THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Why young women aren’t smiling for you any more

Why young women aren’t smiling for you any more

Yasmin Poole, below, is a rather furious feminist who falls into the common error of thinking that her coven of loud feminists speak for all women. I wonder how she squares that with the fact that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016?

And as for women smiling at me, I am at the moment fielding a marriage proposal from a youthful lady with whom I have a lot in common. And I am 78, not a highly marriagable age.

So all women are NOT as Jasmin fancies them. Men should ignore her. There are plenty of women with old fashioned values about. And the challenge from young Chinese ladies is formidable. My son once had a Chinese lady in his orbit who told him "Let me be your girfriend and I will do anything for you". He married a blue-eyed girl, as it happens, but it was a pretty good offer. Unless you are as good-looking as Grace Tame, feminist females should be aware of that competition

The immediate backlash from conservative men in power in response to Grace Tame’s photos with the Prime Minister has exposed how they are the gatekeepers of Parliament’s sexist culture.

Grace Tame’s unforgiving expression next to the Prime Minister became iconic the moment the image was shared.

It also drew swift criticism that can be put straight in the sexist folder. Queensland Liberal Senator James McGrath wrote a Facebook post that criticised Tame as “childish” – an infantilising, belittling word for a courageous Australian of the Year.

Journalist Peter van Onselen offered in his opinion piece for The Australian the tone-deaf, yet telling advice, “If your disdain for [Scott Morrison] is so great ... then just don’t go.”

It’s the same argument from a worn-out misogynists’ playbook. If women’s “disdain” for the political boys club is so great, why should they run for politics? If women “disdain” the system that entrenches our disadvantage, why should we sit at the table and challenge it?

Their criticisms carry a thinly veiled message: women who refuse to obey do not belong in spaces where decisions are made.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Australian of the Year Grace Tame have greeted this year’s nominees for a morning tea at The Lodge in Canberra ahead of Australia Day.

This argument has benefited men in power for generations upon generations. Women are expected to nod, smile, be silent and complicit. Women are expected to shoulder the burden of masking our emotions for the comfort of the other.

No one should be expected to smile at a Prime Minister – a servant of the people – who has fallen at every hurdle when it comes to supporting women’s rights. Especially Tame, a survivor of sexual abuse.

It’s not just a few cockroaches in the backyard. It’s a blatant indicator that the whole house is rotten. The critics who have come out publicly swinging against Tame reveal a deeper and more sinister culture of misogyny within Parliament House.

If these individuals have the audacity to publicly smear a woman for refusing to smile, imagine what it is like for a woman intending to speak her mind in the party room?

No need to imagine. The stories from Parliament paint a horrific picture. Former Liberal MP Julia Banks’ experience of sexual harassment and bullying reveals the ongoing culture of silencing women who dare to say “no”. Brittany Higgins’ alleged rape in Parliament House exposed politician after politician who could have done something but turned away.

Tame’s appearance with the Prime Minister ought to remind us that formalities are no longer the concern of women.

We abandoned formalities during the March4Justice last year too. Together, women across generations screamed for justice at Parliament House until our lungs hurt. In Melbourne’s protest, girls as young as 12 took to the stage in their school uniforms sharing their experiences of sexual assault. We did not nod and politely smile. We listened and we cried.

Yet, like clockwork, the predictable male critics across politics and journalism came out of the woodwork. Men in Parliament can always look to these voices whenever they need a reassuring pat on the back, turning their heads from the hundreds of thousands of women who demanded action.

The vocal boys’ club are mercenaries of the sexist culture that harms our democracy and threatens women’s very lives.

There is hope that the misogynistic cycle can be broken. As a young woman, I see how my generation is willing to resist formalities to speak truth to power. Now, more than ever, we need young women in Parliament to give a voice to our experiences in a way that other generations could not capture.

Young women will also remember. We will remember the inaction of the Prime Minister when he could have acted for us but didn’t. We will remember the gatekeepers who have used their influence to protect their power and undermine women who come forward.

Our demands to address sexual assault is clear. The onus is on decision-makers to listen.

The burden weighs heavy on our shoulders. We need you to make gender equality a defining issue for this federal election in the name of safety and respect. We need you to remember the politicians who tried to undermine and throw stones when we said that our lives matter too.

It is time that we dismantle the vicious boys’ club in Parliament. Because, as Tame demonstrates, respect is earned.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-young-women-aren-t-smiling-for-you-any-more-20220126-p59rd2.html

1 comment:

NorseJanuary 28, 2022 at 11:53 PM
Countless women have told me they prefer to be around men and I do not blame them for not wishing to be around manipulative harpies. Sure, men can be manipulative too, but in general our flaws are fortunately quite obvious, or else we would also be "perfect" like some women.
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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights