Summary: America is changing into a different kind of society. Here are bulletins from the experiments with feminism, progress reports – of a sort – about the condition of the lab rats women. All are written by feminist women who are quite candid about the results so far.
“I’ve distilled the essence of feral femininity.”
Experiment #1
Confuse the development of young children’s gender identity
A headline in Inside Higher Ed: “Gender-nonconforming and transgender students are four times more likely to report mental health issues compared to the rest of their peers, according to a new study that is the largest so far to focus on this population of college students.” That discusses in layman’s terms “Gender Minority Mental Health in the U.S.: Results of a National Survey on College Campuses” by Sarah Ketchen Lipson (an asst prof of health law, policy and management at Boston U) and two other women scientists, published in the September issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Which reports data from the Healthy Minds Study – Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health.
Schools and others working with America’s youth are devoting massive efforts to confusing their gender identities. Textbooks and other reading materials, and films all strive to raise doubts in the minds of the young about who they are. Transvestites and such are stars at children’s Library Reading Hours. Twist a child while they are young and see the result as they grow!
Of course, the death toll from this experiment will be high since the suicide rate of transgender lab rats people is far higher (see the most recent of the studies showing this). They are collateral damage in the destruction of the patriarchy!
Experiment #2
Create experimental personalities for girls.
Long long ago at Cornell, I was taught the basics of gender studies and feminism by Professor Judith Long Laws (author of The Second X: Sex Role and Social Role
Societies often worry about feral men because the natural state of men is incompatible with civilization. Partially socialized young men have a tendency to go rogue and cause chaos. Now technology has made possible the previously unthinkable: we raise somewhat feral young women, so that we see the natural state of women. The first results of the experiment are coming in, as we see how well the lab rats liberated young women are doing in the wild.
“The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls.”
By Mary Pipher and Sara Pipher Gilliam.
Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2019.
“Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.”
The WSJ discusses a disturbing survey.
“A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 36% of girls report being extremely anxious every day. They are particularly worried about school shootings, melting polar ice and their ability to afford college.
This refers to a Pew Research survey in which girls self-report about their lives. The rate of depression increased by 66% from 2007 to 2017. The Pew article makes no mention of “melting polar ice” or “school shootings” as a top concern of girls. The girls reported disturbing news.
“One-in-five teenage girls – or nearly 2.4 million – had experienced at least one major depressive episode …over the past year in 2017. By comparison, 7% of teenage boys …had at least one major depressive episode in the past 12 months. …”About three-in-ten teens (29%) said they felt tense or nervous about their day every or almost every day, and 45% said they felt tense or nervous sometimes. About a third of teen girls (36%) reported feeling this way every day or almost every day, compared with 23% of teen boys.
“Academic and social pressures are among the reasons cited by experts who have studied teen depression. The Center’s survey asked about some of those pressures teens face in their daily lives. About six-in-ten teens (61%) said they personally felt a lot of pressure to get good grades, while roughly three-in-ten reported a lot of pressure to look good and fit in socially (29% and 28%, respectively).”
The gap between 36% girls and 23% boys feeling “tense or nervous” every day is small. It might reflect just the different social scripts of each gender, or willingness to say what they are expected to say. It might be a typical feature of adolescence, rather than an issue for psychiatrists with a bag full of drugs.
Demonstrating the standards of social science research, the authors explain their study and one interesting result.
“We have conducted interviews and focus groups with around 100 American girls aged 12 to 19 and their mothers …Many girls report that their mothers are their best friends.”
Would the girls say this if their mothers were not sitting there? The scientists did not ask. But they give us a lot of bad news.
“But girls today aren’t as self-sufficient as their counterparts in earlier decades: They are less likely to possess driver’s licenses, work outside the home or date. They are also more solitary. …Many girls are rarely out in the world alone, solving problems by themselves. When girls do eventually leave home, they often find themselves ill-prepared to navigate ‘real life.’ In 2011, the American College Health Association reported that 31% of female freshmen said they had experienced overwhelming anxiety or panic attacks; by 2016, that had shot up to 62%. …
“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1993, girls scored the highest levels of suicide ever recorded. From 1994 onward, rates of suicide steadily declined until 2007, when they started to skyrocket.”
That is pretty awful results from 30 years of feminist-run schools, in a feminist-dominated culture. That’s not what they promised from their experiments on lab rats America’s girls. But after all that bad news, Mary and Sara give us the standard big ending. They know the solution: more feminism.
