Lena Dunham, Sandra Fluke, Joy McCann

Posted on | April 13, 2012 | 70 Comments

One of them’s got an HBO series called Girls and has been called “The Voice of Her Generation,” because . . . I dunno, because magazine editors need angles for feature stories. Anyway, 26-year-old Lena Dunham says (perhaps unintentionally) revealing things in interviews:

If you notice my mincey language, it’s just that I’m still shedding the fact that I went to Oberlin College and if you slightly mangled your women’s/gender studies pronouns, you’d be sent to some Guantanamo for liberal arts students. . . .
I know that sex is in itself a political act, and that can’t be denied.

Another young mind permanently warped by feminism, you see. Frank Bruni of the New York Times comments on her opus:

You watch these scenes and other examples of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of “Girls” engaging in, recoiling from, mulling and mourning sex, and you think: Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this? Salaries may be better than in decades past and the cabinet and Congress less choked with testosterone. But in the bedroom? What’s happening there remains something of a muddle, if not something of a mess.

What is happening, of course, is the increasing failure of what anthropologists would call “pair-bonding,” which is in turn related to the waning of what economists would call “division of labor.” Complementarity — the idea that men and women are fundamentally different, and that these differences are essential to their cooperative partnership — has been rejected in favor of competition, under a legal/political/cultural regime based on a zero-sum game.

The entire Sandra Fluke controversy was played out in this context: Women go to law school. If women law students don’t have contraceptives, they can’t have sex without risking pregnancy, and motherhood would hinder their education and career advancement. Therefore, the university must be compelled to pay for women law students to get contraception, or else the women are being victimized by the Oppressive Hegmonic Patriarchy.

Veruca Salt, feminist: “I want the whole works and I want it now!”

Woe betide anyone who responds to this imperative demand by suggesting that maybe Georgetown Law students should keep their britches on, or who points out that students attending a school where tuition is $46,865 a year might be able to spare $9 a month for birth-control pills.

Sex without its natural consequence is now a right, because the casual hook-ups of men and women are inherently unequal, if women alone must deal with the risk of “unplanned pregnancy.” (My wife and I have six children, among whom the “unplanned pregnancies” include our 19-year-old twin sons. Oh, the horrible oppression of it all!)

You are hopelessly old-fashioned, perhaps even a dangerous theocratic reactionary, if you suggest that Sandra Fluke and her fellow coeds might choose the cheap expedient of keeping their britches on, rather than demanding that the university cover the cost of contraception.

Keeping your britches on is the kind of “choice” that feminists don’t advocate, just as they never advocate (as an alternative to what theocratic reactionaries would call fornication) that men and women form permanent pair-bonds, sanctified by religious vows to forsake all others until death do them part.

Alas, the ceremony of innocence is drowned by the blood-dimmed tide and the falcon turning in its widening gyre cannot hear the falconer.

Without faith or tradition to guide them, young people must seek secular sanction for doing what they do, and the dismal science offers little to improve on the basic supply/demand equation of “free milk and a cow.” In a buyer’s market flooded with free milk, the sale of cows has declined. Young men have no incentive to marry and what woman would want to marry one of these slovenly slacker guys anyway?

The generation for which Lena Dunham is hailed as a voice has grown accustomed to viewing life from a selfish and cynical perspective: “What’s in it for me?” Male and female alike, they look at the prospect of marriage as offering no payoff either in security or social prestige, the only currencies they have learned to recognize.

Deprecating moral virtue as a superstitious imposition at best, they will hear no lectures about duty, responsibility or sacrifice.

“Honor”? Who speaks of such a thing nowadays?

Earlier this week, while researching the Bonfire of the Derbyshire, I came across a book review that may shed some light on the situation:

As marriage has declined, so has male industriousness. White men with only a high school education began dropping out of the labor force in the 1970s; the figure stood at twelve percent on the eve of the current recession. . . .
One small but telling statistic concerns working class men who claim to be unable to work due to a physical disability. As the author notes, this figure must have gone down since 1960, given medical advances and the proliferation of labor saving devices. Yet it has risen from two percent to an utterly incredible ten percent. Disability has become a racket.
A time-use study cited by Murray reveals that “between 1985 and 2005, men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours a week.” The greatest share of this increase was devoted to television viewing, followed by sleeping. . . .
Even if a particular working class man beats the odds and finds a girl to marry, he cannot expect the satisfaction of supporting her; she may well end up supporting him. And what self-respecting man wants to end up like that poor sap uselessly tagging along behind his wife who just bought all the groceries?

