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Slutwalkers and Saints
Saint ... or sinner?
The SlutWalks have not just driven many MRAs to distraction; they’ve also driven one of the bloggers at the Gates of Vienna to set aside her usual Islam-bashing for a few moments to take on the awful bullies marching in the SlutWalks. Yes, bullies, for how else can we describe young women who go out of their way to highlight their foul sexiness whilst denying their bodies to the helpless males who happen to catch sight of them?
According to the blogger who calls herself Dymphna:
Women who walk around in slutty clothing in order to “voice” their opinion about male sexual aggression are indeed acting out a hugely immature power trip. … Call it for what it is. Strutting your stuff and daring anyone to stop you isn’t real freedom. It’s a sneaking, sadistic bully-girl game.
So evil is the behavior of these slutbullies that if any man decides, upon catching sight of one of them, to grope or otherwise assault her, well, she’s at least as much to blame as the dude who lays his hands on her.
If the act of strutting your stuff results in an equal reaction, a girl must take at least half the responsibility for whatever transpires as a result.
Dymphna seems to mean this quite literally, suggesting that a slut who gets assaulted should be charged
as an accessory before the fact — i.e., if some dolt grabs her, then at the very least she is his partner in crime. And the offense in which they both participate is a serious transgression against civil order. Sadistic provocation is a breach of the peace.
Ironically, Dymphna the blogger has apparently named herself after Saint Dymphna, a 7th century Irishwoman who, legend has it, was murdered by her father after she refused to marry him.
In the light of Dymphna the blogger’s airtight logic, we have to wonder if Saint Dymphna was wearing something really, really slutty. I mean, what else could have inspired her father’s foul desires?
Are false rape accusations the fault of feminism?
Holly Pervocracy's SlutWalk sign, which apparently causes false rape accusations.
If you thought the “meat market” guy from a couple of days ago – you know, the one prattling on about the “market makers of pussy” — was risibly wrongheaded, here’s an even more insidious attempt to reduce the complexities of human sexuality to a question of “supply and demand.” Over on The False Rape Society blog, Pierce Harlan has a new post with the title:
False rape claims: increasingly a tool to skew the current economies of sex, where sex is cheaper than most women prefer
As you might imagine, the post itself is based on some fairly twisty blame-the-victim logic – with some feminist-bashing thrown in for good measure. Let’s wade through the muck here.
According to Harlan, the “cultural tenets governing sexual encounters” have gone all loosey-goosey in recent years, due to birth control, a general loosening of sexual mores and “the feminist-inspired norms that pressure young women to ‘party like the guys.’”
I assume you have all read Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic A Vindication of the Rights of Women to Get Totally Wasted and Fuck Some Dudes.
But, alas, feminists totally don’t understand the law of supply and demand –and that in the market of sex, they are the supply and not the demand (because it’s not like women ever really want to have sex themselves). As a result, the feminist-inspired young women of today are totally flooding the market with cut-rate pussy.
As Harlan explains:
The experts tell us that men have a much easier time obtaining sex than they did in days long gone. … Women who’d prefer to put a higher price tag on their sexuality are finding themselves locked out of the market.
The results are all too predictable. Women are having sex more often when they secretly are conflicted about it. We’ve frequently reported here about the proven gender “regret asymmetry” where young women have much higher levels of after-the-fact regret than men following sexual hook-ups. Regret too often is transmogrified into feelings of being used, and feeling used too often metamorphoses into a false rape claim.
Does Harlan have any evidence to back up this hypothesis? Yes. And it comes straight from his ass.
Having studied the false rape phenomenon closely for a number of years, it is my conclusion that young women are increasingly resorting to false rape claims as an inappropriate method of skewing the current economies of sex, which favors men and which makes sex cheaper than most women consciously or subconsciously prefer.
In other words: he has spent the last several years searching out news stories on false rape accusations to post on his blog. Because there are almost 7 billion people on planet earth, he has been able to find a fair number of such stories. So he’s concluded that there is some sort of “false rape epidemic” going on. In other words, his conclusion seems to be based almost entirely on what’s known as the “availability heuristic,” which, as Wikipedia puts it, “is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.”
Were I to start a blog entitled “The Dudes Peeing on Things You Shouldn’t Pee On Society,” guess what? I too could cite many examples, drawn from the newspapers of the world. Were I to do this for several years, my brain would be stuffed full of stories of men urinating on just about anything that can be urinated on, from prayer rugs to cough drops. This, through the power of the “availability heuristic,” might convince me that we faced an epidemic of inappropriately urinating men, and that this epidemic was getting worse by the hour. (I mean, before I started specifically looking for such stories I almost never heard about this terrible social ill.)
