Male and Female Sexuality

The feminist Left likes to claim that male and female is essentially the same. That it is only due to the way we socialise one another that makes our preferences one way or the other. There is no hard wiring for either of the sexes, both are maleable to go either way.

Well one very telling difference between men and women is their respective preoccupations with porn and romance novels. Psychotherapist Leon F. Seltzer draws on the extensive research of Ogi Oggas and Sai Gaddam's A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire (2011) and makes some very interesting points

• Men are overwhelming turned on by the visual where women are far more multidimensional in their attractions and there is evidence this difference is hard wired. 

To begin with, it’s essential to note that the literature specifically studying men’s arousal patterns (gay as well as straight) has repeatedly emphasized their sensitivity to visual cues. As soon as the lust-inspiring image registers in their brain, they become turned-on—not only physically but psychologically, too. Exposure to such erotic stimuli immediately activates the parts of their brain related to getting an erection. And, as Ogas and Gaddam suggest, "Men’s greater sex drive may be partially due to the fact that their sexual motivation pathways have more connections to the subcortical reward system than in women" [or, in short] "men’s brains are designed to objectify females."

•  Men's sexual affairs are more a solitary endeavour than's women's who need more interpersonal, social dimensions to sex. 

Additionally, the authors talk about male desire as 'a solitary affair.' That is, the single-minded pursuit of sexual arousal can exist totally independent of a relationship. 'Getting off' as such has precious little to do with emotional intimacy. A man can sit alone, half-mesmerized before his computer screen, as he intently clicks on images and videos in his hunt for what will immediately ignite his libido.

Unlike his female counterpart, he gives little or no thought to actually sharing his erotic predilections or experiences with friends. And searching for stimuli that will engender or enhance sexual excitement (and ultimately create a most pleasurable dopamine release) is quite apart from any tender feelings, or craving for a genuinely intimate human attachment.

• Women's romance novels display an innate desire for love, romance and long lasting, ideally marital,  relationships.

Doubtless, on the road to marital bliss, the romance formula will include a torrid sex scene or two, but still the tale doesn’t end with images of simultaneous orgasms but sounds of wedding bells—or at least “a long-term monogamous relationship.” This may be a woman’s ultimate fantasy, but it hardly seems to reflect a male’s, whose less judicious ideals are unquestionably more carnal than conjugal. How extraordinarily revealing that Ogas and Gaddam, in exploring the most frequent searches on Dogpile, discovered that the two most common queries ending in ”-ing” were, ahem, “wedding” and “f**king” (p. 106).

• Women are naturally attracted to dominant and authoritative males. Indeed women's natural response to such men is submission.

These heroes are virtually always alpha males, to whom a considerable majority of women seem almost magnetically attracted. And romance novels exploit this preference in various ways. It’s not simply the hero’s physical prowess that is so compelling to female readers: it’s also his “status, confidence, and competence” (p. 95). Each of these traits contributes to his overall dominance—and such male authority, or ascendance, is what most women appear hard-wired to be susceptible to, as well as willing to submit to. 

Ogas and Gaddam, observing that studies have repeatedly demonstrated the erotic appeal of alpha dominance to women—from the sensory cues of the male’s voice, to his scent, to his movement and gait, to his sharply defined facial features—

The True and the False

Bertrand Russell says this in his Preface to The Principles of Mathematics (1903):

"what is true or false is not in general mental"

This is true to a point. The proposition "the Cambrian Explosion occurred roughly 543 billion years ago" was as true back then as it is today when us late comers on the scene found out that this was a true statement. But then how does a materialist square this with his views? How do purely physical entities have truth values? Its true that human mental states don't make propositions true or false but they still seem like irreducibly mental categories to me.

So how does one assert the aforementioned proposition as true without positing a Super mental basis to the universe and the way it was created? (I believe the later Fregean philosopher Michael Dummett proposed an argument for God's existence in this way in his Gifford Lectures).

