Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most odious misogynist bullshit I have seen thus far on the topic of the Slutwalks: a post on The Third Edge of the Sword, a blog that seems to go out of its way to be offensive and “edgy,” that takes victim blaming to a whole new level. Here’s the basic, er, argument of the post, which the author has put in giant pink letters so we won’t miss it:
Every woman marching in the Edmonton Slut Walk is publicly declaring herself a slut. This means every woman there desires sex with any and all partners. Any sexual activity you initiate with them comes with implied consent. They cannot say no, and if they do understand all their ‘no’s mean yes. They are all asking for it. They want it bad. Now. From you. Go get ‘em!
Some other highlights:
[I]f you … dress slutty, men are going to stare at you. We’re going to catcall. We are going to tell you all sorts of sexual things we want to do to your body. And if you dress slutty and wave your ass in our face, we will do them. The organizers of this event are not oblivious to this point: what they want is a fake sexual revolution. They want to be able to impersonate sluts without actually being sluts, and that’s unacceptable. If you don’t want to be treated as a piece of meat, don’t marinate and grill yourself and sit perched on a piece of garlic toast. You dress slutty, you show off the goods, you try to get a reaction, you will get one. Hint: it’s not always going to be the one you want. …
The “reaction” he has in mind is rape. By calling rape a “reaction” instead of what it is — a criminal assault on someone, an act of sexual violence, a violation — he of course is attempting to switch the blame to the victim. He spells out his “logic” in more detail:
[W]hen you impersonate a slut we don’t fine you, and we don’t throw you in jail. There’s really only one punishment for dressing like a streetwalker when you aren’t one: you do have to endure the occasional rape. You should really suffer it in silence. Accept the character flaw within you that caused this, and move on. Police and court resources are already busy enough with real criminals: like actual rapists who do nasty things to their niece or the homeless native chick passed out under the bridge, or a conservatively dressed urban professional walking to her car, or a girl out jogging in a track suit. To equate the act of actually violating and raping one of these people with having sex with a girl who’s every square millimetre of public persona screams anybody who wants to can screw me right now is ridiculous.
Once again, this brand of misogyny leads to some conclusions that are pretty misandrist – namely, the notion that men are at heart rapists who can’t control their violent urges:
If you go out on the street in an outfit that would make Britney Spears feel uncomfortable, you do so knowing that your ultimate aim is to make men want you. Well, they want you now. Congrats. Oh, wait, you mean you didn’t understand what that implied? That in the great Bell curve of sexual congress you’ve just pushed everybody on the right-hand side of the -2 std devs line past that imaginary barrier that says “there is no power in the universe powerful enough to stop me from sliding my finger inside your panties”? I call bullshit. You do know. But you want to be a virginal slut, to dress in ways that makes men helpless to their urges but still leaves you fully in restrictive control.
The blogger concludes by arguing that the Slutwalkers are all “lying bitches” because they dress like they wasn’t to be raped, but do not actually want to be raped. Then he makes this lovely suggestion:
If your wife is one of them, I’m very very sorry. Maybe a good rape might make her a little more manageable around the house.
Now this post is an atmittedly extreme example of a misogynistic response to the Slutwalks. But the basic “logic” of this blogger’s would-be argument is essentially identical to that of many MRA and other “manosphere” pieces I’ve seen on the subject, the main difference between them being that this guy embraces the logical conclusion of his argument — that Slutwalkers deserve to be raped — while the MRAs who make essentially the same argument (and fling the same sorts of insults at the Slutwalkers) make a show of saying that they don’t really think the Slutwalkers “deserve” it. And maybe they’ve convinced themselves that this caveat means something . But in that case the extreme reaction that manosphere misogynists have had to the Slutwalks – the insults thrown at the Slutwalkers, the “jokey” references to rape, the prurient sneering – makes little sense. If you argue that women are “asking for it” when they dress like “sluts,” you’re essentially saying they deserve it. You’re making the same argument this guy is making, but pretending you aren’t.
Three young women wake up, confused and terrified, in a room that looks like a cross between a normal hospital room and the creepy underground lair of some mad scientist from a horror movie. A video screen flickers on and a creepy older man, looking a bit like Academy-award-nominee Robert Loggia, appears on it, telling the women that he’s their “jailer.” The women, you see, had all been getting abortions when their jailer’s shadowy accomplices kidnapped them and brought them to this strange prison, where they will be forced to live for the next seven months until they gave birth. “You were all on the operating table, all ready to commit murder,” announces a mysterious doctor. “Your babies will be given life just as God planned.”
