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Friday 4 March 2016

OVERSELLING THE PATRIARCHY?


The origin of Patriarchy is the simple fact that men are stronger and more skilled at combat than women. In a strong and civilized state, physical strength, while still nice, is far less essential to survival. So, as civilization has advanced, and the rationale for Patriarchy has receded, ad hoc virtues were thought up to justify the status quo.

A portion of the Alt Right continues to believe in these ad hoc virtues. And many of these ad hoc virtues are true, just not true enough to justify Patriarchy. Let us look at few examples:

Women are so much less rational than men that, for the good of society, they should be denied all political and economic power.

Don’t be such a drama queen! I agree that, on average, men have slightly more logical minds than women. Researchers are divided on the existence of gender differences in intelligence, but even those who support the notion that men are smarter find that the gap is no more than 5 IQ points.

SAT scores also suggest a small intellectual gap. Reading scores for makes and females are virtually identical. In math, however, boys have a consistent, but small, edge over girls. This gender-gap in math scores is nowhere near as large as the race-gap, and the standard deviation gap is also way smaller. Asian girls score higher than any group of boys, except Asian boys, and black boys score lower than any group of girls, except black girls. Girls do mature faster than boys, but by the time students take the SAT (age 16-17), that advantage has mostly disappeared. And whatever maturity advantage remains is surely swamped by the fact that SAT participation is much higher among girls.

Girls actually get better grades in school than boys, and women graduate from college at higher rates than men.

The Patriarchic claim, in other words, is true, but not true enough. Next:

They’re still less intelligent, they’re just more diligent.

Isn’t it a good thing for people in positions of power and responsibility to be diligent? So, they’re not as bold and creative as men; don’t read the books they write, read mine.

Anyway, the mean score does not tell the whole story because the IQ bell-curve for men is much flatter than it is for women.

So what? Is the plan to confine all social and political power to the smartest 1%? Then why discriminate based on sex? Why not just ask prospective voters to take an IQ test or solve a Sudoku puzzle?

It is true that men are over-represented at both the high- and low-ends of cognitive ability, but again, the difference is nothing compared to the racial gap. In 1932, Scotland tested the the IQs of (basically) every child born in 1921. Boys were 57.7% and girls 42.3% of those at the highest end (IQ of 140 or above). So again, true, but not true enough.

Women are more small-minded, focused on their immediate social network. They don’t pay as much attention to politics, or the world of ideas in general.

 I know.

Therefore, they should not be allowed to vote or hold positions of power. Their abstract reasoning abilities may not that much worse than men’s, but the problem is compounded because they are also less interested in abstract reasoning. They make decisions emotionally.

That is quite a leap. The existence of Angela Merkel, and the fact that women in the US are 5% or so more religious than men, and 5% or so more likely to vote Democratic (which, by the way, is skewed by the black vote because black women vote far more than black men) is not sufficient evidence to say that women are so irrationally emotional that they should all be disenfranchised.

The fundamental difference between the sexes is that women are just more normal human creatures. While blacks and whites, from the 1st percentile to the 99th, are just on completely different intellectual curves, women simply hew closer to the average than men. And I think this applies to much more than just intelligence. Women are less likely to be narcissistic, sociopathic, creative, bold, etc.

So once again, true, but not true enough.

Not evidence of in-group betrayal.
Some Patriarchic ideas are unequivocally false, such as the claim that women are more likely to betray the in-group. Yes, women of conquered lands have often had sex with the conquering men. Of course they do. The conquering armies are made-up of men, and speaking in generalities, these conquerors are not much interested in working-off their lusts on the local male population. Men complaining about this has about as much validity as if women from the conquering nation complained that their men were off having sex with the women of the conquered nation. This is a ridiculously egocentric complaint.

If racial dating preferences are any indication (and clearly they are), women actually substantially more loyal to the in-group than are men (white women especially, just saying). Women are more particular about whom they date than are men, as you would expect—the number of potential offspring a woman can produce in a lifetime is less than what a man can produce in a busy week. Women’s greater discrimination though is not socially-destabilizing because in practice all it means is that they are more anxious to get married.

Feminism has led to an unhappy and dying society, as people get married later in life and have less children.

I have no interest in defending feminism, but honestly, its affect in this areas is marginal. People have less kids now, mainly, because they do not need as many. The average lifespan of Medieval man was so much shorter than today, not because people aged twice as fast, but, in large part, because half of all children died within a few years of their birth. We do not have to worry about that anymore. If you have two children, the odds are pretty high that both make it safely into adulthood. This same general consideration impacts the age at which people get married.

Also, I think the Baby-Boomers and Greatest Generation have distorted our perspective on what is a normal marrying age. Yes, Americans now get married at a later age than ever before, but mid-twentieth century Americans got married at the youngest ages on record. For example, the average age at first marriage for Americans in 2015 was 29.2 for men and 27.1 for women. In Britain between 1550 and 1849, the averages fluctuated between 26.5 and 28.2 for men and 24.3 and 27 for women.

I know this later-in-life marriage pattern (especially women marrying at a later age) is fairly unique to Anglo-Saxons, and most other peoples have historically done things differently, but none of those other peoples have not spent the last several hundred years being the most powerful and accomplished group in human history. So there is that to consider.

Fine, they can have the same political rights I guess (it’s not like we should even have voting anyway), but what’s with this workplace equality bullshit; they should be taking care of the household, not frittering themselves away at some pointless job while their biological clocks tick towards midnight. As you said, they’re average creatures, the workforce does not need their talents.

This is a reasonable opinion, and I have some sympathy for it—I myself was raised in household with a stay-at-home mom. Generally speaking, women are (comparatively) more suited for the nurturing/nesting role, but how are we supposed to act on this belief? Foster a culture which encourages more women to follow their natural impulse, assuming their financial situation allows it? Sure, that’s fine with me.

Likewise, it is natural and right that physically-demanding work and abstract fields of study should be predominantly male, and we should stand firm on this point. If that sounds more like conservatism than radical traditionalism, then so be it. In this case, the conservative position has the virtue of being true.

Ryan Andrews is the author of The Birth of Prudence.


1 comment:

  1. Averages don't matter. The average person is a tool who has no consequence or value. The more important factor is that the entire upper spectrum of IQ and socially aggressive traits is dominated by men. Forget the masses, who basically shouldn't exist as far as I am concerned and have no justification except as cattle for better people, and look at the fact that basically everything interesting and productive was invented by men. Your average man is a conformist, shallow douche and the average woman is slightly more conformist and not as dumb. But among the elite of both sexes women are markedly inferior. The ends of the bell curve are sharper than the middle.
    I don't care about these, LARPing versions of patriarchy that will never happen, but you seem to have misunderstood the relevance of both IQ and other psychological traits. The masses are practically interchangeable NPCs, in there case it hardly matters if they are men, women or donkeys.

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