Changing the Lede

The reason why the most recent interview makes such an emphasis on illegality is that the journalist needed an organizing idea for the piece. And her organizing idea was that I’m a victim because I’m a woman.

“Was it harder for you to get published because you are a woman? Was it harder to get tenure? To get recognition?” I said no to everything and explained that we have blind review. Nobody could have discriminated against me, even if they wanted, which nobody did.

But then I had to provide an alternative hook, so I did.

Actually, it’s easier to publish in my field when you are a woman. To give a single example, next week I’m speaking at a conference about masculinity. All speakers are female, and there’ll probably be an edited volume that will come out of it. But do you imagine an all-male conference panel on femininity? Or even on masculinity? Even if it did happen, it would be total crap because all men are allowed to say about masculinity is that it’s horrible. And I’ll give a talk that will be actually interesting because I don’t have these constraints.

15 thoughts on “Changing the Lede

    1. And lots of men like horrible women. A friend of mine got dumped yesterday by a woman he’s given everything but now he has to take care of a disabled relative and can’t earn as much money. So the bitch threw him out.

      This woman transed her only kid, so there were warning flags.

      Sorry for the rant but I’m very upset and need to share.

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  1. “But do you imagine an all-male conference panel … on masculinity?”

    There was an interesting time not long ago, and you totally missed it.

    In brief: not only can I imagine it, I’ve actually seen it several times.

    But the movements that led to it have been so thoroughly suppressed by the Left, Right, and anything else that wants to play nice with One State politics that you wouldn’t have noticed it.

    “… a talk that will be actually interesting because I don’t have these constraints …”

    Which is how it was for them as well.

    Because they had such forces put up against them, they had to ask for relatively large fees for attendees, not on the basis that the promoters needed a huge pay packet but instead because they needed the money to hire out sufficiently large and secured facilities.

    They also learned early on not to book these facilities in One State Party cities, and so you’d get these people booking places outside of them, such as on the Atlantic coast of Florida or sometimes the suburbs of Tampa, rarely anywhere as nice as Miami or even Las Vegas.

    In the end many of these conferences were a success because they didn’t pretend to fuel endless revolutions, or more critically become catspaws for emergent Second International-type developments.

    So the male versions of what could be viewed as the First International produced some of these results:

    1) Pick-up artistry (PUA) as a lifestyle is a dead-end hedonistic trap that keeps you from developing your inner strength.
    2) Religion, whatever it is and in whatever direction it may lead, offers a prophylactic toward the nihilism and loss of spiritual sense inherent in modern societies.
    3) Traditions were strong for a reason and you would be better served to seek those out and to create new ones.
    4) Masculinity as an acquired set of behaviours intended to make you more attractive to the opposite sex makes you weaker because it puts you in a subordinate position.
    5) “Ignore bitches, stack cash” only goes so far because you still have to figure out what it is to be true to your essence, and the stack of cash won’t help you out of that existential problem.
    6) Being able to identify the techniques used to manipulate you, which the PUA movement did with regard to interactions between the sexes, makes it possible to be less manipulated, also making it possible to develop greater inner strength.
    7) The “exit strategy” for men from feminism isn’t to accept or tolerate feminism, but instead to welcome women who also wish to escape it for a more traditional life.

    And so given the eventual goal of an “exit strategy” and its eventual form, there was no reason for you or anyone else within feminist movements to be consulted.

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    1. I also have vague memories of “Promise Keepers” being a thing within the evangelical cohort. It was part and parcel of the whole men trying to organize a pushback against their planned redundancy.

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      1. “Promise Keepers” being a thing”

        One of several movements such movements that really seemed to start gaining steam after 1990 or so. There was also a movement around Robert Bly’s book “Iron John” and a few others… the little I remember of PK seemed kind of cringe to be honest.

        “men trying to organize a pushback against their planned redundancy”

        No efforts have worked so far and mostly end up being about weird stereotypes and 15 year old boy fantasies… these attempts have mostly gained scorn but they represent a real problem that women should be paying attention to (esp since their planned redundancy is going full steam ahead).

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        1. I didn’t have enough contact with PK to grok what they were actually doing, but what I heard about it secondhand cast it as, basically, let’s encourage men to be responsible caretakers of their families, good actually-there dads, leaders of the community etc. I expect like a lot of things coming out of pop evangelicalism at the time, it was probably pretty cringe in practice, but I can’t help feeling it was probably also the victim of some nasty counter-propaganda takedown efforts. Cancel culture hadn’t come along yet, but the seeds of the thing were already there.

