Sex-trafficking on campus: the logical outworking of feminist rhetoric

First, let’s quickly review what feminists think about young women hooking up with men on campus.

Here’s feminist Hanna Rosin writing in the Atlantic:

The hookup culture that has largely replaced dating on college campuses has been viewed, in many quarters, as socially corrosive and ultimately toxic to women, who seemingly have little choice but to participate. Actually, it is an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.

[...]To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

The Weekly Standard talks about feminist Naomi Wolf:

On top of it all is the feminist-driven academic and journalistic culture celebrating that yesterday’s “loose” women are today’s “liberated” women, able to proudly “explore their sexuality” without “getting punished for their lust,” as the feminist writer Naomi Wolf put it in the Guardian in December.

Wolf devoted her 1997 book Promiscuities to trying to remove the stigma from .  .  . promiscuity. On the one hand, she decried the double-standard unfairness of labeling a girl who fools around with too many boys a “slut,” and, on the other, she lionized “the Slut” (her capitalization) as the enviable epitome of feminist freedom and feminist transgression against puritanical social norms.

And here’s feminist Nancy Bauer in the New York Times:

If there’s anything that feminism has bequeathed to young women of means, it’s that power is their birthright.  Visit an American college campus on a Monday morning and you’ll find any number of amazingly ambitious and talented young women wielding their brain power, determined not to let anything — including a relationship with some needy, dependent man — get in their way.  Come back on a party night, and you’ll find many of these same girls (they stopped calling themselves “women” years ago) wielding their sexual power, dressed as provocatively as they dare, matching the guys drink for drink — and then hook-up for hook-up.

Feminists aren’t concerned about the hook-up culture. On the contrary – they think of it as a natural and good application of their feminist doctrines.

Now with that out of the way, let’s look at what Stuart Schneiderman has found in the Atlantic about the college hook-up culture.

Excerpt:

Not long after she arrived on campus in September, Nicole had started hooking up with a guy who belonged to one of the more popular fraternities on campus. As she explained to me over coffee that day, one night in the fall, she got drunk and ended up having sex with this guy in his dingy frat room, which was littered with empty cans of Keystone Light and pizza boxes. She woke up the next morning to find a used condom tangled up in the sheets. She couldn’t remember exactly what had happened that night, but she put the pieces together. She smiled, looked at the frat brother, and lay back down. Eventually, she put her clothes on and walked back to her dorm. Mission accomplished: She was no longer a virgin.

This was a routine she repeated for months. Every weekend night, and on some weekday nights, she would drink so heavily that she could remember only patches of what happened the night before and then would have sex with the same fraternity brother. One night, she was talking with someone else at the frat when the brother interrupted her and led her upstairs to have sex. On another occasion, they had sex at the frat, but Nicole was too drunk to find her clothes afterward, so she started walking around the house naked, to the amusement of all of the other brothers. She was too drunk to care. Eventually, everything went dark. Next weekend, she returned to the frat.

On that spring day, as Nicole told me these stories, she didn’t make eye contact with me.

When I asked Nicole if she was still hooking up with the same frat boy, she shook her head. She explained that the entire time she was having sex with him he never once spoke to her or acknowledged her outside of his fraternity’s basement. Not in the library, not in the dining hall, not at the bookstore.

“One time, I waved at him in front of the food court and said hi, but he just ignored me.”

“Was he with anyone?” I asked—as though that would make a difference.

“A bunch of his friends.”

And later:

She talked less. She stopped exercising. And she started walking around with her eyes to the ground. The lively girl I had known in the fall, who reminded me of so many freshman girls I had met as editor of a campus publication and vice president of my sorority, had recently been placed on suicide watch by the university health clinic.

This reminds me about one of the chapters in “Unprotected“, by Dr. Miriam Grossmann, in which she explains how women respond to the pressure to take part in the hook-up culture.

