The Other McCain

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

Sailing the ‘Sea of Misogyny’

Posted on | December 17, 2014 | 69 Comments

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked Online:

The buzzphrase of our age is ‘rape culture’. Fearmongering feminists claim women are surrounded by the threat of rape, as evidenced in everything from the Sun’s Page 3 to the continued existence of raunchy rock music, and are drowning in what one melodramatic columnist calls ‘a sea of misogyny’. Activists make videos of themselves being catcalled in the street to demonstrate that a ‘culture of rape’ is all around. Even as the statistics suggest that actual incidents of rape are declining — the US National Crime Victimization Survey records an 85 per cent decline in the per-capita victimisation rate of rape over the past 35 years — still the panic about rape is stoked up. Magazines like Rolling Stone run graphic stories about grotesque rapes, publishing houses churn out rape memoirs, and online forums are set up for women to tell, in as much detail as possible, their stories of being raped — all contributing to a feeling, however unfounded, that women are at risk from lustful men.
So it was in the Deep South, too. One of the main ways in which racists there maintained social divisions and social order was through the spectre of rape. . . .

You can read the whole thing, but what caught my eye was that phrase “sea of misogyny.” Headline on the column in question:

Women are being assaulted, abused
and murdered in a sea of misogyny

Why the passive-voice construction? Who is doing all this assault, abuse and murder? The subject of the sentence is men.

Men are assaulting women. Men are abusing women. Men are murdering women. Are feminists afraid to name their enemy?

Words mean things. “Misogyny” means hatred of women.

At some point in the past decade, “misogyny” replaced “sexism” as the favorite feminist accusation against men, without anybody really noticing the significance of the substitution. Being called a “sexist” never much bothered me, frankly, because what does it really mean?

A sexist is someone who believes that the differences between the sexes are socially significant, and I most certainly do.

To be a sexist does not mean being prejudiced against women or practicing unfair discrimination in the workplace against females. Many women — quite probably most women, including many who call themselves “feminists” — are also sexist in their belief that the differences between male and female cannot be ignored or wished away.

The differences between men and women cannot be legislated out of existence. No regime of regulation, no court decree can create “sexual equality,” because the sexes are sufficiently different that attempts to make them equal only create failure, conflict and misery. Our schools may manage to brainwash children with false beliefs about “equality,” but all that will do is to make it more difficult for those children to be successful and happy when they grow up.

“Feminists have declared war on human nature,” I wrote in July, after beginning the “Sex Trouble” series. While nature will ultimately triumph over her foolish foes, there is no limit to the misery and failure that may result from feminist folly in the meantime.

To be a sexist is not the same as being a misogynist, and the substitution of the latter term for the former tells us something about the steady drift of feminism in recent decades. Entrenched in departments of Women’s Studies, protected by tenure, armed with regulatory authority and political prestige, the academics whose theories form the basis of feminist ideology have taught their naïve students a discourse of power (Foucault) so that when they emerge from the campus cocoon and encounter adult life, they view the world through distorted lenses. Human behavior appears to them to form a gestalt pattern they then describe using the intellectual abstractions (e.g., misogyny) with which they were equipped during their ideological indoctrination.

“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)

You don’t need a college education to be able to identify offensive human behavior as “bad manners” or “stupidity.” No abstract theory or fancy words are required to say that you shouldn’t grope people in the workplace or shout insults at strangers on the street. And rape was a felony long before we had feminists constantly lecturing us about rape.

Here’s the subhead on that column about the “sea of misogyny”:

Women are being killed in a society that
sends the message, clearly and repeatedly,
that they are sexual objects for
men’s gratification and possession

Wait! You’re telling me that this message from society is wrong?

Whatever you do, don’t tell my wife. She has been an object for my gratification and possession for 25 years, and if she ever figures out that this arrangement pleases me because I hate her — that I am a “misogynist” — she might stop supplying me with gratification.