“This generation of girls, we found, is particularly eager to make its opinions heard and defend its rights. ‘I stand up for myself and others,’ Greer, 16, told us. ‘It gives me hope, because when other girls accept themselves like I do, we can take all that energy and launch the Industrial Revolution of girl power.'”
Experiment #3: Bisexuality & lesbianism are hot!
“Miley Cyrus’ split with Liam Hemsworth isn’t just celebrity gossip –
it’s a blow to the patriarchy“
Op-ed at NBC News by Marcie Bianco.
“Women like Cyrus are speaking out about sexuality in ways that put the power –
and responsibility – back into their own hands.”
“As the status quo, heterosexuality is just not working. As a snapshot of 2019 America, these stories present a startling picture: Men continue to coerce, harass, rape and kill girls and women – and go to extreme lengths to avoid responsibility for their actions. On the other side of the issue, girls and women are challenging heterosexuality, and even absconding from it altogether.
“Framed differently, the picture is this: Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression. …While men stew in their mess, women are rising. They are taking back control of their lives and their bodies and they are questioning the foundation of the patriarchy – heterosexuality – that has kept them blindly subordinate for centuries.”
Marcie describes how two wealthy stars arrange their feminist lives at the peak of their sexual attractiveness: Julianne Hough (dancer, age 31) and Miley Cyrus (singer, age 26). They urge young women to ride the carousel forever. Go wild!
How will this experiment work for non-wealthy and non-celebrity women as they age? I suspect we will see a few articles by men complaining that these women won’t marry. But we will see many more articles like these, as desperate lab rats women in their 30s jump off the carousel and demand that men marry them.
“Peter Pan Syndrome: A Man’s Fear of Commitment” at the Self-Love-Beauty website — “This is when a man is afraid to grow up. They usually put themselves first and do not want to commit to anything. They are unable to face adult feelings and responsibilities.” Somebody did not read Aesop’s fable about “The Fox and the Sour Grapes.”
“Where have all the good men gone?” by Alana Kirk in the Daily Mail. Where you left them in your 20s.
See this pitiful question by Marcia Inhorn, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University and former President of the Society for Medical Anthropology (her website), in The Telegraph.
“These are highly educated, very successful women and one after another they were saying they couldn’t find a partner. How could it be that all these amazing, attractive intelligent women were lamenting about their ability to find a partner?”
“Learn how to make him commit: The Secret Lives of Men” by Joel D. Amos. Good luck with that in the next generation.
Conclusions
Feminists are conducting one of the largest and boldest social science experiments ever. Confident in their ideology, they conduct no trials or tests. We donate our children to be their lab rats. We should take a moment and wonder if this will end well, and what might be the consequences of its failure.
For More Information
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- Misadventures of a young woman in modern America.
- The disastrous results of trying to “have it all”.
- The coming crash as men and women go their own way.
- Women’s self-esteem: boosted to their self-destruction.
- Top pop stars prepare women for loneliness – Music videos by Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston, Katy Perry, Hailee Steinfeld, and Fifth Harmony.
- Liberated women still need men. – Who knew?
- See how women’s calculus of marriage shapes America.
- Marriage: soon the Surgeon General will warn about it.
- Feminism has given us successful girls and broken girls.
- First fruits of the war on marriage: poisoning women’s lives.
- Why are men going Galt? Saying no to the rat race & marriage!
A deep look at women on the front lines of the revolution
Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy
“Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other – the Pill and high-quality pornography – and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men’s marriageability.
“Cheap Sex takes readers on an extended tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults’ experience today, including the timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure to link future goals like marriage with how they navigate their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is a story about social change, technological breakthroughs, and unintended consequences.
“Men and women have not fundamentally changed, but their unions have. No longer playing a supporting role in relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. But unravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of “industrial sex” is far more a reflection of men’s interests than women’s.”
Larry, as always i enjoy your posts, and usually agree with most of what you convey. I also agree totally that we are in the midst of a massive experiment that is pushing the boundaries of family disruption, resulting in a generation of children raised in single parent or no parent homes, with resulting dysfunction, psychological dissolution and the secondary social disruption. (Violence, antisocial behavior, solitude, and so on- part of the mess of mass murders, addiction, suicide epidemics, and on and on).
