Recon’s Black Ops

Vox Day has this today.

he reason many female executives are so desperate for respect they never receive is because so many of them know perfectly well they don’t merit it.

34% of executive women claim they know a female colleague who has had an affair with a boss. Furthermore, 15% of women at the director level or above admitted to having affairs themselves. And worse, 37% claim the action was rewarded: they said that women involved in affairs received a career boost as a result.

If 15% are prepared to admit it, the Rule of Three suggests that about half of all female executives are advancing their careers on their backs. Progress!

I don’t know if the numbers are THAT high, but I’ve seen it happen. And this in places where the rules against sexual harassment–at least on paper–were very strict and where fraternization was otherwise highly-discouraged.

What’s really sad is that the woman who does this, is losing face in catastrophic fashion. She loses any chance of getting any respect when she flatbacks it. They are barely tolerated, but never taken seriously, by their coworkers. Not even by the people who would otherwise be amiable.

And the man who sleeps with her, also loses face. Not only do people disdain the woman, they also lose total trust in the higher-ranking male whose judgment is now forever suspect.

Let’s assume we have a man, John Doe. He’s the mayor of an affluent town, and an accomplished professional who is active in his community. Age 55. Kills his college-bound daughter and himself. Murder-suicide. He left extensive notes, instructing authorities on the proper care of the family pets. The ensuing investigation reveals that, in his capacity as mayor, he was under investigation for misuse of a city credit card. His upscale house was also up for foreclosure.

Would he get the same sympathetic coverage as a woman who did the same thing?

I have blogged many times about the war against men, and how this has played out in the Church. This was one of the most important warnings to men on these pages. Bottom-line: men cannot afford to be pushovers. While leadership by the husband hardly guarantees wifely submission, the husband who checks his balls at the altar is doomed to a miserable marriage.

Vox Day also weighs in on the matter of “church men”.

A few thoughts…

(1) My wife–like all good things of this life–is better than I deserve. I am also better than she deserves. (She will tell you the same thing.) I do not “pedestal” either herself or myself. We are two fallen people, each with our strengths and failings, fighting the same battles that everyone else does.

(2) “Servant leadership” is a term not to be found in Scripture. The Biblical model of a leader is one who serves as he is leading, not someone who leads by serving. A good military leader knows what I am talking about: a good officer takes care of his people, even as he is focused on the mission.

(3) Yes, Jesus washed the feet of His disciples. More often than that, He was teaching them, admonishing them, praying for them, going to great lengths to tell them they had no idea what they were talking about, re-orienting their fundamental understanding of everything they thought they knew. He was known to call them derisive names (“Sons of Thunder”), even rebuking one of his favorite Disciples in the harshest of manners (“Get thee behind me, Satan!”)

The Jesus of Scripture had some serious brass. Yes, He was humble. Yes, He served His Disciples. He did those things AS HE WAS LEADING THEM.

What does this have to do with gender relations?

Marriage is a covenant that is designed to model Jesus and the Church. Tim Keller calls this a “Gospel Re-enactment”. Guess which character the husband gets to act out?

Well…in order to get that re-enactment right, the husband needs to know the One Whom he is supposed to be imitating in this drama. Hint: Jesus was not Richard Simmons on a cross.

Women understand this, too. Even as they are naturally prone to attempt to undermine men, they also tend to respond affirmatively to the man who asserts himself decisively. This is why women are drawn to the James Dean types who hold their own. This is why the hot babe in Sunday School would rather get banged by a punk rocker, than be caught dead with the nice guy who sits in the front pew.

The latter guy is a product of modern evangelicalism: a Church that is irrelevant. He’s been screwed. She has, too, even if she hasn’t figured it out yet.

This quote is priceless:

Note that this is an indictment of Churchianity, not Christianity. There is an important difference. In Christianity, the husband is the head of the household. In Churchianity, the husband is the servant leader, by which it is actually meant that he is a servant rather than a leader. And no man who doesn’t know what he’d do without his wife possesses the confident and muscular faith that sustained the martyrs, crushed paganism, ended global slavery, and changed the world for the better.

Where would I be without my wife? I would be right where I am now. I would be minus a wonderful help-meet, but life would still be life. Singleness had many drawbacks, but life was not horrible by any stretch. She also had a life before she met me. We both rationally decided that we would be better together than not, but it’s not like either one of us didn’t have a life.