Now, if you thought that something seemed really … off about that trailer, well, you’re not alone. For the film is not, as you might have assumed from my description, a warning against the fanatical misogyny of many in the anti-abortion movement.
No, the film – produced by a pro-life former judge, crime thriller author, and Republican New Jersey state senate candidate – is meant as pro-life propaganda. As the offical press release for the film’s premiere put it:
The film, which appears to cut right down the middle [of the abortion debate], examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist. Del Vecchio and the cast invite pro-lifers to come to this historic event.
During the months the three women are held in captivity, you see, they are exposed to a barrage of films and books intended to, er, educate them about abortion –what their attending obstetrician Dr. Wise describes as “an abortion think tank.” Two of the captive women do indeed convert to the pro-life side; apparently we in the audience are supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome along with them. The third, as we see in the trailer, tries to induce a miscarriage, which doesn’t go quite as planned.
And this sets us up for the final twist, which I’m just going to go ahead and reveal: once all three women have given birth, Dr. Wise tells them she’s going to sew them all, mouth-to-vagina, into a Human Abortion-pede!
Actually no: the twist is that the “life zone” the three women in has actually been … purgatory! All three “captives,” you see, had died on the operating table while getting their abortions. (Apparently they went to the world’s worst abortion clinic, as first-trimester abortions don’t involve anything more surgically invasive than the insertion of a suction tube; the risk of death from a legal surgical abortion is 0.0006%, one in 160,000 cases, making the procedure many times safer than childbirth itself.) Their time in the “life zone” was a test: the two women who changed their minds were whisked up to heaven, while their miscarriage-attempting, stubbornly pro-choice companion is sent straight to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. Dr. Wise, despite being on the right side of the abortion question, also goes to hell for committing suicide. And, oh yeah, their jailer – Loggia – was Satan. Why Satan and a hell-bound doctor were the ones trying to convert the abortion ladies to the pro-life side I can’t tell you; del Vecchio’s theology is evidently more sophisticated than I am.
The real twist here? As Jersey Journal writer Alan Robb notes:
The Life Zone went viral across the internet [last] Friday after blogs The Frisky and Talking Points Memo picked up on the film’s trailer. … But despite garnering more than 20,000 hits on YouTube in the last four days, only fifty people – including the film’s cast and producers – attended this weekend’s screening, and even those who starred in the movie didn’t know how to interpret its twist ending.
It’s impossible to tell from the trailer if the film is bad in a so-bad-it’s-good way, or if it’s just plain awful. I will try to get hold of it when it hits video, and will report back with my results.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a good horror film set in a creepy hospital, try renting Infection, a Japanese film from 2005. Or, if you’ve got a longer attention span, try Lars Von Trier’s supernatural soap opera The Kingdom, a darkly comic miniseries which takes place in what one might call, paraphrasing Bill Murray’s character in Tootsie, “one nutty hospital.” Both are conveniently available on Netflix instant watch, so you don’t even have to leave your pregnancy dungeon to see them.
EDITED: Added some info on the minimal dangers of abortion procedures.
So Esquire magazine recently posted a list of “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read” on their website. Esquire being Esquire – that is to say, a men’s magazine that had its glory days in the era of Mad Men and that seems to be aimed mostly at old farts (and aspiring old farts) — only one book of the 75 was written by a woman. (That’s 98.67% male, for those of you with lady brains who can’t do the math.)
The internet being the internet, some people noticed that the list was a wee bit heavy on the dudes, even for a men’s magazine, and pointed this out. The bloggers at the Joyland Publishing blog suggested that while the books on Esquire’s list were “mostly fantastic,” it might behoove men to pick up a book or two written by a woman once in a while. And so, with the help of some of their readers, the two assembled a list of “250 Books By Women All Men Should Read.” (Why 250 and not, say, 75? Because they got a lot of suggestions.)
Here’s a little one-question quiz for you all: What title did W. F. Price at The Spearhead give his post on the controversy?
A) “Some Great Suggestions for Books by Women You Guys Might Want to Read.”
B) “Did You Know There Are Female Authors Besides The Chick That Wrote Harry Potter?”
