The first thing you need to know about Lynn Beisner — it’s right there on her profile at The Guardian — is that her name is not Lynn Beisner and thus, whenever she offers personal anecdotes as arguments (as is her habit), the skeptical reader must reply, “Oh, really?”
Why this matters, as I’ve explained before, is that feminists frequently make personal anecdotes the basis of their arguments and, as is the case with “Lynn Beisner,” these anecdotes are often offered by persons writing under pseudonyms, thus making it impossible to verify the accuracy of their stories. Grant that there are legitimate reasons why authors may wish to conceal their identities. Grant that “whistleblowers” may need to hide their identities in order to be able to tell the hidden truth. Grant all of this, and one must nevertheless maintain skepticism toward the anonymous authors who rely upon personal anecdote to justify extraordinary arguments. After Texas Democrat Wendy Davis was caught fudging her biography in January, I explained how this related to a pattern I’d first noticed when reading feminist memoirs in the 1990s:
After reading about a half-dozen of these books, I noticed . . . that many elements of their narratives were “just so” stories, i.e., unverifiable anecdotes that — coincidentally! magically! — just happened to prove whatever political point they were trying to make.
As Daphne Patai pointed out in her 1998 book Heterophobia, feminists arguments rely heavily upon “the authority of experience.” Only women can say what it feels like to suffer sexist discrimination and harassment, etc., and so first-person narratives of experience — and women’s subjective feelings about those experiences — enjoy a privileged position within feminist culture.
The problem with this tendency is that it denies the possibility of objective truth. Facts are made less important than feelings and, indeed, feelings become “facts” in their own right: So-called “hostile environment” harassment cases depend on the claim that women suffered discrimination because of how the workplace climate made them feel. How can any defendant disprove such a claim?
Feminism’s reliance on storytelling and subjective emotion reflects what Thomas Sowell has called “The Irrelevance of Evidence,” a notable phenomenon of contemporary liberal discourse. Facts, statistics and logic never seem to make a dent in liberals’ policy preferences. Abundant evidence exists, for example, that “homelessness” is a problem directly resulting from decades of liberal policies (inter alia, deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill), and yet liberals from the 1980s onward have blamed the problem on Republican “greed” and offered only more liberal policies to “solve” the problem that previous liberal policies clearly caused!
Every public policy argument becomes warped by this preference for emotional anecdotes (“Look at this family thrown into the street after the father lost his job at the steel plant”) over objective fact — in this case, the fact that a majority of the homeless have problems of mental illness, substance abuse and, quite often, criminality.
Nowhere is the irrelevance of evidence more obvious than when encountering feminists in debate. We saw this, for example, in the way the “War on Women” narrative was built around Sandra Fluke’s claim that she and other women at Georgetown Law were horribly disadvantaged by the university’s failure to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives. It didn’t take much research to discover that contraceptives were both readily available and cheap ($33 per month at a CVS two blocks from the Georgetown campus) even without insurance, but the facts had no impact on Fluke’s appeal to “women’s rights.”
Even granted license by media sympathizers to make tendentious arguments short on facts and long on emotion, however, sometimes feminists still feel a need to tell outright lies. This was the case, for example, with University of Wyoming student Meg Lanker-Simons, who fabricated Facebook rape threats against herself, then staged a campus rally to call attention to her alleged victimhood.
This documented background of feminist dishonesty, therefore, caused me to raise a skeptical eyebrow when I encountered Lynn Beisner — or, I should say, “Lynn Beisner” — making a bizarre argument at the progressive blog AlterNet: “How Christian Purity Culture Enabled My Step Dad to Sexually Abuse Me.”
Perhaps every Christian who saw that headline had the same instantaneous reaction as I did: “How can she possibly claim that Christianity enables what it quite clearly condemns?”
We shall examine this weird argument in a moment, but first things first: It is my habit, whenever encountering a weird argument by an author unknown to me, to find out all I can about the person making the argument. Often, the biographical background yields some clue as to why they hold such unusual opinions. And what I found when I researched “Lynn Beisner,” starting with the fact that her byline is a pseudonym, only intensified my skepticism.
You may remember the character Joe Btfsplk from the old Li’l Abner comic strip: Joe was cursed with bad luck, so that a dark cloud followed him wherever he went. Lynn Beinsner is a female Joe Btfsplk, so perpetually victimized that the headline of her August 2012 Guardian column was, “I wish my mother had aborted me”:
If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, “I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me.”
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. . . .
