More about Germany

Study: Men in Germany Are Scared to Start Families

The article, of course, carefully avoids mentioning the real reasons German men don’t want to have children. The very real possibility of their wives leaving them and taking away their children and most of their income is not even mentioned. Nor does the author ask why a German would want to bring children into the world when it is almost certain that one day they will be living under dhimmitude.

German Bishop Slammed For Calling Women “Birthing Machines”

The good news:

A German bishop has sharply criticized government plans to improve childcare facilities, saying they reduce women to “birthing machines” who quickly have to return to work.

The bad news:

The remarks even have conservatives up in arms.

Huh?

The Catholic Bishop of Augsburg, Walter Mixa called government proposals to expand childcare facilities in Germany “harmful for children and families.” Mixa said the plans enticed women with federal aid to entrust their children to state care shortly after birth, degrading women to “birthing machines.”

Germany’s Minister for Family and Youth, Ursula von der Leyen from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) wants to significantly increase to 750,000 the number of places available at day-care centers for children under the age of three by 2013. It is the latest step in an attempt to boost the German birthrate, which at 1.36 children per woman is one of the lowest in Europe.

Mixa said von der Leyen’s plans gave “top priority to recruiting young women as labor reserve for private industry.”

“We need to create family-oriented jobs, not job-friendly families,” Mixa told German breakfast television on Friday.

The minister’s family policies elevated double-income marriages to a downright “ideological fetish,” Mixa said.

Mixa’s comments highlight the deep divide in Germany over the role of the modern woman in society. The battle lines are clearly drawn between those who support women juggling jobs with children on the one side and those who adhere to the more traditional image of the mother staying at home and feeding her kids.

They’re not mad at him for saying women are birthing machines, they’re mad at him for saying they shouldn’t be turned into birthing machines by socialist policies!

Oh, but it’s all right for feminists to use this particular bit of hate speech:

During the 1960s and 1970s, many feminists in Germany used the term Gebärmaschine or “birthing m achine” to criticize women who stayed home after the war, producing one baby after another.

His cardinal is also under fire for speaking common sense:

Only Cologne’s ultra-conservative cardinal Joachim Meisner said he agreed with Mixa. He said children should be raised in the family, and not in daycare.

“In the bible, nurseries are actually just a temporary solution,” Meisner told the Catholic radio station Domradio. “If you turn it into a permanent institution, quasi as an alternative to the family, then this is a misguided development.” He said daycare was only necessary for emergencies and exceptional cases.

What a controversial statement.

Well, Europe’s fucked.

European Union Family Ministers Discuss New Roles for Men

European Union ministers for family affairs and gender equality have been discussing ways to dispel gender role clichés and to get men to take on a more active role in the family.

At the informal two-day meeting that began on Tuesday in the spa town of Bad Pyrmont in Germany’s state of Lower Saxony, EU family ministers signed a declaration aimed at firmly establishing gender equality in the European Union.

More flexible notions of gender roles would make it easier to combine work and families and it would also help EU countries to better tackle the challenges of demographic changes and boost economies, the statement said….

Firms should also do more to provide more child care facilities for their employees, the Czech EU commissioner said in an interview with dpa news agency.

In addition to the changing roles for fathers in child care, the conference also focused on equal opportunities for men and women at the workplace and in the family.

This week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition approved a plan championed by von der Leyen to triple the number of day care places for children under age three to 750,000 by 2013.

Under a new financial scheme for parents in Germany which came into effect on January 1 in Germany, the federal government pays mothers or fathers two-thirds of their last net paycheck — up to €1,800 ($2,360) — for up to 12 months as long as they stay at home to take care of a new baby….

Until now, working women in Germany have had a particularly hard time getting back into the labor market once they have a child due to the lack of full-day schools, kindergartens and day-care centers, which has partially contributed to the low birth rate in the country.

If you’re in the MRA blogosphere, you already know what’s wrong with all this. God help us; no one else can.

