June 30, 2009

I think The Who had a song about this

From AOL News:
A Swedish couple's decision to keep their toddler's gender a secret is stirring debate, especially now that the parents are expecting a second child.

"Pop" is 2 ½ years old, but so far only those who change the child's diapers know whether the youngster is a boy or a girl, TheLocal.se, an English-language site for Swedish news, said last week.

Back in March, the parents gave an interview to the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, saying they decided not to reveal their child's sex because they believe gender is a social construction. "We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mold from the outset," said the child’s mother, "Nora." (The paper used fake names for the entire family to protect their privacy.)

"It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead," the mother said.

The parents, both 24 years old, said they never use personal pronouns when referring to the child. They just say "Pop."

The tot wears everything from dresses to pants, and Pop is usually the one who decides what to wear on any given morning. Pop's hairstyle is also changed on a regular basis, so it doesn’t provide any clues.

Swedish gender equality expert Kristina Henkel told The Local that the experiment could make Pop a stronger person, since he or she won’t be subject to gender stereotypes.


By The Who:
I'm A Boy
(Pete Townshend)

One girl was called Jean Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
Another little girl was Sally Joy
The other was me, and I'm a boy

My name is Bill and I'm a headcase
They practice making up on my face
Yeah, I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear
Spend ages taking hairpins from my hair

Chorus 1
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But if I say I am I get it

Put your frock on Jean Marie
Plait your hair Felicity
Paint your nails, little Sally Joy
Put this wig on, little boy

Chorus 1

I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the street
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud

Chorus 2
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm__ a__ boy__

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

75 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought the David Reimer case had put an end to this kind of insanity? Maybe they haven't heard of it over in Sweden.

Anonymous said...

"It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead," the mother[Yikes! Another 'social construction'] said.

Then it's a good thing that nobody does that.

Anonymous said...

there were cases like this in the 19th century - usually a wacked out mother who lost a daughter or something...the difference is ....they were considered wacked out...

Anonymous said...

What will really be interesting is when the, if its a boy ,he starts acting thus, or a girl and starts acting thus..this will be in direct conflict to their wacked out idealogy, and they will assume some 'gender bias' got in...then they will correct the problem.

Melykin said...

Maybe the child was born with a defect that made it impossible to say what the gender is, and the parents are waiting until the child is old enough to decide.

Otherwise, the parents must be bat$h*t crazy.

Vernunft said...

Sure gender is a social construction. Someone has to devise grammar before it makes any sense.

Now sex...that's rather more biological.

peter said...

I still have no idea how you go from Vikings to this.

Nobody as of yet has put forth a good theory to explain this.

John Seiler said...

Johnny Cash sang the last note on that one 40 years ago:

"My daddy left home when I was three
"And he didn't leave much to ma and me
"Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
"Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
"But the meanest thing that he ever did
"Was before he left, he went and named me 'Sue'"....

YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M89c3hWx3RQ

Baloo said...

Like English, Swedish lacks a sex-neutral pronoun for the third person. How do they cope with that?

Lucius Vorenus said...

Anonymous: What will really be interesting is when the, if its a boy ,he starts acting thus, or a girl and starts acting thus..this will be in direct conflict to their wacked out idealogy, and they will assume some 'gender bias' got in...then they will correct the problem

That could get pretty expensive:

REVEALED: THE JACKO AUTOPSY
nypost.com

An autopsy on Michael Jackson revealed that the King of Pop's emaciated body was riddled with needle marks and scars, and his head was virtually bald, it was reported today...

The shock findings of the Michael Jackson autopsy
thesun.co.uk

...The King of Pop's once handsome face bore a network of plastic surgery scars, while the bridge to his nose had vanished and its right side had partially collapsed...

He was skin and bone, his hair had fallen out and had been eating nothing but pills when he died. Injection marks all over his body and the disfigurement caused by years of plastic surgery show he'd been in terminal decline for years...

Anonymous said...

*Nobody as of yet has put forth a good theory to explain this.*

The vikings sailed away.

Max said...

"Maybe the child was born with a defect that made it impossible to say what the gender is, and the parents are waiting until the child is old enough to decide."

If that were the case, why not just say so? There's no shame - or shouldn't be - in being born of indeterminate sex.

I agree that these parents are going to end up aghast when their little boy or girl starts behaving in a gender-appropriate manner, which is pretty likely to happen.

robert61 (Sweden resident) said...

Sweden is the place more than any other where the seventies never really ended.

Young Pop will teach end up teaching his/her dipsh*t parents a thing or two. I hope for Pop's sake they bear it gracefully.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm. Just dawned on me--this must be what his parents did to Michael Kinsley.

