The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Do They Make It So Easy?

Posted on | September 18, 2014 | 51 Comments

Feminist blogger @joyintorah18 RT’d the above image on Twitter, which was noticed by MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) Mike Buchanan, and someone then called it to my attention. OK, so who is this feminist? Not the naked lady in the picture, I mean @joyintorah18?

Joy is a Canadian who runs a site called “Mancheeze,” which she describes as “dedicated to critiquing the Manosphere, a loose connection of anti-feminist/misogynist websites run by men.” And she recently put up a post with this headline:

Why I’m A Radical Feminist:
OPEN THREAD Without MRA’s UPDATED

It seems that Joy is running a sort of online clearinghouse for this stuff, in other words. To quote from her post:

A couple of female commenters, Wendy and chiiill, have expressed they are happily in relationships with men. One of the things MRA’s and other male supremacists like to do is say feminists hate men. This is clearly not true. Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.
Granted there are some women, like myself, who for political and personal reasons will not have a sexual relationship with men but it’s NOT the only relationship you can have with a person.
I have male friends. They’re just very few and far between and I don’t see them sexually so it removes much of the problem. Men who can carry on a great friendship with me are far more valuable to ME.
I consciously choose to have sexual relationships strictly with women but there is ONE man who I did have a sexual relationship with and who I fell in love with.
This whole ‘manhater’ line is just a cop out projection that they use to woman hate.

There are so many things wrong with this “argument” that it could be mined endlessly — the Comstock Lode of feminist neurosis — but Joy is not significant enough to deserve such labors, and is not as creatively crazy as Witchwind. So let me just focus on this odd sentence: “Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.”

It is a fact that Andrea Dworkin was legally married to a man. She was a lesbian and her husband, John Stoltenberg, is a gay man who first met Dworkin in 1974. They lived together for about 30 years. But to say that Dworkin “was married happily” is to abuse the definition of “married” as well as to abuse the definition of “happily.”

Was Andrea Dworkin ever happy about anything? Perhaps her rants against men and sex made her “happy” in the same way the blitzkrieg of Poland made Hitler “happy,” but that’s about it.

“Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.”

A sentence like that could never be written by any honest person who cared about facts, but Joy is a Canadian feminist.

Let’s talk about John Stoltenberg, the gay man to whom Andrea Dworkin was, we are told, “married happily.” In 1989, Stoltenberg published Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, in which he “argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice.” In 1994, he published The End of Manhood, about which a reviewer wrote, “The notion of manhood itself, says Stoltenberg, is a sham, a trap — and those who would redeem it or remythologize it are kidding themselves, for manhood is a mask, incompatible with truly human selfhood.”

To put it as bluntly as possible, Stoltenberg’s attitude toward masculinity is the attitude of Aesop’s fox toward the grapes: He pretends to scorn that which he desires, but is unable to possess.

Any psychologist would recognize that Stoltenberg’s personality is warped by masochistic tendencies and — hey! — did I mention he lived with Andrea Dworkin for 30 years?

John Stoltenberg’s life, career and ideas are a testimony to the truth of something Glenn Reynold recently remarked:

I’m beginning to think that most lefty movements are just about broken people trying to manipulate the rest of us so they can feel good about their broken selves.

This is exactly right. Sane, happy, normal people don’t need “movements” to validate their self-worth. However, people who are “broken” — unhappy, abnormal and/or mentally ill — are continually chasing after some cause, some crusade, some source of secular salvation that inspires them to immanetize the eschaton.

If they can’t save the world, these deranged souls can at least make themselves believe they are morally superior to the rest of us — we who are sane, happy and normal. This would be harmless, were it not for the fact that such “movements” are supported by intellectuals who turn these crackpot crusades into powerful political forces that result in the enactment of policies that make life miserable for everybody. And so we return to the Canadian feminist Joy, and her weird claim: “Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.”

About six weeks after Andrea Dworkin died in 2005 — she was 58 and had been nearly crippled by damage to her knees resulting from her morbid obesity — Ariel Levy published a long article about Dworkin in New York magazine called “The Prisoner of Sex.” Go read that article (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five) and then tell me how “happily” Dworkin was married. It’s absurd even to argue about it, and if not for this Canadian feminist idiot Joy, I wouldn’t bother.

Go read Joy’s “radical feminist” post and laugh at the absurdity of it: She’s arguing with a blog commenter and, congratulating herself on what she considers her triumphant victory, she then struts before her readership: “Praise me, for I have slain the dreaded MRA!”

A cheap stunt, that. At least when I stomp a troll like Bill Schmalfeldt, I manage to make a clever joke or two. Joy is neither clever nor humorous. The fact that she’s got an entire blog devoted to trolling MRAs is a sad testimony to the pathetic emptiness of her life.

 

Category: Feminism

Comments

51 Responses to “Why Do They Make It So Easy?”

  1. K-Bob
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:03 am

    Well I know they could use some serious help. I rag on Detroit, but I try to remind people that it’s always the same ten percent or so that make a place unlivable. Most of the remaining 80 percent are still good people.