Meet James Taranto

He works for the Wall Street Journal and represents the other main stream in anti-feminists thinking.  The first one is based on guy-religions, the second one is based on the more religious type of evolutionary psychology.  Taranto is within the latter camp.

Now he tells us that there is a war against men, specifically against male sexuality.  That he doesn't define that concept makes it hard to say what he means by the whole thing.  It has something to do with the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s, which was all a big mistake, as far as our James is concerned.  Probably because of that evolutionary stuff in his religion.

In this video Taranto discusses one sexual abuse case from the military.  It's clever work.  He dissects one case which we are to take as a general example of how such things go*. 



At the end of the video, Taranto blames women's sexual freedom for the war on men.  At least that's how I interpret his statement, and that makes my head hurt.  Is he saying that if women get drunk and enter a car with a man they have only themselves to blame for what happens next?  Would there be no such war on men if we had all women in burqas or locked up in their homes?  But how would that stop the war on male sexuality?  What does he mean by men's sexuality?

I don't intend that fuzzy paragraph as sarcasm, mostly.  I just wish to point out that Taranto's arguments are unclear, that deep beneath the surface there must lurk some sort of a hidden and menacing assumption about violence and sex, entitlement to sex, our immutably biological urges and other similar stuff.





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*That's a  common trick in persuasive writing of the kind which doesn't care about averages and statistics and so on.   For instance, you pick either Einstein or Hitler as your specimen guy, and either Mother Theresa or Britney Spears as your specimen gal, and then you let your words fly, to prove something about whole genders.

Note that this is not meant as a statement about the case Taranto discusses.  I haven't read the material to judge his arguments about Lieutenant General Helms as such.  The point is that  one case is not proof of the general tendencies.