Darwinian Dating Scene

George Gilder made his mark during the 70's and 80's warning against some of the ill gains from the sexual revolution. One point that stood out for me was the dating environment becoming a sought of survival of the fittest with the older, wealthier males being predominant and older women at the bottom. Older men who are divorced have more money and maturity than younger men and so can swoop in for second, third, or fourth dibs at the pool of younger women. This leaves more younger and poorer males without a chance but especially the older class of women left behind by divorce.

Miranda Devine's new column gives a modern update of all this.

She has a treasure trove of human stories which tell of loneliness and disconnection between the sexes, and a series of brutal home truths - especially for single women, who outnumber their male counterparts in every age group from 30.

At age 25, women can afford to be choosy, with four single males for every three single females, because they are competing with older men.

But by age 44 there are six single women competing for every five single men of the same age.

The high school dufus unlucky in love turns out to be a great catch at 50, provided he has a decent job.

“Men are in a buyers’ market and they are just in clover,” Arndt said.

“They don’t know what’s hit them. I’m always talking to men who are getting 70 contacts (from women) a day. I know someone who had 80 in the first hour.”

That particular 65-year-old Lothario decided to target the “Mosman book club market” with a line in his profile that read: “Keep meaning to spend a year with Proust, but who doesn’t?”

Pretentious, you might think, but “he was knocked over in the rush,” Arndt said.

Spoiled for choice, some middle-aged men are falling prey to what demographer Bernard Salt calls “hotness delusion syndrome”.

Arndt sees the delusion translate into discourteous dating behaviour, with men failing to show up for a coffee date, for instance, or worse, turning up, taking one look and leaving.

The lesson? The sexual revolution had anything but an egalitarian outcome and younger women should be a little less willing to wait until their 30's and 40's to marry. 

Psychology and the Biblical Worldview - Part 1

Happened to be delving into some of the psychological literature surrounding addictions lately and there is some interesting material coming out that dovetails well with David Brooks’ recent The Social Animal.

In chapter 8 Brooks talks about three aspects to human decision making and self control. The first is the perceiving of the situation. The second is the use of reason to calculate the value of, and means to achieve, any goal related activity. And the third is the power of the will to execute or refrain from executing the decision.

Most notable for me was the first. Brooks mentions that throughout the last couple of centuries the reason and will has been given almost exclusive attention. Personally, I’ve only ever been aware of the second two and it was a revelation to me reading about this third vital component especially given its close biblical parallels on temptation and sin. “The lust of the eyes” is, of course, talked about in 1 John 2:16 and in Genesis Satan tempts Eve with fruit that was “pleasing to the eye”.

Much of temptation starts with the way we look on some thing, or some person of the opposite sex, perhaps. The best way to combat addiction or sin in general is not to put oneself in a position where the will and reason come up against the temptation (this is why the Bible tells us to “flee sexual immorality” 1 Cor 6:18). More often than not the latter will win out. One can know that following a particular course of actions is wrong and will have negative consequences, you can resolve to resist with all your might but there is a reason this rarely works. Just look at the dieting success rates!

But there is more to it than just the physical act of looking. One also has to concentrate on where their attention is being focused. Brooks mentions a fascinating 1970 study by Walter Mischel where he tested the abilities of a group of four-year-olds to resist the temptation to eat a marshmallow by promising that after he returns, if they are successful, they will get two. What was found was that the children that were successful employed methods to divert their attention away from the marshmallows by either pretending it wasn’t there or that it was something other than a marshmallow. Later experiments performed by Mischel employed similar mental techniques by children to focus away from the marshmallow with much greater success than those who focused on the marshmallow and just used sheer will to resist the temptation.

