The Other McCain

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

‘I Suffer From Oppression’

Posted on | November 17, 2014 | 108 Comments

So says @JaclynArcher in a column for Eastern Washington University’s student newspaper, The Easterner:

What is oppression? According to the Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology “Social oppression is a concept that describes a relationship between groups or categories . . . of people in which a dominant group benefits from the systematic abuse, exploitation, and injustice directed toward a subordinate group.”
I suffer from oppression. I am black, I am a woman. I am bisexual. I am an atheist. Various systems, including a flawed justice system, the patriarchy, institutional heteronormativity, and Judeo-Christian philosophical dominance (in the United States) actively marginalize and repress my experience and limit my social freedom, to the benefit of others unburdened by these characteristics.
These various oppressions interact with one another in distinct and various ways. As a woman I am more likely to be sexually assaulted than a man, however, as a black woman I am statistically more likely to be sexually assaulted than a white woman.
Because I am a black woman I am more likely to be perceived as unprofessional, promiscuous, or having “an attitude.”

There you go, eh? The first and most important lesson college students learn in the 21st century is exactly how oppressed they are.

Honestly, I think half these kids claiming to be “bisexual” are just looking to up the ante in the Texas Hold ‘Em Oppression Tournament.

Sexual abnormality is like hitting an ace on the river. Somebody goes all-in expecting to take the pot with three of a kind — say, a female Hispanic afflicted with bipolar disorder — and then . . . “A-ha!”

Here is Ms. Archer with a full house of oppressions: Black female atheist and — what luck! — she gets the bisexuality card on the river.

Not even a pansexual genderqueer could beat a hand like that.

Of course, atheist bisexuals aren’t really oppressed in America. At least 30% of the Obama White House staff are bisexual, and let’s not even mention the gossip about Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, OK?

Heck, it’s 2014. There’s not a sorority girl in America who hasn’t at least once posed for a selfie kissing her girlfriend at a frat party, but most of them don’t “go Kappa Phi Omega,” IYKWIMAITYD.

Queer is the New Normal. Progress ruins everything it touches, and now they’ve even taken the fun out of sexual deviancy. It used to be you had to be weird and wild to do this stuff, but 21st-century progress has made it commonplace to be a perverted freak. Kinky has become boring. It’s us married Christian conservatives who are the weirdos now. My wife and I have six kids. Procreation is a far-out fringe fetish in 2014.

“You mean, you even did . . . PIV? Without protection?”

Yep. PIV barebacking. Multiple times. Consensually. On purpose.

While feminists recover from that shocking idea — I probably should have included a “trigger warning” — I’ll point out that escaping patriarchal oppression is so easy it’s become a journalistic formula: Turn queer and you get your own Salon.com column.

When people ask how Sam and I met, I almost never tell them the entire story — that I was Sam’s big sister in a sorority. I still feel ashamed of that detail, as if I did something wrong by falling for her, or I took advantage of her in some way. So I keep my answer simple. I tell them we met in college.
I never planned to pledge a sorority. I went to Emerson to be around nerdy artistic kids in an urban setting . . .

(This is what we used to call a “euphemism.”)

. . . but I arrived to find the small liberal arts school lacking in a party atmosphere of any kind. … I missed my friends from back home. So when a girl from my dorm asked me to go to a sorority rush event, and I found myself in a roomful of girls who talked about parties and boys and looked so comfortable together, I desperately wanted to belong. I attended more rush week events, hoping to meet a few girls I could call my friends. I never thought I’d meet the girl I’m going to marry.

(Music cue: Darlene Love.)

Before Emerson, my closest encounter with lesbians was kissing a friend on a drunken dare. I’d only ever been interested in guys. My teenage years as an insecure and unsophisticated Long Island girl — who was not only a foot taller than most boys in school, but who spent much of my time listening to Enya and writing in my journal — didn’t prove to be particularly fruitful when it came to getting noticed or falling in love. . . .

(Yeah, being “a foot taller than most boys in school” is another one of those euphemisms, like “varsity volleyball.”)

But the sorority didn’t just offer me dining companions. I now had a group of girls I could hit the bars with. Our sorority was 100 percent boy-crazy. (Well, maybe not 100 percent.) . . .

(Bah-da-BOOM-crash! She’ll be here all week, folks. Try the veal.)