C) “Feminist Publishers: Force Men to Read Women’s Lit”
Yep, the correct answer is C, of course. Apparently a couple of bloggers suggesting some books by women that men “should” read is some kind of Gestapo-like imposition upon men by “Feminist Publishers.” Price grouses:
[I]it strikes me as rather mean-spirited of females in the publishing industry to denounce even ineffectual efforts to introduce men to literature. By all accounts, publishing has come to be dominated by women, and men are reading far fewer books than women these days. Given this state of affairs, you’d think that the women in the industry might be a bit gracious and let the boys pick and choose which titles interest them.
But of course that won’t do, because feminists must find fault with any and everything men are involved in. …
The implication [of the Joyland Publishing blog post] is that men should be forced by political pressure to read female writers (sometimes these feminists come off as whiny, annoying girlfriends complaining that “he just won’t listen to me!”).
Or, you know, it might just be that the writers of the blog post, and those who wrote in with suggestions, really enjoyed the books in question and thought that dudes might just enjoy them too. Sort of like when a friend tells you that you should totally watch the movie Dogtooth, because it is so fascinating and creepy and awesome. Or when I tell you right now that you should go watch Jane Austen’s Fight Club on Funny or Die.
Naturally, the comments from Spearheaders were even more ignorant and obtuse than Price’s post. The basic theme: Bitches can’t write for shit (as far as I know).
In case you think I am offering an unfair characterization of the, er, debate, here’s one Spearheader’s contribution to the discussion:
when a man says “no, I won’t read your literature”, you have to respect that, bitch.
I basically do not read anything a wimminz has written, not even in my favourite genre of science fiction, because every single time I have tried they have been unmitigated fucking crap full of feminazi girl power bullshit and emotional baggage and basically very little hard SF…
I never read anything written by women unless it happens to be instructional and related to work. Pretty much all the fiction I’ve ever read is by and for males. If I read some non-fiction for fun it’s always got a male author. I realized a while back that my cd collection is about 98% male. When I was a kid I never thought about it, it just came naturally. Now that I’m older I intentionally avoid anything by women.
It’s always,er, instructive to see what some random guy who apparently reads mostly instructional manuals has to say about the literary controversies of the day.
There were, of course, more thoughtful analyses, like this earnest comment from the excitable, exclamation-point-happy David K. Meller:
Women write for an audience of their own level–to wit themselves! Most men are simply too intelligent to be interested in what passes for literature scribbled by women! …
Correct me if I am wrong, but is most woman’s “literature” one more kvetch klatsch of women–or girls–getting together to complain about, to defeat, or to evade the workings of us evil, letcherous, abusive, horrible M-E-N! There is no point in men reading such drivel …
There may be better days coming; when women are once again taught the arts of pleasing men, in their creating a comfortable environment for the chosen man in their lives, and when they again will use their ability to read to discover new and better ways to do this, and their ability to write to communicate these truths to others of their sex! Until that happens, literacy for women, much less dominance in authorship, editing, and publishing has been, and is, a BLOODY MESS for everyone, especially men!!
PEACE AND FREEDOM!! David K. Meller
Yes, women should really only be allowed to read and write if they are reading or writing instructional manuals on how to cook and give better blow jobs, possibly at the same time.
PEACE AND FREEDOM!! to you too, good sir.
Speaking of which — the blowjob bit, not the PEACE AND FREEDOM!! — the commenter calling himself dragnet suggested that young men such as himself were simply too busy to read much of anything. They have other priorities:
The vast majority of my reading is for work, research, and classes. …
Frankly, I’d rather be getting laid than reading a novel after a grueling work week. The three or four hours I sometimes have free on the weekend when I’m not working or working out or sleeping or eating, I’d rather be out with my friends or getting serviced by whatever girl I’m with at the time.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a penis, must be in want of some girl to service it.
PEACE AND FREEDOM!!1!!
Anyway, ladies and manginas, any good lady books you want to suggest for the dudes of the world?
Some highlights, by which I mean lowlights, of a recent discussion on The Spearhead of IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on sexual assault charges. The Spearheaders, naturally, have some unique and interesting perspectives on the case:
Black women (like the accuser) are all a bunch of liars. Run away!
I knew it was going to be a black woman- I suspected from the second I heard about this. Crystal Magnum anyone? Don’t want to make this a racial issue- but how can you avoid it? You take 5 ounces of Female/Feminist hate and deception, add 8 ounces of the stereotypical black thing of always sniffing around for a lawsuit, stir .. and you have more than enough reason to avoid black women even more vigorously than women in general.