Stuart explains why women are doing this:

College administrators who counsel young women are permissive about hooking up. They believe that women like sex just as much as men and therefore that if a man likes hooking up a woman must like it too. They are comfortable with the idea that abuse is not abuse if it is consensual.

Thus they encourage hooking up and pretend that it is normal behavior.

Young women have learned from the ambient culture that the alternatives to hooking up, dating and courtship are oppressive. They have learned that abstinence is unnatural and repressive.

As I have often mentioned on this blog, feminism deserves considerable responsibility for this state of affairs.

Feminists encourage hooking up. They are pimping out young women for the cause. They must count among the sex traffickers.

[...][O]ur culture has imposed mental constraints that are every bit as powerful as physical coercion, but far less difficult to identify.

It has taught young women that when they hook up they are making free choices and are doing something that Hanna Rosin and the sisterhood approve of. Forcing young women to hook up by persuading that they have no real choice in the matter is utterly contemptible.

One of the reasons why I remain a virgin is because I think that sex is something that should not be done merely for recreation. It’s a way of bonding, and it’s not fair to women to make them do bonding activities before you have bonded to them through marriage. Sex is not something that should be done before a lifelong commitment. We shouldn’t be passing any laws or creating any policies that encourage women to get involved with recreational premarital sex. It’s not good for them.

Filed under: News, Betty Friedan, Blaming Men, Catherine MacKinnon, Chastity, Courtship, Domestic Violence, Equity Feminism, Father, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Gender Feminism, Housework, Ideology, Kate Millett, Male Bashing, Marriage, Misandry, Modesty, Promiscuity, Sex Differences, Sex Roles, Single-Motherhood

Equal pay and women: does Obama give his female employees pay equity?

Obama talks a lot about equal pay for women and pay equity, but what is his record?

The Daily Caller explains:

Government records show that despite the Democratic National Convention’s early focus on salary equality for women, President Barack Obama has consistently paid his own female staffers less than men who perform similar or identical duties.

The convention is Obama’s show, but Tuesday night in Charlotte belonged to Lilly Ledbetter. The failed lawsuit plaintiff whose name was ultimately attached to a wage parity law Obama signed in 2009 — the first bill to win his signature — addressed the convention, and at least five other speakers raised her signature issue. One was the president himself.

A video of Obama played in the convention hall at around 9:35 p.m. Tuesday, in which he observed that women in the U.S. workforce are “still earning just 77 cents for every dollar a man does.”

“Overall,” he said, “a woman with a college degree doing the same work as a man will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career.”

Such a gender pay gap, he claimed, “weakens families; it weakens communities; it’s tough on our kids; it weakens our entire economy.”

But data from the Obama White House’s 2011 annual report show that female staffers there earn a median salary 18 percent lower than that of men.

And nearly four years ago, at the height of the 2008 election season, Scripps Howard syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock wrote that female staffers in Obama’s U.S. Senate office, too, were shortchanged.

“Obama’s average male employee earned $54,397,” Murdock determined from online Senate salary records. But the future president’s “30 female employees … [earned] $45,152, on average.”

But there is a broader question that needs to be answered. Are the differences in the salaries between men and women due to discrimination, or are they due to the different choices that men and women make?

Here’s a popular article by Carrie Lukas, writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

[...]The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

That makes sense. For example, I think that most women find careers like teaching and nursing more fulfilling than careers in automobile repair or computer programming. And some fields just pay more than others because of supply and demand. But if you look at what people of both sexes earn for the same degrees, the same years of experience, in the same jobs, and correct for time off for child care, and so on, then there is no pay gap. It’s a made-up crisis designed to trick women into thinking that they are victims, and that they need government to save them from the bad, bad men. And most single women do fall for this rhetoric, as a recent poll showed. I think it’s especially true for fatherless women and women who make poor choices in relationships, which is why fiscal conservatives and libertarians need to promote marriage, family and fatherhood more. These things are all related.

There is a gender pay gap – but not the one you might expect

However, there actually is a gender pay gap in the largest cities in the country – but it’s not a pay gap that favors men.

