Chet's view of our new society and politics in America.

Arnold & Male Sexuality

2011-05-23T13:31:00.000-05:00

Every marriage runs the risk of infidelity because that is the innate, biological nature of men’s sexuality.

As a society, we refuse to acknowledge the truth about human sexuality. As a result, we are responsible for maximizing the emotional pain wives and children suffer when the men they love are caught having sex outside their marriages. Why? Because we continue to believe that shaming and humiliating men like Arnold Schwarzenegger will stop other men from behaving in the same manner. I hate to tell you folks: It’s not working. The fact is, there’s a burning sexual instinct pulsating inside most viral, heterosexual men to pursue strange sex whether they are married or not; and, until our culture acknowledges that biological truth and decides to begin the dialogue from that standpoint, we will be complicit in perpetrating the emotional upheaval caused by what is a naturally occurring, human sexual instinct.

Our only power in a situation that is dictated by Mother Nature is to acknowledge its reality, study it to understand it and to change our response to it. We can’t stop tornadoes by condemning them but we can work on understanding them to minimize their impact. Why don’t we do the same for human sexuality? Why do we insist on keep ourselves trapped in the dark ages?

BOYS TO MEN...RITES OF PASSAGE: BOYS TO MEN…RITES OF PASSAGE

2011-04-30T00:09:00.000-05:00

BOYS TO MEN...RITES OF PASSAGE: BOYS TO MEN…RITES OF PASSAGE: "We all remember Ralphie in A Christmas Story being put off on his request for a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas and the words of admonishment..."

More Working Women than Men have College Degrees.

2011-04-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

Census Bureau: more working women than men have college degrees

By Joe McKendrick | April 28, 2011, 12:12 PM PDT

An eye-opening shift just reported by the Census Bureau is the fact that more women than men in the US workforce now have at least a bachelor’s degree.
Among the employed population 25 and older, 37% of women had attained a bachelor’s degree or more as of 2010, compared with 35% of men, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Among all adults 25 and older (including not only working, but also retired and unemployed) the number is even — 30% of both men and women hold degrees.
The data come from tabulations on Educational Attainment in the United States: 2010 and not only examine gender differences in attainment but also provide the most detailed information on years of school completed ever presented by the Census Bureau, showing for each level of attainment exactly how many years of education adults have.
Women also have gained an edge in post-graduate education. More women now hold masters’ degrees — 8.3 million versus 6.9 million men in the US. More men still hold professional degrees (1.9 million versus 1.2 million women), as well as doctoral degrees (1.8 million versus 1 million women).
If you ever have a chance to peruse a college yearbook from the 1950s, you will see a sea of male faces on the pages. Even in the last census year, 2000, the Census Bureau reported that men still exhibited higher levels of college degrees. Among people 25 years or older in 2000, 26% of men had bachelor’s degrees or more, compared with 23% of women. (Actually, it’s impressive that both these numbers rose to 30% within the past decade.)
Still, there are still a large number of people that did not finish school for one reason or another. In 2010, 36% of the nation’s population 25 and older left school before obtaining a degree. This includes 15% percent of the population that didn’t earn a regular high school diploma. An even greater share of the 25-and-older population — 17% — attended some college but left before receiving a degree. At the graduate school level, 4% of the population left before obtaining an advanced degree.
Racial disparities also exist in terms of educational attainment, the Census Bureau reports. More than half (52%) of Asians 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or more, higher than the level for non-Hispanic whites (33%), African Americans (20%) and Hispanics (14%).

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A Guide to Having the Best Vagina in Town :

2011-04-26T15:06:00.002-05:00

A Guide to Having the Best Vagina in Town
Check this out and then go on Amazon and check out Richard Nocera's book: Women Have All the Vaginas...Why Men do What They Do. Or you can read an excerpt on my blog: chetsviewofournewsociety.blogspot.com

OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

2011-04-24T21:42:00.003-05:00

In 1961 and 1962, a series of experiments were carried out at Yale University. Volunteers were paid a small sum to participate in what they understood would be 'a study of memory and learning'. In most of the experiments, a white-coated experimenter took charge of two of the volunteers, one of which was given the role of 'teacher' and the other 'learner'. The learner was told he had to remember lists of word pairs, and if he couldn't recall them, the teacher was asked to give the person, who was strapped into a chair, a small electric shock. With each incorrect answer, the voltage rose, and the teacher was forced to watch as the learner moved from small grunts of discomfort to screams of agony.
What the teacher didn't know was that there was actually no current running between his control box and the learner's chair, and that the volunteer was in fact an actor who is only pretending to get painful shocks. The real focus of the experiment was not the 'victim', but the reactions of the teacher pressing the buttons. How would they cope with administering greater and greater pain to a defenseless human being?
The Milgram experiment is one of the most famous in psychology, written up in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority. Here we take a look at what actually happened and why the results are important.

Expectations and reality

If you are like most people, you would expect that at the first sign of genuine pain on the part of the person being shocked, you would want the experiment halted. After all, it is only an experiment. This is the response Milgram got when, separate to the actual experiments, he surveyed a range of people (psychiatrists, graduate students, psychology academics, middle-class adults) on how they believed the subjects would react in these circumstances. Most predicted that the subjects would not give shocks beyond the point where the other subject asked to be freed. These expectations were entirely in line with Milgram's own. But what actually happened?
Most subjects were very stressed by the experiment, and protested to the experimenter that the person in the chair should not have to take any more. The logical next step would be then demand that the experiment be terminated.
In reality, this rarely happened.
Despite their reservations, most people continued to follow the orders of the experimenter and inflict progressively greater shocks. Indeed, as Milgram notes, “...a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator”. This is even when they could hear the cries of the other subject, and even when that person pleaded to be let out of the experiment.

How we cope with a bad conscience

Milgram’s experiments have caused controversy over the years; many people are simply unwilling to accept that normal human beings would act like this. Many scientists have tried to find holes in the methodology, but the experiment has been replicated around the world with similar outcomes. As Milgram notes, the results astonish people. They want to believe that the subjects that volunteered are sadistic monsters. However, he made sure the subjects covered a range of social classes and professions, were 'normal' people put in unusual circumstances.
Why don't the subjects administering the 'shocks' get guilty and just opt out of the experiment? Milgram is careful to point out that most of his subjects knew that what they were doing was not right. They hated giving the shocks, especially when the victim was objecting to them. Yet even though they thought the experiment cruel or senseless, most were not able to extract themselves from it. Instead they developed coping mechanisms to justify what they were doing. These included:

Getting absorbed in the technical side of the experiment. People have a strong desire to be competent in their work. The experiment and its successful implementation became more important than the welfare of the people involved.
Transferring moral responsibility for the experiment to its leader. This is the common “I was just following orders” defense found in any war crimes trial. The moral sense or conscience of the subject is not lost, but is transformed into a wish to please the boss or leader.
Choosing to believe that their actions need to be done as part of a larger, worthy cause. Where in the past wars have been waged over religion or political ideology, in this case the cause was Science.
Devaluing the person who is receiving the shocks: ‘if this person is dumb enough not to be able to remember the word pairs, they deserve to be punished’. Such impugning of intelligence or character is commonly used by tyrants to encourage followers to get rid of whole groups of people. They are not worth much, the thinking goes, so who really cares if they are eliminated? The world will be a better place.

Perhaps the most surprising of the above is Milgram's observation that the subject's sense of morality does not disappear, but is reoriented, so that they feel duty and loyalty not to those they are harming but to the person giving the orders. The subject is not able to extract themselves from the situation because – amazingly – it would be impolite to go against the wishes of the experimenter. The subject feels they have agreed to do the experiment, so to pull out would make them appear as a promise-breaker.

The desire to please authority is seemingly more powerful than the moral force of the other volunteer's cries. When the subject does voice opposition to what is going on, he or she typically couches it in the most deferential terms – as Milgram described one subject: “He thinks he is killing someone, yet he uses the language of the tea table.”

From individual to 'agent'

Why are we like this? Milgram observed that the tendency of human beings to obey authority evolved for simple survival purposes. There had to be leaders and followers and hierarchies in order to get things done. Man is a communal animal, and does not want to rock the boat. Worse even than the bad conscience of harming others who are defenseless, it seems, is the fear of being isolated.