Conservative Essay on Patriarchy

I just read The Natural Family Dimly Seen through Feminist Eyes. It’s a very good essay on the inevitability of male dominance.

The essay made something clear to me I’ve been suspecting. In Daniel Amneus’s excellent The Garbage Generation, he explained that matriarchies – that is, societies in which women are not bound to husbands and children are the mother’s, not the father’s – are found only in primitive tribes, and that no society has become advanced without patriarchy.

I was fascinated by this book because I had never encountered this concept before, that it was the introduction of patriarchy – of a father having a possessive interest in his children – that made civilization possible. Then when I acquired a copy of Manhood Unplugged, I browsed through it and found the same concept.

Amneus had referred to Bachofen as a source. Now this essay refers to at least three nineteenth-century works that also draw on this theory of history. It turns out it was once standard. And how did this change? This essay traces the revisionist feminist historical theory, where patriarchy was where it all went wrong and women became OMG so oppressed, to the usual suspects: Marx and Engels. It has since become accepted gospel.

Also of interest are A Dawsonian View of Patriarchy and The Patriarchal Family in History.

Camille Paglia on Hillary

Why women shouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton

Whatever her official feminist credo, Hillary’s public career has glaringly been a subset to her husband’s success. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she failed the Washington, DC bar exam. Thus her migration to Little Rock was not simply a selfless drama for love; she was fleeing the capital where she had hoped to make her mark.

In Little Rock, every role that Hillary played was obtained via her husband’s influence – from her position at the Rose Law Firm to her seat on the board of Wal-Mart to her advocacy for public education reform. In a pattern that would continue after Bill became president, Hillary would draw attention by expressing public “concern” for a problem, without ever being able to organise a programme for reform.

Every time I look more closely at a feminist heroine, she always turns out to have slept her way to the top and to be utterly lacking in ability. When you learn about a woman who actually has accomplishments in her own right, she’s always either an antifeminist Christian (like Phyllis Schafly) or a lesbian.

Thank God. (God the Father.)

Thank you to the Hawaiian Libertarian for directing me to this:

New Haven, Conn. — April 17, 2008

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

It was still a highly appalling publicity stunt. Assuming that it was a publicity stunt and that it wasn’t real. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Yale was just trying to do damage control. The echoes of this will last for decades. And Yale deserves it for behaving as if this was art instead of teaching the stupid cunt to draw.

Abortion as Art

I can’t even comment on this. It speaks for itself anyway.

For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse

Martine Powers
Staff Reporter
Published Thursday, April 17, 2008
Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for “shock value.”

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

The “fabricators,” or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Art major Juan Castillo ‘08 said that although he was intrigued by the creativity and beauty of her senior project, not everyone was as thrilled as he was by the concept and the means by which she attained the result.

“I really loved the idea of this project, but a lot other people didn’t,” Castillo said. “I think that most people were very resistant to thinking about what the project was really about. [The senior-art-project forum] stopped being a conversation on the work itself.”

Although Shvarts said she does not remember the class being quite as hostile as Castillo described, she said she believes it is the nature of her piece to “provoke inquiry.”

“I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity,” Shvarts said. “I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.”

The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman, Schvarts’ senior-project advisor, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.

Few people outside of Yale’s undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts’ exhibition. Members of two campus abortion-activist groups . Choose Life at Yale, a pro-life group, and the Reproductive Rights Action League of Yale, a pro-choice group . said they were not previously aware of Schvarts’ project.

Alice Buttrick ‘10, an officer of RALY, said the group was in no way involved with the art exhibition and had no official opinion on the matter.

Sara Rahman ‘09 said, in her opinion, Shvarts is abusing her constitutional right to do what she chooses with her body.

“[Shvarts' exhibit] turns what is a serious decision for women into an absurdism,” Rahman said. “It discounts the gravity of the situation that is abortion.”