Well, first of all, it’s important to note for those who didn’t know that salary differences are purely the result of individual lifestyle choices, not the result of sexist discrimination. Who says? The US Labor Department, that’s who.

Here are the details.

Excerpt:

Economists who have studied the pay gap have observed that numerous factors other than discrimination contribute to the wage gap, such as hours worked, experience, and education. For example, Professor June O’Neil has written extensively about how time out of the workforce, or years spent working part-time, can reduce future pay. Likewise, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, in her book Women’s Figures, has written about the decisions that women are more likely to make to choose flexibility, a friendly workplace environment, and other nonmonetary factors as compared to men.

Recognizing the importance of unbiased research on the pay gap, the Labor Department recently contracted with CONSAD Research Corporation for a review of more than 50 existing studies as well as a new economic and statistical analysis of the pay gap. CONSAD’s Report, which was finalized on January 12, 2009, found that the vast majority of the pay gap is due to several identifiable factors and that the remainder may be due to other specific factors they were not able to measure.

CONSAD found that controlling for career interruption and other factors reduced the pay gap from about 20 percent to about 5 percent. Data limitations prevented it from considering many other factors. For example, the data did not permit an examination of total compensation, which would examine health insurance and other benefits, and instead focused solely on wages paid. The data were also limited with respect to work experience, job tenure, and other factors.

The Labor Department’s conclusion was that the gender pay gap was the result of a multitude of factors and that the “raw wage gap should not be used as the basis for [legislative] correction. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”

It turns out that the pay gap, which was always entirely due to lifestyle choices, is now working against men. Here is Carrie Lukas  again, writing in National Review this time, explaining the latest research on the pay gap.

She cites the radically left-wing Time magazine:

…according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

It would have been nice if Romney could have explained all of this during the debate, but there are some things that are dangerous to explain when you are running for President.

Filed under: News, Barack Obama, Benefits, Children, Degree, Discrimination, Earner, Economics, Employment, Equal Pay, Equality, Equity Feminism, Feminism, Fields, Gender, Gender Feminism, Government, Husband, Hypocrisy, Job, Jobs, Labor, Labor Force, Libertarian, Liberty, Mancession, Marriage, Men, Occupation, Pay Equality, Pay Equity, Pay Gap, Policy, Recession, Salary, Sector, Sexism, Sexist, Unemployment, Wage Gap, Wages, Wife, Women, Years

Stuart Schneiderman: what do radical feminists want women to want?

Stuart Schneiderman on the message sent to young women by radical third-wave feminists.

Excerpt:

If you yourself are wondering what women want, feminist author Hanna Rosin has the answer: women want to hook up.

Rosin believes that hookups advance the cause of feminism. Women who hook up are more likely to be immune to the siren song of husband, home and family.

If we ask what feminists want women to want, the answer is clear: feminists want women to repress their feminine mystique, the better to be good feminists.

They do not just want women to adhere to feminist ideology, but they want women to live their lives as feminists want them to live their lives.

Women’s liberation seems merely to be a way for feminists to run women’s lives. Having thrown off the shackles of the feminine mystique women are supposed to do what their feminist masters tell them to do.

Young women are more willing to submit to random sexual encounters with men they barely know because feminism told them to do so.

If these women are exposing themselves to repeated sexual traumas, then clearly the hookup culture is throwing women off of the family track and putting them squarely on the career track.

Rosin states it clearly:

To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

Rosin would have been more accurate if she said that it is feminists like her who are perpetuating this culture.

By warning women against serious suitors feminism is telling them to choose between hooking up or dating bad boys who will never cut it as husband material.

Like most of the Pied Pipers of feminism Rosin sees a “promising future” only in career. She is not against eventual marriage but she is fantasizing when she claims that women who have spent their twenties in a relationship daze will wake up one day and jump right into a wonderful relationship with a wonderful man.

In so saying, she is lying to young women.

