Female Viagra

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Female frigidity, to call the inability to reach orgasm by its proper name, has a long history. Two thousand years ago the great Roman poet Ovid noted it existence. Here is what he has to say about it:

Let the woman feel the act of love to her marrow,

Let the performance bring equal delight to the two.

Coax and flatter and tease, with inarticulate murmurs,

And if nature, alas! denies you the final sensation

Cry out as if you had come, do your best to pretend.

Really, I pity the girl whose place, let us say, cannot give her

Pleasure it gives to the man, pleasure she ought to enjoy.

So, if you have to pretend, be sure the pretense is effective,

Do your best to convince, prove it by rolling your eyes,

Prove by your motions, your moans, your sighs, what a pleasure it gives you.

Ah, what a shame! That part has its own intimate designs.

I am not a physician and cannot speak about the causes of the problem (although, in my experience, physicians, even in their own field, often spout at least as much nonsense as anyone else). As I read the most recent news about preliminary FDA approval of a female “passion pill,” though, I thought it worthwhile to remind readers of what Simone de Beauvoir had to say about the matter. For those of you who have forgotten, de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French writer and is widely considered the mother of modern feminism.

First, a little history. Like many other feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and Betty Friedan (1921-2006) down, de Beauvoir grew up in a middle-class family whose male head found it hard to provide. Consequently he became the object of his wife’s resentment and complaints. Determined never to be in her mother’s position, the dutiful daughter, as she later called herself, decided to stand on her own economic feet. Meaning to become a teacher, she directed her studies toward that end.

In 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre, then a student and later a famous intellectual. She fell in love and wished to marry him as the only man she considered worthy of her. He, however, did not think he could be faithful and was honest enough to tell her so. That led to the famous pact under which each of them was free to do as he or she pleased, as long as they told one another everything. If she could not have him entirely for herself, at any rate she could share his adventures.

From this point on de Beauvoir was forced to keep up with her soulmate’s petites camerades. She would have been inhuman if she had not resented the arrangement. In her first novel, She Came to Stay, the main character, based on herself, ends up by murdering her competitor. Though de Beauvoir had several affairs, she was unable to find love with others. Approaching her fortieth birthday, she had still not discovered the true joy of sex. From what we know about her it seems that, like so many others in her position, on occasion she faked it. No wonder that, over time, she and Sartre lost their sexual interest in each other.

In the end, de Beauvoir was rescued by an American writer, Nelson Algren. She met him while touring the United States in 1947. Perhaps being far from home, and the sense of freedom such a tour can bring, helped. For several years they kept up a relationship. In The Mandarins, which was produced not long after her affair with him ended and which is autobiographical in all but name, she wrote: “His desire transformed me. I who for a long time had been without taste, without form, again possessed breasts, a belly, a sex, flesh; I was as nourishing as bread, as fragrant as earth. It was so miraculous that I didn’t think of measuring my time or my pleasure; I know only that before we fell asleep I could hear the gentle chirpings of dawn.”

Now that she was no longer handicapped by her personal problem, de Beauvoir found the courage to write about the essence of womanhood. The result was The Second Sex (1949), a best-seller that shook the world. In it she delved into the topic of frigidity. I quote:

״Resentment is the most common cause of feminine frigidity; in bed the woman punishes the man for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him an insulting coldness. There is often an aggressive inferiority complex apparent in her attitudes… She is thus revenged at once upon him and upon herself if he has humiliated her by neglect, if he has made her jealous, if he was slow in declaring his intentions, if he took her as a mistress while she wanted marriage. The grievance can flare up suddenly and set off this reaction even in a liaison that began happily… Frigidity… would appear to be a punishment that woman imposes as much upon herself as upon her partner; wounded in her vanity, she feels resentment against him and against herself, and she denies herself pleasure.״

Many men, de Beauvoir continued, suffer “torment” from their wives’ failure to be sexually responsive. And what starts from an inability to climax, she noted, might easily result in women refusing to have any sex at all. Meanwhile “many married women find amusement in confiding to one another the ‘tricks’ they use in simulating a pleasure that they deny feeling in reality; and they laugh cruelly at the conceited simplicity of their dupes. Such confidences may often represent still more play-acting, for the boundary between frigidity and the will to frigidity is an uncertain one.” “In any case,” the oracle of feminism concluded, “they consider themselves to lack sex feeling and thus they satisfy their resentment.”

