Another tirade by Fred Reed. Always interesting

New under the Sun

A Long View of Women

May 26, 2013

With embarrassment I note that in my last column, due to confusion with an assistant, a photo of a bridge in France was labeled as being in Mexico. I request clemency on grounds that I have never before stolen a bridge, much less transported it to another continent. I have since returned the bridge.

Oh, sigh. One grows weary, or at least I do, of feminists who complain constantly of imaginary discrimination. It makes no sense. They are in almost the only place and time in which women are not mistreated. Those who do not read history may not know the extent to which woman really have been—tired word, but accurate—oppressed.
For the hell of it I made a list of all the men of classical Greece I could name in five minutes, thanks to courses in philosophy and to general reading. Of men, 25 and counting, of women, two: Sapho, notorious for being a lesbian, and Xantippe, Socrates’ wife, for being a shrew. (I didn’t count mythical women like Cassandra and Clytemnestra.) The absence verges on total erasure.
More women are known from Roman times, most conspicuously Livia and Messalina I suppose, but mostly as poisoners and villainesses. In general women were nonentities. Men had life-and-death power over their wives and daughters, meaning exactly that: they could kill them if they so chose. It was not a theoretical power, but one at least occasionally exercised. To an American man in 2013 this seems insane, even if he has had adolescent daughters.
The pattern holds with variation in details almost everywhere. American Indians, savages but hardly noble, subjugated women utterly. Foot-binding, as lunatic a practice as the mind of man has conceived, was common among China’s upper classes. In India women were kept in strict isolation in purdah and, should their husbands die, expected to immolate themselves on the funeral pyres. What all of this was supposed to accomplish, I cannot imagine.
So much for the idea cherished in semi-literate courses in Women’s Studies that non-Western cultures have been female-friendly. They have not.
But in this feminists are right: The three mid-Eastern religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, do indeed have a ghastly record. The Jews I think were least bad, subjugating their women but not waging actual war against them. Christianity was hideous. The Catholic Church for three centuries practiced systematic sadism against witches, torturing and burning alive uncounted thousands of women. Torture meant crushed bones, dislocated joints, molten lead, and other pleasantries ordained by the Vicar of Christ.
Today the church has softened. It has given itself to the minor consolations of pederasty and to urging women who can’t afford them to have large families. This is an improvement.
Islam, intractably primitive, follows still the old ways. Girls in many places are not allowed to learn to read. Horrendous genital mutilation is horrendously common. Why the world puts up with this is a mystery. If I had been the British administrator of colonies practicing such mutilation, I would have had the fathers strung up naked on the town square and castrated with a blowtorch. Barbarous? Yes. But the cutting would have stopped in about ten minutes.
Curiously, in America more fury arises from the suggestion that men may be better than women at mathematics than from tens of millions of bloody clitoridectomies practiced on screaming young girls. Nobody, not the UN, not feminists, makes an issue of it. This too is beyond my comprehension, but maybe I just don’t comprehend well.
So why have misogyny and subjugation of women—these are not quite the same thing—ceased in much of the world, and very much so in America? Said subjugation has been so widespread through all time that one might suspect it to be a trait  genetically determined. But it isn’t. In Europe, North America above the Rio Bravo, Australia, and New Zealand among others, women are fully integrated into society.
Many places thought to be bastions of repressive masculinity no longer are. For example, Mexico crawls with female doctors, dentists, lawyers and such. About half of the students in my stepdaughter’s university (La Universidad Marista de Guaflaljara) by impressionistic eyeball snapshot seem to be girls. Don’t buy stock in machismo. Slide rules have a brighter future.
Feminists believe that they brought about the change by a valiant struggle against long odds and awful men. (By which they seem to mean all men.) Not so, quite. Powerless groups seldom rise unless those in power decide to permit it. For example, Brown versus the School Board was passed by nine white men. Whatever one thinks of Roe versus Wade, the court was male.
It is odd that in America, where women enjoy historically unprecedented rights and opportunities, often greater than those of men—who don’t have affirmative action—feminists complain of oppression. It is fantasy. Consider the undying assertion that women are paid less than men for the same work. It was once true. Today there are fifty thousand slavering lawyers who would love to launch class-action suits, which they would be sure to win.
The trouble with basing your identity on fighting discrimination is that if you run out of discrimination, you don’t know who you are.
The attitude of European men to the change, to include most white American men, is interesting. Men I know are for it, though they may not think they are. Irritation with the unending bitching of the professionals of bitching, the compelled political correctness, the demands for special privilege, the noisy hostility of too many women—weariness with all of these can obscure a few truths:
American men do not want to oppress women. All the men I know very much like intelligent, educated women who do not wear chadors or burkas.  They like athletic, adventurous women with whom they can scuba dive and camp. (My younger daughter got her scuba ticket at age twelve, muchly with her dad’s support.) Many of my male friends have daughters. If any university tried to exclude them because they were girls, a law suit would instantly ensue.
But one mustn´t speak of this. If you speak unfavorably of the ill-breeding and obnoxiousness of professional feminists, they say that you hate women. The tactic is common. Criticize the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis, and you have Jews. Object to the beating to brain damage of whites by urban black mobs, and you hate blacks. Yet it is not the race, sex, or faith that one objects to, but specific behavior of specific members of these groups. A very different thing.
We live in the middle of a social order that is, so far as I know, entirely new. To those who have grown up in it, it seems normal and, now, is. Seen against the backdrop of three thousand years, the merging of women into the polity is astonishing. How it will shake out in the long run is uncertain, but it seems to work well enough. Spare me the nineteen-year-old bimbos in Women’s Studies at Dartmouth telling me how oppressed they are, on daddy’s dime.