However i would quibble with one aspect of your discussion, that i know is totally politically incorrect these days, however when you state that gender behavior is a social construct, like everything else, it is only partly true, and depends so much on which aspects you are talking about. (My favorite answer is always: it depends).
While much of what passes for gender identity and behavior can result from social and behavioral conditioning, there are real and absolute contributions from biology. A wonderful read which may no longer be OK to read is a book by Melvin Konner (another medical anthropologist who probably started the field) called The Tangled Wing which discusses the biological underpinnings of social behavior and personality. So it is not completely a biological construct but also not completely a social construct.
Ignoring that biological aspect is done at our peril. Similarities in behaviors between various levels of other species and humans are legion, and further things like “the biological clock” in women, or tendencies towards violent or aggressive behaviors by males, etc. are probably both hard wired to some extent, and hormonally exacerbated to a further extent. You can over come these with socialization, but not entirely.
There is always a bell curve, and not all males are such and all females are the other. But the trends are there, and again, ignoring those biological underpinnings will only be done at our peril. The experiments may sound good to gen 4 feminists, but males in general still respond to visual stimuli, and women in general tend towards more maternal behaviors after giving birth, and those things tend not to change over less than multi-millenial periods of time. All it takes is to read a critique of youth in Athens from the golden age, and compare it to one from the roaring twenties, and then another from today, and you will find more similarities than dissimilarities.
I would add one other thought, and that is regards to a book review in this month’s Commentary magazine about a novel entitled “Fleischman is in Trouble.” I read the entire review thinking about you and your ongoing discussions of late gen feminism here.Hope you find it as sad, discomforting, but confirmatory as i did.
Barry Newman
Barry,
You are quite right, I overstated the role of indoctrination. I have changed the text accordingly.
Still, the discovery that women do not inherently want children is epic. It has taken generations for feminists to drastically reduce the pronatalist influence of parents and schools. We have already begun to see it. That’s the drive for joint custody. Women push guys to have kids. When they blow up the marriage, they no longer want the kids.
The girls now being raised have almost nil pronatalism. Between their disinterest in kids and guys (possible) disinterest in marriage – fertility will dive to levels now considered unimaginable.
Larry- appreciate the reply. I would say though, that this “indoctrinational” (if that is even a word) drive towards reducing or eliminating the desire to have children is not because that drive does not exist, but because it does and due to the plastic nature of human beings, and the potential for society to be able to overcome nature, that the indoctrination can be successful. i would go a step farther and suggest (cannot back any of this with facts, so forgive me a little license) that the generations of women who have either foregone having children, or having had them walk away somehow (due to their socialized belief that they should be free from that aspect of being human) that many of those women will eventually (suffer is not quite the right word here) demonstrate some level of regret/fallout/dysphoria. While not everyone is cut out to have kids, the drive does not disappear spontaneously. It may be stronger in some, and weaker in others, but it is both biologic and human nature, ingrained in the survival of the species.
Sorry, i forgot to add this thing. One of my favorite writers, and one of the second (losing count so this could be off) generation of feminists is Camille Paglia. Like many of the early feminists, the desire to have equal rights, and live free in society as equals to men, she, and they were not intent on excising the “patriarchy” but, did not desire removal from western civilization, but embraced it and merely asked for equality. She is quite remarkable, however due to her views on free speech, and a host of other issues, has found herself marginalized by the latest iteration of feminists who, like the multicultural left, are intent on destroying western civilization rather than celebrating it. There came today in City Journal a wonderful article describing Paglia and her history that I am sure you would find of interest: The Provocations of Camille Paglia
Well written and encyclopedic, it offers a lot of insight into her background, history, philosophies, and writings. Well worth the time to read. After coming across a similar article i bought several of her books. However, like Thomas Sowell’s writings i still cannot get my family to read any of them. Oh well, one does what one can. Thanks again, Barry
link below:
https://www.city-journal.org/camille-paglia
Yes, Paglia is great. And very funny. And very Italian. This is a lady who grew up with men, and with women who understood men and liked them anyway. Its so weird that it takes a gay woman to be a feminist who actually likes and appreciates men. Wonderful quotes about Post Modernism – she is quite right, a weird Left Bank intellectual backwater peopled by charlatans somehow took over American universities. One imagines it was largely due to adoption by people without enough French or understanding of French society to know what they were reading, but became enthusiastic converts regardless. Well, and they had read too little Moore and Russell, or if they had read it, didn’t understand that either.