Such politically incorrect samizdat I cite merely for its potential relevance, without endorsing either the book, the review or the publication — a necessary disclaimer if I am not to be unwillingly cast onto the same bonfire upon which Derbyshire immolated his career. Speaking of careers and raging conflagrations . . .

“One thing that is difficult to convey . . . is just how respectable it was to denigrate female competence and intelligence before the women’s movement gained a foothold — and before it was prevalent.”
— Joy McCann, “No, We Aren’t the Party of 1950s Gender Roles”

She was spurred to this by a Wall Street Journal column in which James Taranto dared to mention an “overlooked truth about contemporary feminism,” namely its observable hostility to housewives. Joy responds, as always, by asserting her prerogative to define feminism in a manner reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

No man can disagree with Joy McCann about feminism, and any attempt to explain that the word has an etymology and a history — that it describes the radical ideology of a left-wing political movement — is rejected as an infringement upon her prerogative.

James Taranto will discover he must either (a) concede the argument, or (b) stand convicted of misogyny. My advice to Taranto: Reply to Joy’s aggression by denigrating her competence and intelligence.

It always works for me.

RECENTLY:

April 12: Feminism, Careerism, Lesbianism
April 10: Ashley Judd, Victim of the War on Women
March 14: Please: Hurt Karen Finney Some More
March 9: SPLC Adds ‘Misogyny’ to Hate Groups List … and Leaves Me Out? UPDATE: Video of Super-Hot SPLC Vixen Heidi Beirich
March 6: How Feminism Actually Works

Category: Culture, Feminism, Sex

Comments

70 Responses to “Lena Dunham, Sandra Fluke, Joy McCann”

Adobe_Walls
April 13th, 2012 @ 1:49 pm

This should be fun!
King Shamus
April 13th, 2012 @ 1:59 pm

Stacy, you magnificent bastard–I READ YOUR BLOG!
Finrod Felagund
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:05 pm

All this and National Offend A Feminist week hasn’t even started yet. If this keeps up I’m going to have to pull out my copy of Tom Lehrer _That Was The Year That Was_ just so I can listen to National Brotherhood Week.
Finrod Felagund
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:09 pm

But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week, Lena Horne and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek to cheek …
Evi L. Bloggerlady
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:15 pm

They really really really want to change to a different topic!
gloogle gloogle
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:36 pm

“..and everybody hates the Jews”.

Funny how certain lines from that song have, unfortunately, remained unchanged in their accuracy…
gloogle gloogle
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:37 pm

As someone over on Ace’s blog commented, the Republicans’ response to this “war on women” bullcrap should be:

“We’re not declaring a War on Women. We’re declaring a War on Failure”.
richard mcenroe
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:42 pm

ARE YOU CALLING WOMEN FAILURES?! CHAUVINIST! RACIST! ISTIST!

*ahem* Sorry. 30 years a registered Democrat is hard to shake off sometimes.
Darleen
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:48 pm

:::sigh:::

just because the Left hijacked “feminism” doesn’t mean equity feminism never existed or doesn’t exist.
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 2:59 pm

Time to lay down bets. $10 on Stacy to stay the course!
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 3:03 pm

Correct. But the Left has (in effect) copyrighted Feminism, and thus they own it.

As evidence, please see this, and ask yourself: “Why isn’t Joy McCann getting getting this sort of air time from the Lame Stream Media?
robertstacymccain
April 13th, 2012 @ 3:06 pm

Accusing the Left of hijacking feminism is like accusing the pilot of hijacking his own plane.
richard mcenroe
April 13th, 2012 @ 3:16 pm

True enough, as did the need for it. In many cases that led to genuine female competence and accomplishment being overlooked or diminished, as in the years it took to acknowledge the service and accomplishments of the WASPs, the Women’s Air Service Pilots who ferried aircraft, personnel and supplies to Europe in WWII.