So it isn’t just taking in the scene with one’s eyes that counts but one’s actual mental focus and attentional bias. What priorities and goals one sets determines the level of intensity of the addictive stimuli that is encountered. It is not enough therefore, just to resist in the face of temptation but one has to assess one’s mental state several steps before coming face to face with the temptation. A change in goals, ideals, and even identity is necessary so that the attention is focused away from the stimuli in the first place. As this paper on addiction points out:

"That is, becoming committed to a goal pursuit makes the individual responsive to cues associated with those goals in the sense of potentiating emotional and cognitive responses to them, thus giving those cues increased priority in cognitive processing and leading to “attentional biases” for them. During the past 15 years, a considerable body of evidence has accumulated to suggest that substance use and abuse are characterized by biases in the attentional processing of substance-related stimuli. That is, substance-related stimuli acquire the ability to grab the user’s attention." (Field & Cox, 2008)

This isn't just fascinating material and helpful for combating addictions but illustrates just how relevant and prescient the Bible is on the human condition.

Temp and CO2 Mismatch

This passage from Lord Monkton makes me more convinced than ever that Man-made Global Warming is a crock:

...at the end of the Maunder Minimum temperatures rose at a rate of 4 Celsius/century for 40 years. Nothing like that has been seen since: the 20^th century saw just 0.7 Cº of warming, and the 21^st century shows none at all. In a graph showing the linear trend for the last 23 years, the trend line looks like a billiard cue.

So the greatest increase comes just after the MM which is the late 18th Century, well before much of the modern period has had a chance to inject much CO2 into the air. Yet only a modest increase in temperature comes during the 20th century where one would expect acceleration instead. And then for the last decade or two there has been no increase where we would expect an even greater acceleration due to far more CO2 output.

Compassion

Dennis Prager is fond of saying that one should have compassion in the micro and standards in the macro. Gay marriage is one area. The standards to say that marriage should be restricted to a man and woman yet remain compassionate and understanding to each and every homosexual one knows.

Tony Abbott actually looks to be walking that tight rope

On gay marriage Abbott said he was “unpersuaded” but “I have been a bit personally torn on this because Chris (Forster), my sister, came out as gay four or five years ago ... And she is a very lively disputant. I have been well and truly buttonholed.”

I remain convinced that Abbott is a man more disliked from a distance than personally, where the opposite is true of Kevin Rudd. He is loved from a distance but hated in person. 

Income Inequality II

Great piece by Mark Thornton on the Fed's great ability to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, and from the savers to the debtors.

This doesn’t even consider what prices would be like if the Fed and world central banks had not acted as they did. Housing prices would be lower, commodity prices would be lower, CPI and PPI would be running negative. Low-income families would have seen a surge in their standard of living. Savers would get a decent return on their savings.

Of course, the stock market and the bond market would also see significantly lower prices. Bank stocks would collapse and the bad banks would close. Finance, hedge funds, and investment banks would have collapsed. Manhattan real estate would be in the tank. The market for fund managers, hedge fund operators, and bankers would evaporate.

In other words, what the Fed chose to do ended up making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. If they had not embarked on the most extreme and unorthodox monetary policy in memory, the poor would have experienced a relative rise in their standard of living and the rich would have experienced a collective decrease in their standard of living.

Is God Just Another Force?

Consider this quote from the philosopher, John Searle.

For us [naturalists], if it should turn out that God exists, that would have to be a fact like any other. To the four basic forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces—we would add a fifth, the divine force . . . [I]t would still be all physics, albeit divine physics. If the supernatural existed, it too would have to be natural. [Searle, 1998, p. 35] HT: William

Is this the only way that God could act in the world? Indeed there is a far deeper question than this. Is this the only way that God could be a sustaining Cause in the world?

Based on the way I have proposed we should think about form and matter, I would say 'no'. My idea of a form is to think of it as the abstract organisation of the matter that inheres in a substance. A chair is just a bunch of wood organised in a particular way and that 'particular way' is not something physically tangible that could be detected scientifically and it would be a gross category fallacy to say that it must.

