The End of Men?

I guess, like with Mother's Day this year, I was premature with Father's Day by a week. However, I'd like to reiterate how important it is to show good fathers your appreciation this Father's Day, for they are under attack now more than they have ever been in any point in history.

As a case in point, here is how a prominent American "news" magazine is presenting its issue release on Father's Day:



The main article is "The End of Men", written by Hannah Rosin. If you go to the online version of the article, you will not only be treated to some asinine writing, you also get a cutesy little video wherein Hannah and her daughter debate her husband and son over who is better, boys or girls. Her husband, being a liberal ponce (editor at Slate), says nothing in the midst of his emasculation, with only his young son offering a defense of masculinity typical of young boys. (Boys can kick girls in the shins, that kind of thing.) Its quite sad when the seven year-old boy has more balls than his eunuch of a father.

Hannah proves to be the typical shallow thinker of the age when she spews crap like:

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.

What in the world does she mean by "dominant"? That in a hunter-gatherer society, men were hunters and that hunting was "dominant"? Or that when men go farther afield, taking on the physical abuse of toil so their wives can raise their children, taking on toil is being dominant? I get the feeling that her definition of "dominant" is but 50 years old, spawned in that cesspool of the generations: the 60's.

I guess I can make some sexist statement about the intellectual capacity of female journalists, but I digress.

Here's more from the article:

“Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day,” writes David Gergen in the introduction to Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective, write the psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, in their 2007 book, Through the Labyrinth.

This is the research Rosin presents as proof that we are obsolete, at least in business.

First off, who in the world would believe that you can "simulate negotiations" in a damn laboratory? Oh, yeah, Ivory Tower academics who know about as much as the real world as your average World of Warcraft basement dweller. Negotiating requires an assessment of position and the use of leverage. How did they simulate that in a lab?

And those "slight variations" are massive. Men take a more controlling and dominating approach, which is in a different league from women's taking "into account the rights of others". Guess what, when negotiating in business there is no "rights of others". There are interests. The more you can outmanoeuvre and dominate your partners and opposition, the more of your interest you can assert. Just ask Steve Jobs. Heck, the female CEO who was the poster child of feminine ascent to corporate power, HP's Carly Fiorina, is so patently unfeminine she shaves her head and takes pride in being a "ball buster". Why was she let go? Being a parody of masculinity, she often went too far and abused her authority over her colleagues.

Besides all that, how do you account for the fact that even female employees prefer having male bosses?

Then, there's this:

Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions.

Sure, with the current state of the economy, "reckless decisions" are being blamed as a cause. There is good reason for this. However, these people forget that it was also "reckless decision-making" that shaped world history and brought us civilization. The very first "reckless decision" by men (back then as hunters) was to look skyward and question his place in existence. This was followed by that reckless decision to abandon hunting, which they have known for so long, and to risk cultivating crops in a hostile environment. Go down a few more historical roads, and you have that reckless decision by Leonidas to oppose Xerxes, the reckless decision of Alexander to conquer the known world, and that reckless decision by Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon. "Reckless" decisions, without the feminine hemming and hawing and consensus-building, are not useless.

Furthermore, there is this:

The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.

So yes, the modern post-industrial economy somewhat favors women. Considering the dominance of service industries and the glut of corporations that service feminine consumption (and therefore must be led by women), this is to be expected in the United States. (And, coming to a third world country near you.) But before you pronounce the end of men in the post-industrial economy, do make note that economies go about in cycles. The current infrastructure is supported by wealth generated by those "ghosts of economy past", and considering the rapid deconstruction of the post-industrial economy we are seeing unfold before our very eyes (hello, Greece!), I do not find it convincing that economies dominated by marketing firms, non-manufacturing companies, government spending and the service sector are going to be sticking around forever. Furthermore, industries like steelworks, construction and real estate, while reduced, will never go away. Go ahead; try hiring a credit firm to build your house. And have a drink every time some female employee complains that sanding boards is "dirty work".

All of this brings us back to Hannah Rosin's weak-kneed husband, who may be what Pamela Paul had in mind when she wrote a piece called "Are Fathers Necessary?" for the same issue of The Atlantic.

The thrust of her article is simple. Fathers are "non-essential".

The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution. The good news is, we’ve gotten used to him.

What led this woman to believe that there is nothing "objectively essential" about his contribution? First, she goes on about how the kids of single moms do "better" than the kids of single dads. Big whoop. Since child-rearing has always been the mother's forte, this is no surprise. If any, its an argument to stick together, because kids with both mom and dad do better than those of single parents, single mom or dad.

However, peel away the layers of her yammering, her proof boils down to two paragraphs:

The quality of parenting, Biblarz and Stacey say, is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school.

According to Stacey and Biblarz, “Two women who chose to become parents together seemed to provide a double dose of a middle-class ‘feminine’ approach to parenting.” And, they conclude, “based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor.”

Ah, "one could argue". One can also argue that aliens live in Roswell. How good is the proof of the "published science"?

Well, here's the problem with some of the "published science".

The first problem is that many of the researchers are activists before they are researchers, and are sponsored by activist organizations. Hence, this places the rigor of such studies in question. After all, are we to make credible research from Camel and Marlborough that cigarette-smoking is not all that bad?

The second problem stems from the first: these researchers not only have very small sample sizes, the sample sizes for the lesbian group are cherry-picked from economically well-off white lesbians, as compared to a more economically and racially diverse control group of regular parents. Cherry-picking skews results.

To further cast light on the dubiousness of the "science", in these research methodologies, the lesbians self-report the state of their children. So, you're basing scientific conclusions on the guarantee of your subjects?

Going beyond the research, you also have to take into consideration the fact that lesbians tend to rigorously screen the sperm donors they use to conceive. (Hey, who produces sperm? Fairies?) Hence, they can tailor their children to higher performance, much like you can tailor your dog to win dog shows through breeding.

So, the "science" used to render the contribution of fathers "non-essential" is a whole lot of junk.

Now, one can ask some counter questions of Pamela Paul. If fathers are so "non-essential", where is the civilization built on matriarchy? After all, if fathers were optional, then we should see the rise of some civilization that is wholly matriarchal. Matriarchies have existed in the past after all. But why did all of them end up absorbed into patriarchal societies?

A second question; how come most children who were conceived via anonymous sperm donor end up wanting to find their real fathers?  

We may end up paraphrasing the question. With fatherhood under constant attack from an ignorant media and a complacent population, in line with the blitzkrieg on anything masculine, it is no surprise that we are seeing a decline in male achievement and participation in family life. After all, since men are resilient, if they can survive for themselves then they're good. What incentive do men have to cater to the needs of a society that scorns the very essence of their being? And so the fathers go into anonymity.

Needless to say, this bodes badly for Western civilization, a civilization built by the hands of fathers. And if Western civilization collapses, then we will truly enter another Dark Age. No offense to my fellow Asians, but if we are going to be led by a country that considers murdering children an essential part of its economic well-being, we are well and truly fucked.

So, show some love to those good men who decide to stick around for their children. And pray that your children's children will get to do so as well.