted ideas about female empathy. Rosin is practically gloating, as she did in her recent article in The Atlantic. Clearly, Rosin has the feminist view that although the educational system needed to be changed to benefit women, now that men are underachieving, this is simply the fault of the men themselves, has nothing to do with the educational system itself, and is something we should blame men for, in terms of “not taking the hint” and getting “clocked” by women. So nothing needs adjustment in the educational system at all, and if men continue to underachieve, that just means women are smarter than men are, and that women get to gloat. In any case, Boushey revealingly sees this trend as a positive development for women, not only during their younger years, but also later on when they marry and have children:

“Though Reach Advisors looked only at young workers without kids, down the line, the findings may have implications for how families use their time or for shifting the balance of power within the home. When mothers outearn fathers, it may make more sense for the dads to take off work to pick up a sick child. And higher-earning moms may have more say over household decisions than lower-earning ones.”

The last piece is rather revealing, in fact, of the overall orientation feminism has always had, despite its rhetoric. Feminism is, and has always been, about power. In particular the balance of power between men and women, from the perspective of increasing the relative power of women and decreasing the relative power of men. So, rather than seeing the trend of underachieving men as being detrimental to women and society as a whole, it’s seen as beneficial to women, because it is presumed that it will increase women’s power in the home (that is vis-a-vis their husbands), and shift sex roles so that men basically morph into male mommies and women morph into female bread-earning, family-leading daddies. THAT is the agenda that underlies feminism, and it’s precisely why feminists are roundly disinterested in any education or achievement gap that works to the disadvantage of men: they know that this increases female power over men, over time, and that is their main goal. If there was ever proof that feminism is nothing other than an outright war against men, this is it.

The problem, of course, is that these feminist journalists, concentrated in cities like New York, LA and Washington DC, are simply living at many levels of remove from the average woman and her goals, desires and interests. Most women, regardless of education level, are not terribly interested in supporting a man financially, or marrying a male mommy. Some women may be, but they are vastly, vastly outnumbered by women who do not want this. The more that men underachieve, the harder it gets for the typical woman to find a suitable mate. The case study for this is what has happened in the black community — there has been a substantial sex-based achievement gap in the black community for some decades now, and the results are regrettably all too well known: low rates of family formation, sky-high illegitimacy rates, sky-high fatherlessness, and large numbers of middle class black women in their 30s and 40s complaining about the very real lack of suitable black men. What we have not seen is the feminist fantasy of a consistent rate of family formation, and simply having sex roles morph so that the woman is the bread-winner and the man is the mommy — because the women do not want that, period. These women are out-earning black men, but the financial empowerment this gives them does not compensate for how unhappy the massive underachievement of black men has made many black women. If trends continue, in terms of non-black educational attainment, the present situation for the black community is the future for the white and Hispanic communities as well. Perhaps the mouths of feminists like Rosin and Boushey are positively watering at the prospect of generation after generation of underachieving, subservient men, trampled under the stiletto heels of generations of high-achieving women … but in the general culture at large, this spells massive unhappiness for women in the years ahead, coupled with massive social problems due to an ever weaker rate of family formation, and an ever-decreasing presence of fathers in the lives of children.

—- Comments —-

Laura writes:

Brendan writes, “If there was ever proof that feminism is nothing other than an outright war against men, this is it.”

Feminism is not about equity. It is about revenge and domination.

But, as Brendan acknowledges in the quote that follows, feminism is not just an outright war against men. It is also a war against women. It is a war against children, a war against nature, a war against truth, a war against all that is sacred and good.

Brendan writes, “The problem, of course, is that these feminist journalists, concentrated in cities like New York, LA and Washington DC, are simply living at many levels of remove from the average woman and her goals, desires and interests. Most women, regardless of education level, are not terribly interested in supporting a man financially, or marrying a male mommy. Some women may be, but they are vastly, vastly outnumbered by women who do not want this. The more that men underachieve, the harder it gets for the typical woman to find a suitable mate.”

Well said.

Unfortunately, the average woman does not know – at least not yet – that she must explicitly reject feminism, in word and deed. The average woman does not know that if society does not place the achievement of men first then women and men will face lives of conflict, economic hardship, loneliness and exhaustion. The average woman does not know that she has traded financial power for an empty life.

Imagine a man in the mainstream media triumphantly declaring, “The men are clocking the women.” Rosin has the mentality of an adolescent, cheering from the sidelines at some kind of imaginary basketball game of men vs. women.

                                                             — Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Concerning feminist gloating in response to evidence that women now out-compete men in higher education and earn more than men in certain regions of the country, you noted the inconsistency of the gloaters. When the situation was the reverse, feminists whined and blamed until they got their way. Unsurprisingly so, because feminism, in your words, “is about revenge and domination.”

I agree. Feminism is a species of liberalism and liberalism is also “about revenge and domination.” A couple of weeks ago at View from the Right, I posted this remark in the course of a dialogue with Lawrence Auster, which seems appropriate in the new context: “The essence of liberalism is resentment; the inveterate goal of resentment is reversal; liberal programs that aim at reversal use the language of equality, which sounds nice; equality is not, however, the real intention; reversal is the real intention; thus liberal usage of the word equality is dishonest, because the result of the liberal program will be other than what the word equality denotes, and liberals know this in advance.”

Laura writes:

The feminist is motivated by revenge. But against what does she seek revenge? Is it men? No, ultimately it is not (though for all practical purposes, it is). Her war is the gnostic battle against nature itself.