Disgruntled by American women? Fred tells you what to do about it.  If you spend your life in church there may be some language you are not accustomed to and might object to.  But for a different view on relations with women read on.  

How to Marry a Third-World Woman

And Live Happily Every After--Somewhere Else

January 14, 2013

Some years ago, encouraged by readers, I decided to write a book with the above title, and then decided I'd rather do other things, like drink red wine and sit with Vi on the roof-top patio and supervise the sunset. I mean, what if it didn't do it right? So I didn't finish the book. But I had knocked out a few chapters, and now I figure I'll post them occasionally when I can't think of anything else.

Chapter One
Why would a man deliberately set out to marry a woman in the Third World—or, if you prefer, the “developing world”? For any of several reasons, which men talk about in private but not when they might be overheard:
(1) North American women (say these men) have been so corrupted by angry feminism that they have the appeal of a menopausing crocodile with the hives. Yes, there are gradations, and many exceptions, but you don’t find out whether she is an exception until, if she isn’t, it is too late. And yes, the men having these views often have had bad experiences, and remain angry. Nonetheless they tend to have similar opinions:  The average American woman these days is charming as a hung-over ferret but less useful (ferrets kill mice).  We all know the signs. There are the frequent complaints about sexism, discrimination, machismo, the throwaway snotty remarks about the male ego, immaturity, and fear of commitment (they have the last one right, God knows). You get the feeling that too many gringas are coiled like rattlesnakes, looking for slights about which to be enraged. Together these constitute what I think of as “the chip.”
You have to be crazy to tie yourself to such a creature—stark bug-fuck.
(2) The lack of femininity. The word is hard to define, but the quality is impossible to mistake. American women seem to want to be either androgynous horrors or smaller men with the appeal of a truss ad. On the street they dress in those awful Brooks Sisters business suits with the ugly blazers and little shoulder pads. You see them in restaurants, drinking too much and yelling, “He’s a fucking piece of shit,” apparently in the belief that talking like a jock in a rural locker room makes them one of the guys. Some of us don’t want to date one of the guys. We want to date a woman.
They don’t want to be feminine, don’t know what the word means and, if you bring the subject up, they say—spare me—“You just want a submissivewoman.” No, actually, I don’t. Submissive women are boring. I just don’t want a squalling, hair-trigger bitch.
How much of this are we supposed to take? That is, if we have a choice? And we do.
(3) The courts make it dangerous to marry an American woman. If you marry one, the odds are fifty-fifty that it will end in divorce. Given the nature of US broads, the only worse outcome is that it might not. The odds are about two to one that she will file. The odds are overwhelming that you will be raped in court, forced to pay child support, very  possibly not allowed to see your children, stripped of your home, have your pension attached and your passport confiscated. Women are vicious in divorce. Whether they are morally inferior to men can be debated—they don’t fight wars or bomb cities, for example—but in terminating marriages, they are heartless and often sadistic.
They do not—believe me—see you as having a right to know your kids. I talked once to a (female) divorce attorney. She confirmed what many in fathers-rights had told me: Men in divorce are invariably happy to give the woman access to the children. Women very often are not. They use them as weapons, and the courts support them in it. Stealing a man’s children is an excellent form of revenge. They use it to the hilt.
In court, every advantage lies with them. They are quite capable of accusing you of sexual molestation of the children as a legal tactic, and their lawyers will encourage them in it. “Child Protective Services” everywhere is in the hands of feminist zealots and they will work against you. Your support payments will be calculated by the courts based not on what you make, but on what the court thinks you could make. This is called “imputed income,” and you have probably never heard of it. Wait.
Don’t do it. You don’t have to. There are better women out there, much better.
(4) America is no longer a fit place to raise children. If you marry a gringa, she will in all likelihood expect to live in the United States. Your children will then go to the public schools, which are drug-ridden academic disasters with no hope of improvement in the time your kids will be in them.
Worse perhaps, they are propaganda mills instilling political correctness and weak character. You know the kind of thing: Sojourner Truth was the most important figure in the American Civil War, dodge ball is violence, Diversity is the only virtue of any importance, performance, grades, and competition are bad because some kids don’t do as well as others, schools exist to raise self-esteem, degraded English is admirable because it is what minorities speak and the purpose of schools is to make minorities feel good about themselves. The schools are run by women, usually stupid ones, and they try hard to feminize males. If you have boys, they stand a good chance of being forcibly drugged if they are bored and fidgety. The quality of the schools being what it is, they will be bored and fidgety.
You won’t be permitted to raise them. The government will do it. After spending the first half of the day being indoctrinated in school, they will spend the next half watching the lobotomy box (unless you are one of the very few with the strength not to allow the damned things in your house.) This will program them with the moral values, tastes, and misinformation that Hollywood and New York think proper. It will keep them from reading and in many cases leave them unable to read—the flick-flick-flick of TV does not promote an ability to concentrate. The result will be that you will be afraid to say anything that runs against pc because they will look at you as a monster.
You think this doesn’t happen? I’ve got news.
Do you want them growing up as mall rats, bored, taking drugs, getting into sex at fourteen, and never doing anything but hanging out? Or would you prefer to raise them abroad where you have influence? And where, incidentally, they will become natively fluent in another language.
(5) If you are, say, fifty or fifty-five, would you rather date some hormonal train-wreck of an American woman of the same age, or a lovely Thai woman of thirty or thirty-five without the freaking attitude? (It didn’t take you long to answer that one, did it?) Sure, in a perfect world, in which we conspicuously do not live, maybe age shouldn’t matter. But we all know it does. Pretty, young, sexy, and agreeable –oh, dear god, yes, agreeable, please--is a potent combination. If you are looking at another fifteen years on the planet, why not enjoy them?
(6) Money goes a lot further in the developing world, the government leaves you pretty much alone if you don’t do something really stupid, you aren’t gummed up in the developing police state in the United States and, for many men, especially the independent and self-directed, the Third World is just plain attractive.
(7) Finally, you might be sick of what the United States is becoming. More people are than will admit it. The surveillance, controlled press, propaganda, ever-increasing burden of rules and regulations—some weary of it. If you are a man who wants out for these reasons, then you are not leaving in search of a wife, but you will probably want one eventually.
This book is not specifically a guide to expatriation. Details of visas and immigration law can be found elsewhere, though I'll include hints here and there, but these can change over time. However, you need to know what conditions to expect if you choose to live abroad, what life is like. And you need to know what the women are like, how to find them, how not to get the wrong one, the pros and cons and pitfalls. Read on.

