Thursday 19 August 2010

Harvard College a Sexual Desert: Gender Feminism's Bitter Legacy


This interesting (if irritating) article from the Harvard Crimson suggests the illustrious college is hardly a hotbed of sexual liberation. This finding chimes well with the Anglobitch Thesis. Elite Anglo-American institutions such as Harvard are embodiments of Anglo-Saxon cultural values, namely repression, misandry, puritanism and feminism, so such findings are fairly predictable.

How much more evidence do people need that Anglo culture is deeply repressive? Here we have a substantial proportion of young people in their physical prime contained in a co-educational setting having little or no sex for four years. Note how the author explains this gross dysfunction by 'academic pressure' rather than puritanism, misandry or feminism. Recreational heterosexual intercourse normally takes a few minutes to complete, so even that argument falls flat (pardon the pun). How much time do the students need?

The blunt fact is that decades of homosocial, Anglo-American gender-feminism have poisoned relations between the sexes. Note how the article makes no mention of Harvard's draconian 'Antioch Rules', wherein males require legal permission to hold womens' hands, kiss and so forth. At Harvard, healthy, natural instincts have been comprehensively erased by anti-sex, misandrist feminists. Twenty-first century Harvard College might as well be set in seventeenth century New England or Cromwell's joyless Commonwealth.

What an unmitigated disaster...

The complaint that Harvard is a barren wasteland of sexual destitution is not without merit. According to a Crimson survey of the class of 2009, in their four years at Harvard, 52 percent of the students had one or zero sexual partners, and only 28 percent had even one dating partner. Add these statistics to the blogs, studies, and numerous recent articles about how Harvard students can’t get any, and you can’t help but feel bad about your sex life. Harvardfml and d-hall gossip don’t help either.

Luckily, the illusion that everyone else is having more sex than you is not specific to Harvard, so if your neighbor’s all-too-audible Saturday morning romps have got you feeling blue, take heart. “Go Ask Alice!”—Columbia University’s Dear Abby-equivalent—reports that the majority of polled college students also had zero or one sexual partners in a given year, while believing that their peers were having three times as much sex as they were. Other revealing statistics include that 31 percent of U.S. college women are still virgins at graduation and that college male sexual activity is down from 2.1 partners in 2001 to 1.6 partners in 2006.

These stats are comforting until you realize that Harvard is still only at or below the mean. This perhaps indicates that Harvard is indeed a barren wasteland of sexual destitution. Why? “Because you all are so dang hard to get a hold of!” quipped my MIT friend. It’s true. He and I spent two weeks trying to find a time simply to get coffee. Every cancellation and re-schedule had been my fault, because of lab, section, rehearsal, or work. This type of social avoidance and excuse making is distressingly common in our college’s culture. As has been pointed out in all those “Harvard-doesn’t-have-sex” articles, every Harvard student is chronically over-scheduled. What they don’t point out is that we are over-scheduled of our own volition. Everyone puts their work first, believing that in the long run, an on-time Gov 20 paper will be more beneficial than a potentially-awkward date with last Saturday’s hook-up. This generates a society of isolated academia, and we lose sight of the fact that one year from now, that paper’s grade will mean nothing. And that date may have been the start of something really special
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Saturday 7 August 2010

Guest Post by Chuckew: More Anglo than the British


This is an excellent essay by an Australian reader lamenting the gulf between Australia's sunny public image and the crabbed, matriarchal reality. It echoes an interesting book I read by the Australian journalist John Pilger, I think entitled A Secret Country. This discussed the astronomical suicide rates for teenage boys in Australia long before the issue touched the pan-Anglosphere men's movement. That was my first intimation that Anglo-Saxon countries stigmatize males as a sex. It is certainly notable that prominent and influential feminists like Germaine Greer hail from Australia, that the country is presently led by a woman and that Australian feminism is especially well-integrated with the state.


Some countries of the Anglosphere are more Anglo than other countries of the Anglosphere. In fact, Australians are more Anglo than the English. Contrast this with Americans, where Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Spanish and so on had comprised major components in waves of immigration. Whereas in Australia, the White Australia Policy was rendered defunct only in 1973.

To avert any ambiguity, let’s be clear… the “white” in the White Australia Policy related principally to Anglo whites, with “ten quid” cockney immigrants encouraged to settle here. Italians, Germans and other dubious nationals with funny accents were never a part of the “ten quid tourist” program.

It’s been proven to be fiction, but Americans like to entertain the notion that English was voted over German as the national language by only a slim margin. That they sometimes entertain this legend with such fondness suggests that the Anglo influence is not quite as entrenched as some suggest.

Consider Australian politics and laws, and that the Australian mode of regulation has been embraced by bureaucrats the world over. Perhaps they assumed that if draconian laws can work on a people as relaxed and fun-loving as Aussies, then they can be implemented with even greater ease in countries that appear less “democratic”.

Incidentally – the notion of the “easy-going Aussie” is a myth. “Easy-going” is a cultural red herring designed to keep interpersonal relationships at a fun, superficial level, to avoid all that nastiness that more spontaneous, less regulated people the world over are inclined to erupt into at short notice. The lie of the “easy-going Aussie” is great for politics, it makes regulation so much easier. For example, consider the following:

Australia introduced the world to draconian helmet and seatbelt laws:

http://www.tsc.berkeley.edu/newsletter/Winter04/australia.html

Our previous prime minister, John Howard, showed George W Bush what he can get away with. And through our Australian example, we brought Americans the Patriot Act and the Iraq war:

http://www.silencingdissent.com.au/
http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2006oct28_b1.html

Australia has always had draconian anti-association laws, in one form or another:

http://www.umcwa.org/news.php

Which brings us to Rookh’s thesis regarding Anglo feminism. The good-girl/bad-girl duality is nowhere as strong as it is in Australia. The slut is a dominant women’s stereotype, with its dominant male counterpart, the “larrikin” (the English would be familiar with chads, cads and lads). Obviously it is incorrect to say that “good” girls don’t exist in Australia. They do. But they, like their male counterparts, are 2-dimensional personalities that equate morality with “niceness” and “proper behaviour”, not with courage or standing up for what you believe in. Traditionally, I believe that American culture, at least in the past, accommodated more of the latter. Unquestioning and compliant “proper behaviour”, by contrast, is Anglo to the core, and derives much of its momentum from a secular, materialistic, anti-religious perspective (quite in contrast to Puritanism). I believe that Anglicanism may reflect this more pragmatic, sterile approach to religion (but don’t quote me on this).


We have to worry about Australia’s creeping, insidious impact on world politics. Promotion-seeking bureaucrats the world over are inclined to sneak in regulatory practices that work in foreign countries, so that they can claim credit. And in this regard, Australia’s anti-democratic Anglo foundations, coupled with the attractive lie that we are a hedonistic, fun-loving people, is setting some draconian precedents. That’s my thesis, anyway. Puritanism is too opinionated for Anglo sensibilities, really. It is no accident that Australia (and its “seventh state”, New Zealand) has set major feminist precedents.