Some interesting comments:

...and she received death threats....
...While preparing to interview her, “the producer began to explain what he wanted me to say: that a certain second wave feminist had saved womankind and that I, as a young woman, was grateful to her.” When she expressed reservations about the woman’s ideas, “the producer began to get impatient: ‘What you’re saying,’ he sputtered, ‘isn’t in the script!’” (p. 19). In the end, she was not interviewed.

Not more death threats, surely? No... Tell me it ain't so!

Ah,
Ill just post a quote from the third article (Shalit.doc) here.

A few excerpts...

A Return to Modesty was greeted with outrage from predictable quarters, such as pornographers and feminists. Baby-boomer reviewers accused her of “trying to turn back the clock,” the New York Observer printed a front-page caricature of her dressed as an SS officer, and she received death threats (p. 5)....

...The most interesting personal experience she relates involved an invitation, following on the success of her first book, to appear on a PBS program called “If Women Ruled the World.” While preparing to interview her, “the producer began to explain what he wanted me to say: that a certain second wave feminist had saved womankind and that I, as a young woman, was grateful to her.” When she expressed reservations about the woman’s ideas, “the producer began to get impatient: ‘What you’re saying,’ he sputtered, ‘isn’t in the script!’” (p. 19). In the end, she was not interviewed.

And...

Here is my conjecture. It is an old observation that sexual morality is most strict among people of moderate means; looser behavior occurs among the very rich (because they can afford it) and the very poor (because they do not calculate the consequences). The worst possible situation arises when the poor become artificially “rich,” by their own standards, through welfare payments. Now, the elite white brats who pioneered the sexual revolution on campuses in the sixties were able to draw upon the capital laboriously built up by parents toughened in depression and war. Low-intelligence underclass blacks, at the opposite extreme, get their babies subsidized by taxpayers; they are actually rewarded for not having a male breadwinner. You will find even less sexual fidelity among them than among white college kids or the Hollywood glitterati. Shalit, however, did not plumb the social depths of the housing projects...

And the negative...

It is remarkable that a woman with such traditional ideas about marriage, modesty, and feminine decorum never condemns feminism per se. Instead, Shalit claims to have perceived a “fourth wave” of the movement characterized by the rejection of pornography and casual sex. This reviewer is not sanguine about the possibility of an eventual Nth feminist wave coming along to solve all the problems created by waves 1 through (N – 1). Shalit does better when she acknowledges that feminism has “become a sort of Rohrschach test: the word itself has become almost meaningless—and can refer to diametrically opposed ideas” (p. 208). The young self-described feminists she quotes do sound extremely confused. They say things like “I don’t think the first feminists wanted us to be more like men” (p. 218) and “feminism has always been about valuing home life” (p. 222). Some are simply using “feminist” to mean feminine (p. 121).

and...

During their nubile years, many women are at least as concerned with turning male desire off (i.e., telling the 99% to drop dead) as with turning it on (getting Mr. Alpha to commit): they get more offers of attention than they have time to process. Cunning feminists, many of them lesbians, have exploited this circumstance to the hilt, convincing naive young women they are being “harassed.” Quietly observing the furor over so-called harassment during the past two decades, I wondered how these women could fail to realize that the men of whom they were complaining constituted their pool of potential husbands and that they could not afford to alienate all of them. Clearly, I overestimated their intelligence. And Wendy Shalit does not distinguish herself in this respect either; she uses the term “harassment” as freely and uncritically as any man-hating feminist could wish.

Once again, big article, but well worth the read.

"""” When she expressed reservations about the woman’s ideas, “the producer began to get impatient: ‘What you’re saying,’ he sputtered, ‘isn’t in the script!’” (p. 19). In the end, she was not interviewed."""


they wanted a predetermined response from the woman to support their preconceived notions about feminitism ( that it is good and worthwhile etc)

when it became obvious to the biased producer with his feminit agenda tp promote that she had her own views she was immediately politically incorrect and relegated to Bin 44

I just read the Devlin articles -- both his review of Michelle Langley's book and his article "Sexual Utopia in Power".

Frankly, these are some of the most clearheaded pages written about the current state of male/female relationships in the West.