And the man (woman) who plays to any mantra to the contrary, is setting himself (herself) up for disaster.

I am buried up to my eyeballs in the midst of a system conversion, that involves an application, a transactional database, and a data warehouse. Ergo, I don’t have time to comment on this provocative column by Vox Day right now. But if you think I’M cynical about this topic, he’s got me outflanked by quite the large margin.

..Fred Reed makes me look like Richard Simmons.

I see where women, or college girls anyway, are honking and blowing most fierce about how they don’t like the way sex works nowadays. Yeah. It seems that the hook-up is in flower. This means that the girl meets some guy on a bus or in a remedial-reading class in college or finds herself in the same elevator, and he says, “Let’s screw,” and she does, maybe right there in the elevator, and then she’s all mad because she did, and because he did, men, the bastards.

I was born too soon.

What seems to get their panties in an uproar is that they offer their favors to passersby like soap companies handing out shampoo samples, but without the intimacy, and then grouse because the guy doesn’t call them back. Why would he? Give me one reason.

What I don’t get is, why are gals bitching? This is the world they wanted. They clawed and scratched and burned their bras and had court cases and threw fits to get exactly what they have. They hated men because, they said, men weren’t letting them copulate frantically like men had always wanted them to. Men, or more likely their mothers, didn’t let them make themselves unattractive by dressing like hod-carriers and swearing like sailors. Finally men gave in and now women hate them for that. Whatever happened to gratitude?

When I was a young stud—well, young anyway—in high school, girls were still oppressed, which meant that a guy knew he probably wasn’t going to get laid, so he might as well find a girl he really enjoyed being with. The idea slowly leaked into his hormonally disabled psyche that girls were kind of special. You could actually like one. Sure, a guy made pawing motions because he was expected to, and she went along to a minor extent. But that was it.

So she didn’t feel used or hooked up with because she hadn’t been, and he thought he was damned lucky to have her. It was a concept of sorts.

But then came fem-lib. A torrent of really nasty dykes with politically-significant hairy armpits started yowling about how it wasn’t fair that men could cat around and women couldn’t. Then the Pill shifted the paradigm into high gear. Girls could now Do It in relative security, and abortion, also championed by feminists, provided sure-fire back-up. There was now no reason why a woman shouldn’t say Yes.

Which meant—Oh bliss!—that she had little excuse for saying No. Sally Sue might have teeth like pearls and brains and perky tits and a wacky sense of humor and actually be quite a prize, but sex trumps art. If Sally didn’t say Yes, she knew that Greta would. Women had commoditized themselves. It was a marvelous thing for the testosterone wads we think of as college boys.

It quickly came to the old country saw with fangs: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Guys learned that they could say, “Check your oil, lady?” and it worked. Praise de Lawd! Gloria Steinem and Andrea Fire-Plug-with-Leprosy Dworkin had done what men had failed to do in millennia: produce a race of obligately loose women.

Women, never happy, discovered that they didn’t like this either. They wanted the right to rut, but not the duty. Unfortunately the two were a package. What they really wanted was to…get married. Being less adept than men at getting outside of their own heads, they didn’t understand why a lot of men were happy single. For a guy, serial monogamy was fine. So was hooking up. Soap flakes are soap flakes.

But it was what women had deliberately brought about.

Not being too good at abstraction, they didn’t understand that a man can be perfectly happy with casual sex, scuba gear, and a Harley Sportster. Left to himself, he would never think of having a Volvo station wagon, a boring McMansion with a backbreaking mortgage, or a wedded termagant who wouldn’t let him go out with his friends. He doesn’t see himself as exploiting his one-nights. He didn’t tell them he was looking for a soul mate, and may well have told them he wasn’t. (Fortunately they never believe it.) He probably isn’t contemptuous of them. He just wants a shot of leg, and figures she must have been taken by the idea, since she did it.

Certain dialogs become common:

“All you want is sex!”

“Uh…what else have you got?” or “So what?”

Or, “Marriage? Why? Would sex be better? Would food taste better? I don’t get it.”

Or, “Marriage doesn’t make sense. Do you want to eat in the same restaurant all your life?”

Marriage of course has only the function of getting the woman’s legal hooks into the guy. It’s a set-up aimed at child support and nothing else.