Where ARE all the REAL MEN?????????

Anonymous said...

Odd country, that Sweden.

The government regulates the naming of children, so as to prevent, perhaps rightly, the bestowing unto children of nonsensical names or single letters as legal names. The justification cited in preventing such naming decisions is a desire to spare children any trouble that might arise, later in life, from their idiotic parents' having named them on a whim.

Yet no one in Sweden can find in this case a potential for harm great enough as to warrant the government's stepping in to say, in effect, "knock it off"?

Attemping to name your kid "Metallica"? Unacceptable.

Treating the rearing of children as an experiment, in which you needlessly complicate their lives by injecting confusion into their conception of self and sexual identity? A-OKAY!

Lucius Vorenus said...

peter: I still have no idea how you go from Vikings to this...

We are now about as far removed from the Vikings as the people of Rome were removed from Aristotle, circa 450AD-475AD, at the dawn [or "dusk", if you will] of The Dark Ages.

Since the introduction & decriminalization of surgical abortion & chemical abortifacients [i.e. the birth control pill] about 40 years ago, we have been participants in an extinction of great cultures the likes of which the world hasn't seen in 1500 years:

IQ and the Wealth of Nations
en.wikipedia.org

List of countries and territories by fertility rate
en.wikipedia.org

People just don't have any idea how bad things are about to become.

Nora Helmer said...

peter said: "I still have no idea how you go from Vikings to this.

"Nobody as of yet has put forth a good theory to explain this."

Something like 60% of Norway's population died in the Black Death. Presumably the numbers were similar in Sweden.

The Vikings (the ones who hadn't left earlier) simply died out and were replaced by European (Germanic) settlers who moved northwards in the decades/centuries following.

Unknown said...

Well, if Pop is a girl she'll probably be anorexic and cut herself when she is 16. If a boy, then he will probably murder both his parents when he is 23.

dr kill said...

They should have named the tragic little fucker 'Lola' and been done with it.

Anonymous said...

Aww, and everybody thought Michael Jackson had it bad.

Sven Hedin said...

The pre-schools in Stockholm have been pushing gender neutrality for a while. I remember reading years ago about boys being forced to wear a dress one day each school year. I say good. You'll either get one of two outcomes - boys who will grow up to be effeminate Muslim punching bags, like most Swedish males seem to be currently, which means they quickly leave the gene pool. Or fanatics ready to throw a bunch of the expendables of yesteryear up against a wall.

Unknown said...

Wtf do kids do to deserve shit like this?

Anonymous said...

"I still have no idea how you go from Vikings to this.

Nobody as of yet has put forth a good theory to explain this."

Perhaps the Vikings were feared in war not because they were macho as individuals, but because they were well-organized and conscientious. You know, they'd fight for each other to the death and not run because that's what they all had agreed to do beforehand. They took everything, including their own promises, literally.

What we see in this story is also literal-mindedness. We were all told that gender is a social construction, but only the most literal-minded of people actually act on it.

To take another example, the Japanese are well-organized, but not macho. They have a storied military history.

Actually, you probably can't be disciplined and macho at the same time. It's either or. And what's an army without discipline?

It reminds me of that quote from Napoleon that goes something like this:

A single Mamluk would always defeat a single Frenchman. 10 Mamluks against 10 Frenchmen - I don't know who'd win. A hundred Frenchmen would always defeat a thousand Mamluks.

Ian said...

Excellent deployment of the Who song Steve.

anony-mouse said...

Interesting how most comments here (and the mention of both songs) assume 'Pop' is a boy, and how terrible it will be when the male 'Pop' grows up.

Anonymous said...

Vernunft, excellent nominalist distinction!

One could extend this as "yes, human knowledge regarding sexuality *is* a social construct since pandas, alligators, platypuses, etc. don't have 'girls only' bathrooms or 'blue' swaddling clothes for boys -- and good thing that we humans do since the 'relations between the sexes' aren't terribly savory amongst the said creatures. Just as medicine is a human social construct since bees, boa snakes, wolves, etc. don't know sh** about 'pathology' -- and good thing that we humans do since we don't just die out from typhoid any more. Now the biological FACTS of sexuality, the genitalia, the reproductive functions, the hormones, etc. themselves... that's a different matter."