Likewise one could say that God's work in the world is metaphysically present via the abstract forms that exist and organise the matter of each respective substance or natural kind. So there is no new matter or energy present when water is formed out of oxygen and hydrogen but it is organised in such a way as to produce something new and ontologically significant none the less.

Where do these forms exist? In the mind of God, perhaps?

Fiji Dictator Loves Our Media 'Reforms'

Hilarious if it weren't so sad! But what hypocrites the Gillard government is for lecturing Fiji on doing what they themselves are now doing. 

FIJI'S military ruler Frank Bainimarama and his regime say they are "flattered" Australia has followed the rogue Pacific nation and proposed a crackdown on press freedom.

Those who fled Bainimarama's rule yesterday said the architect of Fiji's 2010 media decree would be "laughing" at the Australian government and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

Leading government figures, such as Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her predecessor Kevin Rudd, have launched savage attacks on Fiji's ruler for dispensing with democracy and a free press. Bainimarama's spokeswoman, Fiji's Ministry of Information secretary Sharon Smith Johns, said the Pacific nation appeared to have paved the way for Australia: "When we implemented some of the same provisions in our Media Decree two years ago, we were roundly criticised for suppressing media freedom.

"Yet it now appears, from Labor's proposed legislation, that it actually regards us as pioneers.

"We're flattered that Australia is emulating our lead but wonder why Fiji was subjected to such prolonged protest at the time from Labor, the unions and elements of the Australian media."

She claimed Australia's position "smacked of a double standard"

Don't Fear Spending Cuts

Daniel Henninger in the WSJ against those who believe Armageddon coming from the piddly Sequester spending cut. It seems this Harvard Prof. believes spending cuts are much more important than tax increases to get economies back on their feet. 

Mr. Alesina has identified the alternative. His, and others', work the past decade with how struggling economies revive suggests that the Obama spend-more solution is the opposite of what the U.S. should be doing.

There is general agreement on at least two things about the current U.S. economy. It is emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and its debt level is unsustainable. The path back to stronger growth, argues Mr. Alesina, is a combination of significant, permanent cuts in public spending and relatively small tax increases, if any.

This view isn't born of "right-wing" ideology. Mr. Alesina is an Italian, as are many of his co-authors. As Europeans, Mr. Alesina and his colleagues were forced to confront the biggest challenge facing Western economies the past 40 years. Europe rose from the ashes of war, but how would it rise from the ashes of debt, as benevolent postwar spending programs outstripped revenue?

Mr. Alesina and his colleagues wanted to answer the most basic question: What works?

They sought the answer (which they published in an August 2012 paper on "fiscal consolidations" for the National Bureau of Economic Research) by analyzing an International Monetary Fund history of all the fiscal plans that 17 OECD governments enacted between 1978 and 2009, including the U.S., Canada and Japan. Together, these countries tried everything to grow—raise spending, cut spending, raise taxes or cut them, in endless combinations. What helped?

"Adjustments based upon spending cuts," the economists concluded, "are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax-based ones. Spending-based adjustments"—that is, cuts—"have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all. Tax-based adjustments"—tax increases—"have been associated with prolonged and deep recessions."

The debate over "failed austerity" is misleading because it emphasizes spending cuts but rarely mentions tax increases. "Austerity" plans, the Alesina studies suggest, fail to revive growth when they too heavily rely on raising taxes on income and capital—as across Europe and now in the U.S.

There is no magic ride back to prosperity. The Alesina team is describing the least-bad antidote for the long-term poison of destructive national debt. Fiscal plans based on large, permanent spending cuts are associated with renewed growth more than any alternative policy mix that has been tried. Indeed, spending cuts without big tax increases look to be the only thing that really works. The leading example the past 15 years is . . . Canada. And just an observation: The Dow proceeded to its high after the sequester happened. The cuts were the first credible step in rebuilding private-sector confidence.