The case is somehow all about how badly “beta” men are discriminated against by evil women:
Typically false rape allegations are made when a woman realizes she’s slept with a beta but doesn’t want her rep taking a hit and wants to avoid feeling like crap (betas are icky) my gut tells me either this is a totally fabricated set up (politically motivated) or Strauss-Kahn is getting a lesson in how betas have to apologize everyday for their existence.
She’s accusing him because she’s got AIDS and therefore (?) wants to make a quick buck, ethics be damned:
Since she has AIDS she knows that an infection could take her out at any time and she has a teenage daughter. A person like this will certainly not think like a normal person and may very well do something for a lump sum of cash since she has nothing to lose and may have some resentment towards men and doesn’t care what happens to this one guy. She also may be thinking that if she dies at least her daughter will have the money. This is not someone I would trust. …
I predict that Strauss will be released on bail tomorrow. He’ll pay the female’s lawyer some money and then the whole thing will just fade away.
He’s probably innocent, but he’s a white-hating Commie Jew bastard, so ha ha:
Libertarian here. I doubt this guy is guilty. Seems unlikely, yet possible. But as observed, this guy is a White-hating elite Marxist Jew. So while I agree that political disagreement is not sufficient grounds for wishing false-rape accusation/conviction on him, I submit that his hostility toward my people coupled with his general evil is enough to justify the enjoyment of his suffering. We can’t forget that his politics are what makes this possible in the first place, or ignore the ‘reap what you sow’ component here.
As a white guy, I’d like to say that goldenfetus does not in fact speak for “my people.”
And before anyone steps in to complain that I’ve picked the “outliers” in the discussions, the fanatics whose opinions aren’t shared by the MRA masses, I will note that (as is generally the case with Spearhead comments I quote) all of the comments here have gotten numerous upvotes from Spearhead readers, and only a handful of downvotes, if any. In other words, they represent something close to the Spearhead conventional wisdom. (And by “wisdom” here I mean “offensive idiocy.”)
Here’s a comment found today in the Reddit Men’s Rights subreddit, probably the most “moderate” MR forum I know of online.
From Reddit's Men's Rights subreddit
The comment is in response to the video below, which is camera-phone footage of a woman beating the shit out of a guy (who refuses, on principle, to fight back). The physical abuse starts about half way through the video, and escalates at the end. It’s frankly horrifying.
Obviously this woman should be in jail, and presumably this video would be enough to guarantee her conviction. (If the video is pulled, I have saved a copy.) That’s not the issue. The issue is someone suggesting on the MR subreddit that a woman – a black woman at that — should be quite literally lynched, and getting upvotes rather than massive downvotes for expressing this opinion.
It’s not as if the MR regulars have trouble downvoting comments they dislike; another comment in the discussion stating that “men should not hit women” is considered so outrageous that it is assumed to be the comment of a troll (which it indeed seems to be). Last I checked, it had 8 downvotes, and was the most-downvoted comment in the thread.
There have been some strange, but hardly surprising, reactions in the MRA-verse to the arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on attempted rape charges.
On The False Rape Society blog, Pierce Harlan seems bothered that the police would arrest such an important man, citing an assortment of articles saying that Strauss-Kahn’s arrest will likely have a big effect on markets and on the global economy.
Harlan titles his piece: “So rape claims aren’t taken seriously? Reuters says the claim against Strauss-Kahn could impact “the well-being of the global economy.” After quoting from an assortment of news stories that suggest that, yes, Strauss-Kahn’s arrest has already affected markets and could affect the global economy, Harlan ends with this petulant conclusion:
All because of a disputed rape allegation. Right now, that’s all it is. I have no idea if a crime was committed, and neither do you.
But I know one thing: the entire world is taking very seriously — and perhaps way too seriously — the word of an unnamed maid it knows nothing about.
First of all, just as we don’t know whether or not Strauss-Kahn is guilty of this alleged attack, we also don’t know what evidence the police have. What we do know from other media accounts suggests that there is more to go on than the “word of an unnamed maid” – including DNA and other evidence at the scene, footage from the hotel’s security cams, injuries suffered by the maid, who was treated at a local hospital. There may well have been witnesses too; we simply don’t know. (Also, the maid has now been named in the French press. Wonderful.)
Second, and more importantly, why should the fact that the arrest has affected world markets have any bearing whatsoever on the case? By this logic, no important political or financial figure should ever be arrested for anything.