If a woman has developed the skills necessary to navigate the hook up culture she will not be developing the skills necessary to conduct a relationship, no less a marriage. Better yet, if she had learned that suitable suitors are toxic she will not suddenly decide that she wants one of them to ravish her.

The psychic malformation she has suffered by living the feminist nightmare will preclude that kind of happy ending.

Read the second half of the post to see how young women who are taking this advice feel about it. They are doing it, but is it satisfying them?

Here is an article written by an academic feminist in the New York Times. (H/T Stuart Schneiderman)

Stuart exegetes the article:

In Bauer’s words: “If there’s anything that feminism has bequeathed to young women of means, it’s that power is their birthright. Visit an American college campus on a Monday morning and you’ll find any number of amazingly ambitious and talented young women wielding their brain power, determined not to let anything– including a relationship with some needy, dependent man– get in their way. Come back on party night, and you’ll find many of these same girls… wielding their sexual power, dressed as provocatively as they dare, matching guys drink for drink– and then hook up for hook up.”

Given the relatively lesser body mass of women compared with that of men, matching men drink for drink is a fool’s errand. Anyone who glorifies such behavior has completely lost touch with reality.

And why should Bauer be in awe of the fact that these girls can match men, hook up for hook up? If these women are so desirous of becoming unique individual self-creations, why should they be trying to emulate male behavior?

And let’s not overlook the piece of undisguised contempt for “some needy, dependent man” with whom these women might have relationships. The latest wave of feminism prefers hooking up to relationships.

According to Bauer, the party ends with said liberated empowered inebriated woman down on her knees. As Bauer so nicely expresses it: “When they’re on their knees in front of a worked-up guy they just met at a party, they genuinely feel powerful– sadistic even.”

Sometimes we get commenters who question whether feminism has anything to do with the behavior of women that we see today in college campuses. And to find out the truth, you have to read the elite feminists at the modern universities who have been grading the papers of women for the last 40 years. Was this alcohol-drenched hook-up culture unexpected by these elite academic feminists? On the contrary. It was their goal.

Feminists wanted to abolish the distinctions between men and women. They decided to achieve this by encouraging women to act like men. And the men they chose to emulate were alpha-male bad boys, since these are the men that women who don’t like marriage seem to really admire. Academic feminists like Bauer believe that women are happier now than they ever have been, with all this hooking up and being raised without fathers. They think they’ve won.

I think that women should go to college and work a couple of years before marrying and having children. I think that mothers should stay home with children younger than 6, at least, and maybe even stay home until the children are working. I am curious to know if any of my female readers were ever told by older women not to focus on finding a man in their 20s. Are young women really being told by older women to play the field and to have a good time and to not marry too soon? Because that’s bad advice. Men are most interested in marriage in their 20s once they get a marketable degree and a good-paying job that they’ve been in a few years straight.

Filed under: News, Betty Friedan, Blaming Men, Catherine MacKinnon, Chastity, Courtship, Domestic Violence, Equity Feminism, Father, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Gender Feminism, Housework, Ideology, Kate Millett, Male Bashing, Marriage, Misandry, Modesty, Promiscuity, Sex Differences, Sex Roles, Single-Motherhood

Carrie Lukas does the math on the male-female pay gap

Carrie Lukas

A popular article by Carrie Lukas, writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

[...]The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

My favorite book on feminism, economics and marriage is Carrie Lukas’ “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism“. If you don’t have the book, then please go out and buy one for you, and one for a young, unmarried woman in your life. Books like this one are for women who are serious about making their marriages last. And men can read them, too – so that we’ll know what to look for in women. There is nothing more attractive to a marriage-minded man than a fiscally conservative woman.

Here’s an interview of Carrie Lukas conducted by famous men’s rights activist Bernard Chapin. The next time you see men reading the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, take a closer look. On the inside of that magazine we are often concealing a copy of Carrie Lukas’ book. When Carrie Lukas talks about economics and policy, men think about marriage.