Abortion would have been a better option for me. . . . I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured. . . .
[My mother] was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped. . . .
She abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organisations. My mother found minimal support in a small church, and became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic. The abuse I endured was compounded by deprivation. Before the age of 14, I had never been to a sleepover, been allowed to talk to a friend on the phone, eaten in a restaurant, watched a television show, listened to the radio, read a non-Christian book, or even worn a pair of jeans.
Wow. Three generations of disaster: Her grandmother committed suicide, her mother’s life sucked and her life sucked, too. With such a background, what could she expect from life but pain and disappointment? Next, read her December 2013 column:
“This has never been a real marriage because I never really loved you. I married you because I thought that was what I was supposed to do.”
Those were the words that Todd, my first husband, used to end our marriage. They hit me like a physical blow, shattered me into a million little pieces of jagged pain. After the first raw wave of grief passed, I was hit by shame so intense that it felt like burning ink in my veins. How horrible must I be if my own husband, the father of my children had never been able to love me?
I begged Todd to stay with me. I tried to convince him — and myself — that I could become a person he would love. He responded as if I were crazy to have believed our marriage and his love were ever genuine, and he made it clear that me thinking so was simply an indicator of how out of touch I was with reality. He insisted that any sane person would have recognized our marriage as a sham from the start.
She doesn’t go further into the details of her divorce in that column, but she described it in a column last month at another site:
I know how much self-loathing most welfare mothers endure because, on a dark fall day in 1995, I became a single mother on welfare. . . .
Two days before, I had woken up in overwhelming pain, stuck in the rubble of what had once been my car, but was now a scene thick with chaos and emergency responders. Sparks flew from cutting equipment, the rainy night air was filled with the sound of splashing feet, metal groaning, sirens blaring, and someone screaming in sustained agony. I had no idea where or who I was.
Over the next two days, I remembered who I was and then learned that woman was now gone. In her place was a woman who had broken nearly every bone on the right side of her body, had sustained a serious head injury, and was still in grave danger of having one of her legs amputated. She was also newly single. Next to my bed in the Intensive Care Unit was a sheaf of divorce papers that a process server had delivered during one of my brief periods of wakefulness.
The papers hadn’t been a complete shock, but they were a blow. My husband and I had been having some serious differences. I believed that our marriage should continue as it had started — an agreement between two individuals. I was open to polyamory, under the right circumstances. But my husband had fallen in love with a woman named Caroline, and he wanted her to be his primary partner for life.
My husband had plunged deeply into the alternative and poly community, coming out to our families with aplomb. We would have a new family, one of choice. It might have worked out, but Caroline felt compelled to destroy every woman that she saw as competition. . . .
By the time of my accident, my reputation was ruined. My family had me pegged as a godless sexual reprobate. I lost all support from family and friends when they heard that my first husband and I were trying a polyamorous relationship.
In case you didn’t know, “polyamory” means she and her first husband were what are commonly called “swingers.”
Predictably, this lifestyle led to divorce — the same divorce where her husband told her their marriage had been a sham from the start — and just before her husband was ready to file the papers, “Lynn Beisner” nearly died in a serious automobile accident.
OK, let’s stipulate that everything “Lynn Beisner” has told us about her life in these three columns is true. Not only has her life been a constant series of disasters, beginning with the misfortune of her birth, but each of these disasters has been extraordinarily dramatic. She was not merely a poor child, but grew up in “bone-crushing poverty.” The pastor with whom her mother became involved wasn’t just a bad man, he “was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic.” Her first marriage ended because her swinger husband brought into their “polyamorous relationship” a rival who “felt compelled to destroy every woman that she saw as competition.” Her heartless husband told her he never loved her at all, and served her with divorce papers in the intensive care unit.
All of this, as I say, we will stipulate as true, if only to make the point that “Lynn Beisner” has lived a life so extraordinarily catastrophic, it is impossible to generalize from her experience and find any life lessons that would be useful to most people.
Except maybe, “Don’t be Joe Btfsplk.”
This dispiriting tale of woe and doom, however, is the biography of “Lynn Beisner,” so far as we know. There’s no way to verify it, of course, but let’s just assume all this misery actually happened to her. Now, after reading that lengthy preamble, maybe you’re ready for Lynn Beisner to tell you why “Christian purity culture” is bad:
My step-father began having problems getting erections when I was a senior in high school. How did I find out about this? He told me that he was using me to get an erection so that he could have sex with my mother.