Paglia has a couple of interviews on youtube. I particularly enjoyed one where she demands to know why there are so few women lining up to clean out blocked sewage pipes… and points out that men actually do this stuff every day.
FM wrote: “Fertility will dive to levels now considered unimaginable.”
I ran across this in the WSJ the other day:
“This year is shaping up to be the first year that women make up the majority of the college-educated labor force, a milestone that is already altering benefits packages offered by companies and one that could influence family sizes in the future.”
And at the end of the article:
“Around the world, as female college-attainment rises, typically the fertility rate goes down as educated women delay starting families. In the U.S., the total fertility rate has been below the replacement level of 2.1 since 1971 and hit a record-low of 1.7 last year. ”
Most of the (college-educated) women I know here in NYC don’t think about having children until their late thirties. Then, they go on some dating app like Tinder, find nothing but unsuitable men, and then wonder why everything has gone completely wrong. I feel like the birthrate will continue to drop, and immigration to increase to fill in the gap.
AK,
Thanks for posting that!
“and immigration to increase to fill in the gap.”
There are two aspects to that. First, that low fertility rate is with high rates of immigration (with their on average higher fertility rate). Second, what “gap”? Do we need more low-skilled, low education people? Their rock-bottom wages suggest a surplus, not shortage. Are overall wages rising faster than productivity, implying a labor shortage? No, they are not.
Barry:
Similarities in behaviors between various levels of other species and humans are legion, and further things like “the biological clock” in women, or tendencies towards violent or aggressive behaviors by males, etc. are probably both hard wired to some extent, and hormonally exacerbated to a further extent.
“probably” should be cut from this paragraph. The hormonal effects on humans were known when I got my biology degree decades ago.
The two favorite studies of mine from social sciences (back in the paper world):
Some women decided that they wanted to determine when the turning of females into accepting their role from the patriarchy occurred. They found that there were distinct differences between male and female children well prior to crawling, which is considered one of the first steps in childhood progress. But they concluded that the evil patriarchy was there anyway, it was just too subtle for them to find. Talk about throwing out the data if it doesn’t fit the theory; they threw out their whole work.
The next group completed a study on men and were surprised by the answer; and honestly admitted they should not have been. The study was about what men found visually attractive about women. It was everything. As the authors noted, there was not a part of the female body that some group of men did not think showcased what is feminine, no matter how humble that part was. They concluded, men love the way women look.
John- thanks for your reply. While i generally agree that “probably” could have been cut, (maybe even should have been) given the state of the world these days, and the ability for others to copy and paste, i do not like to be too strident in what i say. James Damore, at Google, found that out the hard way. In what was actually a well thought out and well written treatise that men and women could be different, and rather than lumping all women together and demanding that they be managed exactly as men, (who were also not the same as each other as well), he insisted that each individual should be treated as an individual, with differing motivations, talents, capabilities, etc. How radical and how recidivist! It cost him his job (although he may make it up in a lawsuit, it may not happen in the 9th circuit court given that it is based on the left coast).
I always try to hedge my bets as far as that one goes, and do not want to step on any toes unnecessarily until i am so sufficiently wealthy that i too can afford to lose my job . ;-)
I will say though, that the biologic imperatives are real and deep, and we ignore them at our peril. And yes, as a surgeon who has managed children with hormonal and developmental abnormalities, i can attest that masculinized females, and feminized males, tend strongly towards the hormonal milieu that they developed with. That hormonal imprint can be seen throughout the biological world. It is not necessarily destiny, but there is definitely a strong push. Appreciate the examples. You should look up the Tangled Wing, you will find it very interesting. Although Melvin Konner (an anthropologist who later got so interested in biologic effects on culture and personality that he went and got an MD degree) later wrote a book essentially stating that the world would be better run if it were run by women. He could be right, but i still think that we are better with all of us being part of the world, warts, hormonal effects, and all.
Barry
PS there is another study that shows that women are attracted to men quite differently during different parts of their menstrual cycle. (to paraphrase Warren Zevon from Werewolves of London: little old lady got titillated late last night- hormonal cycles again!)
I’m confused on why you (seem to?) agree that females desiring children is a social construct? Can you expound on that a bit more?
From what I’ve seen, the majority of females do say they want kids, EVEN THOUGH the current social construct is that they shouldn’t want them. Or to be more charitable, the topic of having kids is just minimized/ignored, and girls are mostly guided into picking a career, being aggressive and masculine, and being driven to achieve corporate success.
