Category Archives: Gender

UPDATED (3/6/019): Republican Women Over 65 Are The Most Anti-#MeToo Group. SMART.

Conservatism, Democrats, Feminism, Gender, Republicans, Sex

Believe it or not, liberal Republican women berate their older, #MeToo skeptical sisters. Beware Republican Women for Progress, especially. Just as Democrats do, these prog Republican fems patronize older Republican ladies, depicting them as afraid to even talk to progressive GOPers like themselves. Republican Women for Progress also claim older ladies who vote Republican are afraid to break free, instead, letting “their (Republican-voting) husbands fill in their ballots.” Needless to say, there is little daylight between prog Republicans and Democrats.

#METOO And Conservatism
The Economist

NO GROUP HAS swung against #MeToo more than older women who voted for Donald Trump. They have gone from barely worrying about false accusations of sexual assault, with only 8% agreeing in November 2017 that these were worse than unreported assaults, to 42% saying so, according to two polls conducted for The Economist by YouGov, a pollster. They are now the most likely group to agree that a man who harassed a woman 20 years ago should keep his job, and that a woman who complains about harassment causes more problems than she solves.

Two things stand out. First, even though Americans on average, and Republicans in particular, have become more negative about #MeToo over the past year, the change among this particular group is spectacular (chart). Second, a generational gap now yawns between Republican women who are over 65 and those under 30, the cohort least hostile to #MeToo within the Republican Party.
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One obvious difference between the two groups is that many of the over-65s have grown-up sons. In 2018 some of them fell off their pedestals as hundreds of men were publicly named and shamed over sexual misconduct allegations. Many more feared that “some lady” from the past could, with one accusation, destroy them and their family. This lady became personified in Christine Blasey Ford, when in September 2018 she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, threatening to derail his nomination to the Supreme Court. All this helped fuel a backlash against #MeToo, and not just among men. Many Twitter threads on #HimToo, the hashtag about false accusations, were posted by worried mothers.

“We saw the split among Republican women widen around the Kavanaugh hearings. A lot of the rhetoric illustrated the generational gap,” remembers Jennifer Pierotti Lim, from Republican Women for Progress, a campaign group. “There’s a feeling amongst that generation that a little light sexual assault is no big deal. For women of our generation that’s hard to understand.”

Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative advocacy group, recognises what the movement has done in encouraging people to speak out against prominent men who “people have known were problems”, but wonders whether it has gone too far. “I don’t think the mantra ‘believe all women’ is sufficient,” she says. “Men need to be able to make mistakes, and have conversations with women and not be walking on eggshells.”

Yet the biggest split on #MeToo, as with any question pollsters ask about gender is not between genders or generations but between political affiliations, says Juliana Horowitz from the Pew Research Centre. Democrats have barely changed their views on #MeToo over the past year, even as Republicans have grown more sceptical. No split separates the generation of Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren from younger female Democrats. In fact boomer Clinton-voting women have increased their support for #MeToo over the past year.

The partisan gender gap has already widened. In 2016 Hillary Clinton won 54% of women voters; in the 2018 mid-terms 59% of women voted for Democrats. Republicans appear unconcerned: a recent poll found that 71% of likely primary voters expressed no concern that only 13 of the party’s 200 House members are women (the lowest number in 25 years) and 60% said nothing had to be done to recruit more female candidates.

One explanation of this partisan gap is that it reflects a difference of opinion over what true feminism is. Some conservative women resist what they see as special treatment for women as vaguely patronising. There is another explanation, too. Ms Pierotti Lim of Republican Women for Progress remembers campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016 and being astonished by the number of older women who were afraid to even talk to her and who let their (Republican-voting) husbands fill in their ballots.

UPDATE (3/6/019): R. Kelly.

#RKelly: Looks like another man's being destroyed by American Women Gone Wild. Remember the thing called "evidence"? You need it to convict in a First- World country. Rumor, "she said" is NOT evidence. https://t.co/IHl7ox4bvP #MeToo

— Ilana Mercer (@IlanaMercer) March 6, 2019

NEW COLUMN: Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry

Canada, Crime, Feminism, Gender, Pseudoscience, Sex

NEW COLUMN IS “Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry.” It’s now on WND.Com and The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

Speaking recently to Fox News’ Arthel Neville, Andrew Napolitano, also of Fox News, repeated old feminist canards about sexual assault against women being an under-reported, ever-present crime in American society.

The violence-against-women industry in North America—you know, the one-in-four-women-are-assaulted rot—is propped up by the sub-science or pseudoscience of violence-against-women statistics.

In particular, violence-against-women surveys are based on inflated numbers nobody questions; numbers the advocates bandy about and the politicians rely on when drafting policy and plumping for resources.

