Mad Max and the Anti-Feminist Truth

The preview for Mad Max: Fury Road made it look like a grrl-power movie and some people were touting it as a great feminist flick, so I wasn't very excited about it. After a few friends assured me that it had been misrepresented, I relented and bought a ticket for this past weekend. I'm glad I did.

Fury Road is full of absurdities and impossibilities, but plausibility has never been a major element of the Mad Max franchise. In such an unlikely world, feminism wouldn't be so out of place. I mean, why not? Spiked and armored columns roaring about the desert wouldn't exactly be a realistic feature of a fuel and water starved post apocalyptic world, so it's no more implausible to posit a female warrior woman ruling the nightmare metropolis of Barter Town or taking on the mutant armies of Immortan Joe. Everything is bigger and badder than it could ever be in the real world and that's one of the things we love about these movies. More guns, more insanity, big explosions, and bigger bad guys. But when it comes to feminism, this movie is much more consistent with the facts of life in the real world than it is in other areas.

In fact, Fury Road is one of the most anti-feminist movies I've seen in a long time.

Here are a few anti-feminist principles that it gets right:

• Without a gun or comparable weapon, almost no woman has a reasonable chance in a fight against a below average man. Without Max to fight for them, Furiosa and Joe's harem girls would have been killed or captured very early in the story.
• Objective, widely accepted and enforced moral standards are essential for civilization.
• The physical infrastructure of civilized society (buildings, roads, farms, machinery, weapons, etc.) is almost exclusively created and maintained by men.
• Women are at the mercy of men. They always have been and always will be. If a woman is not under the protection of one man (father, husband, policeman, soldier, etc.), she will be easy prey for some other man. If there is a woman living in peace, she is either isolated from the rest of humanity or else there is a man somewhere threatening violence against anyone who might wish her harm.

You don't have to like it. You can rage against it all you want. It remains the truth:

Feminists are living out a fantasy that is only made possible by a solid--if understated--patriarchy.

Patriarchy Is Good for Women

Matriarchy might look good in theory, but it's about as useful as having all feet and no hands. (See 1 Corinthians 12.)

Says the Elusive Wapiti (blog no longer available):

But what feminists didn't realize at the time they took patriarchy out back and shot it is that patriarchy, among other things, lassoed men into socially constructive behavior and dutiful service of society as a whole. And women in particular. Freed from patriarchy, men were free to throw off the yoke of duty and other-focused behavior and could pursue their own self interests full-tilt. Which quite a few dudes did, and found that a world without patriarchy--the world that women all yelled and screamed and marched and burnt bras for--suited them just fine. And they thought that this world was the one that women wanted.

Forbidden Relationships...aka Love Wins!

Approaching God as a Nation, as Families, and as Individuals

Acharei Mot and Kedoshim (Leviticus 16-20) are about how we are and are not to relate to God. Since marriage is an image of our relationship to God, they contain many examples of forbidden human relationships.

• Leviticus 16 – Approaching God as a nation.
• Leviticus 17 – Approaching God as individuals. Things that will prevent closeness.
• Leviticus 18 – Mistakes other peoples made in their relationships. Judgment as a nation and as individuals.
• Men with women
• The offspring of relationships between men and women
• Men with men
• Men and women with animals
• Leviticus 19 – Being set apart from other nations by a healthy relationship with God and each other.
• Leviticus 20 – Refusing to be different creates unhealthy relationships with God and each other. Don’t blow it.

The Only Love that Matters

In Leviticus 19, God said, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." In Leviticus 20, He said "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death."

There is no contradiction. Love means doing what's best for people. It means refusing to tolerate behaviors that destroy the community & its relationship with God.

Celebrating spiritual disease is cowardly. It's an excuse to avoid speaking the hard truth that homosexuality is perverse rot. It's death. Love doesn't see a person committing suicide and say, "Oh, how sweet! Love wins." What vile filth has infected people's souls that they could possibly entertain such things?

No, love says to the man drinking poison, "Stop! No more!"

This is love by God's standard, the only standard that matters: "You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my rules and do them." (Lev 20:22a)

Open sexual perversion defiles the entire nation, not just those who practice it. The closer a nation is to God, the quicker and more severe is the ruin brought on by their wickedness. Things that will bring a nation to ruin: perversion, blood-guilt, idolatry.

Do you want to save America? Then don't tolerate open perversion. End abortion. God won't wait forever.

Fortunately, forgiveness awaits the penitent. "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked."