To make myself perfectly clear here: Harlan does not say explicitly that DSK is too important to be arrested on the word of a lowly maid, but that seems to be the implicit suggestion of his post, the whole reason to quote several articles about the effect this is having on the world economy, all because of “the word of an unnamed maid [the world] knows nothing about.” I have asked him to clarify what exactly he did mean, and he has refused. In a followup post he asks rhetorically “Have we handed an unnamed maid too much power to destroy a presumptively innocent man?” and answers himself by saying “The question scarcely survives its statement.” Which I will take as a “yes.” He goes on to say:
We reported yesterday what the world press is saying about the sexual assault claim against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. About how it could impact not only the IMF he heads, and France where is a presidential hopeful, but the global economy itself. It is widely believed that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s reputation has been marred beyond repair, regardless of the outcome of this affair.
To say this is morally grotesque does not capture the evil of what is happening to a presumptively innocent man. …
If there is a running theme in this blog, it is this: we have handed anonymous women and children far, far too much power to destroy the lives and reputations of presumptively innocent men before even a scrap of evidence has been introduced to prove their guilt.
If I am reading this correctly — and please correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Harlan — he is saying that ALL men are too important to be arrested on sexualk assault charges based on the word of “anonymous women and children.”
Again, let me ask you, Mr. Harlan, is this what you mean? I invite everyone here to read the two posts in question — the first one here; the second one here – and tell me what you think he is trying to say.
Mr. Harlan, if you want to clarify what you mean here, I will put that clarification up without comment as a post, under a neutral headline (Pierce Harlan clarifies what he meant in his posts on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest”).
I would also like to point out, again, that the police seem to be going on a lot more than the “word of an unnamed maid,” including surveillance tapes, statements from those who spoke to the maid immediately after the alleged incident, DNA evidence in the room. There may also be DNA evidence on her clothing; that we don’t know. But it seems fairly clear that there is evidence beyond the maid’s testimony.
Meanwhile, over on In Mala Fide, a guest blogger from Human-Stupidity.com, an MRA site that devotes a lot of its attention to railing against child porn laws, attacks the accuser and dismisses the charges. It’s hard to know what in the post is sarcasm and what is simply astounding stupidity. But as far as I can figure it, Mr. Stupidity is far more distressed by reports that the maid accidentally walked in on a naked Strauss-Kahn than he is by the possibility that he sexually assaulted her:
The story is very strange, and dominated by clear mistakes and screwups committed by the accuser. A five-star hotel maid trespasses into a naked client’s room? Unforgivable. …
This is not supposed to happen in a high-class hotel. Were the sex roles inverted, were a male employee to walk in on a prominent female guest, like Mrs. Hillary Clinton, the male employee would be fired and arrested for sexual harassment.
Mr. Stupidity then goes on to suggest that such a powerful man would never try to rape anyone because, you know, powerful men don’t do that sort of thing.
A hitherto well behaved, civilized man, suddenly goes crazy? Just because he was naked, he wanted to take advantage of her and rape her?
A man pictured on the covers of magazines, admired by millions of women, who could get any woman he wanted with a snap of his fingers. A man from a country with legalized prostitution who could afford two luxury prostitutes per day, if he happened to be a sex addict. And this guy, exactly the moment the woman walks in, illegally, incorrectly, grabs her and rapes her?
So what does Mr. Stupidity think really happened? After raising the possibility that this is all some political setup, he ends the piece suggesting that the maid – who, he says “committed a serious professional lapse, almost a crime” by accidentally walking in on Strauss-Kahn – simply made up the story in order to protect her job. Because maids are instantly fired for accidentally walking in on guests? Because never ever in the history of hotels has a maid walked in on someone naked? (A quick Google search suggests not only that this is relatively common, but also that it’s a sexual fantasy of quite a few men.)
this is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that’s what it’s all about. A man pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room? He’s got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.
but, would it have been too intolerably oppressive for Kate Middleton to have kept to the traditional vows including promising to ‘obey’ her husband? Yes, I know such a thing is not just hopelessly out of fashion but considered almost a crime against their human rights by feminists and millions of brainwashed modern women. But if the Royals won’t preserve the last remnants of tradition, who will? And what’s the point of Monarchy if not tradition?
Petra acknowledges that Lady Di also refused to say the word “obey” when she married Prince Charles, snidely remarking, “[a]nd we know just how well suited she proved to be for her role and responsibilities.” (Yeah, that was the problem with that famously troubled marriage.) She continues:
Undoubtedly the decision to modernize the vows was taken to show the Monarchy being in step with contemporary culture and to present the new Duchess of Cambridge as a thoroughly modern woman and role model for millions of young women throughout Britain. And that’s the biggest tragedy of it all… The country doesn’t need any more progressive ‘role models’ infected with feminist ideology. What we do need, if this society is ever to reverse the present degeneration, are those who stand up for traditional values and mores.
