I have to admit, I sometimes wonder if they were all raised by Harry Harlow’s fake mothers made of chicken wire and cotton, because they sure seem to be lacking in something. This guy at the Federalist, Hans Fiene, has an essay that reads like something from an alien.
The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.
We do not have a problem of underpopulation — we’re doing just fine, maybe growing too fast for our environment. The “demographic shift” is merely the typical natural change in a population over time. There was an era when there were relatively few Irish in North America, and now there were lots of people of Irish descent. It wasn’t a tsunami, it didn’t cripple us. It’ll be the same with an increase in the proportion of Latin and black families — we’ll be fine. There is a kind of demographic tsunami that would be destructive, like the one that overwhelmed the Indian population of this continent, but there’s no threat of that. Maybe Mr Fiene has a guilty conscience?
Maybe the real problem is his use of the word “us” — it doesn’t seem to have the same inclusive meaning to him that it does to me. He’s using the racist “us”, referring to only people with his skin color.
What is his solution to the “tsunami”? He wants “us”, you know, the white “us”, to have more children than the brown “them”. How does he hope to do that?
Perhaps I’m overstating the danger a bit, but the point remains: Americans need to raise our sagging birth rates. One of the best ways we can do so is by reversing the trend of Americans waiting longer to get married. So, apart from tearing down America’s institutions of higher education, which tend to slow down the recitation of wedding vows, how do we do that? It’s quite simple. We tear down the Friend Zone.
But we Americans don’t have a sagging birth rate…oh, wait, he’s using the racist version of “Americans”, that doesn’t include every American citizen.
I’m relieved that he’s not advocating tearing down universities, but his reasoning is weird. Having children a little later is a fine idea, especially since child-rearing is a difficult and important job that would benefit from a little more emotional and intellectual maturity (trust me, I work with 18-22 year olds all the time, and there’s a huge amount of growth in that span. Because someone is physically capable of getting pregnant at 14 does not necessarily mean they’re mature enough to raise them well…but then, if your vision of parenting is chicken wire and cloth, you may not get that).
Instead, he thinks we need to tear down the Friend Zone. There’s that strange, alien “we” again — now it seems to exclude women. “We” White Men are going to insist that if “You” Women want to have dinner with us, you must also consent to be impregnated.
Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.
Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration. Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.
Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed. For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.
I can simplify that rule a lot. Don’t be friends with Hans Fiene, or anyone like Hans. Hans needs to realize, though, that this isn’t a binary situation, where one is either friends with Hans, or is fucking Hans–there is the possibility of accepting neither.
He goes on and on about his fantasy of a world where women either have sex with him or obligingly vanish into the woodwork, never to speak to him again, but I think we get the message. Hans Fiene does not consider women or minorities to be fully human, and not part of his “us”.
Hans is a Lutheran pastor, by the way.
His mother was probably just fine. He just thought she was made of chicken wire.
There’s just no words…
Ok. I’m wrong. Yes, there are words. This guys sounds like the biggest douchecanoe that ever rode a canoe. He sounds like someone who is a whiny little weiner who doesn’t have a real girlfriend because he looks at them as conquests or objects to be impregnated. That’s not how you get the girl, bro. If she doesn’t want you, why not find someone else?
Prima facie example of the over rampant narrow tribalism of certain men. Anybody not of their color, religion, sex, and not paranoid about the “others” isn’t a person, and is treated as such.
A total lack of empathy.
My interpretation is not necessarily that there are too many non-whites having children, but as birth-rates have fallen, the US (as Europe) has more elderly people in it requiring social care, and fewer young people to pay for it.
To me, this always struck me as a myopic view, after all, either the population increases exponentially forever, or we’re going to have to find a new model of paying for social care. If your solution to a large elderly population is ‘have more babies’ then you’re not solving the problem, you’re just kicking the can down the road for those babies to solve.
Christ on a bike… that is just… so… fucked… up!