We were very religious people. We attended a Fundamentalist Baptist Church so sexually conservative I was not even allowed to wear jeans. But still, he would sit me down and discuss what he had been thinking on those nights when he pressed my body against his and stroked my hair, the curve of my hip and the area between my collar bone and breasts until his penis was hard against my thigh. . . .
“Dear Penthouse Forum . . .”
Excuse my entirely inappropriate sarcasm, but the way “Lynn Beisner” tells this story invites ridicule. Taking her previous biographical revelations at face-value — the endless bad luck of Joe Btfsplk — now we encounter this weird story of her being molested by her step-father. Well, guess what? Elsewhere, on her own blog, she tells us a lot more about her mother and step-father:
She had married a man when I was a junior in high school who was the head of the deacon board, leader of a bus ministry and generally considered “on fire for God.” . . .
Part of my step-father being the spiritual leader of their marriage, and of me when I was a part of their family, was enforcing church attendance for no fewer than six two hour services per week and at least eight hours of additional volunteer work.
WHOA! First as Lynn Beisner previously told us, her mother “became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic.” Next — when Lynn was a junior in high school — her mother married “the head of the deacon board,” who subsequently molested her, using her “to get an erection so that he could have sex with my mother.” And her mother is still married to that same creepy stepfather, who is still active in church.
All kinds of alarm bells are going off here. Based on her lifelong experience of disaster, however, “Lynn Beisner” doesn’t come up with a story about the danger of creepy stepfathers who maybe should be in prison. Instead, she decides to turn this into a story about the harms she attributes to “Christian purity culture.”
Complete Rebuttal in 26 Words: Next time I see a story about a public school teacher molesting a student, I’ll turn that into an argument for the abolition of public education.
From any bad experience, we can learn lessons. But when disaster follows disaster and someone gets that Joe Btfsplk attitude of hopeless doom, their embrace of resentful victimhood can make it impossible for them to learn anything useful from their experience.
Lynn Beisner wrote a blog post, “How God’s Opinion of My Pussy Unravelled Me,” which tells us more about her than it tells us about God.
Also, she says, “I too suffer from clinical depression.” No surprise.
Finally, “Lynn Beisner’s husband . . . helps her daughter shop for prom dresses.” Maybe Joe Btfsplk would see that as an ominous cloud, but Lynn Beisner seems to perceive no possibility the pattern of disaster could extend to a fourth generation.
ADDENDUM: Lynn Beisner tells us about “The Moment I Became a Feminist.” It involves an extraordinarily dramatic story.
You’re surprised, right?
Scott Beauchamp call your office.
She seems to have some issues with her mother.
She just has issues period I don’t believe a single thing she writes about herself she is certifiable and I’m guessing she is someone who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorders
Apparently being emotionally unstable is a resume enhancer for getting a writing gig at the Guardian. How odd that she doesn’t use her own name, because if she/he did we would recognize it ?
Merely more salvos in the war on Christianity. I have read the same story under another pseudonym at some other site than the Guardian.
http://batshitcrazynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Daughter_and_mother_wikimedia.jpg Is this her?
Yeah. She cut off all contact with her mother three years ago. Says it made her life better.
Actually, I think that’s a stock photo somebody used to illustrate one of her columns on a site.
EXACTLY!
Here’s an interesting story.
What exactly does she need to protect her family from-the hordes of leftists who agree with every negative comment about horrible Christianity-because of course, all Baptist churches are like that.
And the curse of the Beisner family continues. Can they ever get a break?
The only viable option is to assume that every liberal, Democrat, progressive whatever in your life is lying to you. If you think they cannot possibly be so stupid as to believe what they are saying to you, but they say it anyway, then odds are they’ve decided YOU’RE that stupid and they can get away with it.
It is a poor choice because for a casually bitchy mom this would be better: http://www.sundaydumbday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Nebraska-Wife.jpg
Are you familiar with the literary hoax Naked Came the Stranger?
You almost wonder if this isn’t something like that: A collective of radical lesbians create a character, “Lynn Beisner,” and then write all kinds of wild stories about the terrible things that happen to her because — PATRIARCHY!
I am guessing how “Lynn Beisner” is it made her mother’s life better too.
I wouldn’t let my 14 year old daughter hang out alone with a senior boy, “study partner” or not, because it’s an inappropriate situation to put her in, but then again I am an evil oppressive Christian so…
She should write graphic novels.
