This book, written by Helen Smith, who happens to be Glenn Reynolds’ (AKA Instapundit) wife, was probably the first work that both came out of the ‘manosphere’ and received some reviews from major publications like the Wall Street Journal. What’s unusual about it is that most of the sources are men, speaking honestly about their beliefs about the changes in the marriage system since the sexual revolution.

The book appears to have sold rather well, but it doesn’t appear like it received much of any attention or push-back from the left, despite its broad criticisms of the spread of feminist influence within the university, the marginalization of men from some areas of public life, and the weak hand which the family court system gives to men.

What you won’t find in this book is anything like a rousing defense of patriarchy or Pauline gender relations. You will find a lot of excerpts of blog comments from places that do advocate that, like at Dalrock’s. Incensed men’s rights activists take up a large portion of the book, so many of the issues focused on are relatively tangential, like men being forced to pay child support for children that aren’t genetically theirs.

On p. 65, Dr. Smith talks about the flight of men from the university:

Imagine that women were taking flight from the nation’s universities and colleges; we would have a national uproar. When men flee, it’s worth a mention every once in a while and there is a bit of hand-wringing over what effect their apathy will have on women. Who will they date? Who will they marry? Will the men be good enough for them? What about hypergamy? Women need to marry up, so the men better man up, get educated and make plenty of money to make women feel more secure. But it seems that many men are no longer going along with the plan. Some have given up on college as it has become a “finishing school for women,” and others never had the chance to consider it as they became disconnected from school a long time ago.

The book also draws from Christina Hoff Summer’s earlier book about academic attacks on masculine values.

There’s an entire section in the book about the ‘decline of male space,’ owing to the banning of all-male clubs, and the doctrine that women must be included in all male social activities.The only way that men can separate themselves from women for a time is to either be isolated, or choose hobbies which are repellent to women.

Where the book is weakest is where it argues for “real equality” and a “rebellion against female privilege” fought by an “Army of Davids.” Feminine privilege is part of Western civilization, and one of its better aspects. Except feminine privilege is not ‘privilege to pretend to be a man,’ but an exchange of virtue in return for protection and respect.

Leftists who love equality prefer feminism, because women are the weaker sex in need of boosting, whereas rightists will tend to favor the more traditional system of unequal rights, roles, and responsibilities. As a political program it isn’t a workable one, although it fits into a story that appeals to the modern muddle.

Some of the advice is comically bad:

What about all of the angry women in the world, like the vicious types who think of men as enemies that are belittling and abusive? Call them on it. Women hate being called out in front of others; if a woman is rude to you or belittling in public, call her an emotional abuser in front of others or in a blog comment.

The reason why it’s bad advice is because to believe in the theology which holds up ’emotional abuse’ as an offense to be sanctioned is to also believe in feminism, and a whole raft of leftist political points besides. Also, feminists are not wrong to see men who oppose feminism as enemies who belittle them.

Yes, we are enemies. No, we don’t want to get along. Yes, we hate feminists. Yes, we belittle their way of thinking, with ample justification.

Let’s not get overly nasty with the author, who is not going to be capable of departing too far from her training as an academic psychologist. It’s better than average at diagnosing the problem, but not terribly good at suggesting a workable solution.

Are men “on strike?”

The title is perhaps self-serving and self-flattering. It’s not so much that men are on strike or that women don’t need men. It’s perhaps more that the complex social structures which prepared men and women for lifelong marriage and the duties that come with it have been destroyed.

There is no marriage preparation anymore. There is something like anti-marriage preparation, which prepares men and women both for an entirely self-centered style of thought and life. People are instead prepared for serial romances and anonymous-ruttings which have high failure rates, cause pervasive misery, and secure employment for urban psychotherapists who earn their keep by gluing together the broken people so that they can go and break themselves some more on the romantic meat market.

We have also lost the sense of manners, aesthetics, and faith common to the people of the past. People who have bad manners have trouble getting along with others, especially their spouses. People who are messy, ugly, lazy, profligate, immodest, promiscuous, and childish in their tastes do not make for good spouses nor good parents. The habits, beliefs, institutions, and moral systems which fostered family life have largely been destroyed, and since they have been destroyed, it will not be easy to recreate them.

Part of what destroyed them was the popularity of the Freudian system of thought, and seeing as the author is a professor of the intellectual framework that descends from Freud, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s little mention of the supplanting of more traditional ways of life with the psychological way of thinking in this book.

The failure of marriage also relates to the disruption of American community life, and the reorganization around individuals and the nuclear family. When there is marriage trouble, the friends will advise each spouse separately in many cases to dissolve the marriage, even if children are involved.

There are countless professionals who earn commissions only when they successfully break up a marriage. These legal and psychiatric authorities are family-butchers who specialize in cleaving one flesh into two, promising lives of happiness and self-fulfillment to each aggrieved individual which will come after the cutting.