On the other hand, there was a tacit sort of acknowledgment of equity that could also occur. Much as in race relations, where whites could simultaneously denigrate blacks as a group, while saying, “that George Washington Jackson, though, over in Tool & Die, he’s a hell of a worker,” individual women in the workplace could and did gain acceptance and acknowledgment. ~~Especially at fifty cents on the dollar~~ Was it harder than it “should”have been? Probably. Was it harder than the mixing of other distinct groups? (Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, Hispanics, etc.) I’m not sure. (I have to wonder if the contemporary insistence on acknowledging the inherent value of any subgroup as a whole is actually impeding that individual acknowledgment these days, since that involves making value judgments on the group.)

And there were a rare few women who actually took a certain pleasure in confounding the clueless men around them. Leigh Brackett took great amusement from the expressions of “experts” like Jack Warner and John W. Campbell when they finally met the author(ess) of The Big Sleep and the “manly” space operas of Astounding. She was fighting genuine barriers, as described in Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, but if she originally got to the top of the barricade through misunderstanding, she got over it through talent and character.
Adjoran
April 13th, 2012 @ 3:48 pm

Are the fat chicks bringing sandwiches this time? I’m hungry.
daialanye
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:14 pm

Please answer these questions: Are men and women biologically different?

If ‘yes’: Do the differences tend to fit men and women for different roles in society?

If ‘yes’ again: Does feminism (as presently practiced) go too far?
Wendy
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:17 pm

Ugh. I can’t believe you put my friend Joy’s name in a headline with a vapid moron… and an actress!

Wendy
Adobe_Walls
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:17 pm

They didn’t hijack it, it was always theirs.
Adobe_Walls
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:20 pm

What about coffee?
Adobe_Walls
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:24 pm

Oh he’ll stay the course.
Tennwriter
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:31 pm

We would like to convince Joy to stop tilting at windmills, and trying to convince those windmills they are indeed giants when they are nothing but windmills, and never were nothing but windmills.

Its a public service.
richard mcenroe
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:33 pm

Ya gotta remember, the official Southern National Sport is Shit-Stirring.

Stacy ain’t maybe up there with Ned Ruffin yet… but the man has his dreams…
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:38 pm

I see that Stacy is continuing his argument with the dictionary again. If anyone here is acting like Humpty Dumpty . . . well . . .

As for Taranto, I never accused him of misogyny and wouldn’t dream of it. Perhaps Stacy needs a new pair of reading glasses.
richard mcenroe
April 13th, 2012 @ 4:46 pm

Be fair, when it comes to “wind”, Stacy can be hard to beat…
Daily scoreboard « Don Surber
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:01 pm

[…] 12. From Robert Stacy McCain: […]
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:20 pm

Coffee, hell, I want a COLD BEER!
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:40 pm

“Definition of FEMINISM1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”Correct. Now, please define the following terms such that Hilary Rosen and Sarah Palin will both accept them:Political:Economic:Social Equality:Further: Who, by name, is generally accepted as being in a position that they can act in behalf of women’s rights and interests, through moral, legal, or ethical authorities?Hint: What is the political leanings of the feminists whom generally get the most air time when it comes to discussing feminism and their impacts on American women?
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:48 pm

Sarah Palin is a real feminist; Hilary Rosen is a fake feminist.

As for the media, they may do as they like. I’m interested in truth–which is not determined by popular vote.
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:48 pm

Dang! Sorry about the formatting; Discus is not your friend…..
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:50 pm

Again:

“Definition of FEMINISM

1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”

Correct.

Now, please define the following terms such that Hilary Rosen and Sarah Palin will both accept them:

Political:
Economic:
Social Equality:

Further: Who, by name, is generally accepted as being in a position that they can act in behalf of women’s rights and interests, through moral, legal, or ethical authorities?Hint: What is the political leanings of the feminists whom generally get the most air time when it comes to discussing feminism and their impacts on American women?
Adjoran
April 13th, 2012 @ 5:50 pm

All these “isms” ain’t making my sandwich get here any quicker . . .
Bob Belvedere
April 13th, 2012 @ 6:20 pm

By God, Stacy is right: you are trying to say the word means whatever you want it to mean [and the same goes for Mrs. Palin if she describes herself as a Feminist].