Perhaps the reader sees the basic problem here without my having to explain it. Always best to assume that the reader is intelligent enough to draw the obvious conclusion in such a situation, but I hope no one is offended while I belabor the point a bit further.

Our feminist here engages in a rhetorical leap that makes Evel Knievel’s rocket-powered motorcycle jump across the Snake River Canyon look like child’s play. She has crammed many different phenomena into a single category, “misogyny,” so that male desire for female companionship (which in feminist theory means reducing women to “sexual objects”) is responsible for assault, abuse and murder.

Men want women because men hate women — that’s what this feminist rhetoric about “misogyny” and “sex objects” really means.

Common sense rejects this formulation when it is stated so clearly, which is why feminists usually avoid stating their beliefs clearly, except when writing books aimed at an exclusively feminist readership. People have been startled by some of the quotes by feminist authors I’ve published during the past several months (you will find six particularly frightening quotes in yesterday’s installment, “As Real as Rape: How Bad Journalism Advances Feminism’s Anti-Male Agenda“) simply because clear expressions of feminism’s core ideology seldom appear in newspaper columns or any other mass media forum.

“Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context . . . is one in which men have social, economic, political power over women. Some men do not have all those kinds of power over all women; but all men have some kinds of power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their women — the women they fuck.”
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (1987)

Feminism has both an esoteric doctrine (a system of beliefs shared among members of the cult) and an exoteric discourse, the language feminists use when evangelizing the general public.

What is taught in university Women’s Studies programs diffuses itself into public awareness slowly, by a sort of intellectual osmosis, so that when we encounter feminist arguments on TV news programs or in online columns, the ideological underpinnings of this rhetoric are not clearly apparent. Common sense tells us there is something strange about these arguments — the casual conflation of normal male sexual desire with murder strikes us as odd — but we don’t know where these weird claims are coming from or why anyone would say such things. We ask ourselves, “Who is this person saying all this?”

Her name is Laura Bates and she is 28 years old. She graduated from Cambridge in 2007 and moved to London to pursue an acting career. Failing at that, she worked various jobs until, in 2012, she launched a website called Everyday Sexism, collecting and publishing women’s tales of men’s abusive behavior. That project was a success, and Ms. Bates seems rather disingenuous about this:

She can’t recall a single conversation about feminism or politics while growing up in a “very, very normal” middle-class family in Taunton; she studied English literature at Cambridge university, spent all her time acting and went nowhere near student politics, let alone women’s groups. . . .
It is hard to believe Bates when she says she would scarcely have known what feminism even meant two years ago, for her command of the gender politics debate is breathtakingly sophisticated.

Yes, it is quite “hard to believe” that a Cambridge graduate, even a literature major whose career interest was in theater, didn’t know anything at all about “gender politics” until, at age 26, she created a web site called Everyday Sexism. The aroma of bovine excrement exudes from that narrative because, even if Laura Bates went “nowhere near . . . women’s groups” as a Cambridge undergrad, feminist ideology pervades the modern university campus like water pervades the sea.

As I have frequently mentioned, Women’s Studies programs are organized on an  interdisciplinary basis, so that professors of history, psychology and literature are part of these programs. If one were able to view Laura Bates’s Cambridge transcript, to see the courses she took and the professors under whom she studied, I can pretty much guarantee she had some exposure to feminist theory, and perhaps quite a large amount, even if she did not recognize it as such.

Certainly, Ms. Bates lived her life in accordance with feminist ideology, whether she studied that ideology or not. She is 28, childless and unmarried — by contrast, my wife was a mother of three by the time she was 28 — and so Ms. Bates embodies the anti-procreation fanaticism that makes “choice” (abortion) women’s most fundamental right. It does no good, in my experience, to explain to feminists that their movement’s vehement hostility to motherhood is largely derived from the population-control agenda funded by white male billionaires (David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, et al.) whose interest in “women’s rights” is more Malthusian than philanthropic.

“Be fruitful and multiply” is one of the many divine commandments that all feminists must reject. There are no Christian feminists, because feminism is a sort of narcissistic idolatry, wherein women deny God and instead worship themselves as their own divinity.

