Is Everything Feminist ‘Empowerment’ Now? Or Is @Belle_Knox a Sociopath?

Posted on | March 21, 2014 | 68 Comments

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve had some masochistic tendencies. When I was a young girl and my friend and I would play house, I would ask her to lock me in her dog cage. . . . It was exciting. It was different.
“I can’t explain why rough sex and pain arouses me; it just does.”
— Miriam Weeks (a/k/a “Belle Knox”)

Let’s talk about rationalization, OK?

Rationalization is a psychological defense mechanism by which the ego defends itself against criticism, either external criticism from others, or against internal criticism from the superego (conscience). We do not need to resort to rationalization to explain or justify success. Praiseworthy deeds require no defense. Rationalization is necessary only to excuse failure or to evade shame for our wrongful actions.

“I started watching porn when I was maybe 11, and it was something I was always very ashamed about, but I really enjoyed watching it.”
— Miriam Weeks (a/k/a “Belle Knox”)

The true motives or reasons for our “perceived controversial behaviors” (thank you, Wikipedia) are ultimately irrational. If our conduct were governed by logic and prudence, we would not have gone “all-in” on that pair of jacks. Rationalization is what occurs after we lose that stupid bet and then try to tell ourselves that our bad decision made perfect sense, rather than being a crazy emotional urge.

Over the past five weeks, Duke University freshman Miriam Weeks has offered the world an increasingly elaborate series of rationalizations to justify her bad decisions, exploiting feminism as a defense mechanism to garner sympathy as a victim of “slut-shaming” while basking in admiration as a sort of “pro-sex” heroine.

Only the mindless incoherence of feminism — the tendency to rally around any woman who invokes the sisterhood and portrays herself as a victim of patriarchy — could explain the uncritical acceptance of the shifting and often contradictory rationalizations by which Miriam Weeks has excused and justified her career as teen porn starlet “Belle Knox.”

“Whatever choice a woman is making and she is the one deciding to do — reclaiming the agency behind the decision to do, even if it is a degrading sexual act — is absolutely feminism. To me, feminism is about women not being shamed but rather being empowered. . . .
“Why is that we have to adhere to the ascribed gender roles of the patriarchy?”
— Miriam Weeks (a/k/a “Belle Knox”)

In February, using the pseudonym “Lauren” in her interview with the Duke Chronicle and in other venues, she said it was about the money: Her parents couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pay the tuition at Duke and therefore, she was more or less compelled to do porn out of dire financial need.

That story never really made sense, because Weeks also said she had turned down a full scholarship to Vanderbilt. If she knew there were financial problems with her family, wouldn’t she have accepted the Vandy scholarship instead? Well, kids make irresponsible decisions all the time, but the misguided attempt by Weeks to “un-out” herself — getting the Chronicle and other publications to play along with the charade that her actual identity was not already widely known — clearly had an ulterior motive, to deflect attention from her family, so that her rationalization could not be fact-checked.

“I’m very passionate about feminism and LGBTQ rights. . . .
“Listen, patriarchy is telling women what to do with their bodies. . . . I think that when people condemn pornography, they’re really just following this societal construct of what sex is, based on religion, based on patriarchy, and so many societal forces.”
— Miriam Weeks (a/k/a “Belle Knox”)

Unfortunately for Weeks, journalistic curiosity overwhelmed political correctness, and reporters for the Daily Mail revealed that (a) her father is a physician whose annual income they estimated at $200,00 a year, (b) her family lives in a house worth nearly $500,000, and (c) Miriam and her two older siblings attended Gonzaga Prep, a prestigious private Jesuit school with an annual tuition of $11,000. Whatever the difficulties of paying Duke’s tuition might be, Miriam Weeks could not plead poverty. She is definitely not “the 99 percent.”

So the focus of her narrative shifted, slightly but perceptibly. Even in her first interviews, with the paradoxical claim that she was not ashamed of doing porn, despite her insistence on hiding behind pseudonyms, Weeks had claimed porn was “empowering,” although asserting that she wouldn’t have done it if not for the need to get tuition money. Once her family’s affluent background was exposed, however, the financial rationalization faded into the background and “empowerment” took center stage. Critics of her porn career as “Belle Knox,” she asserted, were really just threatened by her feminist “sexual autonomy.”

“When I agreed to film that rough sex scene, I knew what was in store for me. . . . I realize that the visual of me with [semen on my face] at the end was nothing compared to the close-ups the site provided of my skin revealing scars from my most vulnerable past when I was a cutter. . . .
“Does my admission that I cut when I was a teenager suddenly make me the porn stereotype of a ‘depressed, crazy girl’? I would say it’s the exact opposite. I have nothing to hide.”
— Miriam Weeks (a/k/a “Belle Knox”)

Let’s run the check list: Intelligent, superficially charming, manipulative, deceitful, narcissistic, remorseless, lacking empathy for others, impulsive, with an appetite for risky behavior . . .

Can you say “sociopath,” boys and girls?

Let the psychologists examine the case study and decide for themselves. My larger point is that there is something profoundly weird about Miriam Weeks, and she is exploiting feminism — relying on the idea that women should always be “supportive” and non-judgmental of each other — to divert attention from her pathological symptoms. Skip forward to the 11:30 mark in this XOJane video interview:

“I think [I would like to see] more stories about the
process of, you know, coming out, or coming to terms with
being gay. . . . I was home for break in October, before
this whole porn thing happened, and I was in the car with
my dad. . . . We were just driving and I said to my dad,
I was like, ‘Dad, I like girls.’ And he was just like,
‘I know, sweetie. I’ve known for a long time.’ . . .
I was shocked. . . . I was like, ‘Was it the half-naked
pictures, posters of girls in my room?’ And he said,
‘No, it’s because you have sex with women.’
He knew somehow, I don’t know. . . . And then,
there’s like an awkward silence, and then
he goes, ‘Well, do you want to go to the
bikini espresso bar down the street?
We probably don’t have the same taste in women,
but I think you’d like it.’ And I just, like, laughed.”

WHOA! “Bikini espresso bar”? Yeah, apparently such a thing exists in Spokane, and I guess feminists will insist that it’s almost as “empowering” as getting boned on video, but what kind of fatherly reaction is that? His daughter tells him she’s bisexual, he says he knows she has had sex with women, and the daughter brushes this off as, “He knew somehow”? Then dear old Dad compares their “taste in women” and offers his college freshman daughter a visit to the bikini espresso bar?

Let’s run another check-list: She started watching porn when she was 11 or 12, engaged in “cutting” when she was a young teen, and now she’s a bisexual porn star who is “aroused” by sadomasochism.

“And then there’s like an awkward silence . . .”

“The only porn I watch is blowjob porn. It is the only thing I can get off to, is watching a girl get her face f**ked . . . That’s hot. I can’t watch normal sex and get off to it. I have to watch blowjob porn. I don’t know why.”
— Miriam Weeks (a/k/a “Belle Knox”)

Miriam Weeks is a twisted tangle of psychosexual pathology, and if her feminist enablers would stop engaging in ideologically motivated gestures to show how “supportive” they are of her “sexual autonomy,” maybe they could provide some long overdue examination of the etiology of deviance in our hypersexualized youth culture.

Stop trying to sell me this ridiculous porn “empowerment” nonsense. Trust me — I know crazy when I see it.

<br />

PREVIOUSLY:

March 20: Also, @Belle_Knox Is a Psycho
March 19: On ‘The View,’ @Belle_Knox Says ‘Most People’ Start Watching Porn at Age 12
March 16: Is Duke ‘Supportive’ of Teen Porn?
March 12: E-Mail to a Friend: Are We Being Too Judgmental About the Duke Porn Star?
March 11: ‘This Is a Tragedy in the Family’: @Belle_Knox’s Horrible Disgrace
March 9: Get ‘Empowered,’ Duke-Style!
March 7: Now @PiersMorgan Interviews Duke Porn Star @Belle_Knox a/k/a Miriam Weeks
Feb. 27: Special Snowflake™ @Belle_Knox and Make-Believe Feminist ‘Empowerment’
Feb. 25: If Porn Is Not Shameful, Why Doesn’t Miriam Weeks Use Her Real Name?

Category: Education, Feminism, Sex

Comments

68 Responses to “Is Everything Feminist ‘Empowerment’ Now? Or Is @Belle_Knox a Sociopath?”

bridget
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:05 pm

Stop trying to sell me this ridiculous porn “empowerment” nonsense. Trust me — I know crazy when I see it.

Only slightly less hopeless than trying to out-crazy Stacy McCain: trying to hide the crazy from Stacy McCain.