I could swear this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the use of the Composite Person in an autobiographical context, but for the sake of a cheap rhetorical device I’m pretending to have a hard time placing it… *cough* *jug-ears* *cough*
I actually lost a friend over such ridiculous claims on Facebook. She is neither a feminist nor an atheist (she is married with children and a born-again Christian), but oddly enough the script still reads somewhat similar.
I am LDS (Mormon). I take it seriously. I also take seriously people’s free agency. While I find it sad when people don’t find the joy I have found, I also don’t think it’s my place to tell them how to live their life. What I won’t do, however, is sit while a person – especially one who knows better – trashes an entire organization and its people because they happened to have a bad experience with a statistically insignificant portion of those people.
She chose to make incredibly foul, baseless claims about the LDS church and how it not only turns a blind eye to sexual abuse, it encourages it and I jumped in. After which I was jumped by a bunch of her former LDS friends who felt compelled to tell me how they were all sexually abused and their church leadership let it happen. I called bullshit because I know what church policy is regarding breaking the law; the Catholic church we are not. If you confess to your ward bishop that you committed a crime, he is both morally and legally bound to report it (I know of at least one bishop that was convicted and sentenced to prison for knowing of sexual abuse and not reporting it). The LDS church WILL NOT provide aid to a bishop – or anyone in a leadership position – who provides cover for somebody who had broken the law. Especially when it comes to sexual abuse of any kind.
You can disagree with doctrine. You can disagree with leadership decisions (Heaven knows I have my disagreements with church leadership’s stance on illegal immigrants). But DO NOT smear the many good men I know – to include my father – who are LDS because you can’t let go of the past or are trying to convince yourself you made the right decision or are just a miserable person who needs to blame your tragic life on somebody else.
I can’t stand people who are unwilling to look at the good because they are so wrapped up in their own shit. And I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool cynic and pessimist. I could be like my screw-up sister and let my life go to hell and blame my mother. But you know what? I’m in my 30’s and haven’t had contact with my mother since before she committed suicide in my early 20’s. The psychological scars are still there and always will be, but sitting and bemoaning my shitty childhood aren’t going to make my adult years any better. So I take responsibility for myself and my problems, figure out what isn’t working, fix what i can, and move on. Feminists would do well to pull their heads out of their asses and realize they and their problems are not the center of the universe, not every man is their father or priest or whoever their tormentor was, and find something to build up that doesn’t involve tearing other people down. If you have to talk shit about somebody else, you aren’t a happy person, no matter how much you protest to the contrary.
Denounced!
(Just kidding in case you didn’t catch the sarcasm.)
Or you’re just underestimating their ability to delude themselves.
Liars have trouble keeping their stories straight on retelling… That’s why the police like to keep asking the same questions over and over.
Looks like RSM is right. You can see that same pic here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daughter_and_mother.jpg
You question the veracity of the pen-scribblings of her mind-thoughts?
I mean, sure, maybe they’re ‘fake’, but they’re probablly ‘accurate’ and bursting with truthiness!
I should have also mentioned, there is a nifty website, http://www.tineye.com/ that lets you do a reverse image search on an image to see where else it shows up on the web. They even have plugins for all the major browsers, so you can just right-click on an image and select the TinEye search.
This dispiriting tale of woe and doom, however, is the biography of “Lynn Beisner,” so far as we know. There’s no way to verify it, of course, but let’s just assume all this misery actually happened to her.
Once I read those two sentences, Stacy, I knew you were about to go in for the kill – and you did not, of course, disappoint.
She’s one crazy fuck, or he. Or he/she. Oh, just forget it lol!
I don’t take her story at face value. I think it’s total bullshit.
Funny story.
When I was a young, up-and-coming female engineer, I worked for a ginormous corporation with many divisions, some of which were defense contractors. I mentioned to a woman I worked with that I was possibly interested in going into politics. She said she thought I’d be great, and knew some people who could help me. Would I be interested in meeting with them?
I was, and when I got to the meeting, I found a group of…um…rather mannish looking middle aged women. They told me they were with NOW, and they were looking for young professional go-getters like me (gasp!) to “advance the cause of feminism.” I asked what, for instance, were the causes of feminism? They were very perturbed about pay inequity, they said. (I guess The Man was holding us girls down.) I mentioned that I’d heard that, and so quietly, on my own initiative, because at that time I had access to data for for all my company’s divisions, I’d done a study on that myself in order verify those allegations.