These people are unbelievable. They managed to mess up the epistemological elegance of nominalism beyond recognition. Nominalism's assertion was not "reality is what we say it is;" it was "words are what we say they are; now reality, that's a different matter." Its advice was not to trust "words" blindly since we frequently associate our psychological (i.e. "subjective," "mental") states with "things" through them, so "facts" must take precedence in ascertaining Truth. These people turned it into child's play. You'd think kids grow out of the stage during which they think the world disappears when they close their eyes pretty early on. Obviously not so; not in everyone's case. Apparently, Wymmyn's Studies will safely revert you back to the cognitive maturity level of age 3.

And all this just to cater to girls' number one obsession: curiosity about men. To be wherever the boys are, to mingle with them, not to be excluded from their private spheres, etc., so that they can find that "fantastic guy of their dreams." Because God forbid, if they're not allowed into say men's dorms, they may not get to see those jocks' (ahem) equipments' size. They HAVE to be allowed into every nook and cranny of men's lives so that they can do their incessant SHOPPING.

Unbelievable. Absolutely staggering! This is pure CRUELTY.


-- JD

Chief Seattle said...

Pop is two and a half years old - my bet is this farce lasts until he's four at most. Kids very naturally organize themselves into girls vs. boys, and all this little one is going to have to do is look down to find out what side he's on.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Interesting how most comments here (and the mention of both songs) assume 'Pop' is a boy, and how terrible it will be when the male 'Pop' grows up.

That is a good point, but my impression is that the dominant meme is suppression of masculinity, not femininity. I.e., men are encouraged to get in touch with their 'feminine side.' You don't hear the converse, really.

Anonymous said...

"The pre-schools in Stockholm have been pushing gender neutrality for a while. I remember reading years ago about boys being forced to wear a dress one day each school year."

No crap? I didn't know. God.

Tell me: what is it that Swedes are after? Why would they do this? It isn't as if they have social rebellion/conflict; it isn't as if they've a heterogeneous population and they have to assuage the feelings of some group--- so why? Why would such a society feel the compunction to do this?

I mean if they were we, then I'd understand their craziness. After all, we have crazies to the left and crazies to the right, but why would Sweden do this?


I "get" that they are a society that promotes sameness (sadly as so many do, equating "same" with "equal"), but what are the forces that push them to this?

Do they fear competition that much?

Richard Hoste said...

Is it time to root for the jihadis yet?

Anonymous said...

"Tell me: what is it that Swedes are after? Why would they do this? It isn't as if they have social rebellion/conflict; it isn't as if they've a heterogeneous population and they have to assuage the feelings of some group--- so why? Why would such a society feel the compunction to do this?"

Because liberalism is a mental disorder.

Lloyd G. said...

Genitalia are a social construction.

James Kabala said...

The only word for this is evil.

Anonymous said...

In Malmö women now can swim in the public swimming halls topless

Richard Hoste said...

Here's another wonderful story from Sweden

Young women in Sweden, Germany and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating. This demand comes partly from concerns about hygiene -- avoiding the splash factor -- but, as Jasper Gerard reports in the English magazine The Spectator, "more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women." One argument is that if women can't do it, then men shouldn't either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is "a nasty macho gesture," suggestive of male violence.
A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already removed them. In Australia, an Internet survey shows that 17 percent of those polled think men ought to sit, while 70 percent believe they should be allowed to stand. Some Swedish women are pressuring their men to take a stand, so to speak. Yola, a 25-year-old Swedish trainee psychiatrist, says she dumps boyfriends who insist on standing. "What else can I do?," said her new boyfriend, Ingvar, who sits.


To answer my own question, yes, it is time to root for the jihadis.

Anonymous said...

Is it time to root for the jihadis yet?

Yes, how ironic to think that in 50 years Sweden will be religiously Muslim and culturally patriarchal.

Liberalism, socialism, cultural Marxism, deconstructionism, postwhateverism, or what ever you want to call it, is a modern Gnostic religion, which sees the human biology, the very reality of the human body, as evil. Evil because it is real and material and innate. What the new religion calls sin is the very acceptance of reality, biological or physical, rather than its misuse. Reality must be transformed, transgressed, subverted, converted, deconstructed, endlessly, relentlessly. This is the formula of Gnostic totalitarianism, both personal and public, driven by the world-denying will-to-power of the enlightened ones.

Both traditional Christianity and Darwinism are on the side of conservatism, because they are both anti-Gnostic. Gnosticism, powered by progressive Gnostic elites, is the terminal state of decaying civilizations.

Chief Seattle said...

