Hook me up a new revolution, cause this one is a lie
Wednesday is not only the new Onion day, but this blog's traditional biweekly day of taking a look into the feminist blogosphere. Using "Link Farm & Open Thread #27" and the latest edition
of Carnival of Feminists, I shall again bring to the light views and
opinions that feminists would perhaps rather prefer to remain in their
safe spaces. Many of these posts might read like they were something
out of the Onion, but as far as I can ascertain, they are perfectly
serious.
First, "The Country’s Youngest Transgender Girl Prepares to Enter Kindgergarten" at Feministe introduces us a kid who has certainly caused several people around him to say the words "that sure is one fucked-up little kid".
The king of the profeminist men, professor Hugo Schwyzer, has encountered a male student who can see the difference between what feminist women say and what they actually do, and describes the incident in his post "Some thoughts on pro-feminism, young men, and always taking women's emotional temperature". Even worse, this young man thinks that sex with attractive women would be fun and pleasant, and tries to behave so that he maximizes the amount of nookie that he gets from attractive women. What a disgusting misogynist little pig full of patriarchal entitlement! Doesn't this little bigot know that he is supposed to be asexual, never letting his inner sexual desires show to the outside world in his externally observable actions? The post "Musings On Biological Imperatives and Cultural Response" at SauceBox explains more about this. Remember this, men: if you ever treat any two women differently in any way whatsoever based on their looks and attractiveness, you are a sexist oppressor, period.
Mental illnesses seem to be surprisingly common in the progressive circles, almost as common as personal financial ruin. Of course, in reality there are no mental illnesses, but what we call "mental illnesses" are just alternative ways to see and analyze the world. Because our hierarchical and phallocratic society doesn't like to be challenged by alternative views, it would rather prefer to silence these voices. But we should be, like, more open to these different ways of thinking and integrate the people who listen to a different drummer to our communities instead of locking them up for treatment and medication. "Stand up for Yves Magloe: a note on mental illness and discrimination" pleads for a professor who went off his meds, had a manic episode and is now losing his tenure. I guess that it's a good thing that he was a professor instead of, say, an airline pilot.
It is no fun being at the bottom, as the post "Just Some Random Thoughts" at "Trash Talks Back" heartwrenchingly explains. As I said earlier, the greatest poetic justice of feminism is when feminists purposefully make themselves unattractive and then have to settle for the bottom-rung defective loser men that they can attract, while the more attractive women monopolize all quality men.
I remember when we watched the first episode of "Pornucopia", an HBO sleaze documentary about the San Fernando Valley porn industry. The first episode featured a female starlet and let her express her thoughts on camera, and we had really difficult time trying to decide whether she really was as immensely stupid as she sounded or if the whole thing was an elaborate act. My basic common sense tells me that women who work in the sex industry would be prodominantly those women who have at least some looks but can't get better "normal" jobs due to lack of either brains or formal education. The post "We only leer at our inferiors" agrees with this idea. Of course, in the feminist socialist utopia every woman would automatically have a well-paying job and generous benefits, but in the real world, some women choose stripping and sex work because they prefer it to working for Wal-Mart or McDonalds, two options that are always available to any woman whose physique would allow her to do sex work profitably. If feminists succeed in their attempts in making sex industry go away (they never will, though, since the demand for this service is too great), I guess that it's just too bad for these women.
The recent news that DC Comics has resurrected Batwoman as a hot lipstick lesbian has made the feminist community angry, as expected. Why doesn't DC Comics make Batwoman a "real" lesbian, that is, a 300-pound bulldyke with a buzzcut? Of course, the 300-pound bulldykes have every right to be what they are, since it's a free world, but unfortunately other people also have every right to choose what they read and how they want to spend their money. This in turn has far-reaching implications for every large-scale media enterprise that wants to turn an actual profit. When you think about it, this is an excellent example of the more general principle that individual freedom is simply incompatible with the feminist goals and policies, because most individuals, given a free choice, will not embrace femo-socialist ideas in their daily lives. This is why feminism necessarily will, should it god forbid ever come to power, result in a totalitarian society that keeps its people in line with constant re-forcible education of dissidents who were captured by the all-encompassing thought police.
For all their gushing enthusiasm about the exciting and alternative Third World cultures and their presumed moral superiority over the West, in practice feminists are so very often disappointed to what these cultures actually do to women. For an illustrative example, see the post "One step forward, three steps back" that informs us about the new rape law in Kenya. This law prescribes the same punishment for false accusations of rape as for the actual rapes. I am not sure, but this law must somehow be the fault of me and other white men in the West, since as we know perfectly well, only the straight able-bodied white males have any free will or moral agency.
Since women are sexual gatekeepers, their opposition to "sluts" (that is, women who give it away too "cheaply" and this way decrease the "price" of sex to men) is humorously analogous to the current progressive opposition to Wal-Mart. See, for example, "My slut-baiting days".