This is the kind of behavior Leftists engage in – the distortion of Truth.

A is A; you can call it B, but it will always and forever be A.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘feminism’ thusly: the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. Right there you see that it is a product of Leftist Thinking because what is being advocated is unrealistic. The sexes are not equal in Nature. What you are also seeing in that definition is that Feminism is a idea developed in the sterile laboratory of Leftist minds – in other words, it is an ideology. Conservatives reject ideology because it is, by it’s nature, fantastical, devoid of relevance in the Real World.
Bob Belvedere
April 13th, 2012 @ 6:22 pm

Nor my coffee…and don’t forget to go light on the sugar and creamer, honey. Oh, and bring me my slippers, will you.
Adjoran
April 13th, 2012 @ 6:26 pm

I wonder if they have this problem on other planets?

http://tinyurl.com/8xryw9d
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 6:28 pm

So do you believe that the sexes are “unequal” because, like Stacy, you confuse “equal” with “fungible” (that is, that equality implies interchageability), or because you believe women are genuinely inferior to men?
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 7:16 pm

Thanks, Bob!
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 7:27 pm

Thank you for the honest answer, even if you did sidestep and partially answer, if indirectly.

The point being, conservatives and lefties disagree on what constitutes “Feminism”. I’ve used that “link to the dictionary definition” trick before on lefties, and it never works.

Because they don’t care about the definitions, so long as they can set the definitions to suit themselves.

You do care what the definitions are. Which is technically correct, but facts are not is what at issue here.

The issue is not any “popular vote”, a point that you miss by light years. MSNBC doesn’t “vote” any more than Fidel Castro does. Same for the rest of the Lame Stream Media.

The point is not any “popular vote”; it’s The Narrative. First. Last. And always. They follow The Narrative.

And the Narrative says “Hilary Rosen good, Sarah Palin bad”. Please don’t tell me any different, unless you can link at least a couple leftie talking heads who agrees with Sarah, and are disgusted by Rosen.

And that’s why you will never be interviewed by MSNBC when they have some Womyn at the top of NOW’s food chain willing to regurgitate the latest talking points from The Narrative grist mill.

Until you change your strategy of chanting “We own feminism!”, that is.

And, no, I don’t have an alternate strategy. I’m just tired of watching people get beat over the head for speaking The Truth, whether the club is wielded by lefties or conservatives. Circular firing squads are no fun to watch.
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 7:28 pm

Nor my cold beer.
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 7:37 pm

“And the Narrative says ‘Hilary Rosen good, Sarah Palin bad.'”

Yes, but 1) the Narrative is not the same as the truth, as I’m sure you’ll concede, and 2) the Hilary Rosen vs. Sarah Palin issue has little to do with feminism, since both women wear that label.

Stacy’s mental meanderings aside, feminism is not a left-right issue, unless or until we’re willing to identify which strands within it are helpful, and which are destructive. Because on its own, the proposition that men and women are equal is not particularly controversial, except in the minds of a few folks who are . . . well, confused.
Adobe_Walls
April 13th, 2012 @ 8:23 pm

Excellent!
Adobe_Walls
April 13th, 2012 @ 8:37 pm

You assert that Palin is and Rosen isn’t yet most people who would label themselves feminists would at least dispute that Rosen is not and the majority of them would dispute that Palin is a feminist.
No matter how many times you make the assertion you have already lost this fight. You can no more recapture the word feminism from the left than those who refer to themselves as “classical liberals” can recapture the word liberal from the left. Once upon a time there used to be dragons, they are windmills now (they are actually much harder to slay) accept that or not what is is.
Tennwriter
April 13th, 2012 @ 8:42 pm

Women and men are not equal in a great many ways, nor should they be. There are some areas of equality, such as the speed limit, but, I must admit that’s not even equal. Women are more likely than men to get out scott free.

But there are some things that men and women are equal in. All must bow and kiss the hand of the Son of God, for one.

Should a man and a woman fighting be regarded as equal, when the plain fact is an uninhibited male could beat up five females at one time? Now, not to be a white knight, and let women off when they start the fight, but a guy should be able to physically restrain a woman without weapons if she does start something.