While we're on the subject of gender relations, I've been re-reading the Iliad lately (ok, reading if the cliff notes don't count). My biggest impression on reading that book is that there were a *lot* of men killed in their prime, and the few that were left didn't have much issue finding women. Similar to Steve's theory of polygamous cultures leaving beta men to fight wars, this book shows that throughout much of history war (and dangerous occupations) left the remaining men free to be alpha men. Conversely, a prolonged, prosperous peacetime is a breeding ground for all things feminist, as woman gain relative power due to the surplus of men.

Antioco Dascalon said...

Liberal truth #1: Whether you are male or female is a social construct, with no biological basis.
Liberal truth #2: Whether you are gay or straight is a biological fact, with no social basis.

So, you have kindergarteners who "come out"as gay and are praised for it and you have pop. How is it, exactly, the case that what type of chromosome, what type of genitalia and what types of hormones you have is socially determined, but to whom you are attracted is biological?

It doesn't even make logical sense. If homosexuality means being attracted to same gender as oneself, and gender is socially constructed, it must mean that homosexuality is socially constructed. Pop couldn't be gay if Pop wanted to.

Sigh. I also vote for a Muslim Scandinavia.

Anonymous said...

Fom the link Gc provided on Malmo women:

"We don't define what bathing suits men should wear so it doesn't make much sense to do it for women. And besides, it's not unusual for men to have large breasts that resemble women's breasts," he said.

HAHAHA. Yeah, but what woman (or man) ever got turned on by fleshy man boobs?

From Richard Hoste about women who are demanding that men sit to urinate:

"One argument is that if women can't do it, then men shouldn't either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is "a nasty macho gesture," suggestive of male violence.
A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already removed them. In Australia, an Internet survey shows that 17 percent of those polled think men ought to sit,..."

Okay, this is more than disgusting! This is...is ....is infuriating! I'm a woman, but I can't stand women who act this way nor men who allow themselves to be emasculated.

When is this madness going to stop??????

Next, there'll be groups in the US demanding that men of one racial group must pee one way while another pees another way. Or, they'll argue that one group has a urinating advantage over the other. Then SCOTUS will have to rule on disparate impact!

And Ginsburg will tell white men they have to be castrated!

Anonymous said...

Man the Swedes are WIERD. No wonder their country is being overrun with muslims.

dr kill said...

I always sit to pee anyway. My doctor told me long ago not to lift anything heavy.

I've been progressive all this time and didn't know it.

Where's my government cheese?

Mr. Anon said...

If little "Pop" is a boy, then I'm sure a rewarding career in motel management is in his future.

http://www.legendsofhorror.org/images/bates/ppic1.jpg

Reg Cæsar said...

Like English, Swedish lacks a sex-neutral pronoun for the third person. How do they cope with that? --Baloo

Baloo, my hero for many years, I'm sad to say is wrong. Both English and Swedish have a third-person 'sex-neutral' pronoun: in Swedish, 'det'; in English, 'it'. (Note that 'it' has no sex, but does have a gender-- neuter.)

Indo-European languages started out with three genders, but many have collapsed those into two. But the Romance tongues combined the masculine and the neuter into a broader masculine gender, while Dutch and the Scandinavian tongues (except Icelandic) combined masculine and feminine into a 'common' gender, while retaining a neuter gender. (Celtic languages also have only masculine and feminine, but I don't know which absorbed the neuter nouns.)

German, Icelandic and the Slavic tongues have all three genders, as did/does Latin, and English. But English is very odd. We are conservative enough to keep all three, but radical enough to be the only major language with totally logical gender. All inanimate objects, and groups (save poetic usages such as ships, nations and planets) are automatically neuter.

Non-Indo-European Finnish has no gender. But they still have separate pronouns for animate and inanimate beings: 'hän' is 'he' or 'she', 'se' is 'it'. But when I was in that country in the '80s, it was common for kids to refer to one another as 'se'. Was that a fad?

Now a question for the Swedes still reading this. I'd read once that Swedish, or at least some dialects, has four genders: neuter, common, and archaic-but-surviving masculine and feminine ones as well.

Is there any truth to this? Does this family speak the European language with the most genders? Oh, the irony of it all...

CJ said...

New question for the next Swedish SAT.

Pop's new sibling should be named

A. Soda
B. Snap
C. Crackle
D. Mom

LBK said...

Not sure why, but there seems to be sort of a racial angle to these radical feminist excesses. That is, they seem to only occur among whites, and mainly among the whitest of the white - the peoples of northwestern Europe. Southern and eastern Europeans are less feminist, and non-whites even less.

This correlates with low levels of machismo in the northwestern Europeans (perhaps caused by lower levels of testosterone?). Southern and eastern Europeans are more macho, and non-whites even more so.

So there seems to be a cline, with northwestern Europe at the epicenter of high-feminism / low-maculinity.