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          1. “let’s encourage men to be responsible caretakers of their families, good actually-there dads, leaders of the community etc.”

            That’s fine and commendable… the cringe part that I remember was that they were supposed to lecture their wives about how they’re ‘assuming ‘taking back’ the role of head of the family and apologize for giving them the idea that they could make decisions on their own….

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            1. If true, possibly cringe. But did you hear it from someone directly involved, or someone who wasn’t there and found the whole thing off-putting?  Legit curious. I ran into both phenomena quite a lot in my younger years– Gothardite-fanboy abuser psychos, as well as good outreach programs that were the subject of malicious rumor campaigns.

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              1. ” did you hear it from someone directly”

                It was a few minutes of a broacast where a PK was going through what a PK had to say to his wife… I switched channels pretty quickly so he may have been an outlier or talking about some extreme situation… but it was an evangelical show, so….

                It seemed less ‘abuser’ to me and more ‘try too hard’ cringe and also calculated to give any sensible wife high blood pressure. I mean stepping up as a husband and father and being responsible and getting involved in the community are great, just do it, no need to lecture people….

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  2. The PUA movement produced some artefacts such as books, some of which are no longer in print.

    You can get the general flavour of what that period was like by reading the books by “Style”, a writer from Chicago whose goals in life back then included shagging rotten the lead guitarists of some chick rock groups in and around Los Angeles, in addition to taking some time to write a highly unconventional “first aid” book intended for men.

    But with this gradual discovery of the seven points above, many of the PUA types found religion and then some.

    There’s one named Daryush Valizadeh, aka RooshV, who was an interesting cautionary tale: he pushed so far with his rhetoric and banter that he managed to get banned from the UK by AA Gill’s ex-wife who became the Home Secretary for a period preceding the Windrush scandals.

    Perhaps it was being banned by an entire country, even one that he would merely transit, that finally got him to realise that there wasn’t anything to his lifestyle then besides being an amusing clown and player of tricks for the purpose of acquiring a “notch count”.

    His blog has been offline for some time, being hidden behind a Cloudflare presence that still appears to be functional, and it’s possible he’s passed on from various now-commonplace health problems.

    Before that, he’d made the conversion to Orthodox Christianity and was doing his best to remedy at least some of the nihilism he’d built up during his time developing the philosophy and mythos of the PUA.

    As for now, the Hobbesean reality? No offer, no proposal, and which is worst of all, continual relegation and apathy; and the life of the correspondent, disregarded, irrelevant, tedious, barbarous, yet prolonged.

    But isn’t that it really, that feminism has no perspective of what it’s like to be on the down swing, that it’s been overly successful with its own Second International leanings and has no clue what may be to follow when it becomes abandoned in favour of a better outlook on life?

    Those men, those especially hated men, got together a few days over a few years and decided to work on their problems, then after solving enough of them essentially disbanded and left a body of work behind to be consulted.

    These things happened and you simply weren’t invited.

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    1. “Perhaps it was being banned by an entire country, even one that he would merely transit, that finally got him to realise “

      He actually wrote that it was growing disenchantment with the liquid no-attachment lifestyle (he didn’t call it that) and above all the death of his younger sister from cancer that brought him to religion. Growing alienation and emotional trauma seem like far more likely causes of his religious conversion than a political verdict by a foreign government.

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  3. You know it was during the late 1960s and early 1970s when “Feminism” started.

    It was that period when, in addition to peace signs and “Make Love Not War” slogans, the mantra “Do your own thing” was penned. And men, still “being men” (in spite of long hair and beards), were still often possessive of their women.

    Naturally, a lot of these women started getting incensed over their not being allowed to do things their way or go about their lives as they saw fit they way “the guys are”. And that’s how the “resurrection of the suffragette movement” in the early ’70s got its initial start—originally with the intent of “leveling the playing field”.

    In time it would eventually morph into its present form of the “gender insurrection” mode that now permeates western societies.

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    1. There are two main threads of feminist thought. One is that women should have the same rights as men while remaining women. Another is that women should be more like men and men more like women. This latter trend has clearly won. For instance, I’m looking up sources about masculinity, and all I’m finding is complaints that men are not women. “Erasing differences between men and women” is, by the way, an old Soviet slogan that originated back in the 1920s. Soviet schools specifically encouraged girls to be more like boys and boys more like girls. I never understood the purpose. But I’m starting to understand it now.

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