I’d never been in a real relationship, and at 19, I was scared of being vulnerable. . . .

(Fear and Loathing of the Penis is rampant these days.)

I met Sam at the start of my sophomore year, my first time holding rush events as a full-blown sister. Sam was a transfer student from Florida who’d experimented with boys, girls and drugs, and she was paired with me as my Little Sister. On the surface, we didn’t have much in common: She had too many piercings and a lack of respect for the sisters. But I knew there was something different between us. . . .

(“I see,” says the therapist. “Please continue.”)

After a few months of being around her I knew that I didn’t feel the same around Sam as I felt around the other girls. When Sam touched me, my skin burned. When she looked at me I felt completely exposed, and the lingering scent of crisp fruits and fresh florals from her perfume — Ralph Lauren Cool — made me dizzy.
The old college cliché of girls experimenting with girls exists for a reason, but I didn’t want to experiment with Sam. I didn’t want to be anywhere near her, because my attraction to her terrified me. When a group of us went out to a bar one night, Sam went home with one of my suitemates. Sam tells me that it was casual, and that she knew I wasn’t ready. But I felt like she was making a bold statement. When I arrived back at the dorms, terrified and full of vodka, I pounded on the doors. Sam says I kissed her. I say she kissed me. But in all my years of kissing nothing had ever come close to this bipolar feeling of comfort and panic. I didn’t tell a soul.
Gossip soon ran rampant throughout the sorority. . . .

Yeah, you can read the rest of that, if you’re interested, but these stories — “Omigod, I Suddenly Discovered I’m Queer” — are beginning to bore me. Never thought I’d say that. However, after months of researching radical feminism, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only reason girls insist that their parents pay to send them to a “small liberal arts school lacking in a party atmosphere” (Emerson College annual tuition, $37,350) is so they can get a Salon column out of it.

And also marry a lesbian with too many piercings.

Give it a few years, and maybe she’ll write another Salon column — perhaps “Omigod, My Lesbian Wife Dumped Me Because I’m Not Queer Enough for Her” — but my point is that (a) the sapphic bildungsroman is swiftly becoming a journalistic cliché, and (b) it is therefore absurd for Jaclyn Archer to say she is oppressed by “institutional heteronormativity” at Eastern Washington University.

“We’re here! We’re queer! And it’s hopelessly boring.”

It’s like those drug-addict stories we read about in junior high. Nice kid smokes a doobie and, two pages later, he’s murdering people to feed his heroin habit or flying out a window on LSD. Then we got to high school — it was the 1970s — and everybody was on dope.

Mostly it involved toking up, turning on a blacklight in your basement rec room and listening to Pink Floyd. We wasted a lot of time and nearly flunked out, but very few of us turned into murderous junkies or took acid-induced suicidal leaps from tall buildings.

There weren’t any tall buildings in Douglas County, Georgia, in 1975, but watching “Romper Room” on purple microdot? Wow, man.

Fortunately, nobody ever told us we were “oppressed.” The Democratic Party didn’t have a Teenage Dopehead Caucus, so there was nothing political about our situation. Nor is there anything truly political about Jaclyn Archer’s bisexuality, except she has been told so.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

How naïve are these kids to believe so fervently that they are oppressed? Oh, look, another bisexual college student. I’m shocked.

No, I’m not shocked, not at all. Do these kids believe they invented deviant sex or something? You’ve got no idea, kids. No idea.

At least three guys I went to high school with in the 1970s died in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. I could name them, but that would serve no purpose. One of those guys played first clarinet in band, which gave him the privilege of sitting next to Kelly Goldsmith, a privilege I envied him, from my distant seat back in the (all-male) trombone section.

Some days Kelly wore halter tops, and when she turned a certain way you could see — well, quite a lot, but Mr. First Clarinet was rather obviously not interested in girls that way.

Nobody gave a damn. Forty years ago in Georgia, gay people were known to exist. They didn’t need a ideology to do so. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan got elected president, then re-elected by a landslide, and the AIDS epidemic broke out that suddenly sodomy ceased to be a private amusement and became a Democrat Party issue.

There are now only two reasons to vote Democrat, sodomy and abortion, and Wendy Davis got 38.9% of the vote in Texas on that basis.

Having lost friends in the AIDS epidemic (the clarinet guy was never my friend, but a couple others were) I’m tired of being accused of homophobia and tired of watching young people wallow in confusion and misery while claiming to be “oppressed” — by me!