I’m thinking of the original 1993 StatsCan Violence Against Women survey, and its preposterous statistical offshoots, which, in turn, were spinoffs of the American violence-against-women statistical sisterhood. Canada follows America’s lead.

Anyone who’s studied research methodology at a good school (check) knows that research is shaped by the researcher’s hypothesis. Duly, the corpus of violence-against-women statistics reflects an exclusive ideological focus on female victimization. It thus consists of single sex surveys—never two sex surveys—with no input from men, to the exclusion of violence females incur from other females, or acts of violence women commit against the man in the relationship.

Developed at the height of the “war against women” moral panic, these foundational questionnaires are the product of a collaboration with advocacy groups and feminist stakeholders, and are thus fraught with problems of unrepresentative samples, lack of corroboration, a reliance on anecdotes, a use of over-inclusive survey questions and, to charitably understate the problem, the broadest definition of assault.

There’s a lot that goes into skewing data.

The “statistical myths” that pervade the rape-is-rampant claims, states libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy, start with “deeply biased researchers,” who proceed invariably from a “false premise or assumption,” who then use biased and small samples whose selection, in turn, is further slanted by paying participants.

Surveys are, of course, inherently dodgy. The general pitfalls of survey methodology, such as asking leading questions, are legion. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry.” It’s now on WND.Com and The Unz Review.

‘Vocal Fry’ and ‘Uptalk’: On The North American Woman’s Ghastly, Gravely Voice

Aesthetics, Comedy & Humor, Feminism, Gender

Talking in “staccato tart tones” is how I’ve always described the American Woman’s gravelly voice. These days, it’s improper to suggest that the sound emitted from the gobs of tele-ditzes, and lots of other women, is just vile.

So the famous Economist column, “Johnson,” is explaining the politically proper terms for this audial assault. Incidentally. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the ultra-conservative polymath after whom this liberal column is named, would have taken his cane to any woman who addressed him in such “staccato tart tones.”

Two vocal features are associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry—often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity—happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality (a bit like something frying in a pan).
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From these descriptions, an alien observer would be bemused to learn that these harmless phenomena drive some people to scorn, or even anger. But they do. When Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her, some viewers were so infuriated by her speaking style that they denounced it on Twitter: “Christine Blasey Ford’s little girl voice…vocal fry, and uptalk worse than clubbed toenails down a chalkboard.” …

… And men fry all the time, too. Critics of the fry-panic have discovered it in the back catalogues of George W. Bush, Kurt Cobain (who was the lead singer for Nirvana, a grunge-rock band), and Ira Glass (an American radio host). None are known as sexy babies.

Moreover, vocal fry is, in a way, uptalk’s technical opposite. It tends to happen when speakers are relaxing their voices to try to make them sound deeper than they naturally are.

THE REST: Johnson: “Women’s voices are judged more harshly than men’s: Assailed for imaginary vocal foibles, women walk a thin line between shrill and mannish.”

UPDATED (3/6/019): Acceptance Into Medical School Depends Greatly On Race, Not Necessarily Aptitude

Affirmative Action, Education, Egalitarianism, Gender, Intelligence, Race

How did he get into very good medical schools with subpar scores (3.1 GPA)? Vijay Chokal-Ingam, who’s of Indian heritage, studied his chances of admission while Indian—and then resolved to pretend to be … African-American. Voila!

Admission into medical school is determined by the applicants GPA (Grade Point Average) and MCAT (the Medical College’s Admission Test), explains Tucker Carlson. The standard, however, differs by the appearance of the candidates.

(Here is a new “MCAT conversion table.”)

Asians with an MCAT of 27 to 29 and a GPA of 3.4 to 3.49 have only a 21% chance of getting into a medical school. A white with that score has a 29% of acceptance.

African-American applicants have an 81% chance of acceptance with these scores.

IF YOU’RE HISPANIC, you have a 60% probability of being accepted with such scores. (Tucker did not explain that respectable scores of 27 to 29 place the candidate in the 61st to 73rd percentile.)

An African-American candidate was 4 times more likely to be admitted to medical school than an Asian with the same MCAT scores.

If only Tucker had surveyed the degree to which women of all races trump men in the medical school selection.

(I also believe aptitude tests have been modified over the decades to address what the egalitarians insist is “racially biased Questions in standardized tests.” But I don’t have the literature to show this dumbing down over the decades.)

UPDATED (3/6/019): “When Merit-Based Hiring Is Deemed Racist, Bridges Fall Down“:

The U.S. government hasn’t had an entrance test since … 1982. It abandoned both the Federal Civil Service Entrance Examination and the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) because blacks and Latinos were much less likely to pass either of them.

In academia, law schools have lowered the bar in admissions and on the bar exam. Universities run a “dual admissions system”—“one admissions pool for white applicants and another, far less competitive, pool for minorities.”