Um, what more could she do to “free” him? If he’s been Friend Zoned*, shouldn’t that be enough notice that he should look elsewhere if he wants a sexual relationship with someone? If he’s spending several years pining over someone who’s made it clear that she isn’t into him like that a) the fault is his and b) it probably won’t actually be years because he’ll end up being a creepy fuck who she ends up not wanting to have anything at all to do with him in a much shorter amount of time. Ultimately, he’ll be alone both romantically and platonically, and we’ll probably have to hear all about it when he writes a whiny, xenophobic screed on the Federalist.
* I feel like there should be some dramatic echo added to this phrase.
I did wonder given that his bio says “the creator of Lutheran Satire, a series of comical videos intended to teach the Lutheran faith” whether this was bad satire. So I checked and found his church is affiliated with Missouri Synod (he is also married) which makes it unlikely that this particular article is satire. On the other hand the Chicago Tribune article http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chicagoinc/ct-pastor-men-and-women-cant-be-friends-0405-chicago-inc-20170404-story.html seems to indicate it was meant to be comedic but his main point remains. To quote the article:
His serious point, he said, was that women who spend a lot of time alone with a man they do not want to marry should “be straightforward” and let the man know “it’s not going to happen but here’s someone who might be interested.”
Of course that is still making a lot of assumptions
So now FriendZoneMan can’t even… leave the Friend Zone for long enough to find another woman who might be interesting to and interested in him, the woman who has FriendZoned him must find him a replacement? I’m sorry, but I’m not about to hand off any of my friends to some random dude, even if he is a Man in my Friend Zone, unless a friend has expressly expressed an interest in meeting FriendZoneMan as a potential romantic interest. Do your own work, FriendZoneMan, and keep those helpless puppy eyes off my doorstep.
I’m just ‘wow’ at the assumption that women should hand out recommendations like that.
re Friend Zone:
I read that as him saying women only good for one thing, making babies, friendship is just a tease to avoid their duty as babymaker.
ugh
?
Hans should concentrate on building up his wrist.
What does getting married have to do with reproduction?
Well the Missouri Synod does have a rather low view of what women can do (women can’t be pastors or elders and in some of their congregations can’t even vote on congregational matters).
He’s got one of those beards that accentuates his mouth, which he no doubt uses too much before he thinks.
The creepiest thing, to me, is the implication that it is somehow this putative woman’s “fault” that she is not attracted to the putative man who loves her. Rather than just an unfortunate quirk of circumstance it becomes a matter of blame and selfish conspiracy. One wonders quite whether this man would paint the opposite situation in the same colours – a woman who loves a man who is not able to reciprocate.
These things are not a matter of fault or blame – they just happen. I’ve suffered the crippling depression of the situation my entire adult life, so I’m intimately aware of how it can go, but overlaying it with a narrative of interpersonal selfishness and cruelty doesn’t help one bit to elucidate the phenomenon. My beloved is not “trapping” me, and the pain I feel is not his fault. He’s still my best friend too, which counts for an awful lot more. Also, nothing in the world is going to stop me from loving him, so there’s no way I’m going to be with anyone else whatever happens. The “solution” isn’t even practical.
Then again, since we’re both men we probably don’t figure in the fertility cultist’s calculations at all.
Look, law enforcement can quote me on this: If I ever meet this guy, he’s kissing the floor by the time I’m done with him. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a rape threat.
Based on the articles he cites, the kindest possible interpretation to put on his article is that by “us” he really does mean all Americans. Apparently conservative economists are working on stoking panic among young people nowadays that, when it’s time for them to retire, there won’t be enough young’uns to pay for their walkers and such.
Of course, the traditional solution for a falling birthrate is just to encourage immigration. Should I assume all those economists are against Trump’s wall?
The entire Federalist site is just awful.
Hans Fiene is just spouting gibberish.
It’s racist, misogynist, and tinged with more than a little Nazism.