CLAY member Jonathan Serrato ‘09 said he does not think CLAY has an official response to Schvarts’ exhibition. But personally, Serrato said he found the concept of the senior art project “surprising” and unethical.

“I feel that she’s manipulating life for the benefit of her art, and I definitely don’t support it,” Serrato said. “I think it’s morally wrong.”

Shvarts emphasized that she is not ashamed of her exhibition, and she has become increasingly comfortable discussing her miscarriage experiences with her peers.

“It was a private and personal endeavor, but also a transparent one for the most part,” Shvarts said. “This isn’t something I’ve been hiding.”

The official reception for the Undergraduate Senior Art Show will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on April 25. The exhibition will be on public display from April 22 to May 1. The art exhibition is set to premiere alongside the projects of other art seniors this Tuesday, April 22 at the gallery of Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall on Chapel Street.

They ban fathers – and give us Big Brother

This week we have a rare glimpse of the true agenda of our new, modernised rulers. They have disclosed their secret, virulent loathing of fatherhood.

They wish to abolish independent, free families headed by husbands, and have us all dependent on the nosy-parker state.

They pretend to be pro-family. But, very occasionally, they have to admit what they are really doing, so as to slip it through Parliament or the civil service. It’s always in some tiny sub-clause.

For instance, a little-read November 2003 document led to a ban on the mention of marriage on government forms. Effectively this ended any official recognition of the status of ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, a change partly to blame for the tragic collapse in the number of marriages revealed this week.

Now we have the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, only seven years after the last one on this subject. Before that, in a 1990 Act, Parliament still dared to say that a child needed a father.

It declared: “A woman shall not be provided with treatment services unless account has been taken of the welfare of any child who may be born as a result of the treatment (including the need of that child for a father).”

But now the words ‘a father’ will be replaced by ’supportive parenting’. Next, what the law said as recently as 1990 will be unsayable in a public place. Opponents of this change will, as usual, be falsely smeared as bigots.

In fact, the change – never openly argued for by its supporters – is a revolutionary blow at the foundations of British society. It is driven by the thinking of a few Marxist weirdos, including Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.

Their wild and twisted ideas were popular among students 40 years ago, when our present generation of MPs, broadcasters and civil servants were lazing on the lawns of their universities. Once before, these people let their cat out of the bag for a swift, frightening moment.

Still to be found in the archives of The Times for February 1980 is a letter from Helen Brook, who spent much of her life obsessively pressing contraceptives first on unmarried women, then on schoolchildren. The triumph of her creepy beliefs has brought about a pandemic of unwanted pregnancies and abortions,the very things she claimed to be preventing.

She let her real aim be known when she wagged her finger warningly at those who dared get in her way, hissing: ‘From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions – objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.’ She knew power was on her side.

When, back in 1967, she offered contraceptive ‘help’ to under-age girls – behind the backs of their parents and their GPs – most normal people viewed her actions as shocking. In 1995 (under a Tory government, of course) she got the CBE. Now her view is the law of the land.

And it is clearer every day that, as the family grows weaker, the parental State is coldly weighing up what is best for us all, with its armoury of identity cards, DNA databases, fingerprints, CCTV cameras and interfering social workers.

We have more or less banned smacking, so tender are we, but have created a feral society swirling with gun and knife crime (and, of course, boot crime, which is just as dangerous if you get your head kicked as if it were a football). And it can only be controlled by a authoritarian state.

We have got rid of fathers, and will soon make them illegal. And instead we shall have Big Brother.

Pick-Up Artists and Feminism

I don’t know how many of you are reading books or websites about how to be a pick-up artist (PUA), but more of you need to be. There’s two essays from those sites linked in my sidebar: The Truth About Women and Women Explained.

