This epitomizes the basic problem with Kevin’s approach.
I think that much could be said about Delaney’s approach, and why it is poor. For instance…
The sorts of women that Delaney describes in other posts of his are not the sorts of women that I would want to be with personally. The kind who “will run tests on a man,” like “rais[ing] a bizarre accusation” or “attempt[ing] to incite an argument…” (from this thread, which along with this thread is where I first made the mistake of trying to respond).
However, taking Delaney seriously, and if I believed that all women are secretly or ultimately that way (or the “good heterosexual women”, at least), then I might not have taken the time to find a woman more suited to my tastes. With a woman acting in this fashion, which I would otherwise describe as “playing games” (or something worse), I might have told myself, “Well… that’s the nature of romance! The nature of women! I need to accept it, if I want a fulfilling relationship, and act ‘manly’ so that she will respect me!”
And what would be the eventual result of all of this, if I were “successful”? I would be with a woman that essentially I didn’t like, on the basis of “acting” a certain way… and given that if I allowed myself to respond to her as I was initially and routinely inclined, outside of trying to be “masculine,” then it’s probably the case that she would be with a man that she essentially didn’t like either.
Not only do I find that a pretty horrible outcome on its own, but when I compare it to my actual situation…? I’ve found a woman who does not play those sorts of games (and who, herself, hates the idea of “playing games” generally), and I am very happy with her, and she with me. In imagining replacing my actual wife and our blissful union with this masculine/feminine bullshit, going to Delaney’s blog to find the latest advice on how I’m supposed to behave, treating women as this sort of alien species that needs to be studied and then patronized, winding up with women such as Delaney describes and trying to convince myself that it’s some sort of a virtue on their part… god, what a nightmare.
So yes, I think that there are problems here. And then there’s this – Rand on “Racism”:
[Racism is] the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
[…]
[Racism claims] that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control.
Now, I understand that Delaney is speaking of gender and not race, whatever that might mean to us. And further, he doesn’t actually make any attempts to argue for his assertions, so it’s difficult to know the source of his claims (except perhaps that he “just knows”, and so should you
). But what is he saying, if not that a woman has certain “intellectual and characterological traits [which] are produced and transmitted by [her] internal body chemistry”? What is he saying, if not that her “convictions, values and character are determined before [she] is born, by physical factors beyond [her] control”?
Of course, to get sincere answers to those questions (if any exist), Delaney would have to speak for himself, which I do not expect, and which would doubtless disappoint were he to try. But this is my evaluation of his arguments, such as they do exist, and I find Rand was probably correct in the present case when she went on to say
This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.