Most of us are inculcated from very young that it is wrong to hurt others needlessly, yet
we spend the first twenty years of our life being told what to do, so we get used to obeying authority. The experiments threw subjects right into the middle of this. Should they 'be good' in the sense of not harming, or 'be good' in the sense of doing what they're told? Most subjects chose the latter – suggesting our brain is hardwired to accept authority above all else.

The natural impulse not to harm others is dramatically altered when a person is put into a hierarchy structure. On our own we take full responsibility for what we do and consider ourselves autonomous, but once in a system or hierarchy we are more than willing to give over that responsibility to someone else. We stop being ourselves, and instead become an 'agent' for someone or something else.

How it becomes easy to kill

Milgram was influenced by the story of Adolf Eichmann, whose job it was to actually engineer the death of six million Jews under Hitler. Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem had argued that Eichmann was not really a psychopath, but an obedient bureaucrat whose distance from the actual death camps allowed him to order the atrocities in the name of some higher goal. Milgram's experiments confirmed the truth of Arendt's idea of the 'banality of evil' - that is, humans are not inherently cruel, but become so when cruelty is demanded by authority. This was the main lesson of his study: that “...ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

Obedience to Authority can make for painful reading, especially the transcript of an interview with an American soldier who participated in the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam. Milgram concluded that there was such a thing as inherent psychopathy, or 'evil', but that it was statistically not common. His alarm was more about your average person (his experiments include women too, who showed almost no difference in obedience to men) if taken off the street and put into the right conditions, can do terrible things to other people – and not feel too bad about it.

This, Milgram notes, is the purpose of military training. The trainee soldier is put in an environment separate from normal society and its moral niceties and instead is made to think in terms of 'the enemy'. He or she is instilled with: a love of 'duty'; the belief that they are fighting for a great cause; and a tremendous fear of disobeying orders: “Although its ostensible purpose is to provide the recruit with military skills, its fundamental aim is to break down any residues of individuality and selfhood.” The trainee soldier is made to become an agent for a cause, rather than a freethinking individual, and herein lies his or her vulnerability to dreadful actions. Other people stop being human beings, and become 'collateral damage'.

The ability to disobey

What makes one person able to disobey authority, while the rest cannot? Disobedience is difficult. Subjects generally feel their allegiance is to the experiment and experimenter; only a few are able to break this feeling and put the person suffering in the chair above the authority system. There is a big gap, Milgram noticed, between protesting that harm that was being done (which nearly all subjects did), and actually refusing to go on altogether. Yet this is the leap that is made by those few who do disobey authority on ethical or moral grounds. They assert their individual beliefs despite the situation, whereas most of us bend to the situation. It is the difference between a hero who is willing to risk their own life to save others - and an Eichmann.
Culture has taught us how to obey authority, Milgram remarks, but not how to disobey authority that is morally reprehensible.

Final comments

Obedience To Authority seems to give little comfort about human nature. Because we evolved in clear social hierarchies over thousands of years, part of our brain wiring makes us want us to obey people above us. Yet it is only through knowledge of this strong tendency that we can avoid getting ourselves into situations in which we might do evil.
Every ideology requires a lot of obedient people to act in its name, and in the case of Milgram's experiment, the ideology that awed subjects was not religion or communism or a charismatic ruler. Apparently, people will do things in the name of science in the same way the Spanish Inquisitors tortured people in the name of God. Have a big enough 'cause', and it is easy to see how giving pain to another living thing can be justified without too much difficulty.
That our need to be obedient frequently overrides previous education or conditioning towards compassion, ethics or moral precepts would suggest that the cherished idea of human free will is a myth. On the other hand, Milgram's descriptions of people who did manage to say 'no' to further shocks should give us all hope for how we might act in a similar situation. It may be part of our heritage to obey authority mindlessly, but it is also in our natures to set aside ideology if it means causing pain, and to be willing to put a person above a system.
Milgram's experiments might have been less well-known were it not for the fact that Obedience To Authority is a gripping work of scientific literature. This is a book that anyone interested in how the mind works should have in their library. The genocide in Rwanda, the massacre at Srebrinica, and the affronts to human dignity at Abu Ghraib Prison are all illuminated and partially explained by its insights.

