By David Futrelle
There are a lot of guys out there who not-so-secretly resent women for having bodies that get them all hot and bothered.
Warren Farrell, the intellectual grandfather of the Men’s Rights movement, famously warned men to beware of the “cleavage power” and the “miniskirt power” of young women. Incels and MGTOWs today rail against women “torturing” them by wearing skin-tight yoga pants. Hell, last week I wrote about one horny Redditor who blamed women for tempting men by showing their arms in public.
So what about in insidious threat of shoulders, which in addition to being “the laterally projecting part of the human body formed of the bones and joints with their covering tissue by which the arm is connected with the trunk” are also sometimes nice to look at?
Enter Father Kevin M. Cusick. On Sunday, the priest and former military chaplain caused a bit of a stir on Twitter after he suggested that women shouldn’t show their bare shoulders in church lest the sight of such a tempting bit of skin cause the men and boys to suddenly start feeling a bit funny in their pants.
Naturally, more than a few Twitterers took issue with Cusik’s stance. And so he doubled down, and doubled down again, launching into a full-on meltdown that lasted until this morning.
But he topped even those tweets with his final comment on the subject, in which he compared himself, and the treatment he’d gotten from critics on Twitter, to Jesus getting nailed to the cross. No, really.
As it turns out, Cusick’s not just worried about sexy lady shoulders; he’s also worried that women’s bare feet could give priests boners. Several years ago, you see, the Pope said it was ok to include women and girls in Holy Thursday foot-washing rituals. But Cusick worried that foot-washing priests might get turned on by “cute” lady feet.
That last tweet about washing men’s feet seems just a little bit ironic when one starts poking around a little more in Cusick’s Twitter history.
Because, as it turns out, shoulders and feet aren’t his main obsessions. For every tweet he’s written about the dangers of improperly exposed female flesh, there are dozens (hundreds?) of tweet about the evils of gay men and their dirty doings — both in the Catholic Church and in the world at large. (He has much less to say about lesbians.)
In Cusick’s mind, the Church doesn’t have a pedophile problem; it’s got a “homosexual problem.”
Not only is this “homosexual network” intent on sexually abusing boys; it’s also, in Cusick’s mind, “perverting” the Church’s teachings in order to promote the mortal sin of sodomy.
Apparently the only way to ward off this “homosexualist” menace is with the magic of Latin.
He’s a bit obsessed with the whole sodomy thing.
He also has some, well, interesting views on “so-called ‘trans'” folks. Here’s his reaction to a news story about a trans woman teacher.
And here’s his, well, novel theory about the nature of transness.
Needless to say, he won’t be celebrating Pride month.
But Cusick isn’t just obsessed with sex. His Twitter history is a virtual smorgasbord of unhinged takes on almost every hotbutton social issue. He thinks abortion leads to “bloodthirsty mobs on the streets.”
He regularly links to alarming “news” articles on the alleged evils of migrant Muslim “invaders,” including at least one article from rabid far-right Islamaphobe Pam Geller. His own opinions on the subject are only slightly less rabid than hers:
Needless to say, Cusick also hates feminism, especially when it involves young boys being taught that women’s suffrage was a good thing.
But the strangest thing I found in Cusick’s Twitter history? He’s apparently afraid of being enslaved — by Beto O’Rourke.
It’s a weird and more than slightly unhinged reaction to a young man standing on a car spouting vaguely lefty political platitudes. But, hey, anything to get Cusick’s mind off of sodomy, I guess.
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@catalpa
Greg or Clint or something
@Crip Dyke
In case I haven’t said so before, it is an absolute pleasure to read your comments.
Man, this troll isn’t even fun. He’s too low-effort.
As for Cusick, he’s a reminder of how glad I am to be part of a sect (Friends General Conference) that does not have any clergy.
@ Catalpa – I think you’re thinking of Desperate Ambrose.
@Catalpa:
It was around the time of Desperate Ambrose, IIRC. If I were to look for it, I think I’d search for the word “masthead” because I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy who complained about people engaged in mockery and we had to point out that the masthead contained the line,
“misogyny, tracked and mocked” before he would believe that we weren’t every bit as guilty of violating the commenting guidelines as he was.
I don’t think yzek is a sock, at least not of any troll that I’ve seen around here.
His particular brand of crappy writing is unlike any of the other trolls, and while the magnitude of the crappiness may vary, the type of crappiness is mostly consistent.
That said, new troll is boring.
…also, Desperate Ambrose could at least craft a decent — if ridiculously overblown, overly verbose, and self-absorbed — sentence.
If God views this as being such a great evil, He can deal with it Himself. Or does omnipotence now mean “acts solely through human lackeys”?
Is tumericbundle a Raul sock or are we getting two concern trolls in one week?
I don’t know if Yzek is a seagull because I’m pretty sure he’s been intermittently trolling here for a few years. He occasionally pops up to air out sad boner grievances and then goes back into hiding.
I was wondering what happened to Raul…
@Rhuu- apparently an illiterati
I think we humiliated him off the site earlier. Either that, or we got him to learn how to structure a coherent argument that doesn’t make him look like an arrogant buffoon.
yzek’s speech patterns don’t look very American to me. I’m tempted to think eastern European, possibly some Slavic country… though his English vocabulary is quite good, there’s just something about the syntax that’s off, and consistently so. Wonder if he’s being paid in rubles.