To expand a little, frigidity—or “female sexual dysfunction” as it is often called today—has nothing to do with physiology. Millennia of attempts to discover its medical origins have failed and continue to do so. Neither anatomical problems (such as “too great” a distance between the clitoris and the vagina, as many early-twentieth century physicians thought) nor imperfect hormonal balances provided the answer to the riddle. It is, as the saying goes, all in the head. A head which, in too many cases, had been turned by all kinds of tales women tell themselves and each other about the deeds and misdeeds of those terrible creatures known as men.

Such being the case, I wish the women who take the new pills the best of good luck. And those who manufacture and sell them, fat profits. But I bet anyone that, as far into the future as anyone can look, the problem will remain exactly as it is.

Here They Go Again

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

For several decades now, female Congress staffers have complained about being subject to “sexual harassment” by their usually male, usually elderly, often (they say) lecherous bosses. To prevent it from taking place, they have demanded and got all kinds of precautions. Now that people have got used to those complaints and do what they can to avoid them, the women are looking for new ways to draw attention to themselves. With success: their latest complaint is about being “shut out” of one-on-one meetings with the same bosses. Nor are they the only ones. Corporate women and women working for the universities have been heard saying the same thing.

Having been a university professor for over forty years, I have some experience in the matter. When I started teaching back in 1971 the idea that male and female students were exactly the same, had exactly the same rights and duties, and should be treated exactly the same way was taken for granted. So much so that nobody ever thought of it or spoke of it. I used to spend some of my time at cafeterias etc, talking to both male and female students. In fact it was partly in the cafeterias of the Hebrew University that my former student and wife of over thirty years, Dvora, and I courted. Since then not a day has passed on which both of us do not bless the Lord for allowing us to meet, fall in love, and move in together long before all this nonsense got under way.

Since then, things have changed. Any professor who meets a female student anywhere, for any reason, and under any circumstances without a chaperone must be out of his mind, crazy, nuts. The least he can do is use a CCTV. But take care: there will be complaints, this time about the loss of privacy. Again I have some experience in the mater. A few years ago I caught a female student who had plagiarized a seminar paper she submitted. I asked her—per email, of course, not in person—for an explanation. A lively correspondence developed in which she failed to convince me she had not stolen her paper, word by word, from some official Israeli documents. In fact I was able to find the paper she had used on the Net, at one of those sites that sell papers! Seeing that I remained unconvinced, she repeatedly asked for permission to visit me. And I, suspecting a rat that may or may not have been there, repeatedly refused. In the end I had no choice but to inform the university. What, if anything, has happened since then I have never been able to find out.

And so it goes. Here are a few examples out of thousands that might be named. Forty-something years ago women first started working on the assembly lines in Detroit. When they were not given as much overtime work to do as their male colleagues, they complained. When, in response, they were made to do obligatory overtime as those male colleagues were doing all the time, they also complained. Their contradictory demands drove the Union of Automobile Workers, which incidentally financed some of the early feminist efforts, to distraction. More recently many women have been heard complaining that the demands of their career are forcing them to postpone childbirth and that, as a result, they have difficulty conceiving when they finally decide they are ready to do so. But when Apple proposed to pay for extracting the eggs of its female employees and keeping them refrigerated so that they might be impregnated at any moment, they also complained.

Long ago, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that everything about women was a mystery and that the mystery has one answer: pregnancy. I myself would modify the sentence as follows: everything about women—real women, not masculine half-women—is weakness. And those who are weak have but two possible ways to go: either charm, or else complain.

