"Hooking Up Smart"

Yesterday, Susan Walsh, of the blog "HookingUpSmart" wrote a very nice comment about my post on hooking up, entitled: "Feminists Gone Wild."

In it she kindly directed us to her blog, which, as I read through it, is a wonderful resource about the cultural debate over the value of hooking up and casual sex. As you will see, Walsh follows the debate more closely and more comprehensively than I do and offers some excellent perspective. Also, being the mother of a college aged daughter, she reflects a point of view that is pretty much universally shared by the parents of teenage girls.

Here is a link.

Feminists Gone Wild!

Feminists are losing their grip. They are losing their grip on young women's minds and bodies. More and more young women are listening to their emotions, not their feminist masters.

In particular, Jessica Grose is worried. She is upset because young women are being influenced by: "... some new wave of anti-orgasmic sexual conservatism that makes you hate yourself for what you did last night." Link here.

After all, what else could make you ashamed of your latest anonymous, random hook up?

Here Grose has conflated hook ups with all casual sex, with all forms of premarital sex, and with all means of achieving orgasm.

I could be wrong but I doubt that young women find hook ups the best and most efficient way to have orgasms.

But, is feminism really in the business of encouraging women to engage in as many random, anonymous sexual encounters? Does Grose really believe that the research shows that: "hooking is not psychologically damaging?"

Those who do must be: "purity-ring-clutching evangelicals [who] believe that it's wrong to have sex before marriage."

Hooking up is one thing; sex before marriage quite another. What purpose is served by confusing the two?

If the research does not distinguish between unmarried couples in established relationships having sex and hooking up, then I would question its value.

In fact, Grose's friends do not seem to agree with its conclusions. One of her friends has expressed regrets about having had so much sex with a bunch of "losers and perverts."

Grose is surprised. Perhaps she feels that the ultimate in feminist sexual liberation is having lots of sex with losers and perverts.

But, she is really surprised that this women can feel shame. "Why would she be ashamed? After all [she] is a feminist who doesn't believe that there is anything wrong with casual sex?"

Grose's friend feels badly for having had sex with a man who: "now doesn't seem to care you're alive." Does Grose feel that her friend should feel good or indifferent about what she did withthe man who doesn't care about whether or not she is still breathing?

More amazingly, Grose seems to believe that if you do not believe that there is anything wrong with your behavior then there is nothing wrong with your behavior. As an excursion into moral reasoning, this leaves a great deal to be desired.

It would be good news for sociopaths, to say nothing of the NAMBLA crowd... which insists that it it fully convinced that there is nothing wrong with child molestation. Do you feel better knowing that these men do not feel any shame for molesting children?

Shame, of course, concerns how you look to others, how others see you. The salient term that was invented for the aftermath of hook ups was "the walk of shame." When a women is making the walk of shame the fact that she does not think that she did anything wrong is not likely to be a great consolation.

But what happens when your shame is telling you one thing and your feminism is telling you something else? Grose seems agitated that young women would listen to what their shame, that is, their own feelings, is telling them and ignoring what their feminism is saying.

If you have made a mistake your shame is telling you not to repeat the experience. It is telling you to mend your ways and to esteem yourself sufficiently to refrain from having sex with men who do not care if you are alive the next morning.

If Grose's friends are an indication, their shame is also telling them to take a step backward, to regain control of their behavior, to recalibrate their sexual sensitivities. This will help them to recover their equilibrium and their self-respect. Apparently, they have sacrificed their self-respect on the altar of feminism, and now they are trying to regain it.

But why does Grose make such a sharp distinction between feminism and the ability to feel shame for having made a mistake? Is she such a cult follower that she cannot respect women who listen to their own feelings and make their own moral choices about how they should and should not live their sexuality? Are high moral standards inimical to feminism?

Didn't feminism tell women not to allow themselves to be used as sexual objects? When women consent to hook up, aren't they allowing themselves to be used as sexual objects?

But what is wrong with hooking up? And why should women feel ashamed of themselves for doing it?