That ironic feminist poster quotes a rather notorious 1992 fundraising letter sent out by Pat Robertson, and every word is true, including the part about witchcraft. Please, click here and buy yourself a copy of Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco by Professor Jone Salomsen and, when you’re done reading that, I can recommend several other volumes on the same topic. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in the subject of women divorcing their husbands and becoming lesbians, you can also order From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life: Stories of Transformation (1995) and Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (2010).

Laura Bates is not a lesbian witch, so far as I am aware. A newspaper profile mentions that she “lives in north London with her fiance, an actor” who, we may presume, intends to obtain gratification from his possession of Ms. Bates as a sex object. And good luck, sir!

My own four sons, however, have been warned to avoid any woman who speaks feminist rhetoric. McCain’s Law of Feminism:

There are three kinds of feminism:

1. Feminism that is wrong;
2. Feminism that is crazy;
and
3. Feminism that is both wrong and crazy.

When in doubt, it’s usually Number Three.

All feminists are wrong and usually also crazy, but you never know what kind of craziness is concealed by their rhetoric. Marry one of them at your own peril. If you come home some day to find she has killed the children, withdrawn all the money from your bank account and run off to join a coven of lesbian witches, don’t say you weren’t warned.




 

 

Comments

69 Responses to “Sailing the ‘Sea of Misogyny’”

  1. Mm
    December 17th, 2014 @ 10:09 pm

    The book is going to be awesome.

  2. RS
    December 17th, 2014 @ 10:10 pm

    One might think that Feminists would make a connection between their hatred of Motherhood and their perception that they exist only as “objects” for men’s gratification and pleasure. Having freed themselves from the “slavery” of childbearing and child rearing by divorcing same from the act of procreation, they now are dismayed that they ostensibly have no value other than as a sex toy. Feminists wished to be able to pursue sexual gratification for its own sake and not for any higher purpose. They were successful, yet now they complain and, of course, seek to blame men for their own shortsightedness.

  3. Kirby McCain
    December 17th, 2014 @ 10:56 pm

    Let’s be clear, not all crazy bitches are feminists.

  4. Jeanette Victoria
    December 17th, 2014 @ 10:58 pm

    Pat Roberson prediction about “witchcraft” wasn’t so far off the mark check out the ELCA’s “Her Church” http://66.147.244.109/~herchurc/about-us/our-message/

    And remember Katherine Ragsdale the Episcopal “priest” that said “abortion is a blessing.” I.e. is is fine with child sacrifice sounds pretty pagan to me.

    If it walks like a duck…..

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 17th, 2014 @ 11:31 pm

    If you consider deserts to be the “sea” here is that “Sea of Misogyny”: http://www.worldmapsonline.com/images/Cram/History/islamicconquests.jpg

  6. DeadMessenger
    December 17th, 2014 @ 11:52 pm

    Yeah, you nailed that one on the head.

  7. DeadMessenger
    December 17th, 2014 @ 11:57 pm

    That link is actually, literally, nauseating. “Goddess Rosary”? Are you kidding me right here? Luther must be spinning in his grave.

    Someday Jesus will say to these people, “I never knew you.”

  8. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:01 am

    It isn’t even true. There are plenty of guys with plenty of gal friends that they like to talk to, play video games with, and work with. The complainers are nuts.

  9. RS
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:05 am

    The ELCA went off the rails the moment it split from the Missouri Synod. In retrospect, it was the best thing to happen to the LCMS, because the spiritual contagion voluntarily left us.

  10. RS
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:09 am
  11. kilo6
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:16 am

    Sail with me away from androgyny

    To the sea

    The sea of Misogyny

    I want to tell you

    How much I want a sammich

    aaaaaand I denounce myself

  12. Zohydro
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:18 am

    That was horrible… I second the denunciation!

  13. kilo6
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:20 am

    perfect companion to the Luther insult generator

    http://ergofabulous.org/luther/

  14. Jim R
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:24 am

    To be a sexist is not the same as being a misogynist, and the substitution of the latter term for the former tells us something about the steady drift of feminism in recent decades.

