Not that the widespread availability of contraception is a good thing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. I first articulated this in an article for Breitbart, and one of the best days in my life was when Hillary Clinton used it in one of her campaign speeches to bolster her supporter’s fear of the Right.
Hillary can whine all she wants, but my statement remains true. There is copious evidence in my favor. Studies have shown that women using the birth control pill DMPA gain an average of 11 pounds over three to four years.86 Cellulite—also known as “cottage cheese thighs”—only emerged after the invention of the pill.87 Women who take the pill regularly won’t receive the natural attractiveness boost that fertile women receive every month.88 The pill even makes women more incestuous, i.e. attracted to men that are genetically closer to them.89
While the ability to choose when they become pregnant was no doubt a source of great liberation and comfort for women, western birth rates have plummeted in the decades following the mainstreaming of contraception. Comfort isn’t necessarily a good thing.
That goes for men too, by the way. Unexpected parenthood used to be an important test of a man’s virtue. Would a man, suddenly a father, stick around and raise his child, or move on to the next girl? If women are wondering why men have suddenly become such assholes, it’s because there is now virtually no downside to hitting and quitting, and easy access to contraception shares a large part of the blame.
ANTI-SCIENCE
Feminist’s denial of facts isn’t contained to recent panics like rape culture. Some feminist myths have been circulating for decades. Like the pay gap. Taken as an article of faith by business leaders and politicians alike, this feminist lie claims that women (on average) are only paid 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
Study after study90 show the wage gap shrinks to nonexistence when relevant, non-sexist factors like chosen career paths, chosen work hours and chosen career discontinuity are taken into account.
The key word is chosen. It’s true, there is a gap between the average pay of men and the average pay of women. It’s also true that 93% of workplace deaths were men in 2015.91 And most the remaining 7% were probably lesbians.
The wage gap is almost entirely explained by women’s choices. Men prefer technical jobs; women prefer people-oriented professions.
When the debate reaches this stage, feminists will usually pivot and make one of two arguments: (a) that “women’s jobs” should be higher-paying or (b) that the pernicious social influence of the patriarchy brainwashes women into staying away from high-paying STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.
In its economic illiteracy, the former argument reveals the Marxist pedigree of third-wave feminism.
The latter is a Gordian knot feminists can’t unravel, and they’re too proud to turn it over to a man. They say they want more women in STEM, yet also encourage women to sign up for worthless gender-studies degrees. As Christina Hoff Sommers says, “Want to close the wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.” No feminists ever do.
The feminist war on science doesn’t end there. (Oh, you thought Republicans were the ones waging war on science? Think again.92) Possibly a greater intellectual travesty is what feminists have done to the study of gender differences, which ought to be one of the most rapidly expanding frontiers in our understanding of ourselves, but, under the direction of feminists and left-wing universities, has withered into mindless repetition of 1960s social-science shibboleths.
One of the reasons feminists fight so hard to stop big-box retailers selling “girl toys” (dolls houses, baby pushchairs, stuffed toys) and “boy toys” (action figures, toy trucks, building sets) is because they fervently believe these innocuous playthings socialize men and women into their respective gender roles. They believe, or say they believe, that if you make a girl play with a truck or a train set, she’ll be more likely to grow up to be an engineer.
Thanks to decades of pseudoscience from feminist academics and left-wing sociologists, this last argument can be tricky to unravel. Thankfully, some of the era’s foremost psychologists—Steven Pinker, David Buss, Robert Plomin, Simon Baron-Cohen—have spent much of their careers doing just that.
The sum total of their research is overwhelming: gender roles are largely governed by nature, not nurture, as feminists would have you believe. The most compelling research comes from Baron-Cohen, perhaps the world’s leading autism researcher. Baron-Cohen grew interested in gender roles after he noticed that boys were approximately four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls.93 He knew autism was correlated with over-systemizing, or an over-technical brain. So he decided to test if boys really were, as the old sexists believed, born with more technically-oriented brains than women.
The lynchpin of the feminist argument that women are made, not born, is the claim that girls are socialized into their female roles during their early childhood. In order to test this claim, Baron-Cohen decided to run experiments on newborn babies—before any socialization could take effect. He provided male and female babies with a physical-mechanical object (a mobile) and a social object (a face). Lo and behold, the male babies showed greater interest in the mobile, while the female babies showed more interest in the face.
Other studies also drive home the inescapable reality that men and women are simply wired differently. Surveys of women across countries have found that women in developing countries, where jobs and resources are scarce, are more likely to enter STEM fields.94 Yet in the vastly more feminist west, where women have greater financial security and career choices, women choose different professions. In other words, when women have a choice, they don’t choose STEM.
That’s not to say women don’t find any scientific fields appealing. Psychology (people oriented) and biology (plants, animals, and again people) are both dominated by women, as is veterinary medicine. Whenever I meet a feminist who claims that the patriarchy prevents women from going into astrophysics and computer science, I always ask them why it hasn’t also prevented them from going into biology, where 58% of bachelor, master, and doctorate degrees are given to women.95 I’ve yet to receive a persuasive response.
There is more. Men and women respond differently to stress—women prefer to be with people, while men prefer to be alone.96 Men and women also experience romantic jealousy differently—men are more upset by sexual infidelity, while women are more upset by emotional infidelity.97 Gender differences can also be observed in entertainment—men prefer realistic shooters and competitive video games, while women prefer social games like The Sims.