Yeah, because there’s nothing even remotely traditional about celebrating a gigantic, extravagant, broadcast-live-to-billions wedding involving about 8 hours of hymns and AN ACTUAL MOTHERFUCKING PRINCE. I mean, they might as well have had a “commitment ceremony” on a commune, or something.
But apparently making a big deal out of a wedding doesn’t mean that today’s degenerate women actually take marriage itself with any seriousness:
Marriage today is, to many women, just an extravagant social occasion and party, their very own ‘princess’ fantasy. It doesn’t seem to include any consideration on what marriage really means, much less on how to be a good wife. Undoubtedly the mere concept of a ‘good wife’ would be deemed oppressive these days. (Are you saying women should have responsibilities and not just rights?!) After all, millions of women feel entitled to ditch their marriages and perfectly decent husbands for no better reason than feeling bored or ‘unfulfilled’. The princesses deserve to be happy – and if they harm their husbands and children in their insatiable quest for fulfillment, so be it!
Damn those women and their infernal desire to not be miserable!
So why on earth could any decent woman possibly have a problem with pledging to obey her husband? Petra assures us, in all seriousness, that
promising to ‘obey’ one’s husband has nothing to do with being oppressed, a second class citizen with no power or say in a relationship, or a servant to a man. It’s a statement of trust and respect, acknowledging the authority of the man as head of family, responsible for and dedicated to his wife’s and their children’s welfare. Despite us wanting to pretend otherwise, a woman’s natural role is to be loving, nurturing and supportive in a relationship. When women usurp the masculine role (power and leadership) and emasculate men it doesn’t bode well for marriage.
Dudes, if you feel “emasculated” because your wife doesn’t unquestioningly follow your every dictate, you must have an awfully fragile sense of self – and an extreme sense of entitlement. Learning that other people have their own needs and desires, and that the world does not bend to our every whim, is one of the most basic developmental lessons we all learn in our lives. Most of us do it when we are babies.
But to Petra, the insistence of most contemporary western women that their marriages be partnerships of equals means that they’re the narcissists:
Women are deluded in thinking they have been ‘liberated’ from some imaginary shackles, when in fact they’ve only sabotaged themselves and contributed a great deal to the rotten state of our society. The anti-male bias is ever present in the West today; we are ‘empowering’ females at the expense of males and conditioning women to disparage men.
The self-absorption and sense of entitlement of today’s women make it nearly impossible to form healthy, sustainable marriages and relationships.
What follows is a by-the-numbers rant about “sky-high divorce rates,” degenerate single mothers, “welfare dependency … sexual depravity,” human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.
Sorry, I got carried away; those last bits were from Ghostbusters.(Not the bit about “sexual depravity” – she actually did said that.)
While Petra is perfectly comfortable preaching special treatment for men – having someone literally pledge obedience to you; how much more special does it get than that? – she’s incensed at the notion that “women have long been enjoying – and often abusing – a privileged and protected status (as the ‘oppressed sex’).”
To Petra, the fact that some women choose not to pledge obedience to their husbands means that men are the real oppressed class, facing pervasive “anti-male bias” and the “emasculating” power of women … demanding to be treated the same as men. In other words:
The explicit subordination of women in marriage = not oppression.
Equality in marriage = oppression of men.
I’m sorry, but Petra’s argument here is even sillier than Princess Beatrice’s hat.
And since when do the guys on The Spearhead give a shit about marriage? I was under the impression they all thought it was some sort of evil feminist plot. .
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*Note to literal-minded Obama-haters: I was making a little joke there. That picture is not real. Also, Obama was not born in Kenya.
UPDATE: Fixed the link to that not-real photo of Obama and pals in Princess Beatrice hats. Which I’ll just link to here as well.
It’s no secret that lots of women love Mad Men, and not just because Don Draper is such a handsome devil. Sure, the show focuses mostly on the swaggering Don. But it also depicts the struggles of numerous female characters as they bump up against the obstacles and issues faced by women at the time, most notably those of secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson as she tries to make it in the boys club that was the advertising world of the 50s and 60s. Meanwhile, the show’s happy homemaker, Betty Draper (now Betty Francis), is about as far from happy as you can get, her life a perfect illustration of Betty Friedan’s critique of the emptiness at the heart of the lives of many middle-class stay-at-home moms of the time.