That women are weak hardly needs to be pointed out. They are weak in the sense that they do not have the physical strength of men. They are also weak in the sense that they are less robust and, owing to their anatomy, less resistant to dirt of every kind and more exposed to infectious diseases. At no time more so than when they are pregnant or lactating. These facts mattered a great deal when most of humanity was still living on the farm and scratching the earth. Now that most of it spends its days in front of computers they still matter; though perhaps—perhaps—in a slightly different form and to a slightly different extent. Or else, why don’t we find any number of women in any of the most physically demanding, dirtiest, most dangerous occupations?

Had women been exposed to the full rigors of “the struggle for existence,” as men are, they would not have survived even for a single generation. Nor, of course, would humanity. Conversely, if women did survive then that was primarily because they succeeded in charming men, marrying them, sleeping with them (not necessarily in that order) and bearing children for them.

Women who, for one reason or another, did not succeed in charming a man to look after them complained. Men are supposed “to take it,” as the popular saying goes. Should they complain, then they are almost certain to be either despised or ridiculed. The situation of a woman is entirely different. Her weakness, real or perceived, means that her complaints are much more likely to be taken seriously by men and, though perhaps to a lesser extent, women (women know how good their sisters are at putting on a show). Especially if she makes sure that her femininity, in the form of a cleavage, shows just a little bit; and especially if she opens the waterworks and makes them speak for her.

Nowadays women who know how to charm seem to be a vanishing minority. Nowhere more so than in the US where, truth to say, they have always been somewhat scarce. More and more, the field is dominated by the majority who complain instead. The more aggressive among the complainers call themselves feminists (the term, incidentally, was coined by a man, Charles Fourier, in 1837). Their whole life is one long complaint about the disadvantages from which they allegedly suffer. By complaining, though, all they do is emphasize their own weakness. That is why, fifty-two years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the vast majority of the top positions society has to offer still remain in the hands of men.

So it has been. So it is, and so, in spite of fashionable literature about the decline of the male, it will be for all generations to come as long as there are still men and women on this earth. Perhaps, considering the alternatives—such as Plato’s Republic, where neither men nor women are allowed to know their own children—it is better that way.

Feminist Follies

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Fifty-two years have passed since Betty Friedan with her book, The Feminine Mystique, jump-started the great feminist revolt against oppression, discrimination, and any other number of horrible things those bad, bad, creatures known as men have been doing to poor deluded women. Looking back, has women’s situation improved? Or has it deteriorated? Here are some of the facts:

* Today as ever, the higher one climbs on the slippery pole of power, richness and fame the fewer women one meets. Only about five percent of the world’s countries have female presidents or prime ministers. From the late Ms. Gandhi down, even many of those got their jobs mainly because they were the relatives of male ones. The percentage of top level female executives in Fortune 500 companies is considerably smaller still. The highest-paid female executive in America is Marillyn Rothblatt of United Therapeutics Corporation, ranks 20^th on the relevant Fortune Magazine list. Interestingly enough, “she” was born a man.

* About two thirds of all working women in advanced countries are still employed in a small number of vast, low-paid, female ghettoes where there are few if any men: whether as teachers, nurses, social workers, communicators, administrators—the last two, euphemisms for what used to be called secretaries—or bank- and supermarket cashiers. As if to add insult to injury, many of those who head the relevant professional associations are men. A phenomenon sufficiently common to have acquired a name, “the glass elevator”.

* Starting as far back as the Roman Empire, and other things (beauty, sex appeal, education, etc.) equal, a female slave, owing to her lesser ability to do hard labor, has always been assessed at about two thirds of the price of a male one. In today’s developed countries, that is almost exactly the rate of female to male earnings.

* Most women, by joining the labor force, have failed to improve either their own economic situation or that of their families. That is because, as Senator (Massachusetts, D.) Elizabeth Warren in The Two Income Trap (2003) has shown, working mothers inevitably incur extra expenses. Such as an additional car; clothing; help in taking care of the household; and all kinds of people and organizations to look after the children either in the afternoon or during the holidays. As a result, and taking inflation into account, in many, perhaps most, cases their discretionary income, i.e. that part of it they are free to spend as they like, is actually less than it used to be.

