Inductivist

Feminism is a form of liberation that should make you happy, right? Wrong. Here is the relationship among white women between being happy and voting for Hillary in 2016 (GSS data):























Women who voted for Trump are significantly more likely to be very happy. Marriage is probably the reason why: married white women tend to vote Republican, and married women are happier. Look:




















Gloria Steinem famously said, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." A fish doesn't need a bicycle unless she likes being happy. 

Feminists instruct us that men are organized to oppress women everywhere.  Women have incredible talents and ambitions, but these are crushed by male rule.

If this were true, we should see high levels of female dissatisfaction. Gifted individuals who are blocked from success surely cannot be happy about it.

A new meta-analysis of hundred of studies and more than one million people from many countries -- some of them with low levels of gender equality -- reports that there are no significant sex differences in being satisfied with life or one's job.

How can this be?  The truth is that women have it pretty good.  Surveys are not going to detect the handful of women who fantasize about Evil Males and push the lie on others, usually in a classroom somewhere.

Only a small percent of engineers are women.  Feminists claim that misogynist forces keep females out of the profession. Once again, the data show that biology is implicated. A new study by John Manning and colleagues shows that levels of testosterone, both during prenatal development as well as adulthood, predict having a job in a male-dominated field.  High testosterone individuals, male or female, are more likely to work as engineers, IT dudes, or skilled laborers, while low T people are more likely to work in education or as homemakers. At least part of workplace sex segregation is due to gender differences in this very important hormone.

Note to feminists: get over it.     

Female decision makers vs Teenage pregnancy--Share

This link takes you to a scatterplot of a sample of countries that shows a close relationship between the percent of decision-makers who are females and the percent of 20 year old women who got pregnant as teenagers (R-squared = .69). I interpret this as greater power among women leading to greater general female autonomy and more promiscuous teenage girls. Your thoughts?

The feminist movement has convinced many Americans, especially members of the middle and upper classes, that women, like men, need occupational prestige. An admirable woman earns an advanced degree and works a prestigious job that makes her a lot of money.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this kind of cultural value system is dysgenic. Children become understood as obstacles to status. A smart women is much more concerned about status and about not ending up a loser with no education and no career, so she is much more motivated than a dull woman to have kids later and to have fewer of them. She is also more aware of how today's behavior affects her future, so she is more cautious and prudent.

So how do contraceptives and abortion figure into this? Both are tools to reduce fertility. The first prevents pregnancy, and the second terminates a pregnancy.  These tools are going to be used to the extent that a woman is motivated to avoid getting pregnant and to avoid having a child, and to the extent that she considers the long-term consequences of her actions.

The data clearly show that the tools of birth control and abortion are used much more frequently by educated women. In this Guttmacher study, researchers showed that women with a college education are much more likely to use contraceptives and to have no gaps in use. Not surprisingly, uneducated females are much more likely to get pregnant.

Like it or not, what this shows is that birth control is dysgenic; it decreases the fertility of the top-half of the population while expanding it among the bottom-half. (I'm not morally opposed to birth control by the way--quite the contrary--but dysgenic is dysgenic.)

I've already shown in a earlier post that, among pregnant women, the educated are much more likely to get an abortion. Faced with a pregnancy that jeopardizes her road to social status, the smart women gets rid of the kid while the untalented girl keeps it.

For a person concerned about the declining quality of our population, the heart of the problem is a culture which tells a gifted woman that if she wants to be somebody she has got to give up having more than one child to pursue a high-status career. But contraception and abortion are the tools given to her to get the job done. They are part of the problem.

Many who are concerned about population quality applaud birth control and abortion because they are  focusing on the fewer births among the bottom-half. The racialist impulse leads some to favor widespread abortion among NAMs. But in their rush, they overlook the fact that the contraceptive/abortion regime works its magic much more on the talented top-half.

The core of problem is that we've been duped into desiring the means rather than the ends. Evolution gave us a hunger for status so we would be able to attract a mate and provide for all those babies. Children were the goal and all the stuff was just the way to get there. Now we worship the means and can't see that it's the humble among us who have all the riches.

Talented people need to get that message, but more on this in another post.

Why feminism kills babies (beyond having gotten abortion legalized): I don't have to tell you that the 48.6 million U.S. abortions since 1973 were made possible by Roe v. Wade, which was a Supreme Court decision aimed at advancing the rights of women--that much is obvious. It is also clear that feminists have fought for policies which maximize access to an abortion. But less well known is that feminism raises the risk that a women will have an unwanted pregnancy and, if pregnant, will decide that an abortion is the right choice to make.

I was curious about the predictors of abortion and ran across a research article in Family Planning Perspectives (Early predictors of nonmarital first pregnancy and abortion. By: Udry, J. Richard, Kovenock, Judith, Morris, Naomi M., Family Planning Perspectives, May/Jun96, Vol. 28, Issue 3). The sample was of 351 young white women from the San Francisco area. They focused on non-marital births and abortions by unmarried women (82% of all abortions are to single women).

So what predicted having an illegitimate child, and then an abortion? For having a non-marital birth, it was: 1) wanting freedom and not wanting to be tied down; 2) having boyish characteristics; 3) feeling that obeying laws is not important; and 4) feeling comfortable as a child arguing with her father. For having an abortion, it was: 1) being a good student; 2) having a well educated mother; 3) small family size; and 4) feeling that obeying laws is not important.

The picture here is of a girl who comes from a libertine, feminist home. Part of what is going on here is the idea that, hey this girl is going somewhere, and we can't let a little thing like a baby get in the way of Angel conquering the world.

Feminists have pushed abortion rights, and have pushed girls to get abortions, and so 50 million people never got a chance to live.

(By the way, Levitt, it is unlikely that these babies would have turned out to be losers).

Here's an example of what he meant: The World Values Survey asked people in 43 countries if a woman needs a child in order to be fulfilled. Only Finland and the Netherlands had lower numbers than the United States.

How close is the connection between lesbianism and feminism? You guys know how much I like to evaluate stereotypes. I looked at the GSS, and the only question with enough lesbian respondents is if you are in favor of abortion for any reason. Here is the breakdown:


Percent in favor of abortion on demand

Straight women 45.1
Bisexual women 73.5
Lesbians 57.6

So bisexuals have the highest number, probably because they are trendy types and actually have a chance of getting accidentally impregnated. (From a purely practical point of view, you'd expect straights to be most in favor of abortion on demand since they have the babies--this issue goes beyond practical considerations to the desire for a symbol of female autonomy). Anyway, while the lesbian estimate is high, about 40% of lesbians would not pass the basic litmus test for being feminist.

Mexican women second most concerned about women's rights: Americans were asked by the General Social Survey (GSS) how important women's rights were to them. Answers ranged from "not at all" (=4) to "one of the most important issues" (=1). I calculated the means for women from ethnic groups with sufficiently large samples. I subtracted the means from 4 so that higher numbers indicate greater feminism. Here they are:


Mean feminist score

Blacks 1.94
Mexicans 1.91
American Indians 1.83
Italians 1.82
Germans 1.70
Irish 1.74
English/Welsh 1.58

It is interesting that the women from the most gender-traditional ethnic groups are the ones most concerned about women's issues. There are at least a couple possible reasons for this: 1) these groups are poorer and more liberal, and feminism goes with liberalism; and 2) these groups have the worst behaving men.

But I thought Mexican women were paragons of traditional family values? These women may not be advanced feminists of the you-must-be-a-lesbian-to-be-liberated type, but evidently they won't be voting in sync with Focus on the Family.