Does anyone else have the same impression, and are there any theories to account for it? Does low melanin cause low testosterone?

Black Sea said...

"You've got your mother
in a whirl, she's not sure
if you're a boy or a girl . . . "

-David Bowie "Rebel, Rebel"

Steve Sailer said...

I'm not a big Bowie fan, but "Rebel Rebel" might be the best guitar riff ever.

Roostero said...

MATRIARCHY = DEATH OF CIVILIZATION

How many painful lessons does it take to punch through the modern left wing male skull the simple maxim that women will rule men (briefly -- before the onset of social collapse) unless men rule women.

Or to put it in more iSteve bio-fitness terms: Females relentless test males for dominance. This occurs throughout mammal species and most of the rest of nature. What the females in some of these Euro countries are now doing is publicly announcing the mass failure of the males to pass the test. The next step is for the females to shack up with males who can actually pass the test -- dominant immigrant men.

And as Roissy would say these ballbusting bitches will finally get a tingle when they are forced to submit to dominant men. Yes Mother Nature really is a sadistic bitch who gets off on punishing weak males.

It is amusing to hammer this uncomfortable reality into the squishy minds of nerdy-pasty-soft highly-educated Obama-voting birkenstock boys because they can't honestly dismiss the Darwinian dynamics of genetic fitness and competition in nature -- and when that grinds up against their sick guilty SWPL liberalism then the smoke really starts coming out of their ears.

Pete Townsend's real issue was that his daddy was a pussy or otherwise went AWOL. Whether Pete's father was in the house or not we know from those lyrics that Pete's father didn't have the balls to control his vicious anti-male wife.

robert61 said...

@Reg Caesar: The archaic masculine and feminine forms are folded into the common gender, so you use common gender pronouns for them. However, you can see their origins in their morphology and pluralization.

The word människa (person) is a typical feminine form, ending in -a and pluralized with -or. As a result, when you grandiosely embody all of humanity in a single abstract person (as in the English phrase "man's quest for meaning"), you have to call that person "she".

Swedish never went through the hysterical post-60s obsession with gender-neutral language we saw in the US, and I have sometimes wondered whether that generic "she" helped defuse the issue.

Richard Hoste said...

Not sure why, but there seems to be sort of a racial angle to these radical feminist excesses. That is, they seem to only occur among whites, and mainly among the whitest of the white - the peoples of northwestern Europe. Southern and eastern Europeans are less feminist, and non-whites even less.

That's what I always thought

Moxon’s theory of women being favored, like many things, makes sense in the Western world but not universally. He says about Middle Eastern culture

"The very different experience of Muslim and Hebraic cultures-where social practices are derived primarily from canonical text rather than the codification of biological imperatives-is the exception that proves the rule. Indeed a plausible argument could be made that the ‘patriarchal’ moral and legal codes deriving from the ‘religions of the book’ are an attempt to redress the imbalance revealed by the practice of ‘natural’ societies."

But doesn’t that seem backwards? Wouldn’t we expect that culture and religion would work with a group’s nature instead of “fixing imbalances?” Kevin MacDonald makes the case in his paper What Makes Western Culture Unique? that inherent racial differences are reflected in and reinforced by religious and cultural practices. Like with the question of race and IQ, it is more reasonable to assume differences than similarity in the kinds of societies we expect different groups to create. I wonder if Moxon really believes that Afghans or Saudis are inherently just as likely to fall for “The Woman Racket” and adopt society destroying feminism as Swedes are.

Racial differences can also help explain why no group of whites has reacted to incentives for irresponsibility the way black Americans have. In 2007 the black out-of-wedlock birth rate hit an all-time high of 72%. Africans are not only looser sexually but have different ideas about the obligations of men and women. Steve Sailer writes that in the West “feminists complain that men lock women out of the world of work. But in Africa, men have always ceded most of the world of work to women.” We see the same thing with regards to out-of-wedlock birth rate to a lesser extent with America’s growing Latino population. East Asians may have birth rates as low as the West but you still don’t see Western style feminism or rampant anti-men discrimination. We all share certain qualities going back to the primordial ooze but different environments have had plenty of time to tweak our differences since then. While there are pluses and minuses to each system, feminism seems to be like racial masochism: a curse that only affects whites.


Look up the MacDonald paper for the theory. Also see "What's Wrong with White Men."

dc watcher said...

"I think The Who had a song about this."

And the Who song reminds me of Jack Lemmon's frustrated refrain in
"Some Like It Hot."

dc watcher said...