Clearly, though, he thinks the Lord’s arm is indeed too short.
A god who cannot defend their own interests without human intervention is no god, and doesn’t deserve worship. Too often people decide to worship gods whose prejudices align with their own or who they can put words in the mouth of and claim they’re divine. There’s every reason to believe that every god in referenced in human history is made up like the tooth fairy, and therefore all these “natural” laws and divine rules are entirely human-contrived to control the gullible and keep them accepting their “lot in life”, aka the boot of the wealthy and powerful on their necks, instead of asking why the rich guy should have so much money when he doesn’t actually work, and why the working poor can slave away 60 hours a week in multiple minimum-wage jobs and still be barely scraping by, just one minor accident away from bankruptcy.
Better to assume there is no god and take it upon ourselves to nurture good and rectify injustice than sit around blindly following some Bronze-Age person’s arbitrary rules and waiting for some divine power to save the good after death.
(Ah yes, I was thinking of Desperate Ambrose. Thank you!)
@tumericbundle
Mocking misogyny is the blog’s whole purpose, as stated in the header. When misogynists come here, we mock them. Exercise our rhetorical muscles and provide a bit of entertainment and possibly education for the spectators.
When the trolls get too odious or cease to be fun to bat around, then we get David to ban them. Until then, we get to be treated to delightful takedowns like those provided by Crip Dyke.
Ignoring the trolls just lets them spew their bile uncontested, and might lead them and potential lurkers to think that they have some level of support for their asshole views. We don’t play by those rules here.
@footprints IWC:
I agree with the general assessment, though I’m not knowledgeable enough for the particular idiosyncrasies to indicate “Slavic” to me.
@Rhuu & anonymous:
Can’t it be both? If it was both then that would mean our work for the week is done and we can all watch as much Cloak & Dagger as we want, guilt free. I mean, that’s what we all want, right? Right?
@Dalillama
It was me! I’m going to spend my points on scented candles, the better to banish bad smells, and bonbons, to remove any bad tastes. Happy to share with anyone for whom this site is a bastion of good sense, excellent knowledge and lovely people. And mockery of misogyny.
@tumericbundle – ‘don’t feed the trolls’ DOES NOT WORK. You know what happens if you just let someone spew their bile uncontested? The recipients of said bile stop participating, or just never participate.
Trolls don’t get bored and leave. And even if they do, what happens next? They go to the next place and do the same thing.
I’m not going to ‘not in my backyard’ troll hunting, tyvm.
As Catalpa said, we’ll let them natter until they get boring, and then they either have a tantrum and leave, or get banned.
The other thing is that we *know* it’s highly unlikely to change someone’s mind. The troll is a lost cause, unless you get someone at the exact right time and place (like that person from westboro), they’re not going to listen.
But the lurkers can, and do, listen. I learn things all the time here, and on other sites. I lurked a lot before I started to comment, and I learned a whole bunch.
So the next time someone asks “why do you feed the trolls?????” you can know that the answer is “Because if you force them to defend themselves, eventually they’ll have a tantrum and quit, and that’s funny. And maybe they’ll realise they are wrong. And also, people can learn things from the long-ago conversations.”
@Rhuu:
Nice memory on Desperate Ambrose. I remembered it was about that time, but I couldn’t remember if DA was the actual one who was saying that stuff.
You not only remembered, you found the original comment. Well done. I wish my memory was that good!
Just in case yzek drops by again:
Quoting specialfrog, then yzek:
Doctrine hasn’t changed?
That’s simply not true. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith used to execute people. Later it became doctrine that the criminal law will be enforced by the secular state and the role of the CDF would be to determine punishments that have no secular impact – e.g. excommunication.
The change in authority and purpose of the CDF was a genuine change in doctrine.
That not good enough for you? How about cash indulgences? While indulgences continue to exist in Catholic doctrine, it is now against doctrine to pay cash for them. (For those who don’t know, saying your Hail, Marys is an act undertaken for the purpose of gaining an indulgence, as are other penances prescribed during confession.)
If you honestly think that Catholic doctrine hasn’t changed, strong guy, your brain hasn’t exactly been strengthened by god, has it?
(I’ve made myself a cheat sheet, Crip Dyke! My memory is crappy haha.)
I mean.. *shifty eyes* It’s super good!!!!
@Rhuu:
This is important, and so often overlooked (because of the invisibility of lurkers).
There’s an oft-repeated statistic commonly known as the “1% rule”: in a wide variety of online communities, only around 1% of users post, with the other 99% just reading. This is, apparently, not entirely rectally-derived: there is research to support such a large disparity. So, for every Crip Dyke eloquently demolishing an argument, there are 99 readers, some of whom may think “hey, I never thought of it that way, but she has a point”. It’s largely thankless work, but there’s real value to it.
@Rhuu:
Is this like the D&D monster manual, with armour class and hit points?
@Moggie – hahaha no, but it should be!!
Bloody kobolds.
@ Weatherwax
I am now thinking of taking a bath with a banjo. There will be singing.
Man, we should make a directory!