We should listen to women on this topic

Zembla says nothing here that isn't already in Harrington (mainly Ch 4, "The War on Relationships," pp81-103). The only thing he does is relate it to CSA, and that relationship only makes sense if you assume (as Harrington does not, and as no rational person should) that the behavior and thinking of women are entirely a product of evolved instinctual inclination. Plus then you have to assume that the behavior and thinking of men is not. Which amounts to assuming that men are rational creatures, endowed with a power to think beyond the limits of their evolved instinctual inclinations, and women are not. Oddly enough, this was the default assumption of liberalism when it arose in what some scholars call the "long 16th Century" (1450 - 1650; John Locke was born in 1632, so was well positioned to serve as the major theorist of this emerging consensus). So basically what Zembla is pushing here is "old" or "original" liberalism, the paternalistic liberalism of the European Enlightenment that postulated white men of property alone had overcome the evolutionary heritage of the species and were tasked with transmitting this new rationality to women, the lower classes, and colonial peoples who remained mired in animality. So while Zembla poses as a critic of liberalism, he critiques it from the perspective of its original proponents. Liberalism itself, in contrast, has been forced by activism on the part of poor people, women, Blacks, gays, colonial people, and other marginalized groups to expand the universe of rationality and to retreat from its paternalistic roots. As a marginalized group ourselves, this is the activism we should be striving to emulate. We often criticize academics and politicians for their failure to listen to us when they talk about age gap sex. We have lived and thought through these issues, yet they ignore what we have learned from experience. But we too often do exactly the same thing when dealing with women. We ignore the testimony of women and substitute for it our own prejudices. Then we wind up with reductionist theories like Zembla's. Feminism has been dealing with these issues for over a century. Its literature is vast. Yes, much of it (like much of our own discourse) is steeped in delusion and denial, but this literature is the place to look for insight into these issues. Harrington, in the chapter I mentioned above of her book Feminism Against Progress, cites Greer, Jong, Sheila Jeffreys, Honor Jones, Shulamith Firestone, Louise Perry, and, naturally, Jane Austen. She also cites male sources and discourses: Kerouac, Jerry Barnett, "Men Going Their Own Way," Eli Finkel, Anthony Giddens, and Robert Trivers. Zembla cites... nobody. Am I denigrating original thinking by BLs? No, I try to do it myself. We aren't academics and we should think for ourselves. And Zembla is right to point out that hypergamy (a term he fails to explain; Harrington also addresses it, saying it means a "preference for partners with social status or resources") is an evolved tendency for human females. But we are not pure puppets of instinct, whether male or female. We can and sometimes do think before we act. But thinking should build on the thinking of others, and especially on the thinking of other marginalized groups that have battled their way to at least some level of recognition within liberal ideology. Zembla has interesting things to say here. But he's being reactionary -- looking backward, not forward. Of course, that's exactly what you would expect from a king. hugzu ;-p