It’s no wonder that historian Stephanie Coontz has described Mad Men as “TV’s most feminist show,” and no wonder why the show is so popular with the feminist women in my life.(Not to mention with me.)
Just don’t tell any of this to Uncle Elmer, a regular commenter over on The Spearhead. He’s evidently never seen the show, but feels confident he knows why feminists love it so much:
Feminists … have a huge forbidden woodie for the “50s”. They simply cannot get enough 50s imagery and its thinly veiled implication that women should stay at home, know how to run a household, and lavishly support their man so he can go out and bring back the bacon.
I’m betting a lot of lez-couples have a secret “50s room” in their McMansion (or remodeled Brownstone) where they can act out these suppressed urges. The props must be breathtaking.
Uh, yeah. As Amanda Marcotte recently observed,“[w]hen you believe that we live in a female-dominated world where straight men are the most oppressed class, it tends to make you wrong about pretty much everything.”
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Be careful, gals. With warmer weather coming, don’t be tempted to wear skimpier clothes. Because female sexuality works the same as body heat on a cold winter’s day: the more skin you show, the more heat – literal and figurative – leaks out. Eventually, you will run out. And that’s bad news, possibly for you, and definitely for your future husbands. (And really, they’re the only ones who count.)
That, in any case, is the theory of one traditional-minded Men’s Rightser calling himself Alucin. In a blog post today he mused about the differences between traditional religious women and, you know, all those filthy “western” sluts wandering around exposing sexy bits like their legs and their … hair. (Not their leg hair, their head hair. We’ll get to leg hair in a minute.) Alucin writes:
Orthodox Jewish [and] Muslim women [cover] their hair and other parts when in public. The ideal is that they save their sexuality for their husband. Only their husband can see their hair, legs, cleavage, and experience their sexuality.
All well and good, Alucin says. “Western women,” by contrast,
fully display their sexuality, and tend not to value virginity or other traditional sexual morals. Then, when married, they turn into dowdy, asexual androids, gaining weight and wearing their man’s clothes. And forgetting to shave.
They give none of their sexuality to their husbands. It has already been used up. She says that she owns her sexuality, but in fact it was the zillion guys she’s been with who have owned her sexuality. Her sexuality has been farmed and mined.
A western woman’s sexuality is for everyone
but her husband.
Here’s one of those horrible hair-showing western harlots singing about hot cleavage in the summertime. (Just so you don’t get too confused by the lyrics, I’m pretty sure the song is from the point of view of a guy missing his girlfriend.)
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The video above, which has been making the rounds of the manosphere, is one of the creepiest and most off-putting things I’ve seen since watching Dogtooth a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I take that back: Dogtooth was much less creepy and off-putting. I was so repelled by what I saw in this video that it literally took me several tries to get through the whole thing. And no, it’s not some weird misogynistic rant by the likes of Bernard Chapin. Oh, no no no. The misogynists of the world are as repelled by the video as I am, though for radically different reasons. Titled “Dear Woman,” the video was actually put together by a couple of self-described “conscious men” who think they’re doing a great favor to the women of the world.
To which I can only say: Guys, stop it, you’re not helping.
If you can stomach it, the video is worth watching in its entirety. If not, here’s what you’re missing: The video is the work of a couple of New Age gurus — Arjuna Ardagh and Gay Hendricks, Ph.D – who, with the help of a little gaggle of guys, have written a little manifesto “apologizing” to the women of the world for all the bad shit done by men to women over the centuries. Or, as they put it:
I feel deep love, great respect and a growingsense of worshipfor the gifts of the feminine. I also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present. I want to apologize to you and make amends for those actions, in order to bring forth a new era of co-creation with you.
The first step in “making amends,” evidently, was to gather together a group of men – some of whom seem to have been roped into it in the middle of a garden party — and to somehow convince them to read out loud the entire text of this manifesto. (The full text is here, but it’s much creepier when it’s read out loud.)
There is something about this manifesto, and the men reading it, that is so “off” that it may well make your skin crawl, and make you wonder how many of the men in the video have dead bodies secreted away in the crawl spaces under their homes. A female friend I showed the video to could only make it through the first couple of minutes before switching it off in horror; one commenter on Metafilter reported that it “made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and not in a good way. Eeew.”