Chapter 6 More basic training then bivouac at Hunter Leggitt

This is written as the thoughts come to me. So it will be pretty disjointed to a professional author. So if you are expecting professional writing you'd better buy a book. Also if you are interested in my entire experience after reading this go to the start by scrolling down and reading up. You've heard of writing from right to left so leave it to google to read from the bottom up. That's a joke son. There will be some pictures. Remember to click on a picture to see a big picture. The next post will show links to the first stories of this blog.

Please leave a comment if you take the time to read this. I'm going to see if google has a page counter. Maybe no one is reading it anyway.

For all you WW2 types whose eyesight is perhaps not too good I will increase the size of the print. Near Camp Roberts is the Military Reservation, Hunter Leggitt, where the trainees go for their final training where they put their knowledge into practice. Somehow I had acquired a camera or had someone else take the pictures. As I said before my memory is/was bad and unless I had a reason to remember it, it is gone. Pictures are a good way to remember what was going on. I managed to contact my friend Burdette Anderson who was in the Infantry at Camp Roberts and as I talked to him it brought back many memories but not of Camp Roberts Basic Training but things in general of army life. Of course he is about my age and considering that he lived through 85 plus or minus years and 90 days of combat on Okinawa I think it is remarkable that we are still around to talk about it.

I don't remember much of Hunter Leggitt but someone did take a few pictures of me there,



Of course they gave us various training in weapons. In the artillery soldiers don't normally carry rifles they carry carbines. So the infantry manual of arms is pretty much unknown to the artilleryman. Later in Germany at Worms when they handed me a n M1 rifle for guard duty I had to do a quick learn of the manual of arms. Not too tough actually as I'd seen them do it a lot of t mes. A real Marine or infantryman would probably have had a laugh if I had actually had to do it. The duty was guarding the perhiphery of the camp. Not too hard as we were a long ways behing the fighting at this stage of the war. This is the first I came in contact with the hunger and starvation going on in Gemany at this late stage. I remember one little kid trying to play and keep up with the other children who had not suffered so much malnutrition as he had. Small spindly legs, very thin, large shoes that kept him from keeping up with the others. I was to see a lot more of this but sheltered in the army with plenty of food, not living in the poplulation at large, the impact on us was less how bad it was for the Germans. Of course we had to know as the women congregated around the post liquor bars, willing to sell themselves for something to eat. But more of this later. But if you are under the impression the the American soldier was popular because of his winning ways you can forget that. I wonder this late date where all the people lived that had occupied Darmstadt and many other cities in 1945. One day late in the war the British or Americans raided the town of Darmstate with a population of around 120,000 killing 30 thousand or so. Take of look at Darmstadt in the summer of 1945. I took this picture Not a soul living here or even a place to stay by the looks of it. where did they go?




Enough for today more on basic before we graduated and sent on to other adventures. A spot of leave then on to the war for some.