So apparently men are to blame for the Mating Gap

 As an upcoming book states, there is a lack of eligible men for these women to have babies with. (There are so many gaps now - there is an opportunity for a dirty joke here for sure.)

Obviously. The author is a professor of anthropology at Yale, after all, so she must know.

Now before we go further I want you to imagine the following scenario (and I know it is going to be a controversial and strenuous analogy, but bear with me). A historian wants to understand the reasons of the collapse of the Third Reich, so what does he (or she) do? Read all the interviews, speeches, memoirs about what Hitler thought the reasons were, and then writes a book that "the Jews were behind it".

This is literally the methodology. As the author says, she gathered egg freezing stories from 150 American women and analyzed them. 

And obviously the results are (drum roll):

• Men who are reluctant to partner with high-achieving women, leaving these women single for many years.
• Men who are unready for marriage and children, often leading to relationship demise.
• Men who exhibit bad behavior, including infidelity and ageism, which often leads to relationship instability and rupture.

So, as we know, it is all men's fault. The first point is patently false -there are lots and lots of studies showing the opposite, as in women are reluctant to engage with men under their own status while the opposite is not true. Heck, even the Guardian (which was very enthusiastic about writing about this issue highlighted in the book) wrote about it. 

I am fairly certain if you ask incels why they can't get a partner you will get a similar list, but obviously those basement-dwelling jerks would be wrong. For some reason people tend to rationalize why they are not to blame. Who knew. So it is very striking to base your methodology on accepting anything your subjects say on face value. And also not correcting for the fact that egg freezing is something that is only a serious reality for about 1% of the population. This is the very definition of Grievance Studies at work -it is men who cheat, it is men who refuse to settle down, it is men who are ageist and refuse to date higher status/earning women. All of which is patently false, or ignores the current reality of how the "new" society (patterns in education, economics, etc.) -and feminism itself-  disenfranchised men, and made marriage less than attractive. Or simply ignores the fact that women seem to have unrealistic expectations.

There are other voices that provide explanation about the "death of marriage" -and it ain't those blasted men who refuse to grow up and cheat with everyone with a vagina. They come both from the left and right.

Now, there are three things to be mentioned here. 

One is that the patently anti-scientific grievance-based social "science" is still in the rage, even in the highest institutions. (Although the fact that George Bush managed to graduate from Yale puts a lie to the supposed high standards of this institution...) This does not bode well for the future as often these questionable "studies" form the basis of policies and provide an endless supply of angry, radicalized upper-middle class crowd, which, when they get into a position of power (which they do due to their privilege of having connections), they will go full into activism mode. We have seen this at Disney (crashing and burning popular franchises), but even (perhaps) in the banking sector. (Obviously a collapse this magnitude is not going to be a single-cause one, but it would not be surprising if we learned that the leaders were happily doing their little activism projects while their ship was sinking -due to their poor, activism-driven decisions...) I am very interested (well, desperate really) to see this sort of activism sweeping into the fields of "hard" sciences (which it already has begun), because when engineers, scientists and doctors are not chosen based on merit, you will have a catastrophe at your hands - as we have seen with ideologically-driven experiments, like Communism, Nazism, and so on and so forth. And you can't make a logical argument against identity-politics deciding who should become, say, a neurosurgeon. After all, you can't argue that it is fine to have crappy writers, politicians, economists, businessperson, etc. chosen based on their identity (the whole equity, diversity and inclusion stuff) but you can't have it with professions where it actually matters... It either matters everywhere or nowhere. So enjoy your diversity hire engineer designing the airplane you are sitting on. It seems like the inmates are taking over the asylum. 

So that is one big problem. The second issue is that these hacks completely discredit sciences. I know it is just social sciences, not hard sciences, but these obvious distortions coming from academia will tarnish every other fields of science -immunology and climatology included- giving fodder to the other group anti-intellectuals on the Right. (Because make no mistake: identity politics is by definition anti-intellectual.)