    It has struck me about the Rolling Stone “article” that what we see is a major escalation. Erdeley, not content with merely telling the story of a girl who’d been raped, found (or created?) a story far more horrible. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I think her mental process went something like this:

    “I’ve got to prove that women are in danger from evil men, i.e. all men* who haven’t been battered into submission by hearing a lifetime of feminist rhetoric. But how? How can I make my point? I know! I’ll write about the worst thing a man can do to a woman (other than deny her free birth control pills): rape! Oh… That’s been done. Um… How about gang rape? Oh… Been done. Even made into a movie… Think-think-think… I’ve got it! A gang rape… of an innocent young girl… at a fraternity… NO! An elite, rich WHITE** fraternity on a Southern campus! THAT’LL get ’em right by the balls! Now to go find me a girl who’ll… um… tell me that story.”

    It’s akin to a small child escalating his temper tantrum from whining to crying to screaming to throwing himself on the floor and pounding his fists.

    Is this not parallel to the course of feminism? Having gotten the vote a century ago and increased equality with men (the number of jobs in our country that prohibit women is rapidly approaching zero), they’ve go to find SOME dragon to slay, some reason to justify their existence. Hence, the need for increasingly outrageous claims of “misogyny”.

    ====

    (*) I believe that Erdeley is married. Can you imagine what that must be like for her husband?

    (**) The nutjob feminists like to ally themselves with the race mongers as their mutual “enemy” is the white male. Read about Critical Race Theory if you’ve got a strong stomach and no blood pressure problems. Many of its proponents are self-identified feminists.

  15. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:28 am

    It ebs and floods in places but has generally gotten bigger.

  16. Good Stuff
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:33 am

    I have been sailing the ‘Sea of Misogyny’ of the blogosphere. A week does not go by that someone does not call me a Misogynist. Which makes no sense

    Tapair Feminists is a subspecies of the Cat Lady species

  17. Fail Burton
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:50 am

    “Feminism has both an esoteric doctrine (a system of beliefs shared among members of the cult) and an exoteric discourse, the language feminists use when evangelizing the general public.

    “… I can pretty much guarantee she had some exposure to feminist theory, and perhaps quite a large amount, even if she did not recognize it as such.”

    Those are the two key mechanisms which fuel this: the mainstreaming of hate speech using fake oppression narratives about equal rights until the original sociopathy emerges as nobility. Here’s the intersectional addition for Ferguson from a black activist author:

    “The U.S. judicial system has made it clear that blackness itself is a capital offense and doesn’t deserve the benefit of a trial.”

    We are being conned by experts who do it on a full-time professional basis. On one end are bigots and on the other naive social justice warriors. Roving between are plenty of folks with genuine sociopathic mental health issues, by an odd coincidence almost all women.

    Beware of Nazis in pig-tails bearing allergies to scented products and wheel-chair access.

  18. Fail Burton
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:51 am

    She’s the classic solution looking for a problem.

  19. K-Bob
    December 18th, 2014 @ 1:03 am

    It’s why they invented monasteries. Well, that and the other two reasons.

  20. Rich_Rostrom
    December 18th, 2014 @ 2:51 am

    “She has crammed many different phenomena into a single category,
    “misogyny,” so that male desire for female companionship … is responsible
    for assault, abuse and murder.”

    It’s fairly crazy – but it’s also a fairly reasonable description of Middle Eastern Moslem culture. They want to own women, control women, and they hate and fear the influence of women,

    It’s also something that turns up in otherwise powerless men. They hate women for rejecting them; they still want women to own.

    I just finished a crime novel called _An Eye For An Eye_. The villain is a drunken brute whose wife has left him and is getting a divorce. He kidnaps the wife of the lawyer who helped his wife, and demands that the lawyer make her come back. She’s _his_: how dare she not serve him as he deserves. He’ll kill her before letting her go with any other man, or maybe just for humiliating him.