The creepyist, skin-crawliest part of the video has to be the section in which the assembled men talk about women’s bodies:
I honor the beauty and integrity of your body. When we worship each other through our bodies with awareness and devotion, there are no boundaries to the love that we can generate. I feel sorrow that men have used your beauty as a form of commerce in prostitution and pornography. In the grip of lust we have often lacked the skills to ask gracefully for intimacy or to take ‘No’ for an answer. I take a stand against any form of enforced or soulless commercialization of woman’s beauty, andI respect that your body belongs to you.…
I honor your capacity to listen to your bodyand its needs for food, rest and playtime.
I feel confident that I speak for many when I say “ewww.” Somehow I’m reminded of Saturday Night Live’s hot-tub-loving “lovers.”
It’s worth pointing out that the written manifesto refers to men and women “nurture[ing]” one another’s body; apparently no one noticed that the dude reading this passage in the video had turned nurturing into “worship.”
As one commenter on Metafilter put it:
“We worship women” sounds like something Buffalo Bill would have said if he had a PR agent. My guess is that they’re sickos who seem really earnest at first but it turns out that they’re actually trying to collect used tampons for onanistic purposes or something.
So what is it, aside from all this worshiping, that makes the video so creepy? Part of the problem is that these “conscious men” are, in their own way, as patronizing and sexist as any manosphere dudes “mansplaining” about how all women only want to fuck alpha guys. Women, in their view, are inherently peaceful earth-mother types. “I commit now to … honoring the spirituality of the divine feminine,” the guys tell us. “Ihonor your deep connection to the earth.”
The manifesto is overflowing with this kind of shit. No matter how “New Age” these guys think they are, these are some truly ancient, and quite thoroughly retrograde, notions.
But that’s just what makes them wrong and misguided. What is it that causes viewers to pick up that whole serial-killer vibe?
I think the answer to this can be found in a book called The Gif tof Fear by security expert Gavin de Becker. The book attempts to explain why our intuitions about creepy people are so often correct. There’s a good reason you feel uneasy around certain people; that’s your unconscious picking up on real, if hard to pin down, signals of danger.
De Becker also lays out some of the techniques predators use in an attempt to allay the suspicions of those they’re trying to victimize. One of the sneakiest? The unsolicited promise, which often means the very opposite of what is said. When someone tells you, out of the blue, that they “aren’t going to hurt you,” it’s often a very good sign that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. When someone feels the need to tell you, apropos of nothing, that he “honor[s] the beauty and integrity of your body” and “respect[s] that your body belongs to you,” you may well want to run screaming.
Even more than the unsolicited promises, I think it’s the unsolicited apologies in the Dear Woman video – so similar in intent to unsolicited promises — are a large part of what is setting off alarm bells in so many viewers. When a young guy in the video takes personal responsibility “for dragging you into … wars, and for the rape, murder, broken hearts and damaged families that resulted from them,” that’s just plain … weird, given that (unless he’s some young despot I’ve never heard of) he’s not actually responsible for any of this.
The “unsolicited promise” is similar to what de Becker calls “loan sharking” – offering unsolicited “help” in order to make victims feel obligated in some way to their unwanted helpers. In the manifesto/video, this “help” is abstract, but the strategy seems to be the same:
From this day, moving forward, I vow to treat your heart as the sacred temple it is, and I commit to honoring the feminine in you and me and in my relationship to all life.
Uh, who the fuck asked you to treat anyone’s heart as a “sacred temple?”
The manifesto/video is also filled with examples of “forced teaming,” another strategy favored by predators who want to convince their victims that they are in fact working together to do the very same thing:
I know that by leaving the past behind and joining hands in the present, we can create a synergy of our strengths. Together, there is nothing we cannot do.
But there’s something else about the video that adds to the sense that something is not right here: no matter how earnest all the men in the video are trying to sound, none of them (except perhaps the two ringleaders) seem to really believe the ridiculous things they’re saying. Instead, they seem to be, with varying degrees of insincerity, mouthing a series of essentially meaningless New Age platitudes – in short, simply saying what they think women want to hear.
No one is buying this bullshit, guys. Give it up.
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This blog deals with some pretty extreme expressions of misogyny. It's not a safe space. You may run across upsetting and possibly triggering things in the posts and in the comments as well.
About We Hunted the Mammoth
" ... a delirious and incisive page against misogyny." -- El Pais, via Google translate
WHTM, written and edited by David Futrelle, tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online, focusing especially on Men's Rights, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pickup Artist (PUA) sites.
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