John E. writes:

Dr. Bertonneau wrote:

The essence of liberalism is resentment; the inveterate goal of resentment is reversal; liberal programs that aim at reversal use the language of equality, which sounds nice; equality is not, however, the real intention; reversal is the real intention; thus liberal usage of the word equality is dishonest, because the result of the liberal program will be other than what the word equality denotes, and liberals know this in advance.

There is also something in liberalism that goes beyond mere reversal of circumstances, and it is manifested in a denial of, ignorance of, or contempt for legitimate authority. And so for instance, when it becomes clear that women are gaining the upper hand in education, pay, and other formerly male-dominated spheres, there is no shame at the inequality that has been created by destroying the former inequality. Rather, the feminists say that men have had their time in the light for all of known history, so women gaining the upper hand now is their just desserts.

Brendan writes:

I think that it’s very true that feminism is, in its essence, fueled by revenge. This is, in many aspects, a result of the merger of “liberal” ideas with Marxist ones. Gramscian Marxism, as most of the readers here know, called for a long march through social institutions in order to change the society and make it more amenable to accepting political state socialism and communism. The means by which this is done, per Marxism, is to create dialectical conflicts, where one side is portrayed as “righteous” and the other as “oppressor”, set them against each other, and push for a resolution of this conflict, or a synthesis, which resets the relationship between the two on a more socialist/communist level. In the case of feminism, obviously the Gramscian idea — which feminism of course predates but which was brought into feminism in the second wave by Marxist feminists like de Beauvoir, MacKinnon and others — is that men are the oppressor class and women are the righteous class, and that the righteous must rebel and crush the oppressor to create a new relationship between the former oppressor and the righteous based on the socialist/communist ideals of leveling and a Maoist-style forced equality. Liberal phrases and concepts are “draped” over this ideological infrastructure in order to make it appear less foreign, less threatening, and more consonant with the longer tradition of the West, in terms of spouting ideas like “equality” and “equity” and so on, but the reality is that this is a dialectical war being waged very deliberately by those who wish to transform the civilization, not necessarily by people who are interested in actual good outcomes for men and women in their future Maoist forced-equalist dystopia.

Of course, not all feminist agitators are committed Marxists. Many are useful idiots for that, however, as I would assume is the case for both Boushey and Rosin here. The key idea behind Gramscian politics is to make the march through the institutions as invisible as possible — and you achieve that by clothing what is being done in more familiar rhetoric and slogans that can be related to the existing broader culture without revealing the Marxist content within. In this case, the pre-existing set of sex-based resentments that women have accumulated against men over millennia were harnessed by the movement in order to create the kind of “fission” or “energy” needed to both kick off and sustain the most intensive phase of dialectical confrontation — in other words, the pre-existing feminist movement, based as it was on long-standing grievances and the resulting anger and desire for revenge, was co-opted and channeled towards a social movement which pitted most women against most men in a cultural/social dialectical confrontation which was designed so that women would “win” and thereby transform the culture to a more socialist-amenable one. This is not to suggest that there is some kind of conspiracy — I don’t believe that at all. Movements are not, after all, conspiracies. But there is definitely a movement, and the movement has been around in academia and elsewhere for many decades. It is not explicitly Marxist, but it is de facto Marxist. And if it denies it is employing the methods proposed by Gramsci, it nevertheless does so, in effect, even if not with a direct intention to do so.

The end result is that men and women have been set against each other as one of the main fulcrums of dialectical opposition in Western culture designed to bring about a cultural and social “leveling” which will make the culture and society more amenable to socialist and communist agitation than a robust, hierarchical society would be. And it’s working, to a large degree. Gramsci, as it turns out, was no fool.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

In response to Laura’s point above, yes, feminism is a species of Gnosticism, just as it is a species of liberalism. Invoking Gnosticism permits us to link this discussion with the discussion elsewhere at The Thinking Housewife of Henry James’ novel The Bostonians.

Stuart writes:

You quote Hanna Rosin:

“The main engine fueling this change—the fact that for every two men graduating from college, three women will do the same—is not going to change anytime soon, which suggests that the next many waves of educated women will also out-earn men. And the men are not picking up the hint.”This generation [of women] has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the American economy better than their older predecessors or male peers,” says James Chung, author of the study published in Time. Or as he also puts it: The women are “clocking” the men.”

This is a classic case of presumption, and it’s interesting that she used the term the main engine.

We are living in a post industrial society, and the effects of this dramatic change still haven’t been fully realised. And the main engine of industrialization and modern industry was, and is, creative, productive men.

Without these men who pioneer and champion industry, there will be no jobs for these millions of dynamic, tertiary, qualified women.

Unless they all work for the government.

Laura writes:

Rosin is celebrating ecnomic decline for us all.

David Collard writes:

While I agree that it is true that creative and innovative men in technical areas are essential for economic development, a point feminists strangely do not focus on, I suspect that the actual number of such men required is in reality small. To put it in an American context, so long as MIT graduates a yearly cadre of bright young innovative males, the American economy will be fine. Also, bright young nerds are not (trust me) primarily interested in building better housewives. Look at Bill Gates. He has bettered the lives of many women, but they don’t thank him for it, and he has used his power and money to advance liberal issues, including feminism.

Laura writes:

Our economy cannot run on technology alone and in virtually every field, from farming to manufacturing to business, men take more risks, possess more intiative and function better in managerial and leadership positions.

Michael S. writes:

Brendan writes:

“Movements are not, after all, conspiracies. But there is definitely a movement, and the movement has been around in academia and elsewhere for many decades.”

Oh, there most certainly is a movement. A bowel movement. A vast, world-historical peristaltic wave of dialectic fecality, daily cresting ever-anew, crashing down upon us, threatening to drown us in Satanic metabolic superfluity.

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