Whenever feminists mock their opponents for supposedly being homosexual (or to use their favourite euphemism that offers more plausible deniability, "homosocial"), they accidentally reveal to the whole world what they really think of gays. Similarly, using the word "retarded" or "spaz" reveals what the speaker thinks about these groups of differently-abled people. The post "The Hierarchy of Insults" points this out, but the attempt to eradicate these slurs from the language is, in my opinion, futile. When people can see in their own eyes that some things are worse and less desirable than some other things, their language tends to reflect this reality, especially at those moments when the conscious mechanisms of self-censorship and politeness have temporarily shut down. Making up new euphemisms for mental retardation doesn't help either, since as soon as people learn to associate the new words to the underlying ugly reality of mental retardation that they refer to, those words also become tainted and ugly. You can keep calling shit caviar for all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that it is pretty repugnant to eat.
Now that HIV and AIDS have been among us for 25 years, many people have been compelled to write about their views of this horrible wasting disease. For example, see the post "And the Band Played On…" at "Firedoglake". For some mysterious reason, HIV and AIDS have never been a big concern in my life, nor in the lives of any of the people who I have associated with, so I don't have much to say about this topic. Oh, except for one thing: I am puzzled about the rhetorical attempt to conflate AIDS to the recent attempts of President Bush to attack gay marriage, because for the past 25 years, progressives have been constantly drumming into our brains that AIDS has not a gay disease and the HI-virus doesn't discriminate based on sexual orientation. Or perhaps I have once again totally misunderstood something, as I so often seem to do.
Another piece of news that has certainly made many people curse and fume in anger concerns the new Dutch political party that wants to lower the age of consent to 12. As I have previously stated, I consider 16 to be the appropriate age of consent in modern society, so I would oppose this party. However, I can't help but wonder why all those people who use epithets such as "sick fuck" to describe this party are then totally silent about the numerous countries in the Third World which have no legal age of consent at all, but in which a girl is fair game as soon as her tits start sprouting. Where could I read the progressives using the words "sick fuck" to refer to these Third World cultures and the people in them? Ah well, perhaps I just have missed these condemnations of their non-Western lifestyle. Otherwise, I would have to conclude that there is a double standard going on, so that you can't expect and demand of the people in the Third World the same as you would expect and demand of the people in the West.
To end this tirade with a positive note, perhaps I should finally link to "Noli Irritare Leones", pretty much the only feminist who is capable of reasoning and whose writings I actually respect and enjoy. Heck, I even believe that she is in the feminism game due to an honest desire to make the world a better place instead of being a man-hating womenfirster. In the post "Men’s natural drive for competition, and women’s natural desire for self-beautification", she examines the issue of to what extent differences between sexes are due to nature and nurture.
First, "The Country’s Youngest Transgender Girl Prepares to Enter Kindgergarten" at Feministe introduces us a kid who has certainly caused several people around him to say the words "that sure is one fucked-up little kid".
The king of the profeminist men, professor Hugo Schwyzer, has encountered a male student who can see the difference between what feminist women say and what they actually do, and describes the incident in his post "Some thoughts on pro-feminism, young men, and always taking women's emotional temperature". Even worse, this young man thinks that sex with attractive women would be fun and pleasant, and tries to behave so that he maximizes the amount of nookie that he gets from attractive women. What a disgusting misogynist little pig full of patriarchal entitlement! Doesn't this little bigot know that he is supposed to be asexual, never letting his inner sexual desires show to the outside world in his externally observable actions? The post "Musings On Biological Imperatives and Cultural Response" at SauceBox explains more about this. Remember this, men: if you ever treat any two women differently in any way whatsoever based on their looks and attractiveness, you are a sexist oppressor, period.
Mental illnesses seem to be surprisingly common in the progressive circles, almost as common as personal financial ruin. Of course, in reality there are no mental illnesses, but what we call "mental illnesses" are just alternative ways to see and analyze the world. Because our hierarchical and phallocratic society doesn't like to be challenged by alternative views, it would rather prefer to silence these voices. But we should be, like, more open to these different ways of thinking and integrate the people who listen to a different drummer to our communities instead of locking them up for treatment and medication. "Stand up for Yves Magloe: a note on mental illness and discrimination" pleads for a professor who went off his meds, had a manic episode and is now losing his tenure. I guess that it's a good thing that he was a professor instead of, say, an airline pilot.
It is no fun being at the bottom, as the post "Just Some Random Thoughts" at "Trash Talks Back" heartwrenchingly explains. As I said earlier, the greatest poetic justice of feminism is when feminists purposefully make themselves unattractive and then have to settle for the bottom-rung defective loser men that they can attract, while the more attractive women monopolize all quality men.
I remember when we watched the first episode of "Pornucopia", an HBO sleaze documentary about the San Fernando Valley porn industry. The first episode featured a female starlet and let her express her thoughts on camera, and we had really difficult time trying to decide whether she really was as immensely stupid as she sounded or if the whole thing was an elaborate act. My basic common sense tells me that women who work in the sex industry would be prodominantly those women who have at least some looks but can't get better "normal" jobs due to lack of either brains or formal education. The post "We only leer at our inferiors" agrees with this idea. Of course, in the feminist socialist utopia every woman would automatically have a well-paying job and generous benefits, but in the real world, some women choose stripping and sex work because they prefer it to working for Wal-Mart or McDonalds, two options that are always available to any woman whose physique would allow her to do sex work profitably. If feminists succeed in their attempts in making sex industry go away (they never will, though, since the demand for this service is too great), I guess that it's just too bad for these women.
The recent news that DC Comics has resurrected Batwoman as a hot lipstick lesbian has made the feminist community angry, as expected. Why doesn't DC Comics make Batwoman a "real" lesbian, that is, a 300-pound bulldyke with a buzzcut? Of course, the 300-pound bulldykes have every right to be what they are, since it's a free world, but unfortunately other people also have every right to choose what they read and how they want to spend their money. This in turn has far-reaching implications for every large-scale media enterprise that wants to turn an actual profit. When you think about it, this is an excellent example of the more general principle that individual freedom is simply incompatible with the feminist goals and policies, because most individuals, given a free choice, will not embrace femo-socialist ideas in their daily lives. This is why feminism necessarily will, should it god forbid ever come to power, result in a totalitarian society that keeps its people in line with constant re-forcible education of dissidents who were captured by the all-encompassing thought police.
For all their gushing enthusiasm about the exciting and alternative Third World cultures and their presumed moral superiority over the West, in practice feminists are so very often disappointed to what these cultures actually do to women. For an illustrative example, see the post "One step forward, three steps back" that informs us about the new rape law in Kenya. This law prescribes the same punishment for false accusations of rape as for the actual rapes. I am not sure, but this law must somehow be the fault of me and other white men in the West, since as we know perfectly well, only the straight able-bodied white males have any free will or moral agency.
Since women are sexual gatekeepers, their opposition to "sluts" (that is, women who give it away too "cheaply" and this way decrease the "price" of sex to men) is humorously analogous to the current progressive opposition to Wal-Mart. See, for example, "My slut-baiting days".
Whenever feminists mock their opponents for supposedly being homosexual (or to use their favourite euphemism that offers more plausible deniability, "homosocial"), they accidentally reveal to the whole world what they really think of gays. Similarly, using the word "retarded" or "spaz" reveals what the speaker thinks about these groups of differently-abled people. The post "The Hierarchy of Insults" points this out, but the attempt to eradicate these slurs from the language is, in my opinion, futile. When people can see in their own eyes that some things are worse and less desirable than some other things, their language tends to reflect this reality, especially at those moments when the conscious mechanisms of self-censorship and politeness have temporarily shut down. Making up new euphemisms for mental retardation doesn't help either, since as soon as people learn to associate the new words to the underlying ugly reality of mental retardation that they refer to, those words also become tainted and ugly. You can keep calling shit caviar for all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that it is pretty repugnant to eat.
Now that HIV and AIDS have been among us for 25 years, many people have been compelled to write about their views of this horrible wasting disease. For example, see the post "And the Band Played On…" at "Firedoglake". For some mysterious reason, HIV and AIDS have never been a big concern in my life, nor in the lives of any of the people who I have associated with, so I don't have much to say about this topic. Oh, except for one thing: I am puzzled about the rhetorical attempt to conflate AIDS to the recent attempts of President Bush to attack gay marriage, because for the past 25 years, progressives have been constantly drumming into our brains that AIDS has not a gay disease and the HI-virus doesn't discriminate based on sexual orientation. Or perhaps I have once again totally misunderstood something, as I so often seem to do.
Another piece of news that has certainly made many people curse and fume in anger concerns the new Dutch political party that wants to lower the age of consent to 12. As I have previously stated, I consider 16 to be the appropriate age of consent in modern society, so I would oppose this party. However, I can't help but wonder why all those people who use epithets such as "sick fuck" to describe this party are then totally silent about the numerous countries in the Third World which have no legal age of consent at all, but in which a girl is fair game as soon as her tits start sprouting. Where could I read the progressives using the words "sick fuck" to refer to these Third World cultures and the people in them? Ah well, perhaps I just have missed these condemnations of their non-Western lifestyle. Otherwise, I would have to conclude that there is a double standard going on, so that you can't expect and demand of the people in the Third World the same as you would expect and demand of the people in the West.