War on Guns

War on Guns going great. Australia's draconian laws against certain guns only creates black markets and a surge in ownership for bikies and criminals.

A HELLS Angels bikie boss allegedly offered to broker a major arms deal that police fear would have seen 50 black-market Glock pistols flood Sydney's criminal underworld.

Income Inequality

The automatic response of most free market types is to defend income inequality as not necessarily a bad thing and I think a certain amount is both unavoidable and benign. But what needs to be pointed out is that a centralised money supply has contributed to much of the wealth inequality we have today.

The economist Bill Bonner writes

What we do know is that you can’t expect to get something for nothing…not in the world of finance and investment. So you can’t expect to earn a lot from your investments…unless you are lucky, or smart, or the feds rig the system in your favor. Which, of course, is what they’ve done for the last 40 years!

No kidding. In the early ’70s, the feds created a new kind of money. Dollars…with nothing behind them other than the feds themselves. If they wanted, they could destroy the dollar. Or keep it solid. It was entirely up to them.

In the event, they destroyed it slowly. In the early ’70s, we recall buying gasoline for 25 cents a gallon. Now, it was over $3 when we left the US a week ago. It’s lost more than 90% of its value!

But this destruction had consequences that were different for the “rich” than they were for the working classes. Financial assets rose with the inflation of the money supply. The price of labor did not. Stocks went up 13 times. Consumer prices (excluding gasoline) went up about half as much.

So the fed increases the money supply and much of this new money goes into the banks and stocks - in the form of low interest loans and stimulus - before it finds its way into the hands of the average Joe in the form of higher wages. But the average Joe still has to pay for the higher energy and food costs that the increased money supply inevitably produces. So monetary easing and government control of the money supply leads to a redistribution of wealth from the poor - in the form of higher costs - to the wealthy - in the form of higher stock prices.

Another Big Government cause of inequality is the whole lobbying process itself. Funnily enough I have heard advocates of more government rail against the rich because it allows them to curry more favours with the federal government. This is no doubt true but the solution isn't to increase government but to lessen government so that the wealthy can't lobby the government for more favours.

You Can't Have It All

This woman deeply regrets sacrificing a family for a high powered career. Sadly for some the realisation comes too late.

Minimum Wage Contradictions

The economist, Bryan Caplan, makes some interesting arguments against the minimum wage. But what piqued my interest the most was his commentary on the research of David Card. Recently, Obama's proposal to increase the minimum wage has put Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, in the spot light. He, along with Card, produced several notable studies concluding that the MW doesn't have deleterious effects on employment.

But Caplan points out that Card also produced studies showing that immigration doesn't have an effect on the wages of low skilled workers and this contradicts the aforementioned studies. How so? The studies on immigration showed that demand increased with the increased supply of labor which means that demand for labor is highly elastic. So instead of the increased supply of immigrants reducing the price of labor, the demand for that labor increases, leaving the wage amount pretty much the same. So demand for labor is infinitely elastic (the demand curve is horizontal).

But Card's argument for the MW having no effect on employment is the exact opposite. There the argument is that the more the MW is increased the more workers are available for work but the demand for employment remains exactly the same. In other words, according to Card's work, demand is infinitely inelastic (the demand curve is vertical).

Caplan's conclusion

1. The literature on the effect of low-skilled immigration on native wages.  A strong consensus finds that large increases in low-skilled immigration have little effect on low-skilled native wages.  David Card himself is a major contributor here, most famously for his study of the Mariel boatlift.  These results imply a highly elastic demand curve for low-skilled labor, which in turn implies a large disemployment effect of the minimum wage.

This consensus among immigration researchers is so strong that George Borjas titled his dissenting paper "The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping."  If this were a paper on the minimum wage, readers would assume Borjas was arguing that the labor demand curve is downward-sloping rather than vertical.  Since he's writing about immigration, however, he's actually claiming the labor demand curve is downward-sloping rather than horizontal!

