The topic was a Women's Studies professor who gave extra credit to students who wore their body hair in a non-gender-normal way and wrote about their experience. Last line of
the post:
Maybe you think body hair is too trivial of a topic to study at the college level, but I believe there is no more profound subject in human civilization than the female body. It is the central focus.
At the end of a long chain of comments, I'm seeing sojerofgod, who says:
Ann is right and all the rest of you bozos are wrong.
Ok, just kidding about the bozo part.
The truth everyone seems to be missing is that for the last 99.999% of the history of Man, women have been the focus of civilization for a very simple reason: No women = No future.
Today we take life for granted. Sure people die, and we all do the whistling past the graveyard thing when we talk about our own eventual demise. When children are born we have an expectation that they will grow to adulthood and lead long, successful lives. An illusion common here in the West (first world) by the way. When a person dies in the US they usually have the social grace to do so without an audience.
Death privately done in their bed or a hospital room. Then they are whisked away by EMTs or undertakers not to be seen again until they are painted and prepped for burial. Nice and sanitary. We don't cheat death, we shutter it. Deny it. Compartmentalize it.
The rest of the world (the real world?) sees a very different reality. People die. A lot.
Right in front of you.
For a rural African for example, odds of reaching adulthood can be as low as 2 in 10. You see your brothers and sisters die. you see adults die from causes as great as a scratch from a thorn bush. You could really call the adults who are still alive the survivors, but that would be a premature thing;
They may very well be gone tomorrow.
In this environment being a female, and the value of women takes on an entirely different meaning. Why are girls married off at young ages? Death is daily walking at your elbow. No time to waste getting on with securing the next generation. From time immemorial tribes, groups, nations, all have warred with one another. Read your bible. A great resource into human nature. War parties attack their neighbors, carry off whatever they can grab but most especially their women. I read some books about the Yanonamu (sp?) tribes in South America. Always raiding each other, stealing women.
Yeah! some of you will say, they just wanna rape them! You know evil men who only think with their second head! True perhaps, in a way. According to what I read, each member of the party gets to have sex with the captives on the way home from the raid. Then the women are married off to men of the tribe and live as equals to the women born there. I know that women is such societies are often abused and disenfranchised. Being an equal among what we would consider slaves may not sound like much. Life, and reality don't really give a damn what you think though. It is the reality of life for most of the planet. Remember Sacajawea? Lead Lewis and Clark to the Great divide? Stolen from her tribe as a young girl and traded for goods to a French fur trapper. Married off to him and carried an infant while pregnant halfway across the Great Plains. Talk about GRRRL Power!
That is not the focus of my discussion though. The fact that Women=Future can't be ignored. Here behind the Wall we have a civilization where women have the freedom to pursue lives separated from necessity. Delaying childbirth until their thirties, or not at all. Becoming professionals, or artists. Life is good. Sadly it seems almost no one appreciates how good we have it now and are busy squandering this inheritance. Like in this "class." I do hope that G-d will continue to bless America, fools that we are. And I pray we will come to our senses before this ugly bit of reality rears it's head here.
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24 comments:
To borrow Mark Steyn's tag line - Demography is Destiny - though I'm not sure he originated it and I'm too lazy to even Google it this Saturday morning. Japan better amend their Constitution and militarized up and go score some chicks somewhere. Their reproductive demographics are down the tubes... average age in what, 47-ish? Probably piss off the Koreans and South east Asia in the process, memories being what they are...
In General, Americans take "Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness" for granted. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it gives us a more optimistic outlook on life. I hope everyone had a good and safe Independence Day.
I think sojerofgod has a good point. If we assume our society will continue for a couple of hundred more years it will be done on the backs of (in the bellies of) those sometimes contemptuously dismissed as breeders. Maybe we can get away with less than the magic 2.1 number , but to do so we have to acknowledge that Dvision and make life style adjustments. Otherwise it will all collapse. And not graceful degradation.
Regards &mdash Cliff
It's the same reason that dogs value bitches when they're in heat.
They're concerned about the future.
we have a civilization where women have the freedom to pursue lives separated from necessity. Delaying childbirth until their thirties, or not at all. Becoming professionals, or artists. Life is good.
Giving women this kind of freedom means the eventual end of the civilization, because women raised with this kind of mindset do not reproduce at a level needed to maintain the population.
Here is a post (The Cause of the Population Decline) that makes a very interesting case that there is a critical age (around 12) when what girls are taught has a huge influence on how many children they have.
Thoughtful piece - thank you. The point about modern world folks not experiencing death in the same way as our ancestors or developing world people today is interesting. Earlier this week on Ann's friend Glen's blog there was a discussion of a feminist article on why mothers are deceased in so many children's stories. You can guess what the feminist explanation was, but missing was the realization that modern stories are based on older stories written at a time when parents often died. Cinderella's fate (mom died, dad remarried, dad died) seems incredibly unlucky to us - but probably was not that uncommon a few centuries back.
Excellent commentary. Very well done.
Now, about that Hobby Lobby case . . . .
"The rest of the world (the real world?) sees a very different reality. People die. A lot."