Anyway, it was the world women crafted, but somehow it didn’t suit them. Nothing does. They relapsed to their default position: Furious.

To make matters worse, women decided that they wanted to be men, or like men, or one of the guys, or some equally awful thing. Enter Anti-Viagra: the little blue blazer with shoulder pads, and the floppy pants-suit suitable for a trailer park outside of Las Vegas. These had the appeal of truss ads and alone would have dropped the birth rate below ZPG, but then came the Chip. As women entered what had been a male workplace, they found that they didn’t much like it, precisely because it was male. Angry as always, they set about neutering all things male, with wild success.

The Chip was the view that they weren’t going to take any crap, accompanied by a constant search for crap not to take. Hating men gave them a horsepower unavailable to males, who didn’t hate women but just wanted to get away from them.

Here again, women got what they wanted. Much favored them. Though they knew less about politics than do men, they voted in larger numbers and, since they did the shopping and liked buying things, they discovered that they had tremendous economic clout. They couldn’t compete well with men, but didn’t have to: Affirmative action worked just fine.

Except somehow it didn’t. One triumph after another somehow didn’t make them happy. They chased boys out of college, providing the satisfactions of vengeance for a crime never committed, but it engendered the hook-up culture, and they hate men for it. They pressured the divorce courts to rape men, and now hate men—the beasts—for not marrying them.

I dunno, Brothels and Cisterns. It seems to me that the feminists got just what they wanted. They made their bed. Now let them lie in it. But quietly. Oh please, quietly.

If you think I’m a tough old bird on the feministas–Vox Day makes me look like a metrosexual wuss.

If what he was saying was true only in the secular world, it would be bad enough. But it is a very real war in the Church as well. The sooner we burn the metrosexual Jesus at the stake, and preach to both sexes the way the Apostle Paul did, the better.

Jessica Wakeman has confirmed the skepticism that Vox Day, Anakin, Triton, and myself have expressed regarding feminism and the risks it has created for men. I will address some of her points, and add my own two cents.

Before you get upset, I will acknowledge a bunch of things that I know to be true: yes, women earn less than men for a lot of sexist reasons and that discrimination must stop. Yes, mothers get “mommy-tracked” and their careers are stalled.

Jessie, you would do well to quit parroting your stupidity. Women do not earn less than men due to “sexist” reasons. Nor do they face the “glass ceiling” that your ilk claims exists. Marty Nemko has a fine piece on the subject.

As for salaries, there are many factors that drive them, including negotiation skills. Aggressive and assertive negotiating skills tend to separate higher earners from lower earners in the same jobs. Men tend to be more aggressive in their negotiations than women. When you are interviewing for a job, you are a salesperson, and your job is to convince your prospective employer that (a) you have a product–your services–that they should buy, and (b) that they should buy that product at the price you believe your services are worth.

I’m not ashamed to want to “marry for money,” if that’s what would you can even call it, because I don’t fundamentally believe it is the “man’s role” to provide for women. My actual motivations, as I see them, are pure enough. I know of great guys out there—journalists, teachers, non-profit dudes—who will probably make great dads. But I personally wouldn’t pair up with them because, realistically, our two salaries together just wouldn’t be enough to cut it for what I want out of life. But, but, but, “Bank accounts shouldn’t matter at all!” And while I agree with that in theory, sorry, a man who can provide for me and our children is just much more attractive to me.

Translation to men: she is a feminist, but sees the man as a material means to a material end. Your only worth to her is the money you can provide.

Bank accounts—and debts—do matter. And acknowledging that doesn’t make me a gold digger akin to Anna Nicole Smith—it makes me smart.

That depends on how you mean what you say. Financial responsibility matters, and this is true of both sexes. Excessive debt is an indication of financial irresponsibility. Bank accounts may or may not mean anything, but living beyond one’s means is a prescription for disaster.

Right now, I rent an apartment with my boyfriend and a roommate, but personally, I’m still living at the edge of my own means as it is. I don’t make a lot of money as a journalist, I owe lots of money to student loans and unless my future husband or I had a great job prospect someplace else, I don’t want to live very far outside New York City, because that’s where the media capital of the world is right now.

Translation to men: “I am a financially irresponsible whore, but I expect a man to help me fix that.”