Filed under: Commentary, Benefits, Children, Degree, Discrimination, Earner, Economics, Employment, Equality, Equity Feminism, Feminism, Fields, Gender Feminism, Government, Husband, Job, Jobs, Labor, Labor Force, Libertarian, Liberty, Mancession, Marriage, Men, Occupation, Pay Gap, Policy, Recession, Salary, Sector, Unemployment, Wage Gap, Wages, Wife, Women, Years

What is the real issue in the push for legalized abortion?

I think the main cause of the desire for legalized abortion, is that women and men do not want to take responsibility for their actions.

The sexual act always has a chance of making a baby. If people who are having sex are not ready to take care of a baby, without the government’s help, then they should not have sex. We should not take chances with other people’s lives just so we can do risky things that make us feel good. The needs of grown-ups to feel good does not trump the right to life of another (unborn) human being. We have to sometimes give up things that make us feel good in order to avoid harming others.

I think the reason why people push abortion is because they want to believe that pre-marital recreational sex is normal. The people who push these policies are often those who had sex themselves before they were married, perhaps because it was fun (men) or perhaps because they wanted attention from the opposite sex (women). They wanted the recreational sex to feel good, but didn’t want to be saddled with the consequences of their desire for happiness.

I think the solution is to replace recreational pre-marital sex with chastity, courting and marriage. Men need to learn to control their desires, and make good decisions to prepare for being a husband and father, and get married, before they have sex. Women need to learn to do without male attention, to prepare themselves for having a husband and children, and to have sex only after they are married. Pre-marital sex isn’t an appropriate way for a woman to get attention from a man. There are other ways. And we should be training men to respond to those other ways. We should also be encouraging fathers to stay married and model love for their children by loving their wives.

We should not have any laws or policies that discourage men from preparing for their role of protector/provider/moral-and-spiritual-leader in a marriage. Sex education should not be subsidized or promoted by government because it makes children learn about sex outside of the context of marriage. And we should likewise not have any laws or policies that discourage women from preparing for marriage, by making husbands seem unnecessary to having and raising children. For example, we should end welfare payments for single mothers to make it clear that men are needed to provide for children, and that men should be selected by women for that role.

Children need a stable relationship with their married biological mother and father. So government has to promote marriage. Government may have to give up promoting third-wave feminism so that we can strengthen marriage, since third-wave feminism is opposed to marriage. We may need to to roll-back to first-wave (equal opportunity) feminism and give up the misguided quest to equate men with women in every area of life.

And we shouldn’t be pushing sex education as a way of removing the moral prohibitions on pre-marital sex. Those prohibitions were there for a reason and people who have pre-marital sex SHOULD feel bad. The solution is NOT to tell everyone that there is nothing wrong with it just because the people who do it want to feel better about themselves by making everyone agree with them. I think the left uses the public schools to beat down moral standards so that they will feel better about their own immorality. But immorality is harmful – and it’s better for young people to abide by traditional moral rules and avoid harming themselves and others than for grown-ups to avoid feeling bad for breaking those rules. Sorry grown-ups, but maybe it feels bad because it is bad – and stop trying to tell everyone that what you did was fine. It wasn’t fine. It was wrong.

Related posts

• Does being a virgin before marriage affect marital stability?
• How to communicate requirements to a Christian woman during courtship
• How feminism made women unsuitable for marriage and parenting
• Why men should refuse a woman’s offer of casual sex
• How Christian women can make Christian men marry without using sex appeal
• John Piper’s questions to ask before you get married
• Does a man’s decision to marry negatively impact his service to God?
• The rules for friendship and courtship between Christians
• What Christian men want from Christian women… in paintings!
• Why Christian men should be chaste
• Should Christians marry non-Christians?

Filed under: Commentary, Abortion, Chaste, Chastity, Children, Christian, Christianity, Courting, Courtship, Dating, Family, Father, Fatherless, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Gender, Gender Feminism, Husband, Marriage, Parenting, Personal Responsibility, Relationships, Sex, Sex Education, Wife