To end this tirade with a positive note, perhaps I should finally link to "Noli Irritare Leones", pretty much the only feminist who is capable of reasoning and whose writings I actually respect and enjoy. Heck, I even believe that she is in the feminism game due to an honest desire to make the world a better place instead of being a man-hating womenfirster. In the post "Men’s natural drive for competition, and women’s natural desire for self-beautification", she examines the issue of to what extent differences between sexes are due to nature and nurture.
Since you enjoyed Caplan on Szasz so much, I thought you might like another economist attacking the idea of mental illness: http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2006/06/fake_science_on.html
Posted by tggp | 3:46 PM
Hmmm, that funny feminist says:
I’ve known for most of my life that I actually was at a fairly high risk of getting raped, while he’s known that, as long as he stays out of prison, getting raped is really unlikely.
While I guess the second part of that statement is true, I would have to say that, operationally, none of the women I have ever known have behaved as if they thought that they were at a fairly high risk of being raped.
I guess it depends on what she means by fairly high.
Posted by Doubting Dick | 8:42 PM
Hmmm, with respect to the youngest transgendered child, I personally think it is up to the parents. If they go with it, that is fine, but if they resist and want to treat the child as male, that is fine as well.
I wonder if the child is actually a CAH individual?
At the end of the day, probably one less fucker to compete with my ofspring.
Posted by realist | 9:28 PM
By "fairly high," I mean that a sizeable minority of women get raped at some point in our lives, and that most of us adjust our behavior at least some of the time to reflect our perception of that risk.
Since, at any given time, a given woman may think her immediate risk of being raped is low, her behavioral adjustments may not wind up being the same as the ones someone else would have expected her to make. And, as with any risk that either men or women confront, what we think we need to do to reduce our risk may not always reflect reality.
Posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax | 10:40 AM
lynn gazis-sax says:
By "fairly high," I mean that a sizeable minority of women get raped at some point in our lives, and that most of us adjust our behavior at least some of the time to reflect our perception of that risk.
Well, the other funny thing is, given all the women who are related to me, and that includes spouse and her immediate relatives, daughters, mother and those female relatives on her side, I don't know anyone who was raped (and this stuff gets around in families ... for example, they all know that I was born out of wedlock).
Then when I extend it to all the women I have known, especially during college when many were upfront about that sort of thing, again I don' know anyone who has been raped (although, there is less likelyhood that I would know in some cases).
So, paint me skeptical, because I think it is a beatup.
Let me ask my daughter when she comes home from college about the incidence of actual rape ...
Posted by Doubting Dick | 7:54 PM
"Where could I read the progressives using the words "sick fuck" to refer to these Third World cultures and the people in them?"
What, don't I count as a progressive? :)
Granted, I used the word "pedophile" instead of "sick fuck", but close enough.
Posted by Vera | 7:29 AM
"I am not sure, but this law must somehow be the fault of me and other white men in the West, since as we know perfectly well, only the straight able-bodied white males have any free will or moral agency."
Exactly where in my post did I say that?
--IP
Posted by IrrationalPoint | 10:15 AM
Exactly where in my post did I say that?
Your didn't, and I didn't claim that it did, but I pointed out the general sentiment that I have noticed leftists having.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 11:08 AM
"but I pointed out the general sentiment that I have noticed leftists having."
Then obviously my blog wasn't a very good example, was it? Although it's kindof a meaningless statement anyway to say that it's a "general sentiment" of "leftists"; leftists vary hugely in their views -- there's no manifesto -- just as conservatives and moderates do. Yours is a strawman argument.
However, as regards the hypocrisy that you claim is manifested in calling Dutch padophiles "sick fucks", let me state for the record that I think all paedophiles are sick fucks, not just the Dutch ones.
--IP
Posted by IrrationalPoint | 8:12 PM
Realist:
"with respect to the youngest transgendered child, I personally think it is up to the parents. If they go with it, that is fine, but if they resist and want to treat the child as male, that is fine as well."
I'm not sure I understand your comment -- you think what is up to the parents?
See, the thing is that, in general, it's *not* fine to "resist" and treat a woman as a man if she wants to be treated as a woman. In this case, the question is whether the child is in fact transgendered, or temporarily identifying with girls. So what's wrong with taking that identification seriously and treating the child as a girl for now (and going back to treating the child as male if the child wishes the parents to do so at some later point)? If the child *is* transgendered, taking her seriously *now* will save her an awful lot of crap later on. And if the child isn't, the parents can go back to treating him as male.
Ilkka:
Transgenderedness is real, regardless of whether or not *this particular* child is transgender. I see no basis for your claim that the kids is fucked up.
"I don't know anyone who was raped"
What makes you think that someone who was raped would necessarily tell you, especially given your obvious sympathy towards rape victimes? I certainly know people who have been raped and otherwise sexually abused.
--IP
Posted by IrrationalPoint | 6:40 PM