Maybe this isn’t “feminist,” but logically, I need to marry a guy who makes more money than I do—preferably a lot more money than I do—for us to be able to afford what I want and I hope he will want, too. An apartment big enough for kids, prenatal care, doctors appointments, birthday presents, vacations, summer camp, college, their own car, all that stuff. I know parents can raise children well on much less. But personally, that’s not the lifestyle I grew up with. I want to be able to give my children everything I had—maybe a little less, maybe a little more—because I think my parents did a great job.

Translation to men: “I am totally clueless about the financial crisis in America, but no matter what happens, I expect the man to be able to give me what I believe I deserve in life.”

I also would immediately disqualify entering into a sharing-bank-accounts relationship with a man who proved to be irresponsible with his cash. College loan debt is fine (I’ve got it) and a reasonable balance on the credit card debt is understandable (I’ve got that, too). But I couldn’t wrap up my life or my children’s lives around someone who spent or managed money irresponsibly. I don’t want to deal with that drama ‘cause I know we’d just argue about it all the time.

True enough, and it works both ways. BTW: you need to kill your credit card debt and rethink your use of credit cards.

I realize that’s just one anecdotal story, but I’m sharing it to demonstrate a larger point: there is nothing feminist about assuming your partner’s debt. And it goes both ways—I wouldn’t blame a man for not wanting to marry a woman who spent money irresponsibly. Couples’ finances are intertwined with one another and if he screws you up, or you screw up him, bad stuff is gonna happen to both of you. That’s why a man who makes a decent amount of money and is responsible with it will always, always be more attractive to most women.

You are correct: there is nothing feminist about assuming your spouse’s debts. That is because feminism is about self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice.

Marriage requires that the two become one flesh. My wife has some student loan debt–not a whole bunch, just enough to be a low-grade nuisance. I have no debt except for the mortgage.

But still, her debts are my debts, and my debts are her debts. We made that choice when we got married.

And yes, excessive debts–by either party–should be a red flag. It is absolutely essential that both parties come to an agreement about money management before the wedding. MrsLarijani and I did that.

Sadly, though, Jessica has shown the men why they need to be skeptical of any gal who is over 25, has student loan debt, and has not shown concrete proof–demonstrated in action–that she has a worldview that is incompatible with feminism.

Jessica Wakeman has this piece, in which she provides a defense of her gold-digging, hypergamous tendency. (HT: Vox Day)

I’ll be spewing coffee out of my nose laughing at her comments. Vox Day provides this response.

So, the woman is living with her current boyfriend while simultaneously seeking some unwitting gamma who will completely fail to see that his only attraction for her is to pay her bills… and of course, her debts. This fits the classic pattern wherein a woman devotes her prime years to “having fun”, which translates as having as much sex as possible with alphas and unemployed artists while ignoring the nice deltas and gammas who helplessly offer her the promise of a stable relationship.

Then, once the daunting specter of THIRTY looms on the horizion, she begins to lower her sights and transform her attentions to the provider class of men further down the socio-sexual hierarchy. And this is why most married sex lives will tend to dry up after a year or two; the woman is no longer required to fake her level of sexual interest in the benefit of the hapless provider and there is nothing he can do about it since she has the full force of the feminized law at her disposal.

This is why it is a very risky and probably foolish endeavor for men to marry women over the age of 25. Even an extended “try before you buy” approach is unlikely to improve your odds, as observation suggests that desperation and/or determination to entrap a provider causes women to present a false sexual front for an extended period of time. And worse, over time her hypergamous nature is going to rise to the forefront and cause her to return to her “happiness-seeking” (read: alpha-seeking) habits.

There are two ways to address the situation. One is to marry a genuinely religious or submissive woman, as she will have a strong inherent resistance to her hypergamous instincts. Remember, instinct is merely an influence, it is not a controlling factor. The second, of course, is to not marry at all. But whatever you do, do not even speculate about the possibility of considering the thought of marrying an aging, debt-laden feminist who is scouting about for a long-term delta provider following an extended ride on the thugacious carousel.

I took option 1.

I promise I am not making this up.

(HT: Vox Day)

Charlotte Allen of The Manhattan Institutute, writing for The Weekly Standard, provides a sobering portrait of what she calls The New Dating Game. Anakin could have written this article.

HT: Noseintheair.