Stanley Milgram

Born in New York City in 1933, Milgram graduated from high school in 1950 and earned a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1954. He majored in Political Science, but decided he was more interested in psychology and took summer courses in the subject in order to be accepted into a doctoral program at Harvard. His PhD was taken under the supervision of eminent psychologist Gordon Allport, on the subject of why people conform. He worked with Solomon Asch at Princeton University, who developed his famous experiments in social conformity. Both were strong influences.
Other areas of research included why people are willing to give up their seats on public transport, the idea of 'six degrees of separation', and aggression and non-verbal communication. Milgram also made documentary films, including “Obedience” on the Yale experiments, and “The City and Self” on the impact of city living on behavior. For more information, read Thomas Blass's The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (2004)
Milgram died in New York in 1984, aged 51.

Women Own All the Vaginas and Why Men do What They do.

2011-04-14T17:59:00.001-05:00

God knows I love controversy so I am going to take on the injustices perpetrated upon men by our society and the favoring of women. I am the first to admit we men have brought this on ourselves by not taking inventory of who we are and why we are the way we are. Compared to women tackling and addressing their issues, we are non-starters.
A good deal of what I will post will come from the writings of noted author, Richard Nocera and his take on Why Men Do What They Do from his book, Women Own All the Vaginas. Here is a sampling of his insights:
Could there ever be a Sex in the City for men too? No way! Men's sexuality would never be celebrated with raised glasses of champaigne in chic restaurants with millions of admiring men proudly watching their heroes toast each other's sexual conquests. In fact, it is just the opposite. Men's sexuality is routinely mocked, ridiculed, and demonized--degrading attitudes women would never tolerate. Consider this: How would our society react if men suddenly started keeping artificial vaginas by their beds, the way women keep vibrating artificial penises next to theirs? It would be seen as just one more indication of how sexually sick men really are. Women as a gender are headed somewhere. They are moving forward; they're improving themselves. Where are men headed? We're headed nowhere. No one is leading the charge to encourage men to move forward and improve their lives. What would forward movement even look like for men? Here's something to contemplate: If men don't improve themselves, we'll be lucky in twenty five years if women keep us around as pets. Chuckle now, but this could happen because no one of prominence is helping guide men to a richer, more fulfilling, and happier life. MEN HAVE NO OPRAH...but more on that and this topic tomorrow.

What's worse is that men don't think for a minute they need an Oprah. Men believe that needing an Oprah would mean they're needy and weak. Most men would say, "What the hell do we need Oprah for? We're the ones running the world. Aren't we?"

Not everyone loves Oprah, but name one man who helps men have a more meaningful life the way Oprah helps women. Rush Limbaugh? Bill O'Reilly? Dr. Phil? I don't think so.

Men need an Oprah because by nature, human beings are meant to evolve and improve their lives; and since we can, we should! Life is a process, not an end result. Is there anything men have consciously changed for themselves in the last fifty years? Sure, we've become better fathers to our children but that's because our wives have pretty much demanded it and many of our fathers were less than ideal. The truth is men have become participants in, rather than creators of, their lives. The bottom line is that men are too preoccupied with fulfilling the male agenda to pause long enough to get off their hamster wheels and seriously contemplate what it means to be born male in America. The enormous demands placed on men to compete, provide, and succeed have left men too distracted to be aware of what they truly want and need. I know this isn't true of all men, but I am not writing about individual men. I am writing about men as a gender group.

Wage Gap Between Men and Women has Evaporated.

2011-04-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.

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Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.
Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.

