When Women Can't Compete

One day a light-headed public official got the idea that there is no significant or relevant different between men and women. So, he mandated that women must be allowed to fight alongside men in the infantry.

Call it the tyranny of an idea, a manifest failure to differentiate equality from sameness. but contemporary feminism has imposed its views on the culture at large… to the point where you almost put your life in danger if you dispute the point.

If women warriors are incapable of completing the same basic training as men, the solution is obvious. Culture warriors take the results as de facto proof that the training itself is sexist. Thus, standards must be lowered so that women can compete.

But, what happens to military units when they are forced to accept members who cannot compete at the same level as men? Surely, it undermines group cohesion. If the person next to you is appreciably weaker and has been admitted to the unit by different standards you are going to be thinking, in the back of your mind, that you must protect her. And that thought will distract you from the task of fighting the enemy.

And then you might ask yourself, if she did not earn her way into the unit, is she there to serve another purpose?

Same-sex groups do not function like coed groups. It ought to be obvious, but making a group coed changes the group dynamic, changes what may and may not be discussed, changes the meaning of different gestures.

A Princeton professor who was the lead parent for his children like to take them to the park. There he discovered that the mothers did not much want him around. They did not want to damage their group by introducing an alien element. Nowadays, as the profession of psychotherapy becomes more female dominant, and as more and more men avoid it, the women in charge do not want very many men around.

And yet, when a male group prefers to remain a male group, its members are denounced and even sued for discriminating.

How do men’s groups resist the feminist onslaught? How do they protect their domain against those who are so enamored of the ideal of equality that they want everyone to accept their own distortion of reality?

You know the answer: in the world of work men work very long hours, they work endless hours, to the point where precious few women have any interest in keeping up. Women prefer career paths that give them the time to make homes for their families and to care for their children; men prefer career paths that are more grueling, more of a test, more competitive… and involving very long hours.

Derek Thompson calls it a values gap. Members of different sexes tend to have different priorities. But, do they not have the right to determine their own values? This feels like reality biting back at the ideologues; the ideologues take serious offense at it. Note well: when Thompson says that American men are obsessed, he is saying that they are suffering from a mental illness. If only they can get a tune up from one of our nation's more motherly feminist therapists everything will be fine.

Thompson writes:

Students’ values shape their majors and their jobs. Those who want to make a lot of money (on average, more men) are more likely to major in economics or business; men are more than 50 percent more likely than women to major in economics at every Ivy League university. Those who prize flexibility and accept lower pay (on average, more women) are more likely to be in the humanities. When Wiswall and Zafar followed up several years later, they discovered that college values predict first jobs: “Students with strong preferences for flexible hours and distaste for hours” were more likely to be in jobs with flexible hours and fewer hours.

Despite the best efforts of feminists and other agents of indoctrination, men still continue to gravitate toward jobs that are more competitive and more demanding. They are born to compete for status, and this has obvious consequences in marriages. The ideal of the egalitarian marriage rarely survives its confrontation with reality.

Thompson writes:

When Harvard Business School surveyed 25,000 of its male and female graduates, it found that high-achieving women failed to meet their career goals. At graduation, most women said they expected “egalitarian” marriages, where both spouses’ careers were taken equally seriously, but several years later, more women had deferred their husbands’ careers. This study, and others, suggest that while married couples often make work-and-home decisions as a unit, the cultural expectation that men be the top providers proves to be an insurmountable force, even (or especially) among the best educated households.

Without our ideological blinders we would probably not be worrying our delicate minds about this issue. Men and woman are different. They function differently.  They have different priorities. Efforts by investment bankers to force men to work less have generally failed.

The New York Post reports on the phenomenon:

Investment bankers aren’t the only ambitious New Yorkers pushing themselves to the brink with intense hours. Law-firm partners, chief executives, physicians and even chefs work considerably longer hours than the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2014 national average of 7.8 hours per workday.

“[These people] won’t drop their work,” [career coach Roy] Cohen adds. “These folks are hard-wired to compete and work without limits. They also know that if they drop the ball, there are dozens of others eager to retrieve it.”

If men are hard-wired to compete, if competing is in their nature, why have these companies decided to go to war against nature?

Naturally, the cultural warriors have set their sights on these men. Social psychologists have produced research studies proving that too much work is bad for these men, that it makes them less productive. Besides, other men in other nations do not work such long hours. And they are happier.

We are happy to be judged by some kind of happiness quotient, but the proof lies in how much the economy is growing or not. When it comes to military units the proof lies in victory, not in gender equity or work/life balance.

Of course, one must take these ideologically-driven studies with more than a few grains of salt. Another recent study supposedly proved that fathers bond with their children just as well as mothers, a fiction that is belied by the most elementary observation of mothers and fathers with infants.

Apparently, the study wanted to prove that there is no such thing as a maternal instinct and therefore that if Mr. Mom is bringing up a child, the child will have lost nothing. Of course, if both Mr. Dad and Mr. Mom have careers, then both will be consigning themselves to a certain level of mediocrity.

It’s always interesting to see mindless ideologues attempting to use their pseudo-science to re-invent human nature. Apparently, they believe that God got it wrong. Or else, if you prefer, that evolution went awry.

One day someone will decide that the problem can only be solved if men are forced to work less, if they are simply deprived of their freedom to work longer hours.

If investment bankers in New York decide to slack off, others will take up the slack. The business might go elsewhere, perhaps to a place where men have better work/life balance and do inferior work. It might also go to a place where everyone is not being assaulted by the feminist thought police.

Besides, the next time we are fighting a war we can now, thanks to the latest academic research, send out battalions of female foot soldiers led by lawyers from the ACLU. The experts will have produced studies assuring us that we will not be compromising readiness or combat effectiveness.

And, if that doesn’t work, we can send in Katniss Everdeen with her bow and arrow. That will strike fear in the hearts of our enemies.