It’s also as PZ points out, mostly factually wrong.
People like him are why I left xianity after 45 years.
This is the old white genocide of Steve King and the white supremacists.
I am not a part of his “we” despite being Scandinavian.
There is no such thing as white culture or white civilization.
King’s and Fiene’s midwestern rural white culture and civilization has nothing in common with my coastal California multicultural civilization.
Ironically, we are from his version of civilization. We moved and never regretted it.
Being a Hans Fieneoid is a toal fertility killer.
These guys have all the appeal of a rabid raccoon.
As many have pointed out, the christofascists use their personalities as a form of birth control.
Ironically their usual solution of forced birthing/female slavery works against their goal of Making America White Again.
Restricting birth control and abortion hits mostly the poor who are mostly minorities. Increasing the nonwhite birth rate.
They never think anything through.
I too have a strange and alien “we” and “us” that excludes racists. I consider myself part of an ideological group, not a genetic or nationalist one, and I consider myself fighting with other ideological groups, namely racist ones, over the best way to think about other people.
True.
If your economic and social model depends on an always increasing population, then your model is broken.
At some point, you have to transition to a steady state.
A terrible place. Men have no agency. Very manly that. And women should have none, can’t have them making their own decisions. They might decide something unapproved.
PZ, I fear you may have parsed one of his phrases incorrectly. I read “Apart from tearing down universities” to mean “the next step, after doing just that”, or “Besides getting rid of those pesky places that teach our line laborers greater ambition, we ALSO need to…”.
I was rather surprised that he didn’t single out Da Gayz as another villain behind our inadequate white breeding programs. Banning LGBTQs as a means of promoting Western civilization seems straight down the Federalist’s alley.
women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.
Therefore, I guess it’s time to eradicate guys. They could do it, right? There’s enough frozen sperm, and once all the males are dead, they can abort any male fetuses as part of the “sacrament of gendering” ceremony.
I think he’s on to something. And I’m so sick of it, I’m willing to put my neck on the chopping block, for the team. Let’s do it.
Marcus Ranum@6
“Therefore, I guess it’s time to eradicate guys. They could do it, right? There’s enough frozen sperm, and once all the males are dead, they can abort any male fetuses as part of the “sacrament of gendering” ceremony.”
Frozen sperm is a short term solution – it will eventually degrade. However we should soon be able to manipulate DNA well enough to create artificial sperm (or even better a single ovum that shares the DNA from two people), and two women will be able to have babies that share both of their DNA, so your main point is right.
If men hang around after that I suppose it will be because most of the ladies prefer to have sex with them. God knows why, but it seems to be so now.
Being helplessly in love with someone who doesn’t share the same feelings about you is something I know about from personal experience. But it never occurred to me to blame the lady in question. I thought it was because of my own nature which in retrospect lead me to delusions like thinking that I “deserved to be loved”.
If I stub my toe on a rock, I don’t feel any need to blame the rock. And similarly if I love someone who doesn’t love me the pain I feel is no responsibility of hers (“Hers” in my case since I happen to be heterosexual).
Good gravy, this is so over-the-top that I would have automatically assumed it was a parody if Erp hadn’t linked that article at #7. He says he only believes 40% of what he wrote – which 40%, I wonder? I mean, aside from anything else, he does realize that some women enjoy explosions and farts and also have deep psychological scars that prevent them from expressing their emotions in healthy, non-violent ways, right? (Not me, of course…I am a totally mature, well-adjusted adult who thinks YouTube videos of dogs scaring themselves with their own farts are a complete waste of time.)
This is called ‘being friends’ by most reasonable people. Entitled ‘nice guys’ a.k.a. entitled shitheads are the ones that have problems with this.
Somewhat off-topic, I only realised earlier this year that the word “guy” was used in a gendered fashion by a lot of people. To mean male specifically.