MEN TAKE SERIOUS NOTE ABOUT HOW THE WORLD VIEWS US

2011-04-06T08:48:00.001-05:00

The nation rightly worries about the fiscal crisis and its ramifications for domestic economic stability. We also worry about the Obama Administration’s fumbling role in international affairs and what this portends for the future of U.S. foreign relationships and America’s position and respect around the world. Though less obvious, but nonetheless significant, is a sleeper issue: we haven’t come to terms with the crisis of modern male immaturity. Here is another instance of an oft-neglected axiom: what seems in the moment to be urgent is often not important, and what is important frequently does not seem urgent.
Researchers have produced extensive documentation, and writers like historian Gary Cross (“Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity”), have explored the “sea change that has taken place in the conception of manhood over the past three-quarters of a century.” Other authors — Guy Garcia and Michael Kimmel, to name two — look at the “decline of man” and the “perilous world” of the American male. Kathleen Parker published a plea for America to Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care; Kay Hymowitz’s, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, was just released.
While I have been thinking about this issue since my days as a college professor and university academic dean, I began writing about it back in 2005 with the publication of “Today’s New Girly Men” in WorldNetDaily. More recently, I wrote “The Crisis of the Disappearing Educated Male,” in American Thinker. Further, my book, Children at Risk: The Precarious State of Children’s Well-Being in America, details all the ways that children (and women) are harmed when, as is so often the case today, many men are more willing to impregnate a woman than to be a present and involved husband and father.
Clearly, awareness is building that, as Kay Hymowitz said, “Today’s pre-adults have been wait-listed for adulthood.” Hymowitz believes that we are in the middle of a “momentous sociological development.” The crisis of the American male is a “major demographic event” where, as Erick Erikson explained, young men between childhood and adulthood experience unprecedented “role confusion, emotional turmoil and identity conflict.”
For those just becoming aware of this emerging crisis, here are what I believe are the three major cultural trends that stunt young men’s maturity.

Decline in Marriage: Historically, marriage has been integral to American life; as the central institution of society, marriage was the typical step forward into adulthood. Yet the marriage rate today is less than half the level of 1969. Fewer people are getting married, and they are waiting longer to get married. The Washington Post reported, “In 1940, less than 8 percent of all households consisted of people living alone. Now more than a quarter do.” A majority of people (66 percent) still live as a married couple family, but the proportion of married Americans continues to decline to levels never before seen. We must recognize that with so many women willing to engage in sex without marriage, males have a limited incentive to “man up” — to be motivated and have a reason to accept the admittedly demanding responsibilities of adulthood.
Decline in Education: More and more men are lagging behind women in educational attainment and thus lack the credentials to compete in the marketplace. Take college graduation: 34 percent of women (ages 25 to 34) have earned degrees compared to 27 percent of men. This fact alone leads to fewer men in graduate schools and in the high prestige and high salaried jobs. Even in areas typically dominated by men —like law, medicine, and business — women are excelling and their numbers and proportion are growing in comparison to men. Clearly, in our eagerness to level the playing field for women we have seriously destabilized the balance between the sexes to the detriment of males. Kathleen Parker was right when she challenged our culture to “save the males.” As Christina Hoff Sommers said in her book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, the fact that “women are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts” is likely to create a “lot of social problems;” the lack of enough well-educated men does not “bode well” for anyone, particularly the growing numbers of sophisticated women.
Unclear Social Identity: Increasingly, men are finding their identity in their hobbies (fishing, hunting, racing, sports, etc.) instead of their careers (where they are falling behind women in achievement and status) or their roles as family providers and protectors — both categories scorned by feminists. Previous generations of men had clearly identifiable roles and opportunities to show their physical prowess and courage — through providing for and protecting their wives and families both at home and against the nation’s enemies at war. Men knew that they were needed; today, young women are told that they “don’t need a man” for anything. Males used to become “men” when they “took a wife” and assumed adult responsibilities. Now, instead of serious, dignified, and decisive male role models in the movies — like Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper — males today are more likely, as Kay Hymowitz observes, to identify with and to emulate “overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell and Seth Rogen.”
As a society, we must revive those values and ideals that provided strong incentives for young men to pass the tests of adulthood. The first steps of a solution are quite simple: we must begin by (1) scorning and ostracizing those men, no matter how rich and famous, who fail to take up the responsibilities of being a husband when they father a child and (2) demanding that our public school teachers unlearn those pernicious myths absorbed in college and graduate school and start re-creating an environment, starting in kindergarten, that respects masculine traits and behaviors: that is to say, stop demanding that little boys act like little girls and punishing or medicating them for acting like little boys. Less than this is, on the one hand, to continue to accept what is unacceptable, and on the other to continue to discriminate against our sons and brothers.
We will not succeed in making a new start until we stamp out the myth that young women can do just as well without a man. Unless we change that thinking, our society will be the poorer. As long as the male half of the population is disparaged, denigrated, and infantilized, they will lack the motivation to “man up” and become responsible and accomplished men.