D. M. Armstrong - Climate Skeptic

Whilst I find his naturalism unconvincing, David Armstrong is an impressive philosopher. He is probably the singularly most influential philosopher that Australia has produced and that is no mean feat. He is one of the few philosophers responsible for the new birth in metaphysics over the last few decades. And his naturalism didn’t prejudice him from a robust engagement with many of the more traditional categories in metaphysics, which one could say, present at least a prima facie difficulty for a worldvew like his. He maintained a thoroughly realist – but naturalized – view of universals and his world was a world of nothing but states of affairs.

Stephen Mumford, in his book on Armstrong’s philosophy, says that he baulked at the prospect of becoming a disciple of his philosophical mentor, John Anderson. Anderson was not unimpressive himself and Armstrong learnt a lot from him, but such was his doggedly independence that he was to be no man’s intellectual servant. Here is an Armstrong quote from Mumford’s book

I am not a natural disciple, and, although I was immensely influenced, I never became one of the loyal circle. This caused Anderson to regard me with suspicion. (15)

Armstrong would have none of the kind of group think that pervades much of the academy today. He was also prominent in opposing the Marxist and Postmodernist takeovers of Sydney University some decades ago. So it doesn’t surprise me that he is also a climate skeptic and at least recognizes the strength of some of the Intelligent Design arguments.

His review of James Franklin’s Science and Its Limits he says this on climate change in parenthesis

(I have just now been reading Ian Plimer’s newly appeared book Heaven + Earth, which seems to show that the case for the global warming hypothesis is very weak indeed.)

And on evolution and ID he says

I had the good fortune some years ago to hear Behe talk, at a symposium on evolution at the University of Notre Dame. I thought at the time that Darwinians were lucky to have such an informed and resourceful critic as Behe. Let the chips fall where they may. I’d myself look for some naturalistic explanation for the whole process of evolution, but let us not regard the case as closed.

In saner times such comments wouldn’t warrant a mention but if one is even slightly acquainted with the extreme dogmatism and group think that confronts proponents of both ID and climate skepticism then such an open position, especially from such a prominent intellectual like Armstrong, is a breath of fresh air. 

(See also his review of John Armstrong's The Meaning of Civilisation)

Strong Currencies

According to the great economist Ludwig von Mises a strong currency is not the dire situation that many assume. The most common worry is that a strong currency means exports are more expensive and less competitive on the world market. But the blessings of a weak currency are over sold. First of all, one of the surest routes to a weak currency is for the federal reserve to print money. This is happening all over the world at the moment as nations compete to debase their currency. The most egregious examples are the US and Japanese.

As this piece from The Drum (ABC) points out, Australia will be a 'victim' in this currency war because its dollar will appreciate greatly leading some overseas investors to recommend shorting the US dollar by buying AUD. But as The Drum piece notes our own Federal Reserve is under the false impression that a rising dollar is a bad thing - no doubt because it thinks our exports will suffer - so it is compensating by trying to pump air into our already overinflated and overpriced housing market.

But as this news piece reports, a stronger currency carries certain blessings such as keeping the price of food low.

Despite persistent complaints about the ever-increasing cost of living, Australia now has the developed world's fastest falling food prices, according to new research.

Food costs dropped 2.7 percent in the 12 months leading up to September, analysis of OECD data has found.

The falling prices are a dramatic turnaround after Australians suffered the fastest-rising food prices of the world's developed nations between 2000 and 2009.

The change could be attributed to fruit prices, which recently normalised after surging prices due to natural disasters in Queensland and Victoria.

But broader trends also contributed to the drop, with Australian food prices remaining contained compared to countries such as New Zealand, the UK and the US since the end of 2009.

University of Queensland economics professor John Quiggin said the reversal in prices was partly due to increased supply at the end of the drought and the strong Australian dollar.

"The appreciation of the dollar pushes down the prices of commodities, which pushes down the price for Australian consumers," Professor Quiggin said.