* Another reason why going to work has failed to improve the economic situation of many, perhaps most, women is taxation. First, imagine a—much simplified, to be sure—situation where two women decide not to mind their own children. Instead they swap them and pay each other for doing what has to be done. As a result, both will start having to pay taxes. Second, many countries do not allow spouses to file separately. As a result, two incomes may well move a family into a higher tax bracket. Either way, the only winners are the statistics on one hand and that insatiable beast, the treasury, on the other. No wonder each time more women start working the lords of the latter boast of it as a feather in their cap.

* Interestingly enough, almost all of those who take the place of working women in any of the above capacities are themselves women. In other words, for every “successful” woman there are now several others whose “careers” consist of doing the kinds of work she no longer wants; such as cleaning, laundering, serving food, cooking, looking after children, and the like. Other women, mainly elderly family members, do the same work without pay. Either way, feminism has failed to liberate women from housework and childcare. Instead, what has happened is that “successful” women are exploiting less successful ones to an extent that has no precedent in history.

* Before World War II, it was often thought that the ability of most married women not to work was “God’s gift” to them. Now, since most young men can no longer support a family on their own, most women have to work outside the home whether they want to or not. Losing their freedom, they have been turned into wage slaves” just as their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are. To say nothing about the famous “double burden;” which has resulted in any number of books that advise women how to manage their time to appearing on the best-seller lists.

* It is true that women are making gains in education. However, that is primarily a reflection of inflation in the field. As the number of students grew, the social prestige diplomas and degrees conferred on their holders went down. Especially since the start of the 2008 economic crisis, a situation has been created where a college education no longer necessarily translates into a good job. Meanwhile, thanks to their stronger bodies, blue collar men with considerably fewer years of school behind them can often make as much or more money as “pink collar” women who do have such an education. That indeed is one reason why more boys than girls are dropping out of school. Furthermore, at the highest levels men still dominate, and by a huge margin. Since Marie Currie early in the twentieth century there has not been one female scientist whose name has turned into a household word.

* Today as ever, the most “successful” women tend to be childless or, at any rate, have far fewer children than the rest. So much do they seem to hate themselves that they are waging war on their own genes! Many other “successful” women are postponing childbirth until it is too late. Indeed it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of the feminist revolution are not women, who have to fork out and undergo all kinds of unpleasant and often unsuccessful procedures, but adoption agencies on one hand and fertility clinics on the other.

* As the most cursory look at women’s magazines and department stores will confirm, feminist attempts to convince women to stop pandering to men by dropping high heels, cosmetic surgery, makeup, and every other kind of beauty aid supposedly forced on them by men have been a total failure. Women undergoing cosmetic surgery, always at the cost of money as well as some pain and suffering, also outnumber men by a huge margin. Now as ever, the Biblical saying applies: “unto your man your desire and he shall rule you” (Genesis 3.16).

* Women’s attempts to make a significant impact on the military have been a miserable failure. Rather, what we got is a host of uniformed female medical personnel, public relations advisers, “organization experts” (who needs those?) and secretaries. As the fact that only about 2.5 percent of the casualties in America’s “war on terror” have been women shows, female combat soldiers remain as rare as water in the Sahara. Where there are bullets there are no women, and where there are women there are no bullets. And fortunately so; in all countries that tried to train women to male standards without exception, the outcome has been a very large number of injuries, some of them incapacitating.

* Finally, the first period in history when large numbers of women in Western countries started living longer than men was the early nineteenth century; precisely the period when the ideal of the non-working, stay-at-home woman was born. In both the US and Britain, the greatest gap in life expectancy between people of both sexes prevailed around 1975. Since then, as more and more women entered the labor force and took up what was long seen as a typical male activity, i.e. smoking, it has been cut by almost half. Feminism, in other words, is literally killing women.

Women, it is claimed, are as intelligent and as able to form their own opinions as men are. Therefore, how countless women around the world allow themselves to be led by the nose by a relatively small coterie of extreme feminists is by no means clear. But who cares? Certainly not I. If women, other than my wife of course, want to ruin their lives by trying to emulate men and become second-rate men, who am I to stand in their way?