Given how effective this system is at carving up families, and how much suffering it generates, it’s no surprise that fear is what many people feel when they contemplate modern marriage. In the case of children of divorce who are now adults, that fear is not something that can be assuaged by sharp rhetoric which, to their ears, sounds like a command to put their hand in a garbage disposal, to flick the switch, and to then watch as the blades mangle the extremity.

“By their fruits ye shall know them,” and modern people do not produce good fruit. The failure to produce good fruit can be portrayed as a brave stand against injustice, it can be produced as an inevitable consequence of technological progress, or it can be portrayed as a shirking of duty, but none of those things solve the problem of improving and increasing fruit production.

Besides, if technological progress was really so effective at generating happy children, fewer ambitious Palo Alto high school students would fling themselves in front of the CalTrain with such annoying monotony.

 

When you want to grow apples, you go to a man who runs an excellent orchard and ask him to teach you how to do it. Humans are not apples, but they are creatures of the earth nonetheless, so to get an answer about how to grow more and better humans, we should go to the people who are already quite good at it, rather than devoting all resources to recriminations-campaigns and image-building-campaigns which redefine moral failings as proud stands against injustice.

This book has been out for a couple years now. I figured that it was worth revisiting, because it’s such a worthwhile book for men to read, and also because it stands apart from almost everything written for men about masculinity outside of the evil sections of the internet that are probably going to be made illegal at one time in another.

Donovan recently announced that the book has sold over 13,000 copies, which counts as significant success for such a counter-cultural work. The typical professionally represented book in a mainstream category counts as a success these days if it sells around 20,000 copies or more.

What’s curious about it is that while this book has made a major impact on the manosphere, just about none of the people criticizing that community has bothered to actually pick up, read, review, and refute the book, which is an unapologetic look at the biological and cultural differences between men and women not just in the modern world, but in the historic context.

Donovan also takes on men’s rights activists and others who try to oppose feminism from an egalitarian perspective:

When pressed to answer this question, feminists and men’s rights activists never seem to be able to come up with anything but promises of increased financial and physical security and the freedom to show weakness and fear. Masses of men never rushed to the streets demanding the freedom to show weakness and fear, and they never braved gunfire or battle axes for the right to cry in public. Countless men, however, have died for the ideas of freedom and self-determination, for the survival and honor of their own tribes, for the right to form their own gangs.

Feminists, elite bureaucrats, and wealthy men all have something to gain for themselves by pitching widespread male passivity. The way of the gang disrupts stable systems, threatens the business interests (and social status ) of the wealthy, and creates danger and uncertainty for women. If men can’t figure out what kind of future they want, there are plenty of people who are ready to determine what kind of future they’ll get.

The author refuses to pander to people who take a victim pose as it relates to feminism:

The anger that drives the Men’s Rights Movement comes from a sense that women aren’t playing fairly, that they are cheating, that when given the chance they will use the rhetoric of equality to skew things in their own favor. The men are right about that. Women are re-designing the world in their own image. It is naïve for men to expect otherwise.

Yes, people don’t always fight fair. Just because you expose that they’re not fighting fair does not mean that they will stop doing it, especially if it works well.

If you’ve skipped buying this book, you should flip through the first section of it, and see if you can stop reading.

What makes this a dangerous book, as books go, is that it talks directly to men about the other option, without rolling around in bathos about what a rotten lot men have these days. Showing off your wounds and talking about how much it hurts only works if it’s in a sympathetic social context. In today’s social context, a display of weakness can get you a lot of Facebook likes and Tumblr reblogs, but it will not actually change your fundamental situation for the better, because a society of vain preening types is not going to care about you beyond what you can do for them.

My other guess as to why liberal publications have not been quick to jump on it is that they rarely cover books anymore, because they mostly focus on being a guide to television watching. Because it doesn’t map well to any TV shows that most Americans are watching, most American periodical readers would have no interest in what some author has to say about manhood.

Nonetheless, this book will probably continue being passed from man to man, and the more people that even take into account what it has to say will be changed. This book would not have been terribly shocking in 1910 or even 1930, but it’s beyond the pale now, which is part of what makes it such an enjoyable pamphlet.

The question of what happened to NASA after the moon landing comes up often, especially in the relatively recent context of the closure of the shuttle program and the privatization of space. This book, Whitey On the Moon, attempts to answer that by going through the historical record.

Kersey’s style is that of a newspaper reporter’s, and most of the book is made up of excerpts of old reports from newspapers and magazines.

The answer is that the agency was a persistent target of civil rights activism from the very beginning. Apparently, even President Kennedy attempted to smooth the way for a black pilot named Ed Dwight to join the moon landing mission despite a lack of qualifications, with the motive being to sway the black community and solidify their loyalty to the Democratic party.

The only reason why the pilot didn’t make it was the president’s personal pet project, and when he died, Chuck Yeager, who was running the astronaut program, was allowed to wash him out. You may be familiar with the rest of Yeager’s story from Tom Wolfe’s book on the topic.