If you were being sarcastic then disregard.
Dark,
You raise an important issue which is only mentioned in this post. I’ll take a moment to sketch it out in a little more detail. Please advise if this is clear.
“From what I’ve seen, the majority of females do say they want kids”
Yes. Feminity = motherhood is a deep “trope” in western culture, and has been forever. As such takes generations to change. Not just because of biology. Women who were barren often suffered for it. The inability to produce children was often grounds for divorce by the husband, potentially catastrophic for most women. In the Bible it was seen as a major problem and often discussed, as in the stories of these women:
“EVEN THOUGH the current social construct is that they shouldn’t want them”
Give it time. Beliefs rooted in deep culture take generations to change. The usual pattern is that people deny that it can change, then deny that it is changing, then realized that it already has changed.
Today in America, young women say that they want to be mothers. This is like asking men if they have courage. The answer is prescribed by social norms. But women’s actions show that it is a lower priority than for their grandmothers. Back then, they went to work on that project when they first became young women. Now women often delay it as long as medically possible. (Note: we’re speaking of the middle and upper classes; as in 1984, the Left doesn’t care how the proles live).
What really shows women’s priorities is the role of children when they decide to divorce.
As with most aspects of this experiment on our society, the lives of the Millennials and Generation Z will show the magnitude of the changes it produces – about which we can only guess today.
Very interesting way of looking at it. Yes, it is one possible interpretation of what we are seeing. I do find it a priori unlikely that we could have evolved as a species with women not really innately wanting children, but being so to speak conditioned by the tribe into it.
But its a very interesting point that one way to tell is to look at how they behave when social pressure is removed. And I agree that the evidence points in your direction.
If that is so, you’d expect societies with greater control of women to be longer lived and robust. Because only so will they be able to sustain reproduction. Don’t know. But its a very interesting way of looking at it.
Henrik,
“you’d expect societies with greater control of women to be longer lived and robust.”
Not necessarily. Once women are indoctrinate sufficiently to want to be mothers, additional control might produce few benefits – or even disadvantages.
Too much of a good thing can be bad.
@Larry Kummer, Editor
Christianity seemed to achieve a golden mean in this regard in contrast to Greece/Rome and Ancient China as well as Islam.
Men were to treat women as Christ treated his people and love them as their own bodies (Ephesians 5)
Women were civilized but they have far more freedom and capacity to contribute to civilization enabling them to maximize as far as such societies remained Patriarchal rather than being hobbled as in many of those cases.
Unfortunately a common feature of many Patriarchal cultures is no doubt female infanticide. Which only Abrahamic religions put a stop to.
What I find interesting is that this indoctrination can overcome the female biological imperative to pass on ones genes.
Does it mean that the desire to procreate isnt that strong overall or that nurture is a more powerful influence?
I dont know, but very interesting to watch.
Sven,
“the female biological imperative to pass on ones genes.”
That’s because there is no such thing. Women and men like sex. That’s all there is.
People, even scientists, love to create castles of theory in the air.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23333868 The neural and hormonal bases of human parental care
Larry, nurturing is there but it appears to be a product of the pregnancy than the product of sexual desire. However, this would get complicated for a women and man after the first child, or persons around children.
I don’t know if you have been part of a “Pass the Baby” party where the women, and men like myself, who love babies pass the newest newborns around and cuddle and talk to them. In this scenario, the social and biological reinforce each other. In fact, one of the comments by participants is to see who has baby lust and make predictions about whether ot not another child would be the product.
From what I remember from mammalian studies ,especially hominids, this is the norm: social AND biological reinforcement.
John,
First, you are changing the subject. Nurturing behavior produced by the physical presence of babies is well-documented, but has nothing whatsoever to do with any mythical “female biological imperative to pass on ones genes.” The closest to that is the pleasure produced by the physical act of sex.
Second, there is zip evidence that this almost reflexive response is very strong in the absence of childhood indoctrination. When the child goes to school, and the wife & mother realizes she can gain her independence and get money by dumping her husband – there is zero zero evidence that the biological response to infants plays any role in her thinking.
Your attachment to this sentimental bit of pseudoscience is interesting. I doubt that it will survive the increasing evidence of its falsity when the women of Gen Z reach their 40s. Time will tell.
I see your point in that it is changing the subject. Will try not to do that.