That’s it, you see? Married, white male Christian father of six — I’m the demonized oppressor in this political morality tale these kids are taught. I’m so heteronormative it’s probably a hate crime.

How the hell did I become so powerful that college kids thousands of miles away are victims of my patriarchal oppression?

And why do I find myself diagnosed by complete strangers who insist that anyone who votes Republican must be suffering from a mental illness — homophobia, an irrational fear of gays — when my fearlessness in that regard is quite nearly notorious. I am not sexually “repressed,” nor am I “ignorant,” and neither my Christian faith nor the fact of my rampant heterosexuality are symptomatic of insanity.

You Can’t Out-Crazy Stacy McCain™ — you have my guarantee on that — and who else would even try to make sense of the radical feminist theory being taught in Women’s Studies programs in 2014?

What has happened is that the whole world has gone so crazy in the past 40 years, no sane person could possibly hope to understand it.

In crazy times, the Madman becomes the Prophet.

And hey, just because I’m hetero doesn’t mean I’m normative.

Blame it on that purple microdot.

 

 

Category: Education, Gays, Sex, Sex Trouble

Comments

108 Responses to “‘I Suffer From Oppression’”

  1. jim
    November 17th, 2014 @ 12:55 pm

    Stacy,
    Here’s a link you will find amusing:
    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IR_w5V_DyDI/VGd-FpxQZGI/AAAAAAAAiws/2DercEbhKEU/s1600/Moment.jpg

  2. RKae
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:01 pm

    I for one am sick to death of Judeo-Christian philosophical dominance in the United States!

    I can’t turn on my TV just to watch a cop show without nearly every one of the characters lapsing into their love of Jesus Christ. And then when they have the bad guy cornered, the cops ALWAYS have to try to convert him to Christianity! It’s such a cop-show cliche now!

    And then there’s Broadway! Damn! I just want to watch a nice musical with a nice simple plot, but there ALWAYS has to be some gigantic show-stopping number in praise of Jesus Christ! Come on! I paid $300 for these seats!

    Don’t forget fiction writing! Every time I read what is supposed to be an ordinary suspense novel, I have to wade through pages and pages of pointless, extraneous “I love Jesus” talk from all the characters!

    Enough is enough!

  3. Adobe_Walls
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:13 pm

    That’s just tinkering around the edges. Eventually we are going to have franchise.

  4. Adobe_Walls
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:16 pm

    Why that’s just silly, ”hungry” is not an emotion.

  5. Adobe_Walls
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:19 pm

    It’s not just your birthright, but also a solemn obligation.

  6. Adobe_Walls
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:25 pm

    Actually when I hear ”patriarchy” I feel a sense of pride.

  7. Fail Burton
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:33 pm

    Plus throw in the sickening parade of white people and general whiteness and it’s enough to make you want to move to Africa.

  8. RS
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:37 pm

    And, dammit. I typed “there” instead of “their” in the, “Who are these people who suspiciously take an inventory of neighborhood atheists and where they spend there Sundays? ” sentence.

    I call “E.B. White Spelling Oppression.”

  9. Steve Skubinna
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:38 pm

    You say underachiever, she says oppressed…

    Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.

  10. Fail Burton
    November 17th, 2014 @ 1:38 pm

    You’re imagining she really believes all that. In fact it’s a shill where all roads lead to whites. She just can’t come out and say “I don’t like whites,” though she clearly resents them.

    No matter what you say they’ll refute it. A black President or Lebron James and Serena Williams being the 1-2 most popular sports figures, March Madness beating the crap out of the all-white college hockey play-offs… it doesn’t matter what you say because this isn’t about reality but is simply glib lying.

  11. concern00
    November 17th, 2014 @ 2:29 pm

    It also stands to reason that if the natural order is inherently oppressive, there is probably not much point in fighting it. Better to normalize and join the oppressors and have some fun.

  12. Bob Belvedere
    November 17th, 2014 @ 2:42 pm

    -Stacy wrote: Mostly it involved toking up, turning on a blacklight in your basement rec room and listening to Pink Floyd….

    Pink Floyd was saved for last. First, we started off with Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Rush, followed by Led Zeppelin, then Floyd.

    –… but very few of us turned into murderous junkies or took acid-induced suicidal leaps from tall buildings.

