The Other McCain

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

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.





 

 

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Category: Education, Feminism, Sex

Comments

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

  1. Rosalie
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 7:06 am

    There’s a name for that: tough love.

  2. ThePaganTemple
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 7:48 am

    Does she make good grades?

  3. ThePaganTemple
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 7:56 am

    I think George was actually referring to repressed sexuality, which was quite a big deal in the sixties, with that generation somehow managing to convince themselves they had somehow rediscovered sex.
    George, who once ruined a party at Ringo’s house by openly declaring his”love” for Ringo’s wife, was more hedonistic than most people realize.

  4. ThePaganTemple
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 8:14 am

    Sociopath, not psychopathic, which is different. Otherwise good points, especially the one about porn being all she can do. I would take it a little farther though, and add that porn is probably the only way she can pay for the lifestyle she is used to while going to school and she would probably still be doing porn even if she had accepted that scholarship to Vanderbilt.

  5. Southern Air Pirate
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 10:11 am

    Along with about half of them over the years have been busted for offering more than just a double triple latte with cream.
    http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021277102_baristafoloxml.html

  6. Southern Air Pirate
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 10:44 am

    It’s the cultural shift that has occurred. It used to be rare to see sex in the prime time hours or even the family hours. Now though you look around at some of the family hour shows and you see at least a third of the episodes dedicated to sex. We have had award winning and water cooler shows that revolve around sex. We have movies that if they don’t seem to have a sex scene in them even if it does nothing to advance the plot in the cinema if not outright art house films (see recent “Nymphomaniac” this weekend or the more famous “Showgirls”) which would be soft core cable porn. Then there has been the constant drum beat from the more libertarian branches of both major parties that porn is not damaging to the culture. Let’s also not talk about groups like the American Library Association which views that people watching porn on taxpayers computers in libraries as a 1st amendment right. Then there is the MSM hero worship of people like Jenna Jameson, Ms. Weeks, Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley, and even child porn star Traci Lords.

    So the cultural shift has occurred where porn is viewed as a desirable job for some folks. The issue is that they have the kids who are entitced to porn because society has said it’s a non damaging job to do and sex is fun. There is no talk of how porn is a horrid job in the larger horrible field of entertainment that the destruction of the people who enter the job field is the norm and the survivors are few. If we add in the special snowflake syndrome we see that we have people who want to be famous for whatever. So that is why porn has risen amongst those who can’t act or sing as a way to get that 15 minutes of attention

  7. pabarge
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

    Note the Bikini Gap in the photo! Awesome.

  8. pabarge
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 1:05 pm

    Feminism is a culture of gender hate.

  9. RS
    March 22nd, 2014 @ 3:24 pm

    You always seem to cut directly to the substance of any RSM post. Well done! : )

  10. jakee308
    March 23rd, 2014 @ 12:37 am

    I sincerely hope she’s putting some money away somewhere and not just in a college degree.

    I hope she realizes that her ONLY commodity right now is her youth. Even if she were cuter, prettier, this would still be the case.

    In porn youth is all. (even the dudes) Once she loses that aura of youth she’ll either be dropped or asked to do really raunchy stuff. (I don’t know what she’s been involved with so far).

    Then she’ll have to decide to remain and do more degrading acts or quit and work for a lot lower pay working harder. (like real people).

  11. jakee308
    March 23rd, 2014 @ 12:45 am

    I like how twice she claims she has no clue why she like sadomasochism and blowjob porn.

    Here’s a clue honey, they’re both degrading. To your soul and to your body. You hate what you are, you hate being who you are, you hate your life and possibly you hate your family/father. So you try to submerge who you are and what you are in degradation and filth.

    Because you believe you are unworthy of life, unworthy of being happy, unworthy of love. Somehow someone has convinced you of this. (perhaps you actually have a distorted view and this is true pathology but you would need to see a doctor for that)

    There’s my ten cent analysis.

  12. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 23rd, 2014 @ 9:52 am

    Or Tony Soprano’s character. David Chase liked to focus on the sociopathic nature of it.

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  16. Just Saying
    March 24th, 2014 @ 11:20 am

    Empowerment! I love “empowered” women – I bang them pretty much every weekend, and have been for more than 40 years. Those little 18 yr olds never get old to me. Can’t get enough of their tight little p*ssies… You can call them what you want – as long as they keep putting out, that’s all that I care about. Keep up the great work ladies – it’s truly a MAN’s WORLD.

    Now bend over and get ready to be empowered sweet thing….

  17. Jock Spice
    March 24th, 2014 @ 8:12 pm

    Not to mention mental illness.

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