Shame is a universal emotion. It is not a social construct. It does not merely exist where people believe in it. And it does not cease to exist because some women are willing to override their sense of shame in the interest of earning a living.

Shame involves exposing intimate aspects of your body or your self to people who have no right or business to seeing them.

Shame does not involve breaking rules, or transgressing a taboo. Grose's friends feel shame, not guilt, and that means that they know that the did not break any rules.

Shame is visited on those who have compromised their dignity. If they do not grasp the ethical dimension of their behavior, shame is at the ready to remind them.

Grose seems to be suggesting that feminism favors hook ups. If that is so, the reason must be that feminism is pathologically repelled by the notion that male and female sexuality are fundamentally different. If so, feminism must believe that if men can engage in hook ups without feeling any shame or guilt, then women should be able to do so too.

Shame is telling women that the feminist view is a bunch of bunk. Women who hook up feel shame because their actions belie their being as women. A woman who is forcing herself to behave as though she were a man does not know who or what she is. Her shame is trying to remind her.

Jessica Grose does not agree. But she notices that feminism is not a lot of help. All it can do for the woman on the walk of shame is to redouble her shame. This means that the woman who has hooked up with a loser or a pervert will learn from feminism to feel ashamed of herself for feeling ashamed.

She feels one kind of shame for her own behavior; she feels another kind of shame for feeling ashamed of her own behavior. Or better, she feels the first kind of shame because she is a woman, and she feels the second because she feels that the first shame means that she is not a good feminist.

If this is the best that feminism can do, I think it's long past time that it stop pretending that it is a friend of women.

"Robert Pearson's Reality Blog"

If you ever glance at the comments section of this blog you will know that someone dubbed "Wahrheit" often writes cogent remarks about my posts. Wahrheit, which means truth, is the pen name for a blogger named Robert Pearson.

Over the years Pearson has developed a following by writing a chess blog. Now, he is branching out, and has just launched a new reality blog. The first post is entitled: "There Are No Solutions."

In it he makes a great point: politicians cynically overuse the term: "solutions." As he puts it, chess problems, or other mathematical problems have solutions. To pretend that poverty and other social problems have "solutions" is to mistake reality for a mathematical problem. I agree wholeheartedly with his point, and recommend it to your attention.

Link here.

How to Succeed in Investing

As a follow-up to my last post, "Emotional Intelligence Will Wreck Your Portfolio," I am linking a column from the Wall Street Journal.There Kate Milani asks whether the bizarre antisocial behavior of Michael Burry and John Paulson was responsible for their ability to make billions shorting the sub-prime mortgage market?

This column serves as a nice coda to what I and Tadas Viskanta have said about the subject. Link here.

Happy reading!

Emotionial Intelligence Will Wreck Your Portfolio

We all want to be liked. We want to be part of the crowd. And we want to be where the action is.

When our team is playing for the championship we want to be in the stands cheering. When it is about to suffer ignominious defeat we adopt the same sulking posture as our friends and neighbors.

We are so afraid of being cast aside that we do our best to think as everyone else thinks and to feel as everyone else feels. Often, when we make investment decisions we are more interested in being attuned to the mood of the crowd than in making money.

We have learned all this in our sensitivity training workshops. We want to develop our emotional intelligence and our capacity for empathy. We have made a fetish of fellow-feeling. We are convinced that it is the key to worldly success.

Of course, there is more than one way to get along. Following your heart is not the same as following the rules of etiquette. Besides, too much empathy will make you an inferior competitor; you cannot compete successfully if you are sensitive to the feelings your opponent will have when you defeat him.

If you want to succeed in business, I recommend insensitivity training. Link here.

Now we learn that insensitivity training might also make you a better investor. If emotional intelligence attunes you to the moods of others it can only wreck your portfolio.

As everyone knows, you make more money going against the crowd than you do in following it. The principle of contrary investing says that you should buy when everyone wants to sell and sell when everyone wants to buy.

When everyone believes that it cannot go down, you should sell. When everyone thinks that it cannot go up, you should buy.

To do that well, you need insensitivity training.