What are you complaining about? For decades now I've been hearing about women who think breastfeeding lets men out of the loop and therefore they don't do it. Yes--this has happened. Others have dealt with this dilemma by fixing articial milk teats on dad's chest. A chubby black guy actually invented one for himself. He looked like a yuppie type.
Producing children -- boys I guess -- without women has been a longstanding male fantasy, showing up often in myth. And any number of movies and books have addressed the issue of pregnant men.
The moral of this story: the feminists are right. Men always have been intimidated by the birth process and the "power" it confers.
Even before all the goofier feminist (too much time, leisure, money and "power" on their hands) ideas, men still called women names (Roosteri) and called men names if they seemed at all dominated by them. Where does it stop Roosterio? Be careful with all that. That's one reason we got to this depressing place in the first place.
Since we're on the subject, please refer to "couvade" cultures. These are cultures where the man pretends (?) to have labor pains while his wife is giving birth. He goes to bed, exhibits great pain, and everyone around him gives him all the attention while his wife is ignored to the extent possible. One of the groups which practiced this is a Tamil group in southern India. I was once browsing in an old ethnology study of India written by a Brit who actually lived there and interviewed people, quoting them. When a Tamil man was asked why the men in his group got so much attention during the birth of the couple's child he said, "men are worth so much more than women, of course they should get all the attention."
I wish I had photocopied that page because it has to be seen to be believe.

simon said...

This is clearly abusive.

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of black single mothers that give their children outlandish names to try and compensate for the childs precieved lack of opportunities. They end up with either some pseudo name like Rowunda or Kameeka or a variant of an English or French name such as Sawaun or Shaunde. The kid ends up branded with a stupid name for the rest of his life. They ought to just stamp loser on his forehead.

Baloo said...

Thanks. I wasn't very clear. In English, we can't usually refer to a human being as 'it,' hence that pronoun isn't sex-neutral but neuter in most cases. (It seems that it can be used for infants sometimes, precisely because the sex isn't immediately obvious, I suppose.) If this phenomenon were happening among anglophones, the kid couldn't be called 'it.' (Where's Pop? — it's in the bathroom.) From what you say, tho, in Swedish it's possible to do so. But if it's not, I recommend the family use Newspeak instead. Much more compatible with their Weltanschauung.

Anyhow, Reg Caesar, I appreciate your linguistic input. I think discussions on this site would often benefit from it. We should always keep Orwell in mind when thinking about politics and language.

James Kabala said...

Roostero: I don't think the lyrics are autobiographical. According to Wikipedia they originated from one of Townshend's many discarded rock opera ideas.

Anonymous said...

LBK said:
"Not sure why, but there seems to be sort of a racial angle to these radical feminist excesses. That is, they seem to only occur among whites, and mainly among the whitest of the white - the peoples of northwestern Europe. Southern and eastern Europeans are less feminist, and non-whites even less.

This correlates with low levels of machismo in the northwestern Europeans (perhaps caused by lower levels of testosterone?). Southern and eastern Europeans are more macho, and non-whites even more so.

So there seems to be a cline, with northwestern Europe at the epicenter of high-feminism / low-maculinity.

Does anyone else have the same impression, and are there any theories to account for it? Does low melanin cause low testosterone?"

I wonder why the same phenomenon does not seem to affect East Asian men, who supposedly also have low testosterone. They seem to do a much better job of keeping their women in check than their Northern European counterparts do.

Daniellesbian said...

i always thought "I'm a Boy" was about mismatched gender roles in general, with no bio or social determinist message apparent. Like Bowie's "Rebel, Rebel" - ambiguous, i.e, could just as easily be a tomboy's plaint. Maybe I'm wrong...

David Davenport said...

Maybe the child was born with a defect that made it impossible to say what the gender is, and the parents are waiting until the child is old enough to decide.

Do a Google search on pop singer Lady GaGa, who is currently getting a big marketing push.

Whiskey said...

Women always do this sort of thing. And it's rampant in Southern European nations as well. Spain, has a female Defense Minister who just gave birth. Italy is prone to all sorts of feminist nonsense as is France. Greece as well. Sweden may take it a bit farther, but not much.

Yes, women are hypergamous and want dominating, higher status men. Equality only makes women's natural hatred for beta men far worse. Too much social power for women produces this nonsense (i.e. women have the demographic majority and block vote).

The reverse, i.e. Islam, is terrible in different ways (mostly social failures due to strife internally caused by polygamy).

The Sandra Tsing Loh article on marriage notes that "enlightened Swedish Women" are seeking out dominating Muslim men for marriage because they wish to submit, just as Roissy predicts.