But back to Harlan and his argument, such as it is:
Women are pressured by feminist-inspired norms to make themselves more available to men than ever, but they have also learned that crying rape after-the-fact is a culturally accepted, indeed, feminist approved, antidote to sex they feel was too cheaply obtained. Instead of saying “no” up front, they are retroactively saying “no” — with false rape claims — after-the-fact. And society has given this backward state of affairs its imprimatur.
One solution? Women need to stop having so much sex — for the sake of teh menz. Or as Harlan, still working the creaky economic metaphor, puts it:
One cure is to enhance the value of female sexuality by decreasing the supply and thereby reduce both regret and false rape claims.
But, darn it, this won’t work, because women are out there marching in the street for the right to, you know, have sex when they want to with consenting partners without being shamed for it.
That, of course, can never happen in a society where “slut walks” are celebrated as liberating events, where colleges excuse women from underage drinking charges so long as they report they were raped, and where false rape claims are routinely excused and implicitly encouraged. In short, it can never happen in a society that encourages young women to be promiscuous and to then tell rape lies when that promiscuity results in an unfavorable sexual experience.
Harlan ends his piece with a call to lock up false accusers for a long time.
Certainly malicious false accusers should be charged. Women who identify the wrong guy in a lineup? No.
And it would be nice if Harlan extended the sympathy he shows for falsely accused men to real victims of real rape, a much larger group of people than the falsely accused. But instead he writes pieces like this one, and links in his sidebar to a host of misogynist blogs that, among other things, routinely joke about female victims of rape and murder, that urge men on juries in rape trials to vote to acquit the accused even when he’s clearly guilty, that claim that age of consent laws are inherently man-hating, and that think it would be great if sex robots and artificial wombs rendered women obsolete.
Those actually interested in helping those falsely accused – rather than supporting Harlan’s retrograde agenda — would do better to support The Innocence Project, and to stop reading Harlan’s drivel.
The Life Zone: If Saw and Human Centipede had a baby
The glow of pregnancy
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.”
This is the premise of a new horror film called The Life Zone, which recently had its world premiere at the prestigious, er, Hoboken International Film Festival, a festival that was, perhaps not coincidentally, founded and chaired by the film’s writer and producer, Kenneth del Vecchio. In case you think I’m making all this up, here’s the film’s trailer, which makes The Life Zone look a bit like an equal-parts mixture of Saw, Human Centipede, and The Handmaid’s Tale, with Robert Loggia in the role of Jigsaw/Dr. Heiter/The Commander:
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.
Using the myth of the “Pussy Pass” to justify rape and murder
From MEN-FACTOR
Quite a few MRAs and MGTOWers seem to have have convinced themselves that women rarely if ever serve real time, or face any real consequences, for committing crimes. In the parlance of the manosphere, this is known as the “Pussy Pass.”
Now, this is, of course, almost complete bullshit. Why the “almost?” Because women do in fact receive somewhat lesser sentences when compared with men committing the same crimes. (So do white people, though you don’t hear the MRA crowd talking much about the “Honkey Pass.” )
Are the lighter sentences for women the result of evil feminist man haters? Not so much, Ampersand of Alas, A Blog argues in a thoughtful look at several studies on the subject. The author of one study concludes, as Ampersand summarizes it,
that this may be caused by sexist paternalism among judges; women are seen less as full adults, and as being less capable of being responsible for their own actions, and as a result judges depart from sentencing guidelines to give women lighter sentences.
Another study found that, contrary to what virtually every MRA or MGTOWer would assume, male judges were more likely than female judges to give especially harsh sentences to men. Let me repeat that: Male judges gave the harshest sentences to men. As the study’s author noted, “the greater the percentage of female judges on a district’s bench, the smaller the gender disparity.” (Emphasis mine.)
Just don’t try telling this to the MRA/MGTOW crowd. We saw the other day how the idea of the “pussy pass” – the notion that “the law does not serve justice” – has led some MRAs to advocate or voice their support for lynching female perps (with what degree of seriousness I don’t know).
Meanwhile, over on NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum, nigeles175d “humorously” suggests that the supposed existence of the “Pussy Pass” should also give guys the right to rape women who happen to give them boners:
[I]f we men cannot control our passions as women often claim, why don’t we get a Dickie PassTM like women get the Pussy PassTM? If women cannot control their tears, their screams, their giggles, and if women are driven to poisoning or murdering their sleeping husbands and use the excuse of years of abuse and being unable to control their mental state, why do we not consider a similar excuse for men. The way some women dress (hint, hint, SlutWalkers) to deliberately entice men to want sex with them, why is it not an exonerrating circumstance in the same way as it is for women? It seems women are never made to take responsibility for their actions, nor are they ever held accountable. Alternatively, if men are not allowed it, but women are, then we’re treating them like children and they don’t deserve the vote or positions of authority.