Prohibited Degrees of Kinship

There are numerous methods of charting degrees of consanguinity floating around out there, so I thought I should post something about my own. Especially since I have mentioned elsewhere that God prohibits marriage to anyone closer than the fourth degree. 

Ancestors and descendants, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and siblings are all out of bounds. First cousins are acceptable. At least to God. You might feel differently. 

Don't use this chart for legal purposes, of course. Many jurisdictions define the degrees differently.

God's Law prohibits marriage with 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degree relations. There are rare, marginal cases that are not addressed or that don't fit neatly into this hierarchy, but that's why God gave us minds and spirits.

Babies Are Good For You

I remember years ago reading about how the incidence of certain types of cancers in women could be dramatically reduced by bearing and breastfeeding babies. To obtain the maximum benefit, I think the article said women should have their first children in their late teen years.

A new study claims that breastfeeding for a year or more halves a woman's likelihood of developing rheumatoid arthritis.

Women Who Breastfeed For More Than A Year Halve Their Risk Of Rheumatoid Arthritis
ScienceDaily (2008-05-13) -- Women who breast feed for longer have a smaller chance of getting rheumatoid arthritis, suggests a new study. The study also found that taking oral contraceptives, which are suspected to protect against the disease because they contain hormones that are raised in pregnancy, did not have the same effect. Also, simply having children and not breast feeding also did not seem to be protective. ... read full article

The old feminist canard about the terrible risks of pregnancy keeps getting weaker.

Is Feminism a Symptom of Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenic Brains Show Sex Pattern Reversal, Compared With General Population
ScienceDaily (2008-04-01) -- It's not always politically correct to say so, but there are a few minor differences between the brains of men and women. New research shows a novel reversal of these differences in the brains of schizophrenics. "In comparison to the general population, women's brains seem masculine and men's brains seem feminine," said the researcher. ... > read full article

I'd really like to read more about this. Under emotional stress, the brains of schizophrenic women look masculine and the brains of schizophrenic men look feminine. The implications could be sticky. Despite my headline, I am not about to jump to conclusions about feminism, homosexuality, or anything else in relation to schizophrenia. More data, more processing required.

Divorce Is Not the Problem

Dr. Stephen Baskerville at MensNewsDaily wrote that "...until we understand that the principal threat to marriage today is not cultural but political, and that it comes not from homosexuals but from heterosexuals, we will never reverse the decline of marriage. The main destroyer of marriage, it should be obvious, is divorce. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers points out that "divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today's challenge by gays." The central problem is the divorce laws."

He's right that divorce is a problem and that the divorce laws are a problem, but he is way off when he says they are the central problem. The divorce laws are terribly perverse, but that is only a symptom of a greater problem that really is cultural. Or maybe I should say spiritual. The central problem with marriage today is feminism, rebellion against God's prescribed order. The absurdities of no fault divorce, mandatory and draconian spousal maintenance and child support payments, default child custody laws, homosexual marriage, et cetera, are the logical end of rejecting the common sense of created order. In that context, divorce is actually an oft-abused remedy that God has built into his Law.

Here's my ideal solution (as of today--I might change my mind later):

1. Take marriage out of the hands of government. Do away with marriage licenses. The civil government has no legitimate role to play in deciding who may marry whom. Neither does the church.
2. Replace marriage licenses and platitudinal "vows" that no one takes seriously with real marriage contracts that must be signed by the bride, groom, and at least one senior relative of each. Two would be better. If there are no relatives available, then a spiritual mentor, such as pastor, rabbi, or priest, would do.
3. Reduce the government's role in marriage and divorce to contract enforcement.
4. Immediately eliminate government financed welfare for able-bodied adults and corporations. Gradually eliminate most other government financed welfare programs as well and eliminate the income tax to compensate. Charity is admirable and spiritually mandatory, but there's no charity at the end of a gun.
5. Institute a biblically based land and property reform. Every family gets its own land, which will be returned every fiftieth year without obligation. No land can ever be permanently sold, but can only be leased for a maximum term of fifty years. The only way that land can be permanently divided or transferred is through inheritance. Eliminate inheritance taxes. (I did say ideal and not necessarily practical, didn't I?)
6. Replace the judicial concepts of punishment and reform with restitution and removal. Scrap 95% of all laws and send all the lawyers to an internment camp on the shores of the Beaufort Sea. The ones we don't just give to old Billy, anyways. All future judges in local courts must be unpaid and must be respected and successful men of the general public.