[The Vikings were feared because unlike other Europeans, they used the sea as a highway, their boats were far superior to any technology Dark Ages Europeans had. Thus the Vikings could be anywhere there was a foot or two of water, at any time, raiding.]

Anonymous said...

DC Watcher is right. And this is the answer to the giant hole left in patriarchy theory - if patriarchy is necessary to civilization (as it obviously it is) - then how come the soft patriarchies of the West are so much more successful than the hard, abusive patriarchies of other civilizations? Or conversely, why is technological progress and material wealth correlated so closely with the condition of women?

The answer is that the soft patriarchies bother to get consent from women. The hard patriarchies just beat them up.

Anonymous said...

"This correlates with low levels of machismo in the northwestern Europeans (perhaps caused by lower levels of testosterone?)."

Well, you have to think of what's left of us, after centuries of technology being used in utterly devastating war against each other. You can't compare the German today, for instance, to the German of 1935. You can't compare the Southern man today to the one of 1860.

Richard Hoste said...

"I wonder why the same phenomenon does not seem to affect East Asian men, who supposedly also have low testosterone. They seem to do a much better job of keeping their women in check than their Northern European counterparts do."

Their women have less testosterone too. It takes pussy men and loud mouth feminist to make it work. A society made up of Asian men and white females would probably make Sweden look like Iraq!

Another theory is that with races intermingling the gender within each race that is less socially valued becomes embittered at the more desirable one. So among blacks you get the sistahs complaining about rich and high status blacks marrying whites women, Asian men bitter about white guys taking Asian women and white men frustrated by white females who have more options than anybody.

These natural imbalances are a good case for racial separation. In the end, Islam is more adaptive than anything else. I suspect on the sexual free market Arab/Persian females would be more desired than their male counterparts so Middle Eastern men should do whatever it takes to resist globalization and secularism.

dc watcher said...

yeah. The soft patriarchies are in some ways the most truly egalitarian systems to date. Never thought I'd say that. Women DO have an innate reason to feel important, even superior. Not personally, necessariy, but important as a species. "Species" is probably the wrong word for half the gender entity, but that's the thought. Men--well, it depends. They (or at least a certain element among men) have created and largely maintain the whole physical and organizational structure in which we exist.
Feminists have had some good points along the years. We are living in the end times--not in a religious sense, but in a sociological sense. All that has passed both good and evil, must be addressed and so it has been. However, the job of ensuring legal equality is done. If either gender feels slighted they can take it to the courts.
I actually believe these Euro fems are desperate for worthy causes and that's dangerous because in rich countries you can just make them up. They do actually have a true worthy cause, but it involves protecting their survival as the founding race of the modern world, not worrying about pink or blue booties for babies many of them will never have anyway.

Lucius Vorenus said...

Uh, is that supposed to be "Daniel Lesbian" or "Danielle Lesbian" ?!?

LBK said...

"Another theory is that with races intermingling the gender within each race that is less socially valued becomes embittered at the more desirable one."

Which leads to yet another theory. Back when the races were geographically isolated, the nordic men may have been passive but the nordic women were even more so, so the soft patriarchy prevailed.

Then came the era of easy travel, and people from more aggressive southern races started moving to the northern countries. These more aggressive women demanded rights and power and of course the soft nordic men capitulated and the result is the mess we have now.

jaakkeli said...

Non-Indo-European Finnish has no gender. But they still have separate pronouns for animate and inanimate beings: 'hän' is 'he' or 'she', 'se' is 'it'. But when I was in that country in the '80s, it was common for kids to refer to one another as 'se'. Was that a fad?

No, it's more the other way. In spoken Finnish just about everyone uses only "se". "Hän" is usually only used in formal language, mainly in written word. It appears to have been this way for as long as we have records of spoken word, way before there were hippies.

"Hän" and the whole distinction might be an Indo-European borrowing. It feels pretty contrived.

Hanafi Moslems said...

To answer my own question, yes, it is time to root for the jihadis.

The first time I ever heard about men being forced to sit down to urinate was during the Hanafi Moslem hostage taking in Washington DC.

dc watcher said...

"Anonymous said...
@dc watcher: I like the attitude of those Tamils. Do they accept immigrants?"

I don't know. You could always write to the Indian embassy. A man could certainly feel like a prince among them. Certain tribes are/were also known for female infanticide by slow poisoning (by mom) over a 3 day period with a lethal milky substance from local leaves.. It was a slow death but probably better then the raw wheat seeds used in the north which kill by cutting the baby's esophagus.
Charming customs. Of course there are loads of Indian ladies as liberated as any over here. Still, the weirdest "feminism" always comes from those who need it the least.
Be careful though. Kerala in southern India is mildly matriarchal traditionally, and you don't want to end up among them, as they are the most progressive people in India.