(Relatedly, who could have ever guessed that a woman at a “Southern Ivy” who comes from a nice family with a doctor father would ever engage in sadistic porn if she weren’t psychologically healthy? Such a shocker.)
robertstacymccain
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:17 pm

Neal Rauhauser, Barrett Brown, Bill Schmalfeldt, Kaitlyn Hunt — I’ve got vast experience in dealing with crazies. If there were a Ph.D. in Crazy Studies, I’d be a full tenured professor by now.
Kirby McCain
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:22 pm

Stacy, why can’t you call Miriam Weeks what she is?
robertstacymccain
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:28 pm

An old song lyric comes to mind:

I don’t know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love.
I don’t know how someone controlled you.
They bought and sold you …
I don’t know how you were diverted.
You were perverted too.
I don’t know how you were inverted.
No one alerted you.
Bob Belvedere
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:31 pm

–My larger point is that there is something profoundly weird about Miriam Weeks…

In this Age Of Leftist Hegemony, the weird and perverse are celebrated and it is Normalcy that is condemned. I fear The West, as a whole, is Sociopathic.

–…if her feminist enablers would stop engaging in ideologically motivated gestures to show how supportive” they are of her “sexual autonomy,”….

To the Leftist, The Cause is all and individuals do not ultimately matter, therefore, they are there solely to be used and discarded if necessary.
#BellaKnox, #LaurenA, and #MiriamWeeks #Rule5 #DukePorn Post #NSFW Update: Is Bella Knox the love child of Sandra Fluke and the Democrat Party? | Batshit Crazy News
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:42 pm

[…] TOM: Feminists empowerment and Belle Knox is psycho… […]
#PiersMorgan and #BellaKnox: This is very wrong… | Batshit Crazy News
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:43 pm

[…] TOM: Feminists empowerment and Belle Knox is psycho… […]
Jeanette Victoria
March 21st, 2014 @ 6:55 pm

Why are liberals and feminists cerebrating this
deeply damaged young lady? In fact why do liberals and feminists cerebrate all sorts of mental illness and call folks who act out “brave”?
robertstacymccain
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:12 pm

What’s interesting is watching supposedly “sophisticated” people being conned by this clever sociopath. Anybody who has studied sociopaths can explain how they “mirror” — they figure out what it is that make you tick, then tell you what you want to hear, gaining trust by exploiting your sympathy. And this is exactly what Miriam Weeks is doing. Read her words carefully, and you’ll notice that she’s got all the feminist buzzwords in there, but she’s just parroting slogans. How in the world is it “empowering” to be subjected to “facials”? And what kind of feminist heroine is so jaded and enslaved by perversion that she can only “get off” by watching such videos?

Yet she blames the “patriarchy” and invokes “autonomy,” and the feminists are evidently too stupid to realize they’re being hustled by a cunning grifter. Miriam Weeks reminds me of Huey Newton, a street-smart hoodlum who figured out that liberals would give him money (and defend him as a victim) if he just talked about racism, “Black Power” and revolution.
Rosalie
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:14 pm

Because they live on victimhood. What else do they have?
RS
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:18 pm

This is yet another example of the Leftist/Progressive tendency to accept anyone and his/her behavior without any analysis whatsoever. It’s similar to the Katelyn Hunt business in that regard. Press the right buttons and the bandwagon is filled with people shouting “You go girl!” Not only do they wind up looking foolish but they do the objects of their adulation no favors by their uncritical acceptance.

Oh, and BTW the story about her dad in the car is BS, too, I’m sure.
pabarge
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:38 pm

Feminism is a culture of gender hate.
Kirby McCain
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:38 pm

She can only get off watching BJ vids, but she likes girls? In what way?
RKae
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:44 pm

“…the Leftist/Progressive tendency to accept anyone and his/her behavior without any analysis whatsoever.”

No. Just hedonistic behavior.

If your behavior includes going to church, refraining from the “fun” of adultery, owning a firearm to protect your home, or turning off the TV when you hear profanity, then your behavior WILL INDEED be analyzed.
Jeanette Victoria
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:45 pm

In the 70’s and 80’s these folks were in mental institution and we call the Borderlines now they are feminist icons?

We live in a deeply dysfunctional society. To be honest this is what happens when woman run things
RKae
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:45 pm

Her protestations remind me of a guy I know who turned 40 and started cheating on his wife, saying, “No, it’s not a midlife crisis thing!”

Riiiiiight! Live the cliché, baby! Live that cliché!
WarEagle82
March 21st, 2014 @ 7:58 pm

Somewhere near Tuscaloosa, a scarlet pachyderm sits in a lonely legume rehab clinic, thanking his lucky stars he did NOT end up at Duke…
robertstacymccain
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:01 pm

When I was a kid, the one thing I never wanted to be when I grew up was that cliché — the middle-aged divorced dude with a toupeé, driving around in a Benz with a girl half his age.
russemerson
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:06 pm

She’s a whore, and not even a particularly attractive one, at that.

Makes me wonder what her parents did or did not do that made her think that prostitution (albeit on video) was an acceptable way to earn a living.