I’d grouped employees by things like job title, tenure, overall experience, education, etc., and looked for discrepancies between gender. And lo and behold! I’d found discrepancies!
The women’s faces looked like this… 😀 But then, oh no, it turned out that all things being equal, women were actually making slightly more than their male counterparts. Then the women’s faces looked like this… >:( I pointed out that this was good news for women, right?
For some reason, I never heard back from them.
In the fullness of time, I realized that this outcome was a good one, else it could’ve been me now writing sick fantasy stories from Fairy Land under the pseudonym Bynn Leisner or something.
Looks like a handy resource – thanks!
But NCTS wasn’t a “hoax” so much as a parody: they always intended to reveal the truth and mock anyone who praised the work.
The feminist “parables” are intended to be believed in full – and in time to become a part of the irrefutable feminista lexicon, when even suggesting it isn’t completely true is an act of oppression – nay, rape!
You know, that’s an excellent point, actually. I wonder whether they ARE stupid or delusional, or maybe stupidly delusional? Because I’ve made cogent, coherent, logical arguments to liberals before, based totally upon provable facts, and the response is typically something like, “F$&* you, you f$#^ing wh0r3! I can find out where your kids go to school, you [four letter word beginning with “c” and rhyming with “runt.”]”
Sounds like cognitive dissonance to me, so maybe I’d lean toward deluded, yeah.
She gets around, doesn’t she?
Maybe she’d turn one into a hit series: “The Walking Feminists”
It’s related to cognitive dissonance. In order to be a leftist, it is necessary to assume certain premises which are all demonstrably false. Like any complex fraud, there are stock answers for questioning any of the premises, and stock arguments for every situation. The “talking points” must be accepted as doctrine without question.
Whereas the cognitively dissonant recognize the incongruities, which precipitates their meltdowns, the leftist is merely angry at the infidel who has dared deny The Truth of All Things.
They are past “deluded” and well into “brainwashed,” methinks.
She does seem to be rather fond of…um…florid prose. Are you sure she wouldn’t be better at something like Harlequin Romance meets Ann Rice? With a cover drawing of a busty, ripped bodiced, bandaged woman, tearing at the sleeve of the handsome man who has his eyes on another woman? hehe
Oh! So it’s like telemarketers with a script, and if you go off-script they don’t know how to respond?
Also a concise synopsis on why anonymous/pseudonymous reports are necessarily less reliable.
But of course the same default skepticism should always also apply to anonymous sources in news reports, especially when unconfirmed by on the record source, and especially those which just so happen to further the point of the story or the bias of the writer (or linker of it, for that matter).
It is only fair to mention that I will probably bring this up again.
Very much like them, yes. Except the default emotive reaction for leftist is anger and threats. No justice, no peace!
Like everyone on the left, she seems to have issues in her life that are in no way at all her fault. She is the victim and Christianity and heteropatriarchy (whatever the f–k that really means) are the oppressors.
I like to blame other people for my problems but when my rational brain kicks in, I know that all of my problems are the result of my choices and behaviors. And guess what? The only thing I can change in life are my choices and behaviors, not those of my poorly conceived oppressors. Understanding that is true empowerment.
“the Catholic church we are not…”
Oh really? Was that line really necessary? You know so much about the Catholic Church? Where did you learn that from, the media?
I am sympathetic to this tale in a general sense (I defend LDS all the time over prejudice), but the way it is written I wonder how sincere you are.
It is harder to lie than tell the truth. Trouble is there are many people who can brainwash themselves to believe the lie as if it were truth by repetition. To unravel it you have to go beyond the lie itself.
Maniacmedik – i have to agree with EBL on this one. Just as an FYI, 0.5% of priests were involved in the sex scandals of the Catholic Church, which is significantly lower than the rate of abuse in the general population, and almost astronomically lower than that found in public schools. There have been some well publicized cases of abuse in the Mormon church, or in groups that identify as Mormon, but I would not ascribe anomalous behavior like that to the whole church.
Exactly. If you read her blog and Twitter timeline, she follows the standard operating procedures common on the left: 1) I have suffered, so I have absolute moral authority and therefore am immune from criticism; 2) I am tolerant and broad-minded. Because I do not engage in stereotyping individuals, I am a liberal; 3) therefore, I stereotype and denounce all conservatives, republicans, and Christians as malevolent evil haters who must be denounced and destroyed. Oh, did I mention that I am morally superior because I don’t stereotype groups of people or engage in bigotry?
“to” criticism.
“ Next time I see a story about a public