I was in a gymnasium the other day, the sort in which you find perhaps twenty exercise machines lined up, each dedicated to toning but not really strengthening a part of the body. Although the place was empty except for me, a recorded female voice said over and over, “Change stations!” followed at intervals by something like, “All right! Ready, by the numbers…One! Two!….” etc. It annoyed me. I weary of constant instruction.
It caused me to reflect on the differences between the attitudes of men and women to gymnasiums, in which I have spent considerable time over the years. Women want aerobics and a very light workout, preferably as a social hour with someone calling cadence. I thought of that horror recommended by a (female) grade-school teacher to replace competitive sports, “a cooperative group activity led by a caring adult.”
By contrast, men do not go to gyms to have a group bonding experience, but to lift serious weight in reflective solitude. They seek strength, not tone, and do not want to listen to chirpy orders. In short, the sexes do not belong in the same establishments.
This led me to think of the National Press Club in Washington, of which I was a member many years ago. It was then for men only–a masculine place, there being over the bar a Maja Nude oil painting of a voluptuous woman. Men could hoist a brew, enjoy male company, and tell war stories.[amazon asin=0595443745&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Then it opened its doors to women. Shortly thereafter a young woman reporter accosted me and said approximately, “Oooh, we’re going to have South America night on Thursday and come in Spanish costumes and have piñatas and it’ll be soooo fun!” Oooooh! I resigned the next day if memory serves. So did a good many other men. There was nothing evil about South American Night. It just wasn’t what men did.
The club had to open up to women as these were coming to be a major part of journalism and the club was where important sources came to give talks. It is one thing to exclude a sex from a social club, quite another from a professional organization. But the invasion made plain that men and women have different modes of socializing. I noticed that if a group of men were talking and a woman entered the group, both atmosphere and behavior changed. I presume the same is true when a man joins a group of women.
I thought the solution would have been to have a pub somewhere on the premises for men only, a similar place for women only, and the rest of the club mixed. There was no hope of this. Whereas men would be perfectly happy for women to have a place of their own, women would never take a similar attitude toward men.
Sexual integration has graver effects. There is much wringing of teeth and gnashing of hands nowadays because boys are “struggling” in school. The problem could be solved in about ten minutes by having separate schools for boys, grade school through high school, with male teachers only and a death penalty for even uttering the word “Ritalin.” Let boys run, jump, wrestle, compete. Grade them on substance, which boys understand (How much algebra do you know?) not on diligence (Did you paste pretty pictures neatly in your unutterably boring, make-work project about diversity?)
Reward performance, not patience, and excellence, not being docile and cooperative and good in groups. Offer advanced courses that appeal to smart boys—calculus, for example—and grade on math learned, not homework done on time. Problem solved. It should gratify women, who don’t want boys in the schools anyway.[amazon asin=B0078F0G72&template=*lrc ad (right)]
It is important to recognize that integration of the sexes is directly responsible for the slide by boys. Today’s schools are run by women for girls. Fine. Girls should be in schools run for girls. Boys should not. Female teachers want decorum and good behavior (not strong points for boys), dislike competitiveness, rambunctiousness and cutting up in class. Boys will engage in these unless heavily, and now chemically, restrained. Thus the drive to keep boys doped up.
Men as teachers can handle boys without having them led from class in handcuffs and subjected to psychotherapy because they drew a soldier with a rifle. Women cannot.
Resegregation is equally desirable at the level of the university. Today young men drop out, barely get through, or don’t go in the first place because of integration of the sexes. (The book to read is Men on Strike by Helen Smith) On reaching campus a male student finds himself in a world of hostile feminism. He is told that he is a rapist, subjected to tedious indoctrination about sexual assault, and exposed to silly Take Back the Night nonsense by hysterical adolescent females.
The school will likely strike him as academically appalling. Outside of the hard sciences, virtually all courses will be heavy on victimization propaganda. In addition there will be whole departments dedicated to juvenile narcissistic self-pity: Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Lesbian Chicana Transvestite Studies, Queer Studies, all of which could be subsumed under an overarching Department of Moron Studies. Not being stupid, and not being intellectual ungulates, young men quickly see that they are not going to learn anything since this is no longer the purpose of a university. They drop out.
Put them in a male-only university, with a male-only professoriate, and teach them history, the sciences, literature, mathematics, philosophy, and languages. Let them engage in athletics as they choose. Emphasize reasoning over propaganda. Problem solved.[amazon asin=B007ZDDKVQ&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Finally, there is the military. Women do fine in supply, administration, intelligence, and medicine. Integrating them into front-line units has proved an unending problem.The physical weakness of women (desccribed by Catherine Aspy, who graduated from Harvard and enlisted in the Army) is only the beginning.There has been, and is, a constant stream of sexual assaults, these being inevitable in what after all is a brutal business. Further, when a woman enters a smoothly functioning squad of thirteen men, they become twelve guys competing for her sexual favors. So much for unit cohesion.
The answer I would like to see is separate combat units for men and women, in the manner of separate sports teams. This would allow women equal opportunities to engage in infantry combat, which is only fair, while avoiding the disadvantages of mixed units. (The book to read if you are interested in a highly insightful account of the question is The Kinder Gentler Military by Stephanie Gutmann.)
Resegregation by sex, which would be both cheap and easy, is probably vital to the future of the United States. The bright little boys now being pushed under become, especially after the male IQ spurt in adolescence, the phenomenally intelligent young men who found Intel, Google, Dell Computer, Microsoft and, perhaps less crucially, Facebook.
I do not mean to disparage the contributions of Victims’ Studies to technological advance and industrial excellence, and indeed their record cannot be questioned, but men too have contributed around the edges, and perhaps should not be stifled by education both unsuited and hostile to them.
[amazon asin=B0078H7D8K&template=*lrc ad (left)]
[amazon asin=B0078H7D9E&template=*lrc ad (left)]
[amazon asin=0595151094&template=*lrc ad (left)]
[amazon asin=B0079NEJNU&template=*lrc ad (left)]