Reining in the Macho

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

In a recent speech, Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström expressed the hope that, by adopting a “feminist foreign policy, Sweden would help rein in Mr. Putin’s “macho aggression.” It is, however, much more likely that the opposite will happen. Directly or indirectly, Putin’s macho aggression will put an end to feminism. In Sweden and abroad, the least it will do is to prevent it from spreading its tentacles more than it already Feminism is, and always has been, a peacetime luxury. Come war, or even the threat of war, and it disappears like raindrops off the back of a duck.

There are several reasons for this. It is not for nothing that, with some rare exceptions most of which merely prove the rule, women have never worn armor or uniform. Physically they are just not suitable for the task. In terms of strength (especially upper-body strength), robustness, aerobic capacity, running speed, endurance, and the ability to throw things only a few of the strongest women can keep up even with the weakest of men. To this must be added the fact that, for obvious anatomical reasons, men’s bodies are much better adapted for leading rough, filthy, unwashed lives in the field.

Here and there attempts have been made to ignore these facts by making women train as hard as men do. The outcome has been a rate of injuries much higher than that which men undergoing similar training sustained. Quite some of the injuries damaged the women’s ability to have children more or less permanently. A few proved deadly.

Partly as a result of this weakness, partly because somebody must look after hearth and children (or else waging war would be pointless to begin with), historically whenever war broke out women have remained at home. Or, else, in case the enemy was near and the opportunity still offered itself, they were evacuated as were the Athenian women in front of the Persian invasion. Staying at home, the last thing they had on their minds was feminism, here understood—and the number of different definitions is as large as, if not greater than, that of feminists—to mean the idea that women should be independent of men.

Again, there are a number of reasons for this. First, women were kept too busy doing all kinds of heavy, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work men normally do to get all kinds of ideas into their heads. Second, with the enemy ante portas even the dullest, man-hating women understood well enough that only men could protect them against conquest, subjugation, and rape (sometimes said, in my view wrongly, to be “a fate worse than death”). Third, with the men gone to the front, some never to return, women did much as they pleased in any case.

Surely it is no accident that Sparta, the most militaristic Greek city-state of all, was also the one where women enjoyed greater freedom and more rights than in any other. Indeed this freedom and those rights may not have been altogether unconnected to the famous Spartan woman order to her son, “come back with your shield of on it.” After all, the more Spartan men were killed in action the richer Spartan women became. Aristotle claims that women ended up by owning most of Sparta’s land. Enough said.

Too, the inverse link between the occurrence of war on one hand and the spread of feminism on the other has other implications. It helps explain why women apparently enjoyed greater rights in the large, massive Hellenistic monarchies than they did during the classical period when all city-states were constantly fighting all the rest. It also explains why the shift from republic to empire was accompanied by an improvement in the status of Roman women. It is no accident that Sweden, as perhaps the world’s leading feminist state, has not engaged in even one war for the last two hundred years.

And the future? Nobody knows. Currently, in spite of intensive efforts to recruit more, only about five percent of Sweden’s uniformed personnel are female. That is considerably less than is the case in the U.K (9 percent), Russia (said to be 10 percent, though the real number may be smaller), and the U.S (15-6 percent). It is much less than the Israeli figure which, counting conscripts only, stands around 25-30 percent. Even some countries where feminism is notoriously weak, such as China (7.5 percent) have more women in their armed forces than Sweden does. From Ms. Wallström down, Swedish women seem to be more inclined to claim their “equality” and “rights” than to defend their country, and of course the rights themselves, weapon in hand, against a “macho” enemy.

Such being the case, not a person in the world, perhaps not even Ms. Wallström herself, knows what a feminist foreign policy could mean. In her speech, all she did was utter some vague phrases about the need to adopt a “soft” foreign policy and put more women in charge of it. Whether doing so will greatly impress Mr. Putin with his 850,000 active troops, ballistic missiles capable of turning much of the world into a radioactive desert, and, last not least, black judo belt, is, to say the least, a little doubtful.

