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.
Yes, SittieKitty. Also the, “don’t bring attention to yourself, ladies,” bullshit. I mean, as a culture, some people do impose this edict on their womenfolk, but I never signed up to be Amish or Mennonite, so…
I may buy some brightly colored skinny jeans later today just to give these guys the finger.
Heh, I just bought a pair of red shoes, Cassandra.
Ima wear a bright teal t-shirt out today. If people don’t give me ALL THE ATTENTION, I may have to conclude that gnl is full of shit. But, I mean, how likely is that?!
Also, is it just me, or does gnl spend an awful lot of time complaining about women for someone named “Gender Neutral Language”?
@shiraz
Red shoes sound so cute! 😀 I saw some in the store but they didn’t fit 🙁
@shadow
I’m wearing a purple/black/ white top and green camo shorts. I have some totally clashing colors, which is probably begging for attention! 😀
I still think he’s ExploreNature. He went exploring and discovered that nature is full of female creatures, so now he’s retreated to the blogosphere, where the existence of women continues to vex him.
Stop stealing the attention away from my glorious manliness!!!
But we must be careful, Marie…because no one will save us from the “affects of (our) actions.”
So in my case, I’m risking being confused with a hooker or a clown.
I guess I’m risking being confused with a teenager from the back?
Right now I’m wearing boxers with red peppers and “hot”/”caliente” all over them. Gosh, if I went out in public with these, who knows what kind of reactions I might provoke?
You’re literally instructing men to find you attractive via your clothing! And at the same time confusing them by wearing boxers.
@Amnesia
I don’t know, but I think they sound like cool boxers.
Hmmm. It’s almost like we’re making fun of people who assume men react to stimuli like bulls when they see red. Guess we think better of men then some people who just don’t know any better.
The important question is whether women like pink because berries in a forest or if they only wear it because baboon hindquarterz (pink signals in heat).
And by having hairy legs! Dear me, I am living dangerously!
Aw, now I’m sad. I was going to wear my shocking pink tee in honor of how much that color apparently offends misogynist weirdos, but it has 3/4 sleeves and it’s going to be over 90 degrees today.
BTW I randomly ran across this C.S Lewis quote, and isn’t it just perfect as a description of the fearfulness behind the whole MGTOW idea and how it ends up destroying the lives of the people who follow it?
Oof. C.S. Lewis just annoys me for the most part though. Then again, it might more be how his writing is used than the writer.
Wait no, NM. Mere Christianity. grr
He really was an excellent writer when he wanted to be.
(Even though I still resent the way the Narnia books got increasingly preachy as you got further into the story, and quite appallingly sexist at the end.)
Oh man, the end of Narnia… So sexist… Really, Susan couldn’t be “good enough for Narnia” because she grew into an adult and got interested in makeup and boys and sex and was no longer “pure”? Ugh.
It was ages since I read the Narnia books, but as I remember the ending, Susan couldn’t go to Narnia because she stopped believing it existed. And, well, the cause of that was her interest in dating and fashion and stuff, which made her believe that talking about a different world was “childish” and “immature”, so she convinced herself it had all just been make-believe.
But loads of people here have given out the “she wasn’t pure enough” interpretation, so now I want to read that text again to see if my memory of what happened at the end of the book was just something I made up in my head, or if it actually says so in the text.
No, I think your memory is correct. The problem is that Lewis drew a pretty clear line between developing an interest in adult womanly stuff and losing whatever quality it is that allows children to believe in wonderful things. Basically the message was that becoming a woman means losing your sense of wonder and giving up whatever you used to love, which is pretty damn sexist.
He linked femininity with shallowness and said that she had excluded herself for that reason, basically. The idea that tomboys are OK but feminine women are shallow/lesser/stupid is unfortunately pretty common in fantasy.
(See Arya verus Sansa in Game of Thrones for a more current example of that trope.)
Okay Cassandra! Yeah, you might have a point there. The thing is, I was REALLY young when I read these books… Haven’t read them since I was, like, twelve or something. By then I’d already started using make-up because I thought it was fun, but I was hardly a traditionally feminine girl, and sort of looked down on those. It wasn’t until I was way past twenty when I fully realized the internalized misogyny inherent in bragging (rather than merely pointing out in some context where this happens to be relevant – which probably wouldn’t be a lot of contexts) about how you’re really not a typical girl/woman. So figures I wouldn’t realize what was problematic about that passage at the time.
@Dvarghundspossen,
I always interpreted it the same way as you did. The boys and lipstick etc where meant to mean that she had become focused on the material world instead of the spiritual, was a bit self centred and no longer believed in Narnia. I think the ‘she couldn’t get back because purity’ argument is bunk. Previously in the series she had grown into an adult woman and at one point (in the Horse and His Boy) she totally gets the hots for a prince in Calormene (liking boys not a problem that time then). She still got to come back once more after that, before she got too old.
I also always got the impression from the book that she would be able to return to Narnia if she started believing in it again, but that is just how I read it.
I think that’s part of why so many people resent the ending, because people tend to read those books at the age at which you’re either open to suggestion that your own tomboyishness makes you special and awesome (bad thing to have reinforced) or starting to develop an interest in girly stuff, in which case it hurts to be told “no more Narnia for you then”.
I do think it’s a little unfair to single Lewis out for that trope though, since it’s depressingly common.