And of course it all goes back to women having the vote — the source of all evil in the modern world. Attitudes like this are, of course, what make the Slutwalks (and feminism in general) necessary in the first place.
Life Before Feminism: When a Woman’s at the Wheel …
Men’s Rightsers and MGTOWers regularly lament what they see as the baleful influence of feminism on everyday life and popular culture. So it’s perhaps worth reminding people what things were really like before modern – that is, second and third wave – feminism.
Second-wave feminism was in its infancy in 1970 when this charming Goodyear ad was shown on the first broadcast of Monday Night Football.
Obviously, the whole “women drivers suck LOL” attitude lives on — in the form of countless dumb jokes, demotivational posters, YouTube compilations, you name it.
But none of that shit hits on the same visceral level as this ad. I think that’s partly because of the smug, patronizing tone of the narrator of the Goodyear commercial, and the hint of contempt that slips into his voice when he mentions the possibility of a mere woman taking the wheel. I think it’s also because to whomever made the ad—and presumably a great number of those watching it — the idea that women are awful drivers is simply considered an incontrovertible fact; the ad isn’t even trying to be funny.
Indeed, this deliberately cutesy vintage Volvo ad, while equally sexist, seems fairly innocuous by comparison. (My only question is why that poor woman seems to have married her father.)
>The Ladies Auxiliary of the Ladyhaters Club
>
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| Women in groups: Always trouble. |
As this is a male environment, us girls can expect styles of communication that we might not use ourselves or readily relate to. For the purpose of this post, I will call all of this “locker room talk”. … Topics and expressions women may find crude are likely to occur and generalizations about women (or white, western, whatever) used to adequately get a point across. These differences, while bothersome to some women, are not wrong in and of themselves and are not reason to shame men into expressing themselves differently. As women in the locker room, we are the ones who need to look the other [way] and make accommodations; not the men for whom this website is for.
We must also respect this place as one of the few politically incorrect sanctuaries that men have in today’s misandrist world. … We should not be bullying men into saying, “yes, indeed not all women are like that!” to appease our own egos. … This is sacred male friendly ground and should be treated as such. … We are but guests on this website and must know our place and respect certain boundaries for the sake of the men here and for the work towards gender peace.
I have voiced my opinion many times women should be banned all together from here. They are contributing nothing and they are taking up a lot of time and energy of the stupid young men who do not realise that women are just attention whores who won’t actually do anything at the end of the day. ….You women pretty much fuck up everything you stick your nose into. And you never, ever tire of fucking things up for men under the delusion you have ‘something to contribute’. You don’t. Get over it. You pop out babies. That is your one and only ‘claim to fame’ and it used to be enough for a man to love a woman for her whole life and to provide for her and the kids. Now it is not. So you women need to ‘act like men’ and suck it up.Indeed. If women had any class at all you would leave of your own accord and let the men sort out what you refused to. The only posts from women here should be ‘Men, please tell us what to do’.
That Hestia has to write this thread proves that indeed women who come to this board do exactly that which she complains against. They have such a cozy and male-coddled life that they are shocked when some men rightly express their scorn and foul language towards their attitudes and manipulative behaviour. Women BREED misogyny because all they do is constantly manipulate and get the attention and protection of men by trying to look sexy all the time. Every time a man turns his head towards a pretty lady, she knows she is being looked after and will be rescued by a man if ever her poor little ass does something stupid. They are CHILDREN at heart. One female college student mentioned to me how according to her “every girl” has gone on dates just to get free dinners. How much more proof do we need that women are NO GOOD WHORES?
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>Something Awful visits The Spearhead Forum
>
This weekend, Something Awful gives its readers a little tour of The Spearhead Forum and some of its more colorful fauna. I’ve borrowed the screenshot above from them. Hagslave entrainment! Yeasty oblivion!
The Spearhead Forum is if anything a little weirder than The Spearhead itself. It is also the main stomping ground of a fellow named Zebert, who has many, well, innovative ideas about how to solve all the problems of the world (e.g. forbidding education for women, prohibiting gatherings of more than four women at a time, removing the voiceboxes from baby girls at birth).
The Something Awful folks have gathered up quite a few of his most intriguing posts, and many others of equal value. Head over there now and enjoy.