    Does this sound like late-model feminist caricature? It was published in _1957_, and the author was Leigh Brackett, the Queen of Space Opera and also hard-boiled crime author. (And co-screenwriter for _The Big Sleep_.)

  21. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 3:18 am

    Religion and beer?

  22. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:39 am

    I just had to hit the freaking tip jar (again), because I really believe in this project. Am I crazy for giving so much money for a book that hasn’t even been completed yet? Maybe. But there has been a lot of sad brainpower devoted to writing man-hating bullshit over the decades, and we need more smart books on the other side.

  23. K-Bob
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:53 am

    That’s one of the two other reasons!

    Beer and cheese were fun, I guess.

  24. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:56 am

    I didn’t know cheese was associated with monasteries! I should’ve, though, since it’s AWESOME. And guys know about awesome.

  25. Adjoran
    December 18th, 2014 @ 5:53 am

    Of course they can accomplish a lot – no women around to tell them they’re doing it wrong, and the walls hold back the sea of misogyny.

  26. Adjoran
    December 18th, 2014 @ 6:01 am

    From sexism/chauvinism to misogyny to rape. Next on Donahue: why disagreeing with a feminist is equivalent to murder.

    I’ve known some crazy chicks but day-um, man.

  27. Gunga
    December 18th, 2014 @ 9:40 am

    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand you just defined how conservatives have been losing the culture wars for the last sixty years. They consistently and constantly propose insane crap and we reply with logic and intellect…and they win..because “emotions!” The Emperor is naked. It’s time to point and laugh, not explain to the mob that it’s not their lack of sophistication that is preventing them from seeing his clothes. It’s time we started calling the crazies “crazy.” It’s time we started calling the haters “haters.” it’s also time that we start requiring registration of anyone purchasing more $20 worth of cat food per week.

  28. Fail Burton
    December 18th, 2014 @ 9:43 am

    The irony that’s baked into this cult is they’ll take a thing like NASCAR or hockey they haven’t gotten to yet and stipulate that white male demographic as a purposeful ideology. Meanwhile the feminists who make everything on earth about women don’t see that as an ideology; it is as natural as rain. But if heterosexuality itself is an artificial construct, don’t be surprised if feminists get around to Foucaultian theories about rain and oppressor shaming umbrellas they shouldn’t have to use.

  29. LLC
    December 18th, 2014 @ 10:06 am

    Ugh…where was the trigger warning for that? 😛

    Disturbing.

  30. Dana
    December 18th, 2014 @ 10:15 am

    Part of the problem is that if heterosexuality is the default normal, then homosexuality is, by definition, faulty, and that means that lesbian professors are broken people. Yet, to be heterosexual means, to the feministae, submission to masculine control, and thus, to be normal means the rejection of what they think normal ought to be.

    And the whole thing runs afoul of the homosexual activists claim that they are born that way. Since heterosexuality is both the norm — something like 98% of everybody being heterosexual makes it the norm — the feministae are locked in a battle with reality: either lesbianism can be chosen, as they are encouraging, but with which the homosexual activists completely disagree, or they are people who are mentally ill.

  31. RS
    December 18th, 2014 @ 10:56 am

    Therein lies the tension because, as you point out, they can’t have it both ways. Sexual preference is either a Social/Behavioral Construct, i.e. learned behavior or a genetically determined predisposition. Those are mutually exclusive propositions. Interestingly enough, James Dobson argues that homosexual behavior is, in fact, learned behavior which suppresses natural heterosexuality. So, an evangelical Christian psychologist is on the same page as the radical, lesbian feminists.

  32. M. Thompson
    December 18th, 2014 @ 11:02 am

    It’s a witch! Burn her!

  33. M. Thompson
    December 18th, 2014 @ 11:04 am

    I only buy the cheap dry stuff for my furry friend.

  34. Durasim
    December 18th, 2014 @ 11:42 am

    It appears that worshiping Moloch is now back in style.

