Category Archives: Sex

Junking Gender

EU, Europe, Feminism, Gender, Homosexuality, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Sex

It is one thing to let children be who they are; a girl to play football, if she likes; a boy to bake bread. It’s quite another to engineer the obliteration of gender roles. And it is one thing for a private school to engage in “engineering equality between the sexes,” as the reporter euphemizes an experiment underway in a Swedish preschool based in Stockholm; it is quite another for the state to compel its tax base to pay and partake in such dangerous, invasive folly. Oh well, it’s good to know that American pedagogues are not the dumbest in the world:

At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.
From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.
“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.”
The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.

The literature in developmental psychology is clear—it was at least when I attended university. The development of gender identity early in life is a function of biology, psychology and learning. A small sample develops the opposite gender identity, likely because of innate, biological processes. It is a blessing that a male or female child no longer has to agonize over an innate mismatch between his or her physical being (for example, male) and the gender identity that attaches to it (female).

In these cases, acceptance and kindness is key. But to engineer gender confusion is a horrible idea. Profoundly stupid too. Going overboard and parading sexuality, any sexuality, in schools and the workplace—that’s plain vulgar, regressive and uncivilized. (See “Libertarianism Lite”)

UPDATE II: Libertarianism Lite Likely Won’t Cut It

Constitution, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Ron Paul, Sex, Terrorism, The Zeitgeist

Some libertarians dream that the establishment-endorsed libertarianism-lite, currently being touted on Fox News- and Business as the only legitimate strand of libertarianism, will catch-on in this America. Dream on.

Liberty loving adults in the US tend not to identify with fast-talking youths, wearing trendy eye-wear, who insist that the cultural foot-and-mouth that is “Glee” and Gaga is the very essence of American freedoms and liberties. (Anyone who has ever read this space knows that I don’t have any objection to risque expression; only to artistically worthless cultural products.)

Granted, life-style libertarians come in all shapes and sizes; they are often older, but are always juvenile. In the country’s founding documents, they divine all kinds of exhortations to let it all hang out. Much as the Left does.

If I’ve learned anything about what remains of Middle America, it is that ordinary, gun-toting, homeschooling, bible-thumping Americans are unmoved by people who draw their paycheques from foundations, think tanks, and academia, and wax orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman. Although it might appear sophisticated, this stuff is reductive and shallow—a kind of post-graduate cleverness that lacks any philosophical depth.

Life, liberty, property: that’s what negative liberty is all about. The rest is either fluff or ancillary.

True, libertinism can be freeing in many ways, but forgotten by left-libertarians (I prefer libertarians lite; it’s more accurate) is this: libertinism is subsumed within a larger, more-inclusive category of liberty.

Besides, joining the Idiocracy is never liberating. Things that addle the brain permanently are, ultimately, not liberating.

(And what’s up with Nick Gillespie’s less than harsh words about the War on Terror? On Fox News’ Stossel, Gillespie seemed to second the general impetus of the War on Terror. He also went soft on the TSA, protesting only that a well-intentioned effort (TSA) had gone terribly wrong. Wrong! The War on Terror is an unconstitutional crock that guarantees the growth of the state. The TSA is engaged in legalized crime and needs to be dismantled, its goons jailed for each assault perpetrated.)

As I noted, when defending Ron Paul, in 2008, from attacks by the same libertarians,

Beltway libertarians … are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else “cool and cosmopolitan.”
Judging by Reason’s “35 Heroes of Freedom,” “cool and cosmopolitan” encompasses William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful.”
Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” That sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.

[Or is it “Womin’s Studies”?]

Naturally, I’m down with any lifestyle the individual chooses, just so long as he or she doesn’t visit violence on others (as the TSA does). But to conflate low-culture and manifest ignorance with American liberties is asinine. (And very much the essence of life-style libertarianism.) As the libertarian law goes, all human beings have the freedom to act-out in anyway they like, so long as they abide by the non-aggression axiom.

Personally, I favor discretion. For if “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, then sexual—or any other—exhibitionism is anathema.

UPDATE I (June 29): Tom DiLorenzo has blogged the this post at LewRockwell.com:

“Fast-Talking Youths Wearing Trendy Eye-Wear . . .
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo on June 29, 2011 02:42 PM

.. and “waxing orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman” on the FOX networks. That’s how Ilana Mercer describes the Kochtopusian “libertarian lite” crowd of Beltway “libertarians.” They’re the same crowd that orchestrated a vicious smear campaign against Ron Paul, as Ilana discusses.
Ilana’s just-released book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, is a must-read. Among the “blurb”writers who praise the book on the first few pages are yours truly, Tom Woods, Thomas Szasz, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

UPDATE II (June 30): ANARCHISM. In reality, working as we are with so few options, there is not much that separates the classical liberal (your host, Mises, etc.) and the anarchist (Rothbard, LRC). The wise, freedom-loving thinker knows this, and works to optimize collaboration. However, as someone who was once an anrachist, and had reconsidered, after careful thought, turning to liberalism in the classical (and American) tradition, my thoughts on anarchism may be of interest.

