When you look at the above picture — a group portrait of the Congressional freshman class of 2013 — what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Maybe something along the lines of “there sure are a lot of white dudes in that picture!”
Not if you’re “Emmanuel Goldstein” over at Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog. No, he looked at that same picture and thought: American women sure are a bunch of worthless attention whores!
Why? Because some of the women in the picture have the temerity to wear … bright colors!
[N]ot one man appears in bright red, blue, pink or yellow. For the men, it gets about as radical as a light grey suit … The women, on the other hand, have never met a gauche shade of neon they wouldn’t wear. Why are American women so hell bent on attention whoring, precisely in the places where they say they want to be taken seriously? Why do women ‘fight for equality’ by swapping outfits with Bozo the Clown? Why are old white women so desperate to show us their wrinkly cleavage?
I’m not exactly sure how you’re defining “cleavage” here, EG, but I’m not really seeing a lot of it in this picture. Well, none, really. None cleavage. I see one outfit, possibly two, that might under some circumstances reveal a small amount of cleavage.
Not that it really matters, as EG’s outrage is purely for show.
He quotes the late paleo-con Lawrence Auster, who also professed to be similarly outraged by women and their terrible breast-baring clothes.
The way many women dress today, with half their breasts exposed, is an expression of total disrespect for men. Men are left with three possible responses. To grab the woman, which is illegal; to ogle the woman, which is socially unacceptable; or to affect not to notice the woman at all, which is emasculating. A culture that normalizes such female behavior—i.e. not only not noticing or objecting to it, but prohibiting any objection to it—is extremely sick.
Really? Men suffer because sometimes they see cleavage and they’re not allowed to grope or drool? Oh, you poor, poor fellows! Should I prepare the fainting couch?
EG then turns to Laura Woods, the self-proclaimed Thinking Housewife, who once declared
revealing dress in professional settings [to be] a last-ditch effort by women to salvage their femininity. They are living daily lives of masculine aggression and drive. They are pressured to destroy their inherent selflessness and desire to serve. They make their breasts appear overblown, near-to-bursting balloons as a way of diverting attention from what they have become.
Near-to-bursting balloons? Apparently Woods has been watching too much office-themed porn.
Naturally, EG agrees wholeheartedly with Woods:
Hers may be the most potent explanation yet. I have surmised as much about the ubiquity of the color hot pink, as a microcosm of this drive, and it’s popularity as a marketing tool to women. It is an impossibly ugly, tacky hue, yet women love it. These women are not feminine in any meaningful way, yet they think that having a vagina is something to be proud of. Wearing hot pink is akin to liking an anti-Kony group on Facebook to feel like you’re doing your part to fight genocide.
Wait, what?
Wearing hot pink is akin to liking an anti-Kony group on Facebook to feel like you’re doing your part to fight genocide.
I’m tempted to stop here, because there’s no way he can get any dumber than this.
But then I remember that I forgot to mention the one man who EG sees as the “male analog to the women I describe.” That is, the male analog to those whorish congresswomen and their oh-so-revealing pantsuits. His name, EG tells us, is
Buzz Bissinger, a GQ contributor who later checked into rehab for a shopping addiction. … Oh, it turns out he’s had some homosexual encounters as well. I’d love to see a straight man test the bounds of ‘equality,’ and dress like these buffoons, and still keep his job.
Damn those bisexual men and their bisexual style privilege! Straight men truly are the mostest oppressed of the most oppressed!
Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of Mr. Bissinger, the male analog, evidently taken while he was on the job:
As you may have noticed, he’s not exactly the “male analog” to the pantsuited congresswomen above, given that in the middle picture there he seems to be wearing NOTHING BUT HIS UNDERPANTS AND SOME WRISTBANDS.
You don’t see that a lot in the Congressional Women’s Caucus.
Dvarg – but people might think they were TEH GAYZ!
Only time I’ve been taken for a man was when I dressed in full cavalier suit when I was about eighteen. Costume included a proper moustache and fake sword. I don’t think anyone seeing me face-on was fooled (not that I was trying to fool ’em, I was just doing it for fun) but some twit passing yelled out “POOFTER!” I counted that as a win.
I’d think part of what they’d be worried about is that if they catcalled a man he might turn round and punch them.
Cassandra, maybe, but I was alone at this time and there were five of them, so I think in this situation they were more worried that they would somehow turn gay if they cat-called the wrong gender. Which is a really weird thing to worry about.
Btw, on the topic of passing, I recently read this blog post by a transvestite man. He had arrived at an airport, and they had this routine check where a member of the staff feels with zir hands over the body of every arriving passenger to see whether they have, like, concealed weapons or something. The rules were that male staff checks male passengers and the other way around. So, in front of this guy there are a couple of other male passengers, and they’re checked by a male staff member. When it’s his turn, the staff person calls for a female colleauge. So our hero goes “No, that’s allright, I’m a man”. And then the staff person protests that no, he’s a woman allright. Our hero repeats “No really, I’m a man in women’s clothing”, but the staff was adament that he was a woman, and eventually he accepted having a female staff member check him just to get things over with.
Pretty weird, huh?
