It’s About Making Babies!

Jane Galt comments on “Naomi Wolf continues giving feminism a bad name” in Asymmetrical Information.

I agree with Jane. The accusation that porn is occupying guys to the point they don’t take time for women is correct to a very small extent. The view that porn fantasies are more fulfilling, and replacing the role of women in men’s lives, may also be true, to a limited extent.

I think all people are prone to addiction, habitual behavior that may or may not be good for the individual. How many women have bragged they know how to manipulate predictable men in the past? Or claimed that predictable men are boring? And listen to the jokes about predictable women — going to the bathroom in packs, devote large amounts of attention and time to appearance and gossip. Yadda, yadda.

Back 50 years ago boys and young men doted on cars to the exclusion of a social life. Or sports, or .. We have had intense interest in our ‘favorite’ TV programs, or sports, or hanging out with friends. Sometimes the pendulum swings that the extra interest centers on dating — I am not sure the increase in sex actually amounted to more than more pursuit of coitus, with no appreciable increase in mating.

Now, I think, there is reason to look at electronic games, adult and otherwise, DVD and VHS movies for rent or accumulation, cable, as well as the various cliques and groups folk hang out with. For older folk there are gambling and drinking addictions, nudie bars and adult novelties. Whatever.

I don’t think the girls looking for a responsible, honorable, honest man for a mate and co-parent has any easier or tougher time than in past generations. The distractions differ, but the results are similar. The amount of skin-to-skin time outside marriage varies from decade to decade, but forming life-mated couples? That has always been hard.

Advice? Do what you are interested in. Live in a community of those in similar careers, dreams. If you run across an honest and responsible guy, catch his eye when he is between tasks, and smile. Repeat on 10 different days. Be a friend, learn who he is, let him know who you are. You need to evaluate the possibilities, not capture the guy because he caught your eye. If you are interested in his happiness, and don’t find any major flaws (dishonesty, lying) and he doesn’t show signs of emotional disconnection illnesses, *then* consider working toward a life-mate relationship. Otherwise, keep looking. There are bunches of good ones out there, working, living quietly and peacefully. Think, ‘Security is good’, and ‘exciting is *high* risk’. Very few of us will ever rate an article in Cosmo or Forum Letters, It is more important that someone we date be a suitable life-mate and co-parent than a dream date in a magazine.

If all you want is skin-to-skin, go where alcohol is served. The song goes, ‘The girls all get prettier at closing time.’ Better yet, hang out at a strip club, and grab the dancers’ leftovers. And welcome to whatever you drag home.

As for women competing with porn fantasies, well that has been going on since storytelling and gossip began. The first men around the second campfire probably commented about one of the ‘hot chicks’, using the historically accurate grunts and pokes men still use today, I am sure. The women watching (in pairs, behind convenient bushes) probably compared them, “My guy has a bigger club!”

I don’t think women should ever have been interested in fulfilling men’s fantasies. Making babies together, sharing comfort, joy, and closeness, surely. Adventure? Ever more exotic thrills? That may be something for occasion, but probably leads to other addictive behaviors. Sound boring? Tough. The choice is essentially security or ambition. Ambition for status, or for ever more exciting thrills, ambition is a hungry beast, and never satisfied. The opposite of exciting is not boring, it is security. Instead of thinking ‘boring’, think, “consistent, dependable comfort”. I mean, really, how can a ‘live my own life’ feminist think in terms of ‘I want to fulfill my man’s sex fantasies’, or even, ‘I want a sex-symbol to make my fantasies come true *just like a man*. Seems a bit obscure, to me.

Scott Adams has put together some material about Global Warming on his The Dilbert Blog. Today is Part 4, and he lists his six (6) point conclusion.

The single most important point, I think, Scott glossed over in first point:

The earth is getting warmer, and human activity is an important part of it. I base this conclusion on the lack of credible peer reviewed work to the contrary and the mountain of work that confirms human-induced warming. While individual studies might be wrong, it’s extremely unlikely the entire field has been so thoroughly duped. The Dilbert Blog: Global Warming – Part 4

I do quibble with Scott’s lack of acknowledgement of the NASA/JPL report that all the planets in the solar system are warming right now, not just earth. The best models of gravity, atmospheric effects, and macro limits on ecological effects leads me to think that what industrialized nations on Earth do will not affect temperatures on Mars much, at least with no more junk than we have thrown at the planet to date.

Some of us agree that human activity plays a role in global warming, but I for one disagree that burning fossil fuels is the major contribution. I think there is ample reason to think that tree management, ocean pollution, and actions that change local albedoes (in say, square mile increments, say through building highways, changing wild lands to suburbs, clear cutting forests, strip mining, etc) have been the significant affectors, and also are the places where significant responses are likely to pay off. Including the ‘dam the fjord’ proposals, to affect Scandinavian spring runoff that appears to be interfering with the salt cycle that powers the stream we know as the Gulf Stream.

But I kind of like the point Scott makes, and one of his contributors that points to a report with similar conclusions, that there are more important places to spend effort and money. The Copenhagen Consensus lists “world’s greatest challenges” and offers solutions. Global warming comes about #20 on their list.

I am skeptical that we can repair or improve some of the overlooked global disasters we have created in recent history.

Will we talk Brazil, that ‘green’ country now running it’s cars on ethanol, into putting back the damned rainforest that they stripped from the Amazon basin? You know, the rain forest that when it went away dumped hundreds of years of carbon dioxide and nitrogen/methane compounds into the atmosphere, and screwed up water and oxygen cycles of oceans around the world?

And then we are going to talk China and Malasia and Southeast Asia and Africa into stopping the burning of charcoal and stripping the old forests for their current wave of construction?

And, maybe we could force car makers to have to plant enough new growth trees to uptake the carbons exhausted by each car they sell, making them include the cost of land and trees in the car’s cost? Or maybe require oil drilling operations to account for the recapture of every pound of carbon they pump from the ground? Internationally?

Or maybe we could stop people from burning leaves in the fall, when they could be composting (or paying someone to compost them), along with grass trimmings, garden weeds, and food debris?

Or, maybe we could rate cars for gas mileage, and pollutants per mile rather than percentages of gases. It never made sense to me to put gadgets on an engine that reduces gas mileage.

Or, maybe we could combine the old time farming practice of putting up sileage — cut the full crop, the whole stalk of corn or oats, chop to small pieces and blow into a silo. Let it ‘cure’ (ferment) for a couple of weeks, only now we collect the methane and alcohol fumes. Now we have a greater amount of palatable (sweeter, with alcohol!) feed for livestock, and ethanol, and methane, too. Surely separating the alcohol from the methane should be a simple enough process.

And, like, maybe we could go back to building hydroelectric projects? Maybe paying more attention to low-head-pressure techniques, and intermittent use techniques to harness flood waters and creeks that only run part of the year.

Perhaps even micro-pressure natural gas generators, to make use of marginal gas wells and oil wells with a slight gas pressure.

Or maybe we can revive that 1970’s theory, that the trace mineral content of most land fills is better than most mined ores. And that it should be profitable to mine dumps for basic minerals.

But most of all, I think the first step has to be to put a lid on obstructive and frivolous lawsuits, including patent and copyright reform. We have to amend our current legal climate that bolsters only the status quo, at the expense of our children.

You know, look for ways to improve the world around us.