Then I think we might be getting somewhere. ;-)

Scientists Discover that Boys and Girls Are Different

AP medical writer, Maria Cheng, tells us that women may need different heart treatment than men, because they are fundamentally different. "There is a big question mark over why this is happening," [Dr. Eva] Swahn said. "We want there to be equality between the genders, but that doesn't mean that women and men should get the same treatment."

In other words, no matter how many times we are told that men and women are the same, they aren't. Pretending otherwise has real consequences.

Like it or not, we all have a job to do

What happens to a partnership if the partners continually pull in opposite directions? If one partner pulls while the other sits? If both partners sit on their arses? The relationship fails. Someone (or both) gives up.

Here’s the problem, as I see it, with marriage: most men don’t know how to be men and most women don’t know how to be women. Some relationships can be saved by just one of the partners doing their part; the other eventually comes around. That doesn’t work all the time, though. Many people will get really tired of carrying all the weight, and eventually they’ll just stop. They’ll take their ball and go home, maybe waiting for a better, saner game on some other day. They’re the John Galts of marriage.

Men, you need to learn how to be men. Not men in touch with their feminine side, and not men who bully their way through everything. Men with strength and humility. Burn your pink polos and your black sabbath t’s, too. (Metaphorically, of course. There's nothing particularly wrong with pink polos or Black Sabbath T-shirts.) Then you need to hold the line. Don’t back down. Don’t give in to political correctness. Don’t let the zeitgeist (or your wife) set your rules.

Women, you need to straighten up right now. Lose the tattoos, the whorish dress, and the attitudes, and take some responsibility for yourself and especially for your family. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if it makes you sick. Submit to your fathers and husbands. Now.

Female Emo-Shine

Over at Voxday, Pretty Lady wrote, "Thus a woman's behavior may appear to be controlled by her emotions in the moment, as in weeping easily, but does this necessarily imply that her subsequent decisions upon all matters related to the situation in the future will be controlled by the fact that the situation caused her to weep? Or will she simply factor in the emotion as one more variable in the equation, and proceed to evaluate the other variables accordingly, once she has calmed down?"

In my experience, emotion is a factor in everyone's decision making process, however it is more heavily weighted in the minds of most women. Men and women tend to see in slightly different cognitive spectra and emotions shine brighter at the female wavelengths, like the sun overwhelming apparently lesser considerations like the moon and stars and west-bound traffic in the morning. The moon doesn't shrink and the cars don't stop coming when the sun is in your eyes; they're just harder to see.

Feminism's Unintended Consequences

At Eternal Bachelor, Duncan Idaho commented on an Independent News article:

When you take into account housing benefit and things like not having to pay Council Tax, prescriptions, etc, single mothers tend to have more income than single people and often more than a couple who both work full-time.

If you reward skank behaviour rather than punish it, you will encourage skank behaviour. Obviously.

This is both good and bad. The article states,

An extensive study published today reveals that girls as young as 13 are making a "career choice" by deciding to have children, since they see parenting as preferable to working in a dead-end job.

Most of the subjects of the report are not actually children--or at least they shouldn't be acting like children. By the time a girl is fifteen years old, she should be behaving like an adult and she should have been well prepared by her parents to be a wife and mother. Fifteen is past childhood and on the border of womanhood. A nineteen year old should be fully a woman. That's when she really should be having children.

At least these young women acknowledge that motherhood is a better career choice than desk-hood. But notice that I said wife and mother. Rampant bastardy and the subsequent rises in crime and socialism are products of modern feminism. Follow this ironic chain of unintended consequences: chivalry -> feminism -> licentiousness -> bastardy -> poverty and maltreatment of women. The feminazis actually wanted the process to go from bastardy back to more feminism and the further dissolution of the family. Unfortunately for them, you get what you pay for. The family is the foundation of a healthy society. If you lose that, you lose everything else.

Duncan Idaho essentially said the same,

It also shows that many girls do want to be full-time mothers rather than work full-time in a dreary office or factory. It's feminism they have to thank for that. Fifty-years ago, before feminists drove women in to the workplace, it would have been easily possible - and encouraged - for a girl to get married in her late teens and have a far more worthwhile career of running a home and raising children. Feminists didn't think women would want that - or, in some cases, knew women want that but decided that they, feminists, had more right to dictate what other women wanted than those women themselves. The more single mothers, the more cost to taxpayers, meaning it gets harder and harder for the few remaining traditional women to be full-time mothers and housewives.

So, whilst females used to marry young and have children, now many do the same but without the marriage bit, because the increase in the welfare state means the government can support a stay at home mother but the average man can't. So women who want to be full-time mothers often have no choice but to effectively make the government the daddy. This makes the welfare bill rise further, starting a chain reaction whereby more girls will have to have kids out of wedlock just to be able to be a full time mother. On and on it will go until the welfare kittie is empty.

And then everything falls apart, and hopefully we can forget about all this nonsense and get on with family life the way God intended it to be.

Discrimination Against Caucasian Men

Interesting article in June 19th's ComputerWorld: "100 Best Places to Work in IT 2006". Here are some of the statistics cited as justifications for three of their top five picks:

-#2 University of Miami: "74% of IT staffers are minorities."
-#3 Capital Group: "52% of the IT staffers are minorities."
-#5 Grant Thornton LLP: "43% of its IT managers are women. 29% of IT staffers are women."

I don't have anything against minorities or women. I think that if one person is more qualified to do a job, then that person should get the job. It doesn't matter to me if the person is a black woman from Atlanta or a hermaphrodite from Sacramento. If he/she/it can do the job, then great! The problem is when people start discriminating against one group in order to make up for a perceived injustice to another group.

Do minorities really make up 74% of the IT professionals in the Miami area? Or 52% in all of the Capital Group locations? I'm having trouble believing that. I think you'd have to work hard to hire that many minorities in technical fields--or you have to hire them all from India--because most IT people in the United States are white men. Even in Miami.

I work in an IT department with eight men and one woman. This department isn't unique. I've been in IT departments with ratios of 12 to 0 and 15 to 1. These companies weren't discriminating against women. It's just that there aren't many women interested in these jobs, and many of those who do apply aren't qualified. Grant Thornton must be discriminating against men from the very beginning by giving a preference to women regardless of technical ability. If the numbers of men and women who apply for positions at Grant Thornton are roughly the same as at other companies, then men competing against women for the same jobs are at greater than a 50% handicap just because they are men. They continue to discriminate against men who seek promotion. If you are competing against a woman for a management promotion, your chances of getting the promotion drop by one-third solely because of your gender.

The article should have been called "100 Best Places for Minorities and Women to Work in IT," because they don't look so great for white men.

Update 07/10/2006: Read-worthy post at http://lndavout.blogspot.com/2006/07/response-to-lee.html .

Happy Fathers Day. You're worthless.

I just watched Animal Planet's Most Extreme: Dads. By the end of the show, I was really feeling how great it is to be a man. Maybe their list of top ten animal dads will explain why:

10. Lion - Defends his children.
9. Antechinus Mouse - Mates nonstop.
8. Golden Jackal - Gives his food to his children.
7. Giant waterbug - Cares for the eggs.
6. Rhea - Cares for the eggs.
5. Stickleback Fish - Cares for the eggs.
4. Jacana Bird - Polyandrous and lets female kill his young.
3. Bull Frog - Cares for the young.
2. Penguin - Makes milk for the young.
1. Seahorse - Gestates and gives birth to young.

Number 10 is a pretty good pick. The lion is strong and fierce. He's number ten because he defends his family and territory from predators and intruders. So far so good.

Number 9 is OK. Hyper-potency is something to be proud of. I guess. It's not bad at least. Well, sometimes anyway.

Number 8 is pretty respectable. You have to respect a man who sacrifices for his children. We're not doing too badly yet.

Number 7 is...well, he's mom. He made the list because he does things that women traditionally do in a human household. Same with number 6 and 5 and 4. They all hang around the nest and care for the eggs. If that wasn't bad enough, the Jacana lets any old female come along and kill all his eggs before laying some more in his nest. He has no way of knowing whether this batch shares his genes or not. He's a polyandrous sex slave. And these traits make them great dads how? I suppose they're great dads for being bugs, birds, and fish, but Fathers Day is about human fathers, isn't it?

Number 3 is another homemaker, only he sticks around to care for the tadpoles, too. Yeah! Another Mr. Mom!

Number 2 not only cares for the young, but he makes a milk-like substance for them too.  Swap to a human Dad breast-feeding his baby. Isn't that sweet? Are you sick, yet?

Number 1 has an internal pouch into which the female lays her eggs. They gestate inside of him, they hatch, and he gives birth. Animal Planet says he is number one because he is both mother and father.

Now, dads, don't you feel special? Now you know that defending your children and sacrificing for them is the least of your good traits. Emasculating yourself and doing everything you can to turn yourself into a woman is your only hope of really measuring up.  Fathers are worthless except when they are able to emulate mothers.