Everyone believes in contrarian investing. Yet, the principle is, as Shakespeare had it: "more honored in the breach than the observance." Why is it so hard to be a contrarian investor; why is it so emotionally taxing?

Tadas Viskanta, proprietor of the investing blog, Abnormal Returns, asked precisely that question in a post yesterday. Link here.

Like many of us Viskanta was reading the just-published chapter from Michael Lewis' new book on the financial crisis. Link here.

But like few of us, he was struck that the first man who figured out how to make a fortune by shorting sub-prime mortgages, a man named Michael Burry, was far from being the most emotionally intelligent human on the planet. In fact, Burry was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome.

Asperger's is akin to autism. People who suffer it have some of the same traits as autism, but are generally more functional. They tend, as Viskanta says, to become obsessed with trivial details and data. They are also notoriously incapable of tuning in to other people's emotional states.

Asperger's, as Lewis says, causes people to fixate on abstractions. It could be numbers, it could be games, it could be puzzles, it could be "lawnmower catalogues." People with this condition can focus and concentrate for endless periods of time on minute, trivial, irrelevant details of things like sub-prime mortgages.

As Lewis put it, Burry was lucky that he was drawn to subprime mortgages. He might just as easily have been fascinated by "lawnmower catalogues."

Besides this love of trivial detail, Burry had another great advantage as an investor. As Viskanta puts it: "One could argue that having some diminished capacity to read the emotions of others may in fact be valuable in success as a contrary investor."

As I said, this is easier said than done. And not just because most of us do not emulate people with Asperger's.

Speaking about the emotional difficulty of holding short positions in sub-prime mortgages, Viskanta writes: "To hold that sort of position, like shorting subprime mortgages when everyone thinks the value of real estate can't go down, is an emotionally taxing proposition. You are constantly being bombarded by news and opinion that you are in fact wrong. However, for those individuals who are less able to read emotional cues this investment process may come more easily."

If you want to test your own emotional insensitivity, ask yourself this. When everyone in your neighborhood is going to get together to celebrate a victory or to greet the dawn of a brighter tomorrow, are you emotionally equipped not to attend and not to care? Would you rather join the party or read the prospectus for a bond offering?

Or, ask yourself this: when all of your friends are losing money, does that make it easier to lose money yourself? Would you rather be able to commiserate with your friends, by being in the same situation, thus being one of the gang, or would you prefer to have to shut up and dissimulate the fact that you have been making money while they have been losing theirs?

How many people hold on to losing positions because they want to be just like everyone else?

In either case, if you go against crowd sentiment, you will be consigning yourself to strangeness, weirdness, and the status of an outsider.

This will tax your emotions and drain your energy. If you think that it is easy and that you just need to follow a couple of sentiment indicators, you have missed the point.

If you are not willing to work as hard as your competitors, if you are not obsessed with detail, then you would do best not, as Viskanta suggests, to step into the arena with them.

If an investor's emotions are his enemy, then he should develop a system, and follow the most strict discipline in making his decisions. Never make decisions on whim, but never, never, make them because you want to own the same stock that everyone owns. Especially when everyone is convinced that that stock can never go down.

Presidential IQ: God Save Us from Genius

At the end of his column on presidential intelligence David Corn asks the one salient question: Does it matter? Link here.

After regaling us with accounts of the extraordinary intelligence of Democratic presidents like Carter, Clinton, and Obama and after dismissing Republican presidents like Reagan, Bush, and Bush as dimwits, Corn is forced, by his intellectual integrity, to ask whether high IQ makes for effective leadership.

In truth, however, Corn seems to be saying that the label of genius is a consolation prize for those who could not govern effectively.

If Jimmy Carter occupies the summit of presidential brilliance and Ronald Reagan is just some unenlightened fool, then, a quick glance at their respective records would lead us to believe that genius disqualifies a president.

Corn's reflections issued forth from his experience of watching Pres. Obama lead a health care summit last weej. In fact, as I mentioned at the time, it was more seminar than summit, and Corn should know that seminar leadership is not the same as presidential leadership, but that is off the point.