I had been aware of Langley's book for a while. It didn't shock me at all -- in fact it pretty much represented much of what I saw in my ex during the unraveling of our marriage, and generally how powerless you are to stop it once it starts. Her analysis of what is happening in relationships throughout our culture right now is spot on, it seems to me. I disagree strongly with her proposal for the way forward -- which seems to be for monogamy to be abandoned, and for people to simply accept that women can only be monogamous for 4-5 years at a stretch, and all of the various fathers will be sorted out by DNA testing, because this will be more pleasing to women. That may very well be pleasing to women, but there's no reason women can reasonably expect men to play along with that arrangement. In fact, if monogamy is widely destroyed, the impact will be that men will simply sire far fewer children -- they certainly won't be committing to one woman if they know that this is likely to be dissolved in 4-6 years simply because women will naturally bore of the relationship due to their normal sexual cycle. The more obvious answer is a restoration of monogamy and more durable marriage, rather than the easy divorce situation we have now -- a situation which simply provides women with the means to endulge their sexual cycle and re-mate, with the convenience of evicting the man from the home, and taking half of the assets and getting support payments for years. More likely is that men will refuse to marry, increasingly, and also refuse to sire children outside of marriage -- and, in fact, this already seems to be happening, with the overall decline of the percentage of the population which is married.

The "Sexual Utopia" article expands on Devlin's ideas. There are some ideas in this one that gave me serious pause (I do not at all support disenfranchising women, for example -- I believe he indicates some support for this because he thinks it may be the only way for things to be changed, but be that as it may, I do not support that). But the overall thrust of the article seems quite on target to me. His main thesis is that the sexual revolution, in its great relaxation of monogamy norms, essentially was based on a female sexual utopia in which women could express their more natural sexual nature -- which is hypergamous (in other words, tending to want to mate with the highest status male available) rather than monogamous. As Devlin rightly describes, this is what we are seeing today -- namely some women throwing themselves at the desired males (alphas, who always got laid, but never got laid by so *many* as is the case today) to win them, some women holding out for alphas for a long period of time and finding that the clock runs out on them, and quite a large number of men who are not even considered mate material until the ticking of the clock becomes louder for women in the mid 30s. Devlin is willing to admit that monogamy is an imposition on women, and not natural for them any more than it is for men, but makes a persuasive case that it is more advanced than the hypergamy that likely preceded the institution of marital-enforced monogamy on men and women -- largely because in a pre-monogamous culture, where many women wanted to mate with only the alphas, much of the male energy -- as we can see in other species who have hypergamy as a model -- would have been consumed by fighting with each other in order to achieve alpha status (because many other men would have very limited mating opportunities at all), whereas forced marital monogamy allowed men (and women) to channel energies in much more productive areas, which was an evolutionary advantage over groups which continued to practice hypergamy.

It's a grim message, however. Devlin is much more sanguine than I am that we are going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. I do agree with him, though, that if we do not, and our society becomes increasingly hypergamous (something Devlin refers to as "rotating polyandry"), we will decline relative to other civilizations which continue to practice monogamy -- again, because much productive male energy and focus will be placed into essentially useless things -- very much what we already see happening in the culture today.

Well worth reading these articles, despite their length.

I read Devlins articles a few months ago. Good stuff.

I cant agree with your stand on disenfranchising women. If society is to regain its balance, its leeches MUST be deprived of power.

Whether this is de facto or de jure is a separate question. Women before the vote werent oppressed creatures without rights, they could hold a job, start a company, own property - whatever a man could, except vote (and even all men only got a the vote a few decades before that). Thing is most women are fascists at heart - probably why so many communist 'revolutions' made it a point to have 'equal rights' - great way to destabilize your enemy from within.

Devlin's idea of personalized marriage contracts seems rational to me. Women still have the CHOICE of either not marrying, or finding a husband who will allow them to vote by themselves - all it does is expand the rights of men to, optionally, allow the man (or woman!) to vote for the family as a block. Its a question of norms (at least for me). Would I deprive my wife (hypothetically, Im not married to a rare good girl, and have no wish to go after a blood sucking feminist which is the typical western female) of the right to vote? No, I wouldnt. However once it becomes a given - lke the wife taking her husband's last name - I would avoid women who insisted to maintaining the vote - she would obviously be a self centered brat to buck social norms that way.

It should be emphasized, America was a republic - not a democracy - not even all men had the vote - only those with property. Thats the correct approach - let women have the vote (and men too) if they have the property (aka if they have a stake in the country other than as a leech). The natural outcome would be most people will not have the vote - but more women than men would lose it - because they are less hard working, less intelligent (not just IQ wise) and (though this is rarer and rarer) get pregnant and have babies.

The vote is a privilege, not a right.

P.S I think there was a professor (John Lott?) who did a study showing a very strong and steady increase in government size and power after women got the vote - most women do NOT understand in the least freedom and what it takes to maintain it.

Revolutionary ideas..

Also, we must remember that if thats the way things were, then it progressed to what we have now..

If we go back to it, what will stop it returning to how things are now?

Frogs evolve from tadpoles.. If we turn the frog back into a tadpole, it will naturally turn back again.. (If you get what I mean!)

The rise of the power of the state, and its increasing influence in our personal lives, probably had a lot to do with how things went regards pro-feminist ideas.