You're describing my life - as an American - yet talking about other places. I saw my first dead body by the age of 5 and saw a man lose his head when I was 10. My best friend's father was shot in front of me at 13.
Welcome to "the real world".
Whites are so disconnected from the reality of life in THIS COUNTRY - the one they've forced the rest of us to endure - their ignorance is frightening,...
Ann said: " I do hope that G-d will continue to bless America, fools that we are. And I pray we will come to our senses before this ugly bit of reality rears it's head here."
Ann, you are exactly right, God has blessed America. God has blessed other countries and cultures as well. And he has taken that blessing away. You can read about it throughout scripture.
There is no mystery has to why the blessing has been removed from countries/cultures. It's called disobeying God's tenants. AKA sin. There is no hiding the fact the America is on the wrong path. Talked to any Moabites lately? Their specialty was sacrificing their young children. See any parallels to America?
"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness."
America is toast unless we turn from our evil ways.
Young American women do include a large proportion of fools that do not understand how good they have it. I have three daughters and two get it pretty well. One, I'm not sure about but she has a good life even if she thinks she is oppressed.
Cortes' translator, Marina, is despised by the Mexicans. It is felt that she betrayed her own people. Marina was sold into slavery by her mother so that the family inheritance would not have to be divided between Marina and her brother. Marina had no reason to feel indebted to Aztec society......Feminists seem far more likely to aim their fire at western bourgeoise societies than other societies, both primitive and advanced, that are far more brutish in their treatment of women.
Good for Sojerofgod for his/her thoughtful comment. Speaking to his comment about women being part of the loot when the aggressors/invaders win, there are multiple instances of that in Indian history. If you have heard of the old practice (now outlawed) called Sati, that was about women throwing themselves in their husbands funeral pyre when the men got killed in the battle. This started as a rebellion by the wives/women of not giving themselves up to the invaders, (believed to have been started by a queen called Padmavati, there is an opera by that name by Albert Roussel). But of course, like much else, it morphed into a grotesque ritual where the widow was expected to kill herself even when there were no aggressors/invaders which then had to be forcibly outlawed.
rhhardin,
"It's the same reason that dogs value bitches when they're in heat.
They're concerned about the future."
I have looked at a girl's ass and seen my future but, I don't think that's what Ann had in mind,...
Here is a post (The cause of population decline) that makes a very interesting case that there is a critical age (around 12) when what girls are taught has a huge influence on how many children they have.
Interesting article. One of the points, maybe inelegantly made, is that 1st World Women, and esp. here in the U.S., squander their reproductive years working on their careers, and having sex with alpha (or fake alpha) males, and then wake up in their 30s to discover that they can no longer attract the type of males that they would want to marry. And that is when they turn into cat ladies (I thought observation to be an interesting touch).
And, the article also makes the observation that the more casual sex a woman has with the greater number of men, the lower her value as a marriage partner. Of course, that shouldn't be true, but for most guys, it really is. And, that, I suspect, is because the greater the number of sex partners a woman has had, the more likely her husband is to be a cuckold - which means that he is more likely to end up raising children fathered by another man. I would suggest that this is also why virginity in women is still somewhat desired by men, and why men tend to have had more sex partners than their female partners. And, I would suggest that it is something that has been going on long enough that it is wired in our psyches.
The noble native Americans tribes had a real appreciation for the Strong tribes surviving while the others go out of business.
Surviving meant how many warrior age braves were ready to raid the other tribes preemptively and steal their women and children first for Amnesty membership in the tribe.
Stealing European settler's women and their children required killing off all off the men so no rescue searchers would come and track them down.
And then for a hundred years the French fur trappers were able to trade arms to the Hurons et al. for use against the European settlers. This savagery on William Penn's western border caused Quaker Penn to bring in families of known trouble makers from Northern Ireland's Scottish colony which suddenly found themselves oppressed by the Anglican Church establishment. They had been settled in the Northern Irish counties to deny that strategic area of Ireland to Catholics and French and be useful fighters to defeat the invasion from the French, Catholic, and Jacobin Axis. They defeated that Axis, and after the Glorious revolution became seen as unwanted occupants now that the the British Monarchy who wanted the credit for victory and to divide the spoils of war in Ireland among their Aristocracy.
Fortunately Penn imported them to settle his western border areas as fighter that would be a buffer to the savage Huron raids since Quakers never fought back.
These Scots-Irish families starting out from western Pennsylvania ( Pittsburg area) just took over the unoccupied border lands, and instead of savages raiding their women and children, the savages found themselves so-called victims begging Penn and the British to remove them back over the mountains.
From western Pennsylvania many Scots-Irish families migrated south and southwest ignoring authority except their own fighting leaders, their own rifles, and their own votes at settlement Presbyterian/Baptist congregational meetings.
In October 1780 these "trouble makers" to British Rule decided the Revolution using a typical Scots-Irish peremptory attack on a hated British Army of invading murderers.
The British Commander had sent them a threat to kill the men and take their women and children for any refusal of the king's Rule in America. The Eastern Tennessee "over mountain men" assembled and chose leaders who quickly hunted down the British commander and his Army and gave him their reply at the battle of King's Mountain.