>If you don’t agree with me, angry dudes will kick your ass
>
Anyone who’s seen Taxi Driver will remember Travis Bickle’s late night soliloquy on the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, [and] junkies” he saw every night driving his cab. “Someday,” he told himself, “a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
Of course — SPOILER ALERT! — what he really meant by “a real rain” coming was that he, Travis Bickle, would lose his shit and start shooting people.
Bickle wasn’t the only one to mix his predictions with a heaping helping of threat. Those who predict the end of the world at the hand of gods or men or some vague terrible cataclysm are all too often rooting (secretly or openly) for the civilization-destroyers they are ostensibly warning against. We saw this the other day amongst those MGTOWers who are now talking giddily about how complete economic collapse will serve to put foolish women and their “mangina” pals in their proper place.
And we see it again and again in the Men’s Rights movement, when MRAs sternly warn their detractors that if people don’t start listening to them, and pronto, the men of the world will rise up and, well, kick the shit out of everyone who opposes them. This is a warning only in the sense that a mafioso telling someone that, if he doesn’t pay what he owes, his legs just might possibly get broken, is a warning; by all reasonable definitions, it is a threat. As opposed to the leg-breaking, the threats of these MRAS aren’t very specific threats, but they’re threats of violence nonetheless.
I ran across one recent example of this sort of “warning” in the comments to Paul Elam’s piece on misandry — or at least what he labels misandry — in the Good Men Project’s package on the Men’s Rights movement. (My own contribution to the debate is here.) Here’s “Factory,” responding to another commenter who pointed out that some of his wording in an earlier comment had been awfully violent:
Who said I was interested in proving I wasn’t violent?
In point of fact, I continually warn people that if these issues are not MEANINGFULLY addressed, and soon, there will be a LOT of violence (see: Middle East) that we MRAs won’t be able to stop.
And frankly, if it comes to that, society (and all the women in it along with the men) flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.
Your hubris as a movement is causing a lot of men to be angry. You all vastly underestimate both the anger, and the ubiquitous nature of this anger.
We MRAs do nothing except act as weather vane and map. That’s why we have no central authority, or funding, or organization of any kind. We are average guys mad enough to stand up like we do. There are a LOT more guys that are just as mad, but content to let others lead.
And there are a growing number of men that take Feminist (and ‘official’) dismissal of mens issues as indication that ONLY violent revolution will lead to change.
And speaking for myself, if it ever comes to violence, I will stand aside, and feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done…but I won’t lift a FINGER to stop it.
Just like people like you are doing right now.
Notice the not-so-subtle, and rather thoroughly bungled, rhetorical sleight of hand here. Factory paints the violence as something he won’t indulge in (but won’t stop) — forgetting that in the very first sentence he admitted that he was himself violent. He refers to MRAs as little more than a “weather vane” for male emotion — but somehow later in the paragraph they are leading things. He claims that he will “feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done,” but this is only after stating in no uncertain terms that he thinks “society … flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.”
So, yeah, this is as much a “warning” as the hypothetical mafioso’s reference to broken legs.
Naturally, Elam himself stepped up to second Factory’s emotion, declaring that “[m]en, when disenfranchised and pushed to the edge, have frequently become violent.”
On his own site, Elam has been much more frankly threatening. Recently, telling off one commenter who had the temerity to actually question the gospel according to Elam, he finished off a long rant about male anger with this:
I would not suggest that treating half the population, the stronger half at that, with too much continuing disregard is a very good idea.
Thinking they will never come out swinging is a stupid, stupid way to go.
This kind of logic might best be called the Appeal to an Ass-kicking. The structure of this argument could be broken down as follows:
1) Source A says that p is true
2) If you don’t agree that p is true, Source A (or perhaps some other dudes) will do you bodily harm.
3) Therefore, you’d better fucking agree that p is true.
This is probably the oldest and crudest form of logic there is, and one that is popular amongst many animals as well. (My cat is a master of it, at least when p = “you will give me treats now.”)
Perhaps the best way to respond to it is the way that the commenter calling herself fannie responded to Factory on the Good Men Project:
You’re arguing that men are going to be so angry they’re not going to be able to control their rage and are therefore going to start inflicting mass amounts of violence upon others.
I’m not sure a feminist could be more defamatory of men than you are being.
MRAs sure are misandrist.
I, and feminists like me, think men are better than that.
Me too.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Animal lust
>
What better day than Valentine’s Day for a post about love? Or at least the MGTOW version of love, which is more like a mixture of lust and loathing.