Should a woman who has a safe job, in AC, and gets time off for pregnancy have the same salary as the guys who work with power tools in the unheated and uncooled garage? Going further, should a guy and a gal doing the same exact work get the same pay? (N0…civilization is built on marriage.)

Women and men are largely apples and oranges. Why do we critique the apple for not having a thick peel like an orange to keep out the worms? We do so if we’re feminists.
Bob Belvedere
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:00 pm

They are, indeed, unequal in their natural abilities. Males and females are complimentary, the two together making a good team because they bring different qualities and skills to surviving and thriving in life.

I’ll take Woman’s Intuition over Man’s anyday in judging people.
JeffS
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:05 pm

I do not concede that Rosen versus Palin has little to do with Feminism™. My point is that the left has made every effort to insure that they do. By The Narrative (which I disagree with), Rosen is a Feminist™, Palin is not.

That The Narrative is not the truth is immaterial. We are not dealing with honest people here. They don’t care about the truth, they care about being in power. If that means lying to the world on live TV with a smile on their face, that’s exactly what they will do. Check out any White House press conference since Obama took office if you don’t believe me.

Feminism is a left-right issue, but not because of women rights. It’s a left-right issue because the left has hijacked it. Until you stop pretending otherwise, you have no chance of being on the same screen as NOW President Terry O’Neill as a peer. Which you should be. As long as lefties politicize Feminism™, you won’t be.
Bob Belvedere
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:08 pm

Joy wrote: …feminism is not a left-right issue, unless or until we’re willing to identify which strands within it are helpful, and which are destructive.

As with an -ist or -ism, in other words, as with any ideology, Feminism finds it natural resting place on the Left, for, as Russell Kirk pointed out:

…For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed. In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers….

While there can be no ‘Test Act’, as it were, a person cannot embrace any ideology and still claim to be conservative.

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/ten-conservative-principles/
Bob Belvedere
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:14 pm

Adobe: The one flaw in what you wrote is the statement: ‘You can no more recapture the word feminism from the left than those who refer to themselves as “classical liberals” can recapture the word liberal from the left’.

As Stacy pointed out, Feminism has a history that shows it was developed by the Left.
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:39 pm

Complementarity implies symbiosis; symbiosis implies symmetry.

Symmetry implies equality.

So I will take it that you do believe in the equality of the sexes, but don’t like saying it out loud, because to you equality implies sameness, and you can’t wrap your head around the fact that it is no such thing.
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:40 pm

See my reply to Bob above; Disqus won’t nest replies in their proper order.
Joy W. McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 9:50 pm

This is in reply to Bob, Jeff, and Adobe (though it will likely appear above their comments).

If you remove the term “feminism” from the lexicon of Terms That Are Permissible for Conservatives to Use, there is no effective means left to say assert that you stand against sexism, which of course most conservatives do.

Besides which, this attempt to erase the term strikes me as totalitarian in flavor, and therefore about as anti-conservative as it gets.

The concept of women being equal to men shouldn’t be treated as if it were some exotic rarity, and the assertion that it is any such thing drives females away from the conservative movement.

I mean, I get that you guys are having fun doing it, but if the goal is to build up conservatism, I fail to see why you persist in this harmful tack.

Why not simply have bumper stickers printed up that read “Republicans Are Sexists: Vote for the Other Guys!” It amounts to the same thing.
DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Lena Dunham, Sandra Fluke, Joy McCann
April 13th, 2012 @ 10:04 pm

[…] The Other McCain waxes philosophical. Keeping your britches on is the kind of “choice” that feminists don’t advocate, just as they never advocate (as an alternative to what theocratic reactionaries would call fornication) that men and women form permanent pair-bonds, sanctified by religious vows to forsake all others until death do them part. […]
Pathfinder's wife
April 13th, 2012 @ 10:17 pm

Self reliance is one of the cornerstones of American mythos, and not a bad thing to cultivate — make it yourself (if you would like, there is surely someone who will show you how, then you will not need to be a slave to the charitable welfare of others — give a fish, show how to fish, and all that).

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.