And by 1828 they had won the US Presidency under a fighting leader named Andy Jackson.
So women bearing and raising babies under protection from men is the key to our survival...especially if they are Scots-Irish babies.
Ironically the savage native American tribe losers, who are still not reproducing fast enough and cannot get a supply of stolen women and children have their feelings hurt by words. So they are wailing to academic Quakers among us to be offended the victims because we once beat them for our own lives and to keep our women and children from rapine by the noble savages.
The truth everyone seems to be missing
One of my pet peeves--commenter pretending he's so original by simply ignoring all the many people who said something similar, and the many more people who may have, if they bothered to address that facet of the conversation.
It's a sentence that could be edited out every time and the comment would be improved by a reduction in false self-congratulation.
"Whites are so disconnected from the reality of life in THIS COUNTRY - the one they've forced the rest of us to endure - their ignorance is frightening"
Crack, Most of Americans, white, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, some black and Mexican built their reality, and it's very comfortable. You need to learn from us, not hate your betters.
In this environment being a female, and the value of women takes on an entirely different meaning. Why are girls married off at young ages? Death is daily walking at your elbow. No time to waste getting on with securing the next generation.
************
This explains very clearly what I consider to be THE one major difference between hetero and same sex marriages: only hetero marriages/unions represent laughing in the face of death. In the midst of all the disease and death, two nubile young things are going to hook up and make more people - thus the reason for a wedding celebration: the continuing survival of our species.
This is also why I am such a "wedding curmudgeon". These days, most wedding to-dos are between middle class professionals with little interest in reproducing, have already reproduced, or are past the age of reproduction. They are also much older than centuries ago, so weddings no longer symbolize two people about to take a huge step towards adulthood, and their lives will be very different after that day. Far from it - the only difference after the wedding is a pile of gifts/money and thank you cards to be processed.
A modern wedding is merely to stroke the ego of the bride by letting her be "princess for a day", and is essentially a fundraiser for people already established in their careers. "If we spend this $$$ on our wedding, invite ### number of people, each bringing a gift costing $$$, then we make $$$ overall."
If you don't believe me, then you must be a man. If you are female, any female getting married assumes you are "one of them" and are thus interested in every detail of their upcoming event. Even if you don't give a shit and roll your eyes....she...just...keeps...jabbering...seatingarragementsflowerscake....
Probably racist of me to ask but:
Crack Emcee said:
You're describing my life - as an American - yet talking about other places. I saw my first dead body by the age of 5 and saw a man lose his head when I was 10. My best friend's father was shot in front of me at 13.
I am guessing these were all black people, right? How many of them were killed by other black people? All, maybe?
That doesn't make it any less, or more, horrible. No kid should grow up like that. I am sorry you had to. If you want to talk about how reparations might stop this kind of behavior I think that would be a very useful conversation.
You have not wanted to in the past but perhaps today is a new day.
It ain't white people's fault that blacks kill other blacks in such astounding numbers. It ain't even America's fault since they have been killing (and enslaving) each other in astounding numbers for more than a millenia before the US even existed.
John Henry
Well, well. I was hoping to spur a little discussion. Loads of things to address here I suppose.
Nah. Nothing doing.
Peter Capstick once wrote (and I paraphrase poorly)
"The only reason you are sitting here reading this is because everyone of your ancestors, Every One! managed to reproduce before dying in a line that stretches unimaginably far back to creation."
In many cases the time between one event and the other was quite small.
Americans haven't yet reached the sorry state that Europeans have, being unable to produce enough children to support their parents in old age, but we are on the way there. Do you suppose that government-paid birth control and abortion on demand (soon also to be paid for by the government?) will hasten the day?
In Europe, they've imported third-world workers, many of them Muslim, and do not appear to have had much success (have they even tried?) in assimilating them into European culture. Are the Muslim suburbs in France, with their periodic riots, what the future holds for us?
My impression from the little slice of the US that I live in is that families are tending to have three children, i.e., more than the replacement rate. That's good news, to the extent that it's true. But my impression also is that the US has ceased to be good at assimilating immigrants into US culture. I'd feel a lot more optimistic about the future if we were really serious about encouraging immigrants (many of my ancestors were 19th century immigrants from Germany and Ireland) to become Americans.
"The truth everyone seems to be missing is that for the last 99.999% of the history of Man, women have been the focus of civilization for a very simple reason: No women = No future."
That is a simple-minded comment. One could just as easily argue that without a man to fertilize the egg there is no future either. We need both men and women to have a future.
Even if cloning of humans is perfected and women don't need sperm anymore, they will still need men to make civilization go. Or as Camille Paglia once famously said, if civilization were left in the hands of women we'd all still be "living in grass huts."
We need both men and women to have a future.
Hence a special social recognition of, and legal protections for, the male-female relationship. Once known as marriage.
Steal the name, the reality remains the same.
"It ain't white people's fault that blacks kill other blacks in such astounding numbers."
Oh, don't you understand? It's ONLY white people's fault. It is time we recognized that we have been denying Crack Emcee's people their full humanity by thinking they're adults responsible for their own actions. They will only truly be free when we recognize that they are our children.
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