Not necessarily for the official purpose. Though if you’re so inclined, I say more power to you. As a dyke I’ve experienced how women treat those who love them, and I think anything men can do to level the ground a bit is fair game. They’ll take anything they can get from you, let you lavish them with gifts and fancy dinners, all in the hope of getting some sex, which they probably won’t give you. Most men would like to get married and commit for life, but feminists have made this a reckless proposition with their no-fault divorce and vicious alimony customs. (There is no reason a man should continue supporting a woman who has left him, but as the law stands, that’s the price for a few months of sex.) Women will break your heart just for the rush of power it gives them. I am completely in favor of men strategizing to get some of their own back. If women are going to be faithless sluts, men should take advantage of them.

But there’s other value to PUA writings. I read this stuff and even though I’m a lesbian, I’ve never attempted to use any of this to pick up girls. I’m a Dyke Going My Own Way. I’ve been celibate for several years, ever since the last time I was dumb enough to let a woman get her hands on my heart. I suppose I could learn these techniques to get laid, but then what? I’m not a one-night-stand kind of gal, and these techniques don’t protect you from fickle women who abandon you the instant something shinier comes along. Aside from heartbreak, even though gay marriage still isn’t legal in most places, these days a smart lawyer could probably come up with a way for my ex-girlfriend to take half my shit™. The only bright spot is that I can’t be hit with a paternity suit.

But the practical nature of pick-up means that PUAs can’t bullshit themselves about human nature, particularly female human nature. People who want to fantasize about creating A Better World can afford to kid themselves that when they change “society”, women will turn into independent, hardworking, innovating equals to men. People who live in the dream world of the “positive attitude” can kid themselves that women want men who are equals who will be nice to them and respect them (and that people are basically good and peaceful and nonviolent). But PUAs have to get real-world results. If they don’t get laid, they know their theories are wrong and need adjustment.

Pick-up works because PUAs understand that women want strong, confident, dominant men. It’s pretty funny to see most women’s reactions when they read an article or see a talk show about this. “Oh noes! This is so demeaning! And it wouldn’t work, either! Women aren’t that dumb or superficial!” The hell they’re not.

The qualities I’m about to discuss are biologically based, but they’re not completely inescapable. A patriarchal culture, in which women are guarded by parents, husbands, the law and religion from too much folly; in which women are indoctrinated by religion and fiction that such unnatural qualities as chastity and fidelity are good things; in which people are subject to constant discipline, as never happens in a matriarchy, and hence are trained to fight their base impulses – in such societies, women can overcome a great deal of this. Not all. This is why there are still some decent women among devout churchgoers; despite the dissolution of society as a whole, these women are shielded by the subcultures in which they live. When the Muslims start invading, it is Christian housewives who will prefer to die rather than yield their virtue to the invaders, while the feminists who are currently bragging about how independent and liberated they are will meekly spread their legs for their conquerors, and soon will be talking about how wonderful chadors are.

Not all PUAs are male chauvinists, by the way. It’s hard to be a realist about women without becoming an MCP, but some of them manage it. But they still subscribe to a lot of very unfeminist principles. One of the cardinal rules is, Lead the men and the women will follow. In a mixed group of people, the PUA will focus on winning the men over, getting them to like him or accept him as alpha. The women in the group, hardwired to want the men who have status in the tribe, want to sleep with whichever man the men respect. Women don’t choose their mates themselves, they let all the men around them choose them!

Rob Fedders has recently posted about another of their principles: that of feminine hypergamy. In the absence of legal and social pressures for monogamy and premarital chastity (that is to say, civilization), the natural human social group is the harem. 95% of the women sleep with 5% of the men. (“Now that women are “liberated” (and thus at the mercy of their own emotions and baser instincts) this is mostly no longer possible in today’s society.“) Even a low-ranking, minimally attractive woman can sometimes get an alpha male to sleep with her; men are designed to want lots of sex partners. The PUA relies on this, making sure that he is part of that 5% of men.