But I’ll bet the words “Sunday School” probably didn’t figure very large in her childhood.
JeffWeimer
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:29 pm

“Once her family’s affluent background was exposed, however, the
financial rationalization faded into the background and “empowerment”
took center stage.”

Don’t forget she dismissed a full scholarship to Vanderbilt in order to pay her way through a women’s studies major at Duke.
K-Bob
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:33 pm

Come on you guys, Rand Paul wants us to court these folks as part of our expanding tent. Sex workers hate the NSA too, after all.

It’s all about winning! Yay!
Dana
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:38 pm

Oh, c’mon now, tell the truth: when you were a kid, you were just like all the rest of us, and never even saw yourself as ever being middle aged.
Art Deco
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:40 pm

If my own experience and observation is any guide:

1. It’s what they did not do that was salient; and

2. If that. What Judge Ellen Morphonious once said: “some people just zig when they oughta zag”. Some people are immersed in a corrupt peer culture and some people are just verrrrry willful. Seen it up close and personal.

—

Right now, her father needs to send her a letter of the sort the father of Ted Turner sent to his son in 1963, which included the following: “I fear you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy environment, the better”. He needs to shut the financial spigots off and be prepared to lower the guillotine on his daughter, if only to instruct his other children.
Art Deco
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:42 pm

That in and of itself is an indicator of parental negligence.
Anon Y. Mous
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:47 pm

lacking empathy for others

I wouldn’t quibble with most of your diagnosis, Dr. McCain, but I am curious on what you base the lack of empathy. Perhaps the effect this is all having on her family? Although I would call that more like garden variety selfishness rather than proof of a true lack of empathy.
RKae
March 21st, 2014 @ 8:54 pm

Not all of us. I always saw myself as growing up and growing old. I saw myself as being like my grandpa. I may have FANTASIZED about being 10 years old forever, but that’s all it was: a desperate wish for the impossible.
RKae
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:01 pm

I’m always very analytical about crowd behavior in a riot. It fascinates me to no end. I like to focus on one guy and ask, “What’s going on in that guy’s head?” He sees that “the rules are off” and giggles as he smashes a window in an “I finally get to do this!” sort of delight.

That’s what I see in the culture today. It’s a riot mentality; a lot of people thinking, “I finally get to do this!” as they commit adultery. I’m reminded of an ad for Las Vegas where a woman smiles to herself as she unpacks and a man (boyfriend or husband we are led to presume) asks, “What did you do in Vegas, honey?” The whole “Hey! She committed some really cool sins!” vibe is all over the ad.

People are drooling in anticipation for the rules to fall.

There’s a true insanity moving through the air and people are breathing it in.
Mm
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:08 pm

I find it odd that people think the family is loaded.
1. They put three kids through private schools and private colleges (Miriam is the youngest). As I said in a previous thread, family friends and neighbors estimate the educational expenses over the past 20+ years in the vicinity of $1 million.

2. The parents are still paying back their own student loans. I can relate since it took me over twenty years to pay all of mine.

3. A $500,000 house in the Seattle area is not a mansion. The Daily Mail posted photos and it’s nothing special.

4. The dad makes $200,000 NOW, but straight out of school and for quite a few years after, he was probably making in the $50,000 range. Remember, he had to provide for his family and pay back his own loans on his salary.

5. We dn’t know what other financial obligations the family may have had. We’re they helping to support the wife’s family in India, for example?

I was in the medical field for a while back in the eighties. I worked with a young doctor who had just bought into a practice. He was grossing about $200,000 back then. He showed me what he took home after paying his staff, student loans, taxes, etc. it was around $40,000, on which he had to support his family of four plus his and his wife’s parents in Mexico. People’s finances are re not always as cut and dry as the outside world would like to believe.
Cube
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:19 pm

People are drooling in anticipation for the rules to fall.

That’s certainly true in some quarters. But they never anticipate that when the rules are off, they are off for everyone, not just themselves. It never occurs to such people what will happen when the predators realize there are no more restraints. That’s when things get truly scary. Be very careful what you wish for folks, you may get much more than you bargained for. And its a lot harder to build walls again than it is to tear them down.
Southern Air Pirate
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:24 pm

You make couple of mistakes in your reasoning. Gonzaga Prep isn’t in Seattle it’s in Spokane. Which is a 6 hour drive from Seattle and they don’t have dorms for the students to live in. So while it’s a 500k home and in Spokane, a google/Bing search doesn’t show the home that the Weeks family lives in the area. There are pictures that the Daily Mail have in their article are attached to a home in the porn area of California that Ms Knox/Weeks lives or lived in while shooting some of her films.