Personally I can only imagine one kind of Swedish feminist foreign policy: it is called appeasement. Not to use less polite terms. I wish it much success.

Guest Article by Michael Klonovsky

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Arrows and Maxims

Michel Klonovsky*

One of the achievements of modern art has been to provide even coprophils with a proper aesthetic environment.

What is worse: communication or ex-communication?

When enough zealots subscribe to it, democracy may well turn totalitarian.

The height of hypocrisy; the idea that in every child there is a Mozart or an Einstein.

Had it not been for the numerous men who cooperate with it, feminism would have been limited to case studies in psychology textbooks.

Where there is no enemy, the pariah is needed to create unity.

Only when there are no elites does the term “elite” turn into a swearword.

To be a “politically engaged” artist means dreaming of many engagements.

The more just the war, the more numerous the dead civilians.

One handout to a beggar is worth more than twenty volumes on the origins of poverty.

The cathedrals of feminism are the abortion clinics.

Never do the eyes of the devil shine as much as when he hears the words: liberty, equality, fraternity.

Modern dialectics; a woman works longer and longer hours so as to be able to afford proper child care.

Real cowardice starts at a certain age.

The more committed to an ideology a historian is, the more likely he is to claim his works are “scientific.”

Five Frenchmen, five opinions, Five Jews, ten opinions. Five Germans, one opinion.

No blue-blooded family, however degenerate, could have produced the idiots one finds in any parliament.

I like feminism. It brings good news. Its emergence means that society’s most important problems have been solved.

When it comes to trivia shows, the well-educated fail miserably.

How can one respect a boss who sits behind a computer?

A so-called “creative” person may be recognized by the fact that he has never invented anything.

Chess, considered as a test for the intellect, must be unimportant; or else surely there would have been more female grand-masters.

Gender-equality rests on the idea that one can climb the sea and swim the mountains.

Not to believe in the effectiveness of prayer, but to cast one’s ballot in elections, does not exactly point to realism.

What I would love to read: a study of the way Greens behave under a dictatorship.

Professors are often blinded by their own theories.

When a woman says no, says the macho, what she means is yes. When a woman says no, say the feminists, what she means is no. Both are right. When a woman says no she may mean either yes or no.

To denounce racial discrimination is part and parcel of a civilized society; to deny the differences between races, sheer hypocrisy.

Literary criticism: the parasite needs the tree.

One outcome of the “sexual revolution” has been to turn Western men and women into slaves of their sexual drives.

Populism is the democrats’ mistrust of democracy.

The height of absurdity: to discuss the limits of freedom of expression within those limits.

As Jonathan Swift wrote, a genius may be recognized by the fact that all the idiots unite against him. Example: Steve Jobs.

Whoever so much as mentions political correctness immediately becomes its accomplice.

My generation was the last which had to discover the secrets of sexuality on its own. Nowadays to have sex is to imitate pornographic actors on screen.

When feminists reach the point where they can no longer find plausible examples of discrimination in their own countries they turn to Africa or else to the ancient world.

Thank God it was good bourgeois scholars who re-discovered classical antiquity. One shudders to think what would have happened if the field had been left to left-wing “social scientists” or to female professors of gender studies.

So high is the quality of modern plastic art that none of its creators has ever produced a single failed work.

Today it is not the Pope who claims to be infallible, it is his opponents

To be a socialist means preferring the unfreedom of the many to the freedom of a few.

Wherever right and left are said to have been abolished, it is the left that rules.

“Adept at multitasking” is what we call those who are incapable of solving an equation or following the thought of a philosopher.

What a wonderful feeling, to despise a person accused of despising others!

He would like to become immortal. She would be content with a nice home of her own.

The nice thing about dying is not having to cope with future technology.

No tourist has ever stopped to admire a building erected by a socialist, an environmentalist, or a feminist.

* Michael Klonovsky is an author and journalists who works for Focus magazine in Munich. The above is a selection from his book, Aphorisms (in German).