  35. Durasim
    December 18th, 2014 @ 11:59 am

    Somebody was also able to get this hidden camera footage from the world feminist convention.

  36. Dana
    December 18th, 2014 @ 12:02 pm

    Actually, it really could be both, differently in different individuals, but that still means that therapy to treat homosexuality is both possible and wholly legitimate.

  37. NeoWayland
    December 18th, 2014 @ 1:06 pm

    Being lesbian doesn’t make a woman a witch anymore than being straight makes one a Catholic.

    As for the Reclaiming trad, they’ve always mixed political activism with their faith, often using their faith as the justification. Despite the noise they make, they do not speak for all pagans or all witches.

    Pat Robinson has been off far more times than he has been right. Does anyone remember when he attacked a Star Trek movie because he thought it claimed to have found God? The whole pole hinged on the bit where the entity was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

  38. NeoWayland
    December 18th, 2014 @ 1:12 pm

    I’m not fond of either side, I’m with conservatives for fiscal freedoms and with liberals for social freedoms.

    That being said, I can trust the conservatives to tell me what they think and feel. I can’t count on liberals to do the same thing, often they’ll try to play me just to clear the board of opposition. Then they’ll turn on me with a vengence.

  39. Quartermaster
    December 18th, 2014 @ 1:24 pm

    Nah. A wreck looking for a place to happen.

  40. Quartermaster
    December 18th, 2014 @ 1:32 pm

    Much larger. Not sure why the composer called it the height of Muslim conquest as the Umma has gotten much larger with the eastern extent to the southern Philippines at the extreme.

  41. Quartermaster
    December 18th, 2014 @ 1:33 pm

    Ain’t clicking on that link. No how, no way.

  42. Texas Plumber’s Truck Now Owned By Satisfied ISIS Gunner | Regular Right Guy
    December 18th, 2014 @ 3:46 pm

    […] Sailing the ‘Sea of Misogyny’ […]

  43. Jeanette Victoria
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:05 pm

    Having been a pagan for 30 year and knowing all the so called “Pagan elders” Lesbianism is strong among those women who practice that sad narcissistic “faith” call Wicca. Heck there are tons of Dianic covens that are exclusively lesbain

  44. Jeanette Victoria
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:13 pm

    A Women’s Eucharist: A Celebration of the Divine Feminine http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/1258401/posts

    Episcopal Church Officially Promotes Idol Worship
    Women’s Eucharist calls for worship of pagan deities specifically condemned in Scripture.
    http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/octoberweb-only/10-25-31.0.html

  45. Fail Burton
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:36 pm

    Surprise!!! They’re crazy liars disconnected from reality and reason, a revolting development.

  46. Fail Burton
    December 18th, 2014 @ 4:44 pm

    Anti-Foucaultian theory stipulates they are politically abstaining from sex with men in a mass political protest since that theory posits:

    One does not become a woman but is rather born one – anti-Simone de Beauvoir

    Strictly speaking, “women” exist. – anti-Julia Kristeva

    Woman have a sex. – anti-Luce Irigaray

    The deployment of sexuality . . . did not establish this notion of sex. – anti-Michel Foucault

    Don’t ever listen to me – Monique Wittig

    Just kidding – Audre Lorde

  47. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 5:21 pm

    I’ve read enough of Stacy’s snark to trust him to mock the fools as mercilessly as they deserve.

  48. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 6:18 pm

    Or a wreck looking for a train to happen.

  49. Daniel Freeman
    December 18th, 2014 @ 6:26 pm

    Stop genociding her thoughts, man! She can’t think for herself if you disagree, therefore we must go all Nazi thought police on you.

  50. NeoWayland
    December 18th, 2014 @ 7:11 pm

    Having been a pagan for more than 27 years, I can tell you exactly what I said before.

    ‘Tis truth still, you see.

    I don’t know who you met or what path you followed then.

    I do know that not all lesbians are witches, not all witches are lesbians, not all pagans are witches, and not all witches are pagans.

    Notice my careful use of the word “all” there.