[From a review of "Smart and SeXy"]

Impartial studies have revealed that HR women often use their influence in the hiring process not to advance the interests of the company but to screen for potential boyfriends and exclude female rivals: better-looking men are more likely to be given job interviews, while better-looking women are less likely.

Women’s move into the workplace has inevitably been accompanied by demands to remake workplaces so as to be more convenient to women. For example, one obvious consequence of female careerism is that many men are tempted to flirt with female coworkers. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with such behavior. As the author points out, flirting is something men have evolved to do, and “the species could not propagate without this behavior.” But most of these men do not come close to the wealthy movie stars and romance novel heroes with which the modern woman’s imagination has been filled. So women have demanded and gotten an administrative and legal regime which prohibits male flirting wherever it is “unwelcome” (i.e., whenever the man is unattractive). This is not merely unfair to these men. As the author points out, another “problem with criminalizing these men is that their labor and contributions are several orders of magnitude more valuable than the contributions of the women who make allegations.” It is also highly hypocritical on the part of women in view of their own demonstrated tendency, as described above, to use their jobs to advance their own sexual strategies.

Government work, being unconstrained by the need for profitability, is better able to absorb the costs of hiring large numbers of women, and accordingly women are 50 percent more likely to work for the government than men. Almost 60 percent of state and local government workers are women.

The feminists whose demands created our present employment regime want, in effect, for the cost of women’s behavior and decisions to be externalized to employers, customers, fellow employees and tax payers. Indeed, once all these hidden costs are factored out, it is unclear just how many “working” women are actually engaged in any sort of productive labor; the author suggests that the numbers may be as low as 30 percent, and there is little evidence women as a whole could ever become truly independent in the economic sense (although many women in the contemporary West are undoubtedly “independent” in the sense that they do as they please).

The cure for such waste is simply not to have many women in highly demanding positions. If they must work, they can be restricted to positions able to tolerate lower dedication.

The extension of political rights to women also involves high and sometimes hidden costs. Female influence in public life, wherever it exists, always follows a pattern which has been termed “the feminine imperative.” Kaine defines it as a “push to shape the social and legal institutions of society such that they benefit women specifically without much interest in whether those changes are harmful to men and civilization generally.” Thus, in contemporary America, women support the growth of the welfare state because its main beneficiaries are single mothers and the disproportionately female elderly population. Although the author does not discuss this, it has recently been suggested that female enthusiasm for “refugees” is a displacement of the maternal instinct to a domain where it is counterproductive. This whole question of the sources of female political behavior might be a fertile domain for scientific research once ideological controls are eased.

The author notes that

"women have a long history of being the main driving force behind hysterical cultural movements that seek massive top down control of behavior. The temperance movement has a lot of similarity to modern rape and sexual harassment hysteria. In the past, this hysteria was considered a female-specific mental disorder; women seem to be especially susceptible to the combination of highly emotional, frenetic and illogical thinking characteristic of hysteria."

But in recent decades, the very term “hysteria” has been banished from the vocabulary of psychiatry for what may be nothing more than ideological reasons.

Feminists promised that the entry of women into the workforce would unleash enormous reserves of previously untapped human talent and usher in greater prosperity and happiness for all. Instead, it has imposed vast new costs, particularly on men and taxpayers as a whole. And women themselves do not seem particularly happy under the new arrangements either: one in four American women are now on some kind of psychiatric medication just to get through the day.

The sexual consequences of this social revolution have been dire. White birthrates are below replacement across the West, and the most intelligent women are worst affected. As the author states, “the current average age of first birth for highly educated women is 32, and 1 in 4 highly educated women never have any children at all; a deeply dysgenic pattern.”

Kaine is admirably forthright in drawing his conclusions:

"The once symbiotic relationship [between the sexes] has morphed into a parasitic relationship where women depend on the coercive power of the government to extract wealth from men while providing little to men in return. . . . In essence, this is a free rider problem in which women want the benefits of civilization, but do not cooperate with the needs of the group to make civilization possible. . . . Progressively larger amounts of money [are] being taken directly from the pockets of men to pay for a largely ungrateful and ever more demanding population of women. This is wealth that productive men should be spending on their own families and children. . . . Reversing the dire consequences of feminist inspired policies and cultural beliefs thus constitute an urgent and existential imperative for the West if it is going to survive."

I couldn’t have put it better myself. If the West does survive, its future historians will marvel that a relative handful of women were able to turn the most advanced society in the history of the world upside down against the interests of the overwhelming majority of women and men merely to satisfy the imperatives of an ideology based on resentment and without any empirical support.

I was unfamiliar with Roderick Kaine until I came across this book from Arktos. He is clearly a gifted writer with an unusual ability to combine technical mastery of the hard sciences with sound social and political thinking. I hope we shall be hearing more from him in the future.