I had never come across this usage before. To me it has always meant “person”, or more specifically “down to earth person like me”. “One of the guys” being a synonym for “not one of those prissy, distant, stuck-up people who aren’t like us”.
But apparently it can also be used, as here, to mean a male. Someone tells me that the title of the musical “Guys and Dolls” is intended in this manner “men and women” rather than, as I had thought “solid, working-class people like us and that prissy, narcissistic, refined crowd we hate”.
re 26:
I understand. same here. yet is was always obvious that it was just a term illustrating the exclusivity to male gender, when a woman would say about being part of a group of male friends “just one of the ~guys (no pressure for romance nor “benefits”)”
meaning, when “guys” was meant generically, non-gendered, the tone always had to strongly emphasize the alternate meaning from the conventional “buncha-boys”. Like how “men” was always used more seriously while “guys” is used more casually.
bleh. [taking off faux-etymologist hat]
I think what he means by “demographic tsunami” is the aging of the population with fewer working age adults to pay for health care and benefits for the retired. There is some cause for concern here, particularly in places like Japan and Italy, but not really in America. While it’s true that there are fewer working age people per retiree, and that this trend will continue, economic growth more than offsets it. And at any rate, more immigration would completely take care of the problem, but gosh, we can’t have that.
Or we could do what France does, which is to have the state offer generous maternity and child care benefits, which has succeeded in getting their fertility rates back up to replacement level, but we can’t have that either. Brown people might use it to pop out more kids. Besides, blaming women for not putting out (when we’re not blaming them for being sluts) only makes sense, since every problem is somehow always the wymmin’s fault.
i.e. make sure women are dependent and unable to leave.
There is no Friend Zone. If you think you’ve been placed in the Friend Zone it’s because you dishonest dipshit led a woman on by pretending to be her friend.
And after he’S met all 3.8 billion women on planet earth he’s still alone.
Says the guy who has never had a lady friend in any possible meaning of the term.
BTW, not all guy friends are actually heterosexual. And yes, hetero women and hetero men can be friends, they just don’t want to be your friends.
Really, Mike, Mrs. Pence should stop you from writing shit on the net.
Marcus
Now, apart from the fact that it sometimes takes a few decades to find out someone’s gender, I think we could allow bepenised people back into society after a short break. You know, tear down patriarchy with no one around who tells us to smile and then just raise kids. Like that baboon tribe where all the macho males got killed and the rest found out that life was rather nice without them.
I know I “friend zoned” a number of women. I’m such a bastard I guess.
@14 I’ve suffered the crippling depression of the situation my entire adult life, so I’m intimately aware of how it can go….
That seems so sad.
If you’re worried about the Friend Zone, there’s a very simple solution: Just be clear and direct about what you want. If you want to fuck a particular lady, just tell her exactly that*. Then she can tell you to either drop your pants or get lost. Either way, congratulations, you’re now out of the Friend Zone.
* There are certain issues about creepy behavior that may come up, but in my experience if you’re just reasonably chill about it and make it clear that you respect her decision (whatever it is), you’ll be fine.
cartomancer @ 29,
“Guy” meaning roughly “fellow” derives from Guy Fawkes, who was by all accounts a man. The name itself is French, cognate to Italian “Guido”, and ultimately derived from the Germanic “Wido” (Gu- is often used as a Romance approximation of Germanic /w/, which is still pronounced /w/ in English but is /v/ in German (so think William, Wilhelm, Guillaume, Guillermo).)
In my version of US English, “you guys” is the second person plural pronoun, “hey guys” is a generic greeting that can be used to address any group of more than one people, regardless of the gender distribution (that is, even if you know that all of them identify as women), but in the singular “guy” is masculine. So as much as possible these days I try to use “y’all” as a generic, genderless second person plural pronoun, but I often slip, especially if I’m back in New England.