The amazing thing is that Corn still accepts that Obama is some kind of genius. Yet, if his genius had been evident in his test scores and academic records, I guarantee you that we would all know about it. Since we have never seen the smallest scintilla of evidence about Obama's academic achievements, the chances are very good that they do not entirely support the charge that he is a genius.

Surely, Obama delivers great speeches. His dulcet oratory is so smooth and soothing that it tends to hypnotize and mesmerize an audience, to the point where they cannot even ask whether he is right or wrong. The media, in particular, has been singularly unwilling to question the contradictions and misstatements that are sprinkled throughout any Obama speech. The same media seems to be constitutionally incapable of calling Obama out on his broken promises.

They, like David Corn, have been seduced by the great orator, the man whose music has led them very, very close to intellectual subservience.

As for Jimmy Carter, when Corn offers as evidence of genius the fact that Carter graduated in the top 10% of his class at the Naval Academy, we should note that being in the top 10% of a graduating class does not make you another Einstein.

But why then has a David Corn allowed himself to be duped into thinking that Democratic presidents are geniuses? How did he allow himself to be so thoroughly seduced by the myth of Obama's genius that he missed what was going on at the health care summit?

Corn imagines that Obama was masterful in his command of fact. Other less impassioned souls have noted that he got an awful lot of them wrong.

If the Democratic party is the party of genius why is it that every commentary on the summit asserted that the Republican Congressional leadership made the best presentation, based on facts and a thorough command of the issues, while Congressional Democrats limited themselves to anecdotes.

If we are measuring intelligence, why not notice that this health care summit, accompanying Obama's renewed efforts to get his health care bill passed, was his response to the recent Massachusetts senate race. When the voters of Massachusetts repudiate your signature domestic policy initiative, is doubling down a sign of superior intelligence or political obtuseness?

But what is this myth of presidential genius really about? I suspect that it is an effort to trick people into allowing others to make their decisions for them. When you say that these presidents are geniuses you are also saying that they are so much more intelligent than the rest of us that we should allow them to make decisions about matters that we cannot begin to understand.

When Obama willfully ignores the message of the Massachusetts senate race, he is displaying ignorance, not genius.

But that does not prevent him from presenting himself as the smartest kid on the block, the one who must make your decisions for you, whether you like it or not.

Surely, this logic appeals to a certain segment of the electorate, which consistently votes for these supposedly great minds. And that trusts them to make the most important decisions, regardless of what the rest of the population thinks. It surely represents something like a government-knows-best point of view.

Of course, liberal political thinking-- today's version-- comes down to us as a modern version of Plato's rule by philosopher-king. Plato believed that those who were most intelligent, most philosophical, and most impractical should be making decisions for the rest of us. Today that group would comprise professors, lawyers, and bureaucrats.

The Road to Marriage

Maybe you've seen the old cartoon. A man driving through the countryside stops to ask directions from a farmer. The farmer leans toward the driver and says: "Come to think of it; you can't get there from here."

That was my first thought when I read Hannah Seligson's article: "Destination: Marriage. Route: Anybody's Guess." Link here.

At its best, her article reflects the state of the current dating scene. It does not offer solutions or directions. More importantly, it makes a point I have been at pains to articulate: social, culture, and sexual revolutions have left women disoriented and confused, not knowing how to attain the goal that most of them still want: marriage.

Seligson does not have a solution, but she is happy to cast blame. First, on society. Second, on men.

Surely, it is better than taking personal responsibility for one's own actions.

In Seligson's words: "... society's messages to young women are so mixed that the path to that goal [i.e. marriage] has been obscured and, at times, blocked."

Of course, she does not ask which messengers are mixing the messages and fostering an anarchic dating environment.

She continues to say that young women have learned from bitter experience that: "dating-- and getting into a relationship that leads to marriage-- is at turns ambiguous, arduous, perplexing, and often heartbreaking."

Seligson believes that in the "Wild West of dating" young women are looking for rules, anything that would "order the chaos," but can find none.

Apparently, there are no signposts and no guidance, so young women are being cast into a chaotic dating scene where they are being forced to make up their own rules as they go along.

