From The Biter Bit Files

     Now and then I must confess to Schadenfreude. It’s a nasty failing, but when everything has been politicized, such that there’s no sphere of actual private life to which one can retire and make one’s refuge, seeing those you despise lose a round brings a satisfaction for which there is no metric. I’m fairly certain that many others feel the same way.

     Thus it warmed the cockles of my spiny little heart to read this story:

     Stephanie Burns came up with the idea for Chic CEO, a free online platform for female entrepreneurs, in 2008, when she was getting her MBA. Many of her friends had lost jobs in the recession and were asking her for tips on how to start their own businesses. After hosting about 15 friends at her San Diego home to exchange advice, Burns realized there was a market for offering entrepreneurial guidance to women. A year later, she launched her company.

     Up until 2014, the focus of her work involved providing practical business advice to women in the form of free, easy-to-follow online materials. Every so often, Burns also organized networking events for women at which attendees could sip cocktails and chat about work. It was to one of these gatherings, held at an Italian restaurant last April in downtown San Diego, that two men showed up.

     May we have some suspense music, Maestro?

     Two men named Allan Candelore and Rich Allison, who had each prepaid a $20 registration fee on the Chic CEO website, tried to enter the restaurant. According to a legal complaint that they later filed with National Coalition for Men president Harry Crouch, Burns turned them away at the door, saying the event “was only open to women.” They took a photo, left the premises, then promptly initiated legal action, turning to a 1959 California law originally written to prevent discrimination against minorities and women.

     That law, California’s UNRUH Civil Rights Act, forbids businesses to discriminate on several bases, including sex. Chic CEO was thus legally prohibited from barring male attendance at its event. That’s about as open and shut as any case in civil-rights law ever gets. The consequences:

     It’s not clear how much the out-of-court settlement cost Chic CEO, but it was enough to virtually drive them out of business.

     If you’d like a fresh, steaming-hot sample of feminist outrage at having an anti-discrimination law used to penalize discrimination by women against men, read the above-linked articles. For myself, I expect to enjoy my fit of Schadenfreude all morning.

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     I’ve written before that discrimination is both right and necessary. Ergo, laws that forbid discrimination are wrong on principle. That having been said, what better way to demonstrate the wrongness of a law than to have it used to penalize a group it was intended to privilege, a group that had assumed victim status and used it to oppress others?

     Now, as it happens – and I mean what I say here in its exact sense – the typical American woman is unable to think. It’s possible that this is an artifice of her educational environment, but whether or not that’s so has no bearing on the consequences of her deficiency. Thus, she’ll celebrate something like the UNRUH Civil Rights Act without reflecting on its symmetry, because it’s “intended” to protect women against discrimination by men. When that symmetry is used against discrimination by women, she’ll whine that “It’s not fair,” never reflecting on the impossibility of making intent a component of law that stands above its text.

     However, whereas the typical American woman is unable to think, far too many American men are disinclined to think – in particular, about the secondary and tertiary consequences of acting on “good intentions.”

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     Many, many bills have been written, passed by both houses of some legislature, and signed into law by the relevant executive without anyone taking time to reflect on the outer consequences of those bills. For example, for quite a while New York state maintained an “anti-usury” law that capped the interest rate that could be charged on a mortgage or installment loan. Such a law arbitrarily limits the price of loaned money to a certain maximum – and every price cap creates a shortage of the thing thus price-limited. In this case, the shortage was of loans, particularly mortgage loans, to persons with poor credit. In consequence, such persons, a large percentage of whom were young people without a substantial credit history, were shut out of the real estate market.

     Then came the Carter Inflation. The dollar was deteriorating at roughly 13% per year, while the banks were limited to a maximum mortgage interest rate of 10%. Suddenly, it wasn’t just “persons with poor credit” who couldn’t get a mortgage; no one could. The only way to buy a home in New York state was in cash.

     Yes, the “anti-usury” law was repealed. But those against whom the law had discriminated for decades had no recourse. Their injuries were permanent.

     So it is with every law that purports to forbid “discrimination.” Discrimination is often rational and economically necessary. For example, the racial disparity in the sciences is unavoidable, as American Negroes earn doctorates in the sciences at a rate far below that of American Caucasians and Orientals. Thus, a law that requires physics departments to have a “proportional representation” of the three races would close nearly every physics department in America. The same could be said of symphony orchestras, Chinese restaurants, and the National Basketball Association, albeit the “underrepresented” races would differ.

     Freedom of association must apply to business and commerce just as it does to one’s choice of drinking buddies. A group such as Chic CEO should be allowed to stage a women-only event without legal jeopardy. But permission for women to discriminate against men comes at a price the feminist harridans are unwilling to pay: permission for men to discriminate against women. This is a Gordian knot sheathed in tungsten carbide; “good intentions” cannot slice through it.

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     I’ve written in the past about female idiocy, and I stand by the convictions I’ve espoused. That doesn’t mean I’m happy about these consequences:

     Which is why American men who still possess a shred of masculine self-regard won't marry you or procreate with you, treat you with suspicion at all times, speak derisively of your oh-so-vaunted "accomplishments" and the viragoes who trumpet them, and are generally disdainful of your entire sex.

     Think about that when you next hear a "joke" about kicking one of us in the nuts.

     Before we lost our grip on the manly virtues, when “Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection,” women were statistically safer, less prone to injury, and far less likely to degrade themselves with heedless promiscuity and its frequent consequence, unwed motherhood. They also had more de facto latitude of action. The rise of gender-war feminism, about the consequences of which Robert Stacy McCain has written many thousands of words, is responsible for the deterioration in the aggregate condition of American womanhood.

     And so I say unto you, Gentle Reader:

     If you’re an American woman...
     If you consider yourself a decent, “fair” person...
     And if you sincerely want to see the condition of women improve...

Oppose The Feminist Harridans.
Stand For Freedom Of Association.

     The feminists are not your friends. Celebrate with me the ever more frequent demonstrations of how their legal “triumphs” have caused them weeping and gnashing of teeth. And reflect on what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his magnificent essay “Compensation:”

     You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong....

     All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbour feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me....

     Justice is not postponed....Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.

     And thus shall it ever be.