Also, as part of a deal which a number of doctors (and nurses and some others in the medical field) have taken advantage of is having the government pay off their loans or even subsidize their medical education as part of a medical specific ROTC or OCS program where they give up some 4-6 years of their lives in uniform as a member of the medical corps in exchange for those payoffs. Which once they have completed the obligation of service they can either stay active duty or transfer to reserve or National Guard service.
Bob Belvedere
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:30 pm

Because they are either Fellow Travellers in on the scam [which I explained in my first comment on this thread] or they’re Dupes, some of whom are as deranged as Miriam Weeks is.
Bob Belvedere
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:31 pm

THIS.
Bob Belvedere
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:36 pm

This is why, I believe, it is a wasted effort to seek to make anything but short alliances with the capital ‘L’ Libertarians [ie: the Ideologues].
Mm
March 21st, 2014 @ 9:53 pm

Except the article said the parents are still paying off their own loans, and the Daily Mail article the I saw identified it as the family home. Thanks for correcting the city. All of this confirms my point which is that we do not know what the familiy’s financial obligations are. Also, she is an adult and is now on the hook for her own behavior, regardless of daddy’s income.
sjreidhead
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:00 pm

As a feminist, I don’t care if she’s doing porn, or being a good little submissive wife, running for office, or flipping burgers. I suspect the only thing she’s capable of doing is porn. I’m more of the opinion she’s taking it all the way to the bank, which is fine, if that’s what she wants to do. As for being a psychopath, they do have a tendency toward success, willing to do things people with basic values won’t do. They call it success. Frankly, my dear, my idea of porn is my favorite baritone in a costume from the Regency period. Indeed, they say that the Colin Firth version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is thinking woman’s pornography. I’ll go along with that.
Funeral guy
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:03 pm

Your analysis of the family’s financial situation is interesting, but only as a sidebar. The main point is Ms. Weeks had the offer for a full ride (pun intended) at Vanderbilt. A very fine school that most students would be thrilled to attend. Unless that part of her story is bull$hit. A high probability in my opinion.
Mm
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:06 pm

I agree on both counts. I bring it up because her father’s alleged income is usually discussed, as well.
Art Deco
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:10 pm

No, she has reached the age of legal majority. She is a dependent. (And an utter ruin). Assuming adult responsibility at 19 was not all that uncommon in 1957 (when the age of legal majority was 21). It’s quite out of the ordinary today.
Funeral guy
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:11 pm

Bingo. We have a winner.
Funeral guy
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:13 pm

Strap-ons.
Funeral guy
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:14 pm

See; Sheehan, Cindy.
rumcrook™
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:17 pm

The parents have probably known for a while that she is a pathological liar and disturbed
Art Deco
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:19 pm

Anyone other than yours truly remember this Frontline documentary?

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/09/movies/frontline-documentary-death-of-a-porn-queen.html

—

The documentary was an autopsy on the woman’s life. You have to slap yourself on the side of the head and recall that in the world of 1987, this sort of thing was still understood as repulsive and pathological by the liberal establishment.
Art Deco
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:30 pm

Again, that she turned it down is an indicator of unseriousness right there. That she was not simply told by the authorities in her household that that option was not on the table is another indicator. That she majored in a worthless arts-and-sciences discipline is a third.

Had her father been in command of the situation she’d have been told she was attending Vanderbilt and studying one of the following: economics, mathematics, a natural science, or a foreign language. Should she have conceived of herself as a vocational spinster, add engineering to that list. (The nursing school does not have undergraduate programs there).
Nan
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:37 pm

I’d start pitching it to universities then.
Finrod Felagund
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:54 pm

When I was in elementary school, they had us calculate how old we’d be in 2000.

It seemed like such a large number at the time, but then again when you’re single digits, all double digit ages seem large.
Finrod Felagund
March 21st, 2014 @ 10:56 pm

From what I understand, the large majority of bikini coffee shops are in Washington state. They kind of are to Washington state what Waffle House is to Georgia.

Hm, ‘bikini coffee’ in Google returns 150 million matches.

More hm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_barista
Cube
March 21st, 2014 @ 11:53 pm

…discarded ~~if necessary~~ when no longer useful.
FIFY

Which in this case will be very soon. She’s about to crash and burn, unfortunately.

The conservative, religious types the Left despises are the ones who actually care about individuals and back it up with actions, most often without anyone else knowing about it. Funny how that works, eh?
ChandlersGhost
March 22nd, 2014 @ 1:09 am

Here’s the full video of the documentary.
Kirby McCain
March 22nd, 2014 @ 7:03 am

Somewhere in Nashville the Commodore is thinking, that was a close one.