Anonymous said...

by the way guys. The WHO song is not autobiographical. Pete Townshend got on well with his parents and his mom was among his greatest supporters. In fact, I distinctly remember him metaphorically patting them on the backs in a Life interview where he complimented them on their open mindedness. He'd had his first "screw" in their house (while they were away), and he knew they were as comfortable with the fact as he appeared to be.

Another thing. Weird sects that suppress sexual urges, sometimes in drastic ways and unnatural ways, were a big deal in Russia just before the Revolution. But they had a history there. Lunatics like the Swedes in question have always been around. It's just that they were considered non-mainstream and loony.

David Davenport said...

... then how come the soft patriarchies of the West are so much more successful than the hard, abusive patriarchies of other civilizations ....?

Because, Ma'am:

(a) "Westerners" are naturally better and smarter than others;

(b) Soft patriarchies have only been around in the West for a couple of generations, and the softies may not last for another generation.

Unknown said...

I always sit to pee anyway. My doctor told me long ago not to lift anything heavy.

Yeah but the water in that bowl is COLD.

Anonymous said...

LBK said...
"Which leads to yet another theory. Back when the races were geographically isolated, the nordic men may have been passive but the nordic women were even more so, so the soft patriarchy prevailed.

Then came the era of easy travel, and people from more aggressive southern races started moving to the northern countries. These more aggressive women demanded rights and power and of course the soft nordic men capitulated and the result is the mess we have now."

Nordic men are not feminine compared to other men. Trust me, Nordic men are tougher than many immigrant males from places like India and Sri Lanka, who look like pregnant women in front of the local men. If Nordic men lacked testostrone explain how they have dominated the Strongmen competitions. You need a lot of testostrone to build those muscles.

I think the reason the Vikings turned to 'this' is because of the Nordic or general Northern European tendency to take ideologies too seriously. And the ideology I am about to talk about is not 60's hippy revolution but Christianity which started as a similar hippy revolution of it's time. The fact is below the civilized church Christianity of family values, hierarchy etc... (which are European pagan values superimposed on the base of Christianity) lies the true Christianity of the essenes of Israel which includes hatred for sex, hatred for life, a desire to turn everybody away from life and to turn people into sexless, sinless angels. The Ethiopians and the Italians did not take that aspect too seriously, the Northern Europeans did. Protestantism was an attempt to go back towards this true base Christianity (the only positive thing Protestantism did was allow marriage of the priestly class). No wonder the Nordic nations are Evangelical Lutherans. In several Quaker Protestant groups in America, men and women were encouraged to live together without sex and living as if there was no gender. That is exactly how the essenes of Israel lived. It is the Protestant nations which saw the rise of feminism, those nations where the males were taught that sex was an necessary sin.
So today’s Scandinavians are the result of about eight centuries of Christian nonsense taken too seriously by the descendants of those brave Vikings.

Anonymous said...

LBK said...
"Then came the era of easy travel, and people from more aggressive southern races started moving to the northern countries. These more aggressive women demanded rights and power and of course the soft nordic men capitulated and the result is the mess we have now."

Wrong again, historically and even pre-historically it is the Northern men from Northern Europe and North East Asia who moved south and took the southern women thus spreading genes of high IQ. There have been more cases of northerners like the Mongols, Germanics and Vikings defeating southerners and taking their babes than the other way round. It is because of this the Chinese built the great Wall to the North and not the South and Rome fell to the Germanics but not to the Carthaginians.
It is because places like Africa (below Ethiopia) and Papua New Guinea were too isolated for those Northerner males invading and impregnating the local women, that the IQ there is so low. Had they Northerner males invaded and mated there in the remote past, Southern Africa and Papua New Guinea would have had IQs in the Arab/ Malay (medium IQ) range.

Lampan said...

I'm surprised by how conservative you all seem to be. Why would the child be harmed by this? I really don't see how NOT forcing something upon a child could be bad. It's not like they're preventing the child to be or do something, they just don't want other people to treat the child in typical male or female way.

As for you who draw parallels between this case and David Reimer... Please. Have you even read the article?
David Reimer was lied to and practically forced to act like a typical girl when he was in fact a boy.
Of course it ended badly.

This "Pop" however, is not being forced to do anything. Nor prohibited to do things.
The parents simply choose to have an open mind and treat the child as a child, instead of treating it like a boy or a girl.