Sixteen Volts

I found out a few days ago that somebody had sent the women's center of this university an email that contained a few well-chosen anti-feminist paragraphs clipped from my old blog posts. Whoever this person was, she had found some valid points (for her case, I mean) that would have been best not written, but in some others she had been pretty careful to cut away the surrounding context and leave in the most inflammatory parts. For example, the following quote snipped from my April post "Are you angry yet?" sure seems damning:

There should be some central planning mechanism that would allocate each woman a bunch of needy men to satisfy each week. I think that this would be only fair: if feminists think that they are entitled to 50% of wealth created by productive men that these men would selfishly want to keep to themselves, then those men should be correspondingly entitled to 50% of sex that the feminists are able to provide to men but selfishly choose not to.

Look, Ilkka wants to turn women into sex slaves! What a monster! But hold on a minute. Let's provide the full context to this snippet, so that we can see if it might change its meaning in some important way:

I said it once and say it again: feminism and socialism are one, and that one is socialism. For all practical purposes, all feminists are socialists, except those who actually had to live in socialist countries. That is, they believe that some central planning mechanism should take from each according to their abilities and redistribute to each according to their needs. Of course, this time this planning mechanism should be led by wise women, so that all reasons of psychology, economics and computational theory that make socialism impossible would magically not apply any more. But perhaps it surprises my readers that I actually support this principle, as long as it is also applied to men's sexual needs and women's sexual abilities --- and let's not forget which sex is capable of multiple orgasms when we determine which sex wants sex more and is therefore more capable of supplying sex. There should be some central planning mechanism that would allocate each woman a bunch of needy men to satisfy each week. I think that this would be only fair: if feminists think that they are entitled to 50% of wealth created by productive men that these men would selfishly want to keep to themselves, then those men should be correspondingly entitled to 50% of sex that the feminists are able to provide to men but selfishly choose not to. This arrangement would show us how committed feminists really are to socialism when they for once get to be the givers instead of the eternal takers. This should probably also drive through the point that socialism is great fun only as long as you get to be the taker.

Let's hope that she never comes upon Jonathan Swift.

I learned about this email when I was contacted by a reporter from the university newspaper. Even though I was surprised, I explained her my side of the story. Even though that reporter obviously stands ideologically quite far away from me, we had a friendly conversation and I believe that she will write the article fairly, so I look forward to seeing this article on print. Last time I checked, the paper had not yet come out at least at those stands that I usually walk by, but perhaps this will happen soon.

Meanwhile, as they say, dogs bark and the caravan passes. I let my teaching and the results that I achieve there speak for themselves. I am so certain of this that I actually, from my own initiative, compiled the said reporter a list of my female students for the past year and told her to ask them if they think that there is something wrong or unfair in my teaching.

But we'll see how this story will develop and whether it will turn into something out of a Tom Wolfe novel. By the way, once we note that the previous issue of the local student newspaper (note: this is a different paper than the paper mentioned above) featured a two-page fawning article "The importance of being Ernesto" about Che Guevara, the wannabe socialist dictator whose bloodthirsty career of eliminating dissidents was fortunately cut short by a well-placed bullet which unfortunately made him and his famous image the God of college leftists everywhere, I kind of doubt that I really am the worst moral influence to the impressionable young minds around here.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, September 20, 2006 at 1:41 PM