When the moon launch actually happened, civil rights protesters picketed it, appearing in mule-drawn carts, as a way to showcase their displeasure with the ways that the public funds were being allocated.

By the early 1970s, public opinion had re-oriented against the space agency, arguing that it in particular needed to have greater racial and gender diversity, but also that the money spent on ‘moon shots’ would be better off spent on domestic welfare. By 1976, NASA had instituted an entirely new method for selecting astronauts to ensure greater representation, on threat from a lawsuit ginned up by the black lady from Star Trek.

Not so oddly enough, this was a similar time period during which power was beginning to transition to Silicon Valley, and its unprincipled exceptions of filtering employees by proxy IQ tests. Microsoft was founded in 1975, at the same time as the capable were being told they were no longer wanted in the government. The Yeager type of person would not be winding up in government after those new policies.

The reason why this story doesn’t get told too often should be clear: after the calls for increased diversity, NASA built useless shuttles full of unqualified astronauts which kept exploding on television instead of colonizing Mars.

To Kennedy, who pressured Yeager to relax the requirements, the selectivity of the program seemed largely arbitrary. We see from the destruction of the space shuttles, and some other disasters, why the program had to be so demanding and selective. It’s not an easy thing to go into space, and it can’t really be phoned in by people who are not at peak, with sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to handle all the inevitable contingencies.

In fact, wherever there are institutions charged with accomplishing difficult goals, with stringent entrance requirements, disparate impact always appears, because the gifts of nature are unevenly distributed.

As Silicon Valley falls to diversity concerns, we should expect a similar fate for those companies as we have seen with NASA. Politically speaking, the Valley-ites are too weak and submissive to survive. If the men with the ‘right stuff’ could barely hold off the onslaught in the early 1960s, the technology dwarves of today have no hope of doing so today, especially considering that doctrinaire leftism that has won over the industry.

Calls to diversity appeal especially to the mediocre man, who knows that by displacing the best with non-merit hires, they will have a lighter load, and less will be expected of them overall. Couple that with the warm feeling of moral do-gooding that washes over all the people who lower standards of excellence to employ all the colors of the rainbow within a single institution, and you get a recipe for mediocrity, and eventual failure.

Indeed, SpaceX, the private space exploration company, has recently been sued for racial discrimination.

The idiotic quote from the company spokesman just demonstrates how ignorant that these corporate leaders are about what civil rights law actually means:

“At SpaceX, we don’t care about your gender, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age or anything else of that nature — to succeed here, the only requirement is to work hard and produce outstanding results,” Taylor said. “Given the ambitious goals of the company, the standards for work performance at SpaceX are very high [and] it is critical that all employees meet this standard.”

That’s a statement of an illegal employment policy. It routinely results in disparate impact, which is why it’s illegal.

Considering that it’s not likely to be possible to dissuade Americans away from civil rights on a reasonable time frame, the best way for countries like Russia, China, the Gulf monarchies, and other small states to take over from America’s scientific leadership is to poach talent and entire industries away from the US, with the promise of noninterference in hiring practices.

For various cultural reasons, it’s difficult to do this, but considering the recent pushes to diversification, and the closing off of the domestic exits, it should be a lot easier for foreign nations to set up special poaching programs similar to the ones that the US used to pursue Soviet talent. The only thing that is surprising is how few of such programs have succeeded, arguably because the countries that would be capable of doing it are so incapable of absorbing foreigners, which is probably a good thing for them in some respects.

Kersey makes the connection to the fall of Detroit, but perhaps it doesn’t go far enough. Japanese and Korean companies supplanted American car companies from their market-leading positions in part because neither country has diversity programs. In fact, the operating philosophy of companies like Honda and Toyota are inextricably linked with Japanese culture. The success of these companies comes from purity, rather than ‘diversity.’

If diversity really brought about strength, GM would be the world’s leading auto manufacturer, and Detroit would look like Tomorrowland.

The fact is that the US will not be dissuaded from its path to decline until it is forcibly dissuaded, probably by some combination of foreign powers and internal dissent. The failure of the Space Shuttle, which presaged the more recent F-35 debacle, will presage future embarrassments.

Americans universally believe in their own eternal military superiority, which is how you know that the US will be crushed militarily by a technologically and morally superior rival some time in the near to mid term. It will also be repetitively defeated by technologically and economically inferior foes, as we have seen since the end of the Korean War.

America’s proxy in Ukraine is being crushed by the materially inferior Russia, and NATO is fraying under the pressure.

Considering that Americans learned nothing from the domestic collapses of the steel, auto, computer hardware (in large part), aerospace, and manufacturing industries, it’s unlikely that the Americans will learn anything from the collapses of the remaining areas in which they enjoy leadership.

This is why competition matters — people, as a rule, do not change, unless they are forced to change by circumstances.