A strong currency also keeps other commodities low, like fuel. 

Now for some basic economics. As von Mises pointed out many years ago, a strong currency doesn't necessarily make exports more expensive because a weakening currency is caused by inflating the money supply and hence drives up the cost of domestically made goods. From what I understand, this is because the cost of imported raw materials go up because of the weaker dollar and this makes the goods more expensive and hence offsets any advantage that the weaker dollar may have had against other currencies.

Japan and the US are two test cases. Whilst the US has debased its currency over recent years without hardly any improvement in its terms of trade, the Japanese Yen has been appreciating whilst its exports haven't suffered at all.

In this regard Japan provides an interesting case study. Despite decades of a strengthening yen, the domestic price level has remained stagnant. Deflation has more recently eroded the domestic price of goods in Japan. Foreigners, for their part, have to pay a higher price thanks to the appreciation of the yen. But they pay that higher price on fewer money units because of deflation. No harm, no foul, one might say.

Yet the effect goes further. Domestic Japanese producers have access to cheaper import markets. Located throughout a relatively small series of islands for one of the world's largest economies, Japan lacks many of the natural resources necessary to be a global powerhouse. A strong yen allows these producers cheap access to foreign resources, while maintaining their selling prices. Profits are strong as a result. Consumers benefit as well. Many Japanese are well-seasoned travelers, able to navigate the world, secure with their valuable yen. Japanese consumers are afforded a high quality of life — complete with great vacation pictures — thanks to the strong position they have in the world. This position is attributable to the yen.

If we want a good picture of the net effect of these two forces, we can turn our attention to the real exchange rate. Adjusted for the change in the Japanese price level versus the United States', the story of Japan's competitiveness becomes much more apparent.

Misogyny in India

To be a woman in India. Articles like this make a mockery of the multiculturalist idea that all cultures are the same and the feminist doctrine that women experience widespread misogyny and discrimination in western countries. Maybe such feministas like our own PM, with her pathetic misogyny speech, should learn something about the real thing.

What has often struck me is the difference between being a woman in Delhi and a woman in Melbourne. In India there is a constant feeling of insecurity that is almost oppressive.

You are hyper-aware, never speaking to anyone you don't know - particularly men - avoiding eye contact, taking the women's carriage on the Metro and dressing conservatively to blend in as much as possible. And yet in spite of all of these measures you are still never safe. There isn't one trip where an attack on a woman - often publicly, by a gang of men - is not reported in the media. But more devastating is the knowledge that thousands of women across India often experience similar behaviour without an outlet for assistance or justice.

In light of this experience, the recent gang-rape of a young female student on a bus in Delhi shocks but does not surprise me. In a country where women are silenced, and any harm done to them is seen as indicative of their own recklessness, men are able to act with impunity.

This unfortunately means that acts of violence become more aggressive. The media attention surrounding the recent tragedy has highlighted the pervasive misogyny that is present in contemporary India.

A politician called women ''painted and dented'' for protesting and alleged that ''rape victims'' were often prostitutes who were not paid.

Exposés of Delhi police show they believe women who come forward with rape accusations just ''cry wolf''. In any event, they are to blame for dressing immodestly and conducting themselves inappropriately, and in extreme cases victims have committed suicide after police harassment.

This apathy towards violence against women begins in the womb with female infanticide. With dowry deaths and child marriage so prevalent, India is regarded as the worst country in the G20 to be a woman.

Gary Johns

AMONG the world's biggest economies, infanticide, child marriage and slavery make India the worst place to be a woman.
In India, women and girls continue to be sold as chattels, married off as young as 10, burned alive as a result of dowry-related disputes and young girls are exploited and abused as domestic slave labour.

The numbers of missing women is highest in two northwestern states Punjab and Haryana (Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray, Economic & Political Weekly, December 1, 2012) where attitudes to women are crudest.