(Sources for all this: Online Etymological Dictionary, Wikipedia, and my own memory.)
cartomancer @ 29,
“Guy” meaning roughly “fellow” derives from Guy Fawkes, who was by all accounts a man. The name itself is French, cognate to Italian “Guido”, and ultimately derived from the Germanic “Wido” (Gu- is often used as a Romance approximation of Germanic /w/, which is still pronounced /w/ in English but is /v/ in German (so think William, Wilhelm, Guillaume, Guillermo).)
In my version of US English, “you guys” is the second person plural pronoun, “hey guys” is a generic greeting that can be used to address any group of more than one people, regardless of the gender distribution (that is, even if you know that all of them identify as women), but in the singular “guy” is masculine. So as much as possible these days I try to use “y’all” as a generic, genderless second person plural pronoun, but I often slip, especially if I’m back in New England.
(Sources for all this: Online Etymological Dictionary, Wikipedia, and my own memory.)
cartomancer @ 29,
“Guy” meaning roughly “fellow” derives from Guy Fawkes, who was by all accounts a man. The name itself is French, cognate to Italian “Guido”, and ultimately derived from the Germanic “Wido” (Gu- is often used as a Romance approximation of Germanic /w/, which is still pronounced /w/ in English but is /v/ in German (so think William, Wilhelm, Guillaume, Guillermo).)
In my version of US English, “you guys” is the second person plural pronoun, “hey guys” is a generic greeting that can be used to address any group of more than one people, regardless of the gender distribution (that is, even if you know that all of them identify as women), but in the singular “guy” is masculine. So as much as possible these days I try to use “y’all” as a generic, genderless second person plural pronoun, but I often slip, especially if I’m back in New England.
(Sources for all this: Online Etymological Dictionary, Wikipedia, and my own memory.)
(So evidently my previous comment is in moderation; I think I know why.) More on topic: I’ve always had women friends; I don’t know if it’s because I had three older sisters, or because my tastes don’t always match the stereotypical male tastes, or what, but I’ve always found it easier to relate to women than men. And yeah, there were times when I wanted to go beyond friends, and other times when the woman did, and for whatever reason it didn’t work out, and I’ll confess that I didn’t always react well to rejection, but I managed to find a lifetime mate and we’ve had two pretty decent kids together, so I’m not complaining. And I still have women friends.
The “Friend Zone” – the place where the entitled white guys who were pretending to be “friends” with women in the hope of getting sex out of them discover their protestations of friendship were being taken entirely seriously.
Really, boys, the easiest way to avoid winding up in “The Friend Zone” is to stop pretending you’re happy with “just friendship”. Be honest about what you want from women – if you want a fuck-buddy then say so, for crying out loud. Say it good and early in the whole process. Stop wasting your time and ours on these stupid “friendships” which go nowhere, and stop pining over the unattainable. Accept that “no means no”, stop thinking your life is a Hollywood rom-com (here’s a hint: if the trendy hipster soundtrack to your life stops when you pull out your ear buds, or ends when you leave the cafe, you’re not in a Hollywood rom-com), and start learning how to get along with other people over the long term. Listening to other people when they tell you things (like “I don’t want to have sex with you”) is a good place to start, really.
PS: Number of known deaths directly attributable to blue balls = 0.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s0EPv6Bv-V8
Fiene’s ideas are delivered to the alt-right in videos like this. Nearly everyone tells me that these are jokes or parody. Nope. “Inside the Hajnal line, you think you need more time?”
It’s easily digestible alt-right fun. Peter Brimelow, Jared Taylor, Spencer have explained that this is their strategy.
Friend-Zone Me! G’head. Okay, I never go out because I’m broke, I don’t go to clubs or movies, your best chance of spotting me is at the grocery store. . . Well, nevermind that then.
Oops. clicked on post instead of preview.
But to finish my statement : This guy never gets out of The Friend Zone (which he seems to be terrified of as if it were the Phantom Zone in Superman) but his grip on reality seems tenuous at best.