The state is a pragmatic beast, it will create laws that work for it, depending on what pressures it is under..

Giving women the vote gave the state more power.

The women voted for the state to have more power in their relationships than their menfolk/husbands..

Quote from haahoo

Revolutionary ideas..

Also, we must remember that if thats the way things were, then it progressed to what we have now..

If we go back to it, what will stop it returning to how things are now?

Frogs evolve from tadpoles.. If we turn the frog back into a tadpole, it will naturally turn back again.. (If you get what I mean!)

The rise of the power of the state, and its increasing influence in our personal lives, probably had a lot to do with how things went regards pro-feminist ideas.

The state is a pragmatic beast, it will create laws that work for it, depending on what pressures it is under..

Giving women the vote gave the state more power.

The women voted for the state to have more power in their relationships than their menfolk/husbands..

your nick should be the Sheikh more in line with your style

hahhoo has a valid point.

I dont think we know whether feminist behemoth would recur or not via men being dumb enough to give women the vote. Time will tell.

But yknow, women being given the vote, *I think*, was an exclusively western phenomena, and adopted by other nations because the West, at this juncture in time - is the most powerful in the world. Kind of like how our laughable political correctness is accepted as normal.

Hahhoo's question, in my mind, boils down to this: Was the 1920's grant of the vote to women an abberation, or something that would naturally arise in an industrial/post-industrial society?

I just dont know.

A little insight into my thinking : Im originally from the East. So I seem to have this schizophrenia in my head. I *KNOW* women arent good with logic, power, are VERY given to dissimulation (look it up) back East. Its just what reality is. But in the west, I assume women are proto-men, and it comes at a mini-shock to me to realize, after undertaking momentary analysis of their everyday behaviour - that they are extremely similar to the women in the east - just considered to be better.

That points towards indoctrination, we are bombarded with a false message of man woman equality from all directions in the West. Doesnt change the original question though - one could just as easily say, maybe the effort needed to, or ease of indoctrination, decrease in industrial/post industrial societies

I dont think we know whether feminist behemoth would recur or not via men being dumb enough to give women the vote. Time will tell.

"Men" did not give women the vote.

"Men" had fought hard for many years to get the vote for themselves and if "dumb" had any part in it it was giving the vote to dumb bastards of either sex.

Most people - I would put it at around 70% - could not be trusted to decide between french fries and salad let alone choose a person of Character and Integity, Intelligence and the ability to apply sufficient effort to get informed enough to Represent them.

"Women" is not the issue when it comes to voting. There are some women a great deal smarter and much better informed than some men. But the vast majoroty of both men and women are either too thick or too lacking in sense to vote.

Percy said:

"Women" is not the issue when it comes to voting. There are some women a great deal smarter and much better informed than some men. But the vast majoroty of both men and women are either too thick or too lacking in sense to vote.
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Thats as I mentioned in my previous post. But there is no doubt that if youre talking about 'too dumb to vote' either by IQ or by constitution and/or instinct - women are further along the 'shouldnt be allowed to vote' bell curve than men - even though the majority of either are unfit for the privilege.

I cant help but wonder at your reply - it seems you are busy playing the chivalrous knight - playing down the defects of women. That is exactly what mainstream conservatives do, and its just as dangerous as feminism itself, as it places you in the role of wolf in sheeps clothing - dissapating the thrust of any movement that would form a solution as it were.

This could be unconscious though - men have a strong protective instinct of women, even though it is positively detrimental in today's society

Quote from shaazam

your nick should be the Sheikh more in line with your style

haha! yes, I do like milk!!

Quote from Percy

"Men" did not give women the vote.

"Men" had fought hard for many years to get the vote for themselves and if "dumb" had any part in it it was giving the vote to dumb bastards of either sex.

Most people - I would put it at around 70% - could not be trusted to decide between french fries and salad let alone choose a person of Character and Integity, Intelligence and the ability to apply sufficient effort to get informed enough to Represent them.

"Women" is not the issue when it comes to voting. There are some women a great deal smarter and much better informed than some men. But the vast majoroty of both men and women are either too thick or too lacking in sense to vote.

Yes, you are right percy, sadly, it is hard to decide just WHO should be allowed to vote and who should not.. And looking at the standard of politricians we have..

Quote from ardia

I cant help but wonder at your reply - it seems you are busy playing the chivalrous knight - playing down the defects of women. That is exactly what mainstream conservatives do, and its just as dangerous as feminism itself, as it places you in the role of wolf in sheeps clothing - dissapating the thrust of any movement that would form a solution as it were.

This could be unconscious though - men have a strong protective instinct of women, even though it is positively detrimental in today's society

Aye, I used to think percy was a bit chivalrous in his way, if he was and is not so much now, I guess that is from bitter learning experience, the sort we all go through!