The only explanation I can think of is that the staff at the airport had recently been on some HBTQ education day, where they were told to assume that a person is a woman if zie’s got make-up and women’s clothing – and then they took this advice way too far.
I’ve never understood that. People have some odd ideas about how sexuality works.
(Then again, I’m bi, wtf do I know about how straight people think.)
Yeah, I’m bi too, so maybe that’s why we just don’t understand the completely reasonable fear of accidantily turning gay from misdirected cat-calling!
The idea that one could in theory find oneself attracted to a person of the “wrong” sex doesn’t really make sense to me in general (if you’re attracted to them then surely they’re right for you in some way, yes?), but I’m trying to step back and acknowledge that the world may look very different to someone who’s straight. Which would be a lot easier if so many men didn’t use moments of attraction that they weren’t expecting as a reason to beat up the people who they were attracted to.
Oh, those flippin’ scanners and security pat-downs. Genius system even without those issues. I was told I had to have a pat-down because there was a Questionable Bulge at my hip. (That’s my hip, not my groin!) “That is my hip, my right leg’s half an inch longer than my left,” I told ’em, but no, they had to convince themselves manually that my thin, pocketless skirt wasn’t covering something in a ridiculously obvious place. ::rolls eyes::
Since the introduction of the cancer-ray scanner and the patdown that gets to 3rd base as the only alternative I’ve made a point of flying in very fitted clothes just so as not to give security any excuse to think I might be concealing anything under my clothes.
To be fair, not all straight people are like that (NASPAL FTW!). Husband is straight, but he isn’t scared in any way of finding a man attractive. As a matter of fact, he has been attracted to men a couple of times in his life, but he still identifies as straight because these were exceptions. But it’s nothing he freaks out over. I don’t know if I could be with anyone who freaks out over being attracted to “the wrong” gender, since that reaction smacks of biphobia to me.
The cancer-ray bit doesn’t bother me, I’d rather go through that than have the Let’s Get Familar With The TSA session. I’ve been through security twice in the USA, iirc (was it used for domestic flights a couple of years ago?) and that piece of idiocy was the only time I got attention from them.
I don’t think I have any tight clothes except underwear, and I’m not doing the butt-and-gut-hanging-out leggings look. 😛
I think we were getting that sort of security here, too. Not sure if it’s in yet, I don’t recall when it was being installed. Hopefully it’s not applicable for domestic flights. I’m off to see my sister in Queensland in a couple of weeks.
NASPAL – food for doggy astronauts! 😀
There could be some great additions to the “not all” canon. NACALT, of course (not all cats are like that).
The one time I got patted down I was so tempted to start mouthing off, like excuse me ma’am but don’t you think we should at least go out for drinks first, maybe get to know each other a little? But then I realized that it wasn’t fair to be obnoxious to the people at the bottom of the chain for decisions that they didn’t make.
Tom Martin had it right all along as penguins are shown to be hypergamous and commit paternity fraud
My mother has both hips replaced, she calls the pat down her “TSA massage.” When she was flying a lot after my grandfather and aunt died within a month of each other, they got to know her, so it wasn’t too bad.
Biphobia, homophobia–because being a “guy” is a performative peice, and if you get it wrong your man card can get revoked.
Which is why the whole man card thing is a totally shitty thing.
It’s like, um, guys, you can say Lee Pace is the prettiest man in the whole wide world. It doesn’t make you less of a man, and you can still want to sleep with women, not men. Denying it just makes it sound like you have something wrong with your eyes.
(because Lee Pace IS the prettiest man in the world, and I will hear no argument on this matter; the case has been closed for some time now)
::googles Lee Pace::
Kinda looks like Ryan Gosling… Yea, he’s a pretty attractive guy.
I’m straight. I can appreciate a good looking man, but it’s not as if I’m “attracted” to them. I live on a migration path for the local high school. I wear kilts. There are often boys who try to gender police me. Usually by muttering (though the one who went into dramatically falling down with laughter was precious). When I catch them at it I tell them I don’t care. This confuses them. I’m supposed to be uneased, and hurt, and defensive, because they are laughing at my “unmanliness”, or sometihng.
But as soon as I call them on it, they get quiet,and their body language closes up. I take some comfort from it. They know it’s not right.
Back when Miranda still dated, I sometimes had the weird issue of straight men freaking out that I existed, trying to justify that I wasn’t “really a man,” and then hastily try to out-butch me. Cognitive dissonance out the wazoo! Gave me a bit of neurosis back in the day… back then, I was a lot less secure in my gender. Nowadays, I’m married and don’t have to deal with it.
This is the thing, right here. The amount of rules and unspoken ‘This is So’ stuff that goes into it is EXHAUSTING. And it means running around ALWAYS CARING about what other people say.
@Sittie kitty
Pushing Daisies. That is all.
Re: Howard Bannister
My impression of performative masculinity is that it’s something so hard and rigid that it LOOKS strong as hell, but due to its lack of flexibility, it’s actually brittle. And due to a really devout ad campaign, everyone insists it’s the strongest, toughest substance around.*
* unless you tap it in which case it shatters but ONLY BECAUSE IT’S SO HARD AND STRONG OKAY
HB, I like this kinda guy, or this. They are totally different looks, I’ll give ya…