The third: if you want to help these very rich, powerful women, who find that there are very few richer and more powerful men for them to date, well, perhaps, you should not engage in misguided finger-pointing... Not surprisingly these powerful men tend to date  younger women (as in the case of DiCaprio, many of them sequentially), without a financial risk to the fruits of their hard work. It certainly makes you feel better about yourself, and you can imagine yourself as fighting the good fight (because actually fighting the good fight, for example for the women of Africa, the Middle East and the rest, would be hard), but it will not help those women you profess to be wanting to help. It will make them even more miserable.

So for the love of god, please stop lying. And do not tarnish sciences like this. 

Let's blame the whistleblowers, shall we?

 So there were several instances when the obvious bias of certain media outlets, or even whole "scientific fields" (I am not sure how gender studies constitute as science, but whatever) have been revealed by people who submitted fake articles and got published.

The Independent has published an outrageously, obviously over the top article about comedy and free speech (rather a call to curtail it). Got published, no problem. This is very important as it exposed how certain (if not all) media outlets do nothing but pushing agendas. When it was realized it was a hoax, people were outraged at the perpetrators -rather than actually at the obviously biased media outlet. No hard questions about how this may or may not be an endemic issue with all media printed or otherwise. Nothing to see here. After all, it is not as if it is something important, right? We only get our news from them, after all, they only shape our reality.

Same with the Grievance Studies affair- the authors managed to publish a whole chapter of Mein Kampf as a feminist manifesto, they argued for chaining white students, and talked about rape culture in dog parks -and were enthusiastically welcomed by the academic publishers. They passed through peer review, and it seems like social sciences embraced these articles wholeheartedly.

When it became clear these were fake articles, again, the outrage was not directed at the publishers (and the academics who peer-reviewed them), there were no hard questions ask how these academic fields can be biased to this cartoonish level where the Mein Kampf is actually publishable -no, the outrage was directed against these horrible hoaxers.

To this day there are no consequences of these events. None at all. The people who are responsible for these hoaxes are trying to push a conversation about them, they do appear on programs, podcasts and whatnot, but these are very much isolated from the "mainstream". The mainstream media, the mainstream conversation resolutely ignores them. If anything they only blame them for exposing this agenda-driven "science" to the whole world, giving ammunition for right-wingers, climate change deniers and so on to question the integrity and validity of science (as the above linked Atlantic article does, too). So to recap: it is not an issue if you pervert science. It is only an issue when you publicise it.

And this, again, is ignored completely. 

 

Female hunters and how to claim victory over the Patriarchy

 

Apparently women can hunt. Who would have thought? Seriously, here we are, sitting in our male privilege, telling women to go to the kitchen, and boom, a news like this happens.

Damn. It is a good thing that all these popular science portals present it in an easy-to-digest way, already positioned for fitting into the narrative of identity politics so popular nowdays, posted on their facebook pages with short tags, like "sexist scientists". Or with "The idea that men always hunted and women gathered in ancient hunter-gatherer societies is a myth."

Well, of course it is a fucking myth. It is a myth you just made up, because a cursory glance at the academic papers and wikipedia will tell you that the whole issue of sexual division of labor was not viewed in this simplistic, "Patriarchic" manner by all those sexist, white male scientist people. Let's also ignore the fact that present hunter-gatherer societies (you know, what researchers used as the closest available to model how early humans lived) also very much have gender roles present (as the author of the original paper admits). Let's also ignore the fact that it is not actually a clear-cut evidence, and 'a few female hunters' does not equal to the sweeping generalizations even the study's authors are making (which is kind of telling about their findings... somehow I do not believe they can be partial when they say things like this: "Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past". This sounds like some activism mixed with science to me. I would also like to get an explanation how this "genderization" happened in all known stone-age level societies present on this globe.) To be honest, even some common sense thinking would tell you not to expect strict gender roles in a society that is balancing on the edge of survival: whomever can, will hunt. Nobody will tell a female hunter not to hunt when she brings home an elk.

But this, of course is beside the point. Let's ignore the decades-long scientific discussion. What we need is articles showing how we stick it to the Patriarchy, so people who have absolutely no fucking clue what science is can happily share it on their facebook, generate clicks, and, as a side-effect fight the gender wars which are only deepening the fissures in our societies. (Just reading those posts will melt your brain, by the way. People did find a way to inject some anti-European -anty white under a more palpatable name- sentiments there as well if the whole male-female discussion was not enough for you.)