I’ve spoken before about what I’ve called the MGTOW Paradox: Men Going Their Own Way generally seem to hate the ladies, but the ladies still keep giving them boners. Recently, on the grotequely misnamed Happy Bachelors forum, Marcus Aurelius — who describes himself without irony as “one of the more, if you will, ‘spiritual’ voices on the forum” — offered four partial solutions to this problem of excess lady desire. They are, in order: Porn, furious masturbation, a deep understanding of the Buddhist notion of “the impermanence of form,” and … whatever this is:
And another thing I do…when [desire] ACTUALLY hits….like say I see a hot looking girl at work, and it starts to creep up, I actually indulge in it for a moment. I look at the woman. Think about my attraction to her nice…whatever. Then, I think about it as tho I am at the Public Zoo. Seriously. At the zoo, you will see a wild exotic animal, and you will stare through that glass in awe of this animal…..but you wouldn’t set foot in that damn cage…because you KNOW if you did….that damn thing would TEAR YOU APART. Thats how I like to look at attractive american women. Animals in a zoo.
That only works for so long, dude. Then you turn into a furry.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Valentine’s Day, Massacred
>
Don’t let it be said that the dudes of the manosphere aren’t ready for Valentine’s Day. Oh, they haven’t been ordering little teddy bears and giant bouquets of flowers for their sweeties. They’ve been getting ready to throw a fit at the very notion of the ersatz holiday.
Marc Rudov, a self-described MRA, “relationship expert” and all-around asshole, has been trying to organize a boycott of VD for several years now. “There’s nothing romantic about coercing men to oblige female entitlement,” Rudov recently told AOL News. “Valentine’s Day artificially and unilaterally caters to women. It’s the media’s annual male-bashing fest.”
Over on The Spearhead, grizzled MRA veteran Zed has written not one but two articles attacking VD, which he describes as “Extortion of Insincere Materialistic Tokens of Affection Under Threat of Emotional Violence Day.” Meanwhile, Paul Elam — never one for subtlety — has one-upped old Zed, denouncing the holiday as “a socially coerced day of hyper-entitlement for a generation of princess leeches.” Endorsing Rudov’s boycott, Elam seems especially incensed by the omnipresent “Every Kiss Begins With Kay” ads that clutter the airwaves every year as VD approaches.
One commenter at The Spearhead summons up his inner comedian:
There’ two types of VD. One is a potentially serious affliction that can be caught from sexual relations with a woman. Symptoms include tiredness, lack of sex drive, acute pain in the groin region and loss of work productivity. It’s difficult to treat as the parasite responsible is very demanding and difficult to get rid of.
The other is a bacterial infection treatable with antibiotics and rest.
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| Marc Rudov: Trying to hypnotize you with his teeth. |
It’s almost cute, all this energy and anger. These guys seem to really think that they’re the first people to ever have an issue with Valentine’s day, the first people to ever get irritated by “every kiss begins with Kay.”
But, guess what? Lots of people hate Valentine’s day. I generally find it pretty annoying myself, and the Kay commercials, which basically suggest that the women of America are jewel-hungry prostitutes and the men their johns, set my teeth a-grinding. Granted, I’m generally been most hostile to VD when I’ve been single, but when a couple of years ago I discovered that my then-girlfriend was a really really really big fan of the holiday (and not a fan of my more laid-back approach to it) it was actually one of the things that led me to break up with her a few weeks later.
You know who else hates Valentine’s day and the blizzard of retrograde sexist advertising that accompanies it? Lots and lots of women, especially those of the feminist persuasion, who generally don’t take kindly to the insinuation that women are diamond whores. Indeed, a couple of weeks back, hundreds of the mostly women of Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes subreddit happily upvoted a topic with the title “If I see one more freakin’ “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” commercial I am going to find whoever is responsible for that nonsense and take a big fat poop on his face. “
Hell, Valentine’s Day hatred is everywhere. In the London Times, Helen McNutt — a woman, if her first name is any indication — spelled out “20 reasons it’s okay to hate Valentine’s Day.” Meanwhile, the Onion News Network ran a hilarious piece on the “Annual Valentine’s Day Stoning Of a Happy Couple .”
And if you want your VD hatred live and direct, you can always monitor Twitter for bitter anti-VD tweets.
Indeed, VD hatred has become so omnipresent that the folks at Slate, hoping to gin up some pageviews with some well-timed contrarianism, ran a piece — get this — actually defending the holiday. “I’m almost afraid to say it,” the piece began, “I have plans for Valentine’s Day. … If I’m lucky, there may even be chocolate and flowers involved.”
Like a lot of VD haters, I have plans for February 15th. They definitely involve chocolate, bought at a steep discount.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