Seligson is correct to note that things would be much better if there were a book outlining the rules for dating, especially for dating that would lead to marriage. As it happens, there is such a book. It is called "The Rules." As I have blogged, it was all the rage a few years back, and was attacked and discredited by people who prefer anarchy to rules, who prefer ad hoc arrangements to formal institutions like marriage. Link here.

The anarchic dating world was the creation of contemporary feminism. If you are going to denounce the message, you would do well to identify the messenger.

After blaming society, Seligson is happy to blame men. She is joined by Jenna Goudreau who writes in Forbes Woman today that marriage is: "the last frontier of the women's movement." Link here.

Apparently, men are to blame. For not being sufficiently attuned to feminist concerns. And for not living up to the stereotype that feminism has cast them in. One would be hard put not to conclude that men are being blamed for not being sufficiently docile and subservient.

Since feminism is an ideology, it wants women to have it all on their own terms. But when have you ever heard of a marriage in which one partner had everything on his or her own terms? At best, this is an unattainable ideal, one that actively discourages women from developing the negotiation skills that are essential to a happy marriage. At worst, it is a formula for domestic tyranny, one that will always end badly.

Let's follow Dr. Helen Smith and call this by its rightful name: misandry. As Dr. Helen has long explained, when men are constantly criticized and excoriated by the culture, when they are punished disproportionately in divorce courts, why would they ever want to get married?

Those who criticize men might think that they are trying to improve male behavior, but Dr. Helen is correct when she says that men hear the message as a red flag warning them against marriage.

How do these ideas infiltrate the culture? Read Dr. Helen's post on Suze Orman for a truly extraordinary picture of advanced male-bashing. Link here.

Orman, who has no real training in marriage counseling, is telling a woman on national television that she must divorce her husband. Orman makes no attempt to disguise her prejudice, and this means that she assumes that her view is the conventional and accepted wisdom. She does not even think that she is saying anything controversial.

When Lori Gottlieb recommends that women settle for a less than perfect man, would it not be reasonable to say that if men are as bad as the "women's movement" has made them out to be, a woman has no choice but to settle.

If there is no such thing as a good man, then a woman's task is to find the one who is the least bad.

And be assured, when a woman is prone to see the worst in men she will almost certainly find confirmation for her beliefs.

If you do not believe that there are any good men, you are not likely to recognize one when you see him. If he appears to be a good person, the culture would have taught you to assume that he is a sham, a simulation of human goodness. Your task will be to find fault, to criticize anything you can, to pick him apart.

Don't be surprised if this does not bring out his best. It will tend to induce him to act badly. Not so much because he has been repressing his essential wickedness, but because he will not want to disappoint your expectations!

I don't want to leave this on a pessimistic. Just because Seligson is clueless about how to get to from dating to marriage does not mean that I might not have a few helpful ideas for young women. After all, I spend some of my professional time doing relationship coaching.

First suggestion: act like you respect yourself. As everyone knows, the path from Girls Gone Wild to conjugal bliss is long and arduous. I am not saying that it is impossible, just that it is very difficult. If you want to get married, do not accumulate too many experiences that you will have to live down.

Second suggestion: if you have had a bit too much fun in your past, don't share it. It is none of his business. He does not want to hear about it. If he tells you that he wants to know, and if he swears on the Bible that he must know your past, he still does not want to hear about it.

Third suggestion: act like you respect men. If you do, most of the time they will be more than happy to be respectful toward you. And they will be far more likely to want to marry you.

Fourth suggestion: if your man is acting like a child, ask yourself whether you are treating him like a child. If you give a man most of the advantages of marriages without requiring any commitment, then you should not complain if he is happy to comply. As I said, he will not want to disappoint you.

Fifth suggestion: cultivate in yourself the virtues that you want to find in a man. If you want a man to be more responsible, be more responsible yourself. If you want a man to commit to you, honor all of your commitments to him. A woman who cannot show up on time when she swears she will do so cannot expect her man to see her as someone he can trust to honor a larger commitment.