    True…some of us became musicians.

  13. Bob Belvedere
    November 17th, 2014 @ 2:45 pm

    My privately-held hedge fund, Dinsdale-Mud Bricks, LLC, is looking into that.

  14. Bob Belvedere
    November 17th, 2014 @ 2:57 pm

    A lovely Fisk.

  15. Suburbanbanshee
    November 17th, 2014 @ 3:03 pm

    “When I arrived back at the dorms, terrified and full of vodka, I pounded
    on the doors. Sam says I kissed her. I say she kissed me.”

    Kissing or seducing somebody drunk is automatic sexual assault if you’re a man. But apparently it’s a sign of Twue Wuv if you’re a woman.

    Sigh. The only thing this is a sign of, is that anybody who’s desperate enough can convince herself of anything. Twue Wuv is a nice way to save face with yourself about your drinking problems and your hot and cold running hormones, but I’m pretty sure that drinking less and learning to beat shyness in less chemical ways would make you happier in the long run. A lot of people have college relationships that don’t last, because college is not much like real life; and “lesbian during college” is a fairly large social phenomenon for similar reasons. I hope I’m wrong, but this all sounds like a Dr Phil show waiting to happen.

  16. richard mcenroe
    November 17th, 2014 @ 3:06 pm

    And “horny” is more of a religious experience.

  17. Squid Hunt
    November 17th, 2014 @ 3:12 pm

    A newt?

  18. Daniel O'Brien
    November 17th, 2014 @ 3:29 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

  19. Zohydro
    November 17th, 2014 @ 3:33 pm

    Reckon that’s short for “neuter”… But ya get better!

  20. Obamacare On Time, Under Budget? | Regular Right Guy
    November 17th, 2014 @ 4:27 pm

    […] ‘I Suffer From Oppression’ […]

  21. Art Deco
    November 17th, 2014 @ 4:42 pm

    No, 0.8% of the adult population at any one time.

  22. K-Bob
    November 17th, 2014 @ 5:43 pm

    Hey, potential oppression is actually rape, okay?

  23. DeadMessenger
    November 17th, 2014 @ 6:55 pm

    I’ll agree with you there. My position is “shut the heck up, and get on with your life, you whiner”.

  24. Juliette Akinyi Ochieng
    November 17th, 2014 @ 7:32 pm

    Sometimes, regardless of your various protected victimhood groupings, other people will conclude that you are an asshole. This chick needs to accept this and get over it.

  25. Fail Burton
    November 17th, 2014 @ 8:05 pm

    Thanks to people like McCain, people are starting to understand our mere existence as straight white men is considered an attack according to the ideology of intersectionalism falsely mainstreamed as equal rights “feminism.”

    Folks are no longer listening to phony explanations – sympathy that was once there is drying up. By claiming to speak for them, intersectionalists have done more harm to non-whites, women and gays than is imaginable, including the general idea of equal protection for all of us. They have set back civil rights by decades and endangered the very nature of our Constitution.

    These folks need to be marginalized into the same swamps as the KKK and neo-Nazis and spoken about the same way, because it is the same intellectual space. Forget it when they give over with the LOLs and Godwin’s Law. It is what it is, and you don’t have to kill or imprison people to wreck a nation.

  26. RKae
    November 17th, 2014 @ 9:00 pm

    I think the more succinct phrase is “Cowboy up!”

    And it’s best if accompanied by a slap across the chops.

    And if you can get THIS guy to deliver the slap…

    …well, do I need to explain the intrinsic value?

  27. Fail Burton
    November 17th, 2014 @ 9:24 pm

    Do any of these people ever suffer from shut up?

  28. K-Bob
    November 17th, 2014 @ 9:27 pm

    Brewer linked this article in the sidebar at Ace’s

    By the way, Maetenloch posted a pic of the #ShirtStorm shirt:

    http://ace.mu.nu/Windows-Live-Writer/d7370e8e42eb_E195/shirtnew-gunner-girls.1381967955.1229558179.2_2.jpg

  29. theoldsargesays
    November 17th, 2014 @ 10:38 pm

    “I suffer from oppression. I am black, I am a woman. I am bisexual. I am an atheist. ”

    She forgot to mention that she’s a nut job. And a self-identified “victim”.

    If you’re going to be oppressed then you might as well go all in!