In addition, over and over again on the sites and in the books, PUAs remind each other that men must take control of the situation at all times. “Mystery” explains that in addition to taking the responsibility of making the first move, initiating kissing or necking, men also have to take the responsibility of holding back; if a girl impulsively goes further than she’s really ready to, she feels cheap and doesn’t see you again. As long as the man takes responsibility for making the conversation interesting, as long as she doesn’t have to feel responsible when they have sex, she’s fine with it. Women are allergic to responsibility. I know that all of you who have seen feminist editorials defending women who murder their children or husbands can see how this is relevant.

PUAs have a rule: Never call her on her shit. Women subconsciously know that they’re controlled by their emotions and they need men to be able to deal with that. When I read this stuff, I realize just how wrongly I was dealing with my girlfriends and platonic female friends. I made the same mistake Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, also lesbians, made: I assumed other women were like me. Except for maybe half of my fellow dykes, they’re not. When some dame was tearing my heart to shreds, I used to, if you can believe my stupidity, try to reason with her, to point out that her behavior was illogical and unethical. Naturally, that ruined any chance of reconciliation. Calling a woman on her shit forces her into unpleasant self-awareness and saddles her with responsibility women aren’t designed to handle.

PUAs have a concept they call a “shit test”. Basically it means that when a woman starts to take an interest in a man, she starts giving him shit to see if he’ll past the test of not putting up with it.

I think feminism is just one big shit test. Women as a group decided, “Let’s see how much men will let us get away with!” Unfortunately, the answer was, “A lot.” Every unreasonable demand they make – the vote, default custody, alimony, admission to male colleges, enlistment to the military, sex discrimination lawsuits, abortion – has been handed over. Small wonder they have resorted to proposing such things as a tax on being male and books claiming that “all intercourse is rape” and whining about “the male gaze”. They keep getting more and more ludicrous in the subconscious hope that men will put down their feet.

Unfortunately, once women were allowed to vote, male politicians were only too willing to sacrifice the male prerogatives upon which civilization rests in order to get elected. This is why the naturally dominant sex has been unable to prevent feminism.

Come to think of it, the instinctive verbal attacks women launch whenever they encounter MRA arguments could be seen as another “shit test”. They recite whatever bullshit their professors told them about “the patriarchy” to see if the MRA is just another beta male who’ll crumble on encountering female resistance, or if he’s a real man who can withstand the arguments of a weak and silly woman. They don’t do this consciously, of course. But millions of years of evolution have guaranteed that they do indeed do it.

Sure, females do better in school.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately about how more and more men are dropping out of college and high school. Women are outnumbering men and making better grades.

Eventually, this will have a positive effect: businesses will, eventually, stop hiring college graduates preferentially, because there won’t be enough men with degrees to do the work. This will weaken the hold the proselytizing left-wing professors have on the West.

Wait, you thought women would then get all the good jobs? Not likely. These days businesses have to keep a few women on the payroll to stay out of court, even though these women usually aren’t able to do the work or are just too lazy and slough it onto someone else (nearly always a man). But the work does need to get done, and that means men. If businesses can’t get “qualified” (degreed) men, they’ll change their qualifications.

In case anyone’s wondering, the greater female performance in school does not even slightly negate male superiority. Succeeding in a classroom requires qualities that women are good at: pleasing a parental authority figure, passively listening and then repeating back what one’s been told (in flirting, this is what novelists used to call “hanging on to his every word”), being quiet, orderly and obedient. Of course women do better. Women have millions of years of evolution designing them to do these things.