Here they are in “AGAINST ANARCHISM.”

“Do Immigration Laws Violate Libertarian Axiom” is another relevant read. Ditto my immigration archive, the articles in which advance (unanswered) arguments as to why humanity does not have the right to venture wherever, whenever.

UPDATED: Have Sexual Abuse Will Travel

Celebrity, Politics, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Republicans, Sex

The therapeutic creed is often used to coerce people into conformity. A central tenet of that creed is the idea that any trauma suffered will fester unless excavated, in public, if at all possible; on Oprah if you belong to the gilded elites. Research does not support the idea that beavering at—and broadcasting—past pain; picking at those scars and digging in them wounds, makes for a better adjusted individual. Still, an individual will pay a cruel price if he dares to challenge this convention.

Of course, there is nothing heroic about sharing the intimate details of your life. This state of affairs is the norm in a society that abhors boundaries between what is private and what is public, and encourages a state of flux between these spheres. If anything, hero status is granted to the conformist who lives by the precepts of pop-psychology, and manages a showy demonstration of therapeutic ‘self-knowledge.’

Thus, Sen. Scott Brown, a liberal, Massachusetts Republican, made a smart move by coming out with his torrid tale of childhood sexual abuse.

The silent and steely type is out. A country run by women (some of them with the Chromosome Y) wants its men to let it all hang out. Or at least to be a metrosexual like Barack Obama (who, to his credit, is more discreet than Scott). Brown’s “book,” grandiosely titled “Against All Odds,” might even be an attempt, like that of Republican Tim Pawlenty’s, to grease the skids for a presidential run.

Excellent strategy. Ask Oprah; she knows a thing or two about helping to elect a president.

UPDATE: On FAcebook, Michael Barnett expresses surprise that there is a “market for this stuff. Why do people want to hear about other people’s sexual abuse? I sure don’t.” I replied: “Michael, you are not yet a properly ‘evolved’ man. You haven’t got good ’emotional intelligence.'”

Befriend me on Facebook.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/IlanaMercer

UPDATED: Poor Pollyanna & The Liberal Media (Logan Assault Cover-Up)

Crime, Feminism, Gender, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East, Sex

CBS reports a shocker (not): The glorious revolution in Egypt was marred by the “brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” of their chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan (via Erik Rush).

Someone has to say this: So deeply silly is the prototypical, progressive female in her fantasies of rescuing the world, that she discards reality. Logan’s rescuers, a couple of clever—presumably local—sisters, were no doubt clad in the traditional nosebags. Local sisters are not so careless as to dress immodestly in a country in which the majority (82 percent) supports executing adulterers. The left-liberal women of the West imagine they can walk around Africa or the Middle-East as free as birds, burdened only by overwhelming love for the locals.

The assault occurred on “the day Mubarak stepped down.” This poor, poor Pollyanna, and the men and women of the liberal media, will return armed with assorted rationalizations intended to solve inner-conflict: the rapists were Mubarak’s men; should be forgiven because of the circumstances, etc.

UPDATE (Feb. 17): Diana West questions the Logan assault cover-up, during which the 39-year-old journalist was called “Jew, Jew”:

Why CBS kept mum for four days about the brutal sexual assault of network correspondent Lara Logan by a Tahrir Square mob on Feb. 11 we just don’t know.

Did Logan, flown out of Cairo by a network-chartered jet to a U.S. hospital hours after the attack, request secrecy as a brutalized victim?

Were news executives, or even Logan herself, concerned that the bombshell news of the assault, which took place almost exactly as Hosni Mubarak was relinquishing all powers, would detract from the “jubilant” crowd’s “democracy” drama? Such a news blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by a mob of tea party-goers at, say, a massive Glenn Beck rally – and particularly if other correspondents had previously suffered unprecedented assaults and threats from the same crowd. A keening outcry would have arisen from the heart of the MSM (mainstream media) against the mob, accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.

But in this singular Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime. We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers. What CBS didn’t mention – what was later attributed to an unnamed network source – was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!”

…

“Missing is any acknowledgement of the fact – the overwhelming, highly upsetting but nonetheless unavoidable fact – that Islam’s teachings on women and particularly Jews are literally hateful. And that’s the Quranic truth, as copiously expressed by the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, grand imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, approximately Sunni Islam’s “pope.” As he put it, and with plenty of canonical support: Jews “are the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”

Read more: Media hushes up Islamic misogyny of Logan assault http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=264941#ixzz1EHiFNRTV