  30. theoldsargesays
    November 17th, 2014 @ 11:08 pm

    And a raaaaacist.
    You forgot raaaaacist.

    That’s a special form of oppression that is not allowed to be lumped in with other, lesser, forms of oppression, lest the victims of raaaaacism be cheated out of their fair share of oppression which would in turn subject them to…..
    (YSWIGWTDY?)

  31. theoldsargesays
    November 17th, 2014 @ 11:18 pm

    As they say to themselves “No wonder their society disintegrated”.

    Maybe this is what caused the collapse of Mayan Civilization?

  32. theoldsargesays
    November 17th, 2014 @ 11:21 pm

    STOP lessening the extent of her oppression, you’re oppressing her.

  33. Wombat_socho
    November 18th, 2014 @ 12:05 am

    One hears things, y’know?

  34. Wombat_socho
    November 18th, 2014 @ 12:07 am

    Unfortunately, no. We’ll have to oppress them harder.

  35. Wombat_socho
    November 18th, 2014 @ 12:10 am

    This is actually classy compared to the Big Johnson shirts.

  36. theoldsargesays
    November 18th, 2014 @ 12:53 am

    Well sh!t then, we’re going have to unionize or something ‘cuz this oppression stuff’s turning into a full-time job.
    It used to be a fun thing that just came naturally, now you’re talking about work.

    I know there’s still the whole
    White Hetero Christian Patriarchal benefit thing which is okay, but you’re talking about putting in overtime now?

  37. theoldsargesays
    November 18th, 2014 @ 1:00 am

    And bloggers.

  38. theoldsargesays
    November 18th, 2014 @ 1:03 am

    Well its all according to one’s perception…..
    You seem very perceptive btw.

  39. M. Thompson
    November 18th, 2014 @ 2:25 am

    Do you have any giant hedgehogs looking for London gangsters?

  40. K-Bob
    November 18th, 2014 @ 2:59 am

    Hah! Yep.

  41. Bob Belvedere
    November 18th, 2014 @ 8:21 am

    I did for a while, but then their heads were nailed to the floor.

  42. Ilisha
    November 18th, 2014 @ 8:46 am

    Thank you so much for writing this series, Sex Trouble. I was indoctrinated with feminist dogma, especially in college “Women’s Studies” classes, but later began to have serious misgivings. I *felt* deeply troubled by feminism, but couldn’t explain why.

    For that matter, I didn’t really know exactly why. I tried to write an essay entitled, “What’s wrong with feminism,” just to sketch out my thoughts. It was not a success.

    Then I stumbled across this series. At least an intelligent, evidence-based deconstruction of feminism. I’ve been eagerly devouring every article, and when I’m finished, I hope I will at last be able to formulate and articulate my own critiques of feminism.

    Thank you so much for having the courage to challenge feminism, and for all your research and hard work in putting together this series. For me, it’s watershed.

  43. Bob Belvedere
    November 18th, 2014 @ 8:47 am

    Stacy’s putting this whole series into book form for future reference.

  44. Bob Belvedere
    November 18th, 2014 @ 9:41 am

    ‘Could This Be One Explanation?’

    -Jean Raspail

  45. Bob Belvedere
    November 18th, 2014 @ 9:42 am

    Without any additional benes!

  46. RS
    November 18th, 2014 @ 9:50 am

    McCain: Doing the job Liberal Arts professors used to do.

    But without the tenure.

  47. Ari Mendelson
    November 18th, 2014 @ 10:14 am

    Of COURSE sexual deviance is boring. Especially compared to procreation.

    I compare it to shooting. You can take your gun to the range and shoot it at a little paper target to your heart’s content. But how does that experience compare to hunting where you fire live rounds at a living target?

    Yeah. I thought so.

  48. Jekyll
    November 18th, 2014 @ 12:29 pm

    Question to All: Which of the 50 genders are ‘you’ on face book ? No mirrors please.

  49. Fail Burton
    November 18th, 2014 @ 12:42 pm

    This is what killed the dinosaurs. Brains the size of peas.

  50. theoldsargesays
    November 18th, 2014 @ 5:34 pm

    But these type of people don’t have pea-sized brains.
    They may choose to act as though they do bit they are just being lazy.
    Victimhood, government subsidies and hollow platitudes are an easy way out of the carrying the burdens of one’s choices for some people.