When colleges were male-dominated institutions, attended chiefly by the minority of men who were going to be doctors or clergymen or something, male energy and restlessness forced limits on these natural tendencies of the academic environment. It meant that school could not be extended forever, and that only those who really needed the knowledge acquired by sitting around listening to other people (as opposed to gaining first-hand experience) even tried to tolerate it. Most men just went to work after a couple of years of school to learn to read, write and figure. Andrew Carnegie went to work at the age of 13. Had he been born in our era, he would have been forced to rein in his energy and spend those valuable years catering to the ego needs of some neurotic female Democrat. José Silva was the oldest son. When his father died when José was six, José was the man of the family. He supported his mother and siblings by such work as peddling shoelaces on the street and shining shoes. He grew up to invent the Silva Method, by which thousands of people have learned to use their minds more effectively. How many Silvas and Carnegies have we destroyed in recent decades?

In addition, females generally learn by rote while males learn more by concepts, a tendency that’s been mentioned often in these articles. There are exceptions – I was one, and it’s one of the reasons school was unendurable for me. I kept trying to comprehend concepts such as photosynthesis, the Pythagorean theorem, or inflation, and the teachers, who had learned by rote and were just reciting what the textbooks said, couldn’t answer my questions about it because they had no comprehension of these things themselves. In fourth grade my science text had a very confusing explanation of the difference between a solid, a liquid and a gas, and my teacher answered my puzzled questions about it by reciting the textbook’s confusing definition; she didn’t understand the difference herself. The result was that for years afterwards I was convinced that science was a crock until I found out better from reading on my own. Ironically, this was from the feminist book on evolution The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan. Miss Morgan’s strategy backfired, however, because the interest in evolution she sparked eventually made me realize that feminism is a pile of crap.

Rote learning is also valuable, but we need conceptual learning more if we’re going to figure out how to harness solar energy or cold fusion and colonize Mars and cure cancer. (All of these things will be done by men. I don’t have to claim psychic powers to predict that.) Tailoring education to meet the mental needs and learning styles of the average girl, which is what female teachers inevitably are doing, is consequently disastrous.

It isn’t so much that men are smarter than women, though there are more male geniuses, as that men think differently. Men have a more problem-solving, strategic way of thinking; you might say men are mentally aggressive. I think this way, and it’s interesting to see how surprised people are. They might consider themselves feminists in their frontal lobes, but their monkey brains know what to expect from males and from females, and I ain’t it.

It was feminism that brought about the notion that everyone ought to go to college. In the 60’s, feminists demanded that the workplace be opened to them. (Actually, it already was, but most women had the sense to do more important, fulfilling things with their lives, like raise children, and employers didn’t have to worry about sex discrimination lawsuits if they didn’t hire lazy or incompetent women.) It seems that at first these Women’s Libbers imagined that they would be able to compete with aggressive, strategically-thinking men. Once they were in the office, they quickly realized they were outclassed. So they fell back on credentials. With credentials being the most important thing in hiring, ability was out of the equation and women could compete. College had already been dumbed down to a degree by the G.I. Bill that made it more widespread. Now it’s been made so useless that any moron can do it.

I suggest we make colleges all-female institutions and let them spend their entire careers there. Meanwhile, men and lesbians can do the real work in the real world without any degrees or diplomas. Deal?

High Testosterone Means High Profits

You can almost hear Gordon Gekko cheer. Financial traders are widely seen as filthy rich, brash, and, well, ballsy. Now it turns out that there’s cash in those cojones. According to new research from the University of Cambridge, a male trader’s daily testosterone level is higher on days when he makes more than he would in an average day. What’s more, the higher a trader’s morning testosterone level, the more money he’ll likely have netted before the close of business that day. Testosterone, in other words, can be good for business.

In the study, published Monday in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a U.S. scientific journal, 17 London traders, aged 18 to 38, donated saliva samples over an eight-day period. Each time they did — once at 11 am, and again at 4 pm, book-ending the bulk of each day’s transactions — the traders, dealing mostly in futures, recorded their current profit-and-loss standing. (They were also quizzed to make sure that nothing they’d eaten or talked about outside of their work was acting on their hormone levels.)

The article completely ignores the existence of women. I know there are few women traders – and I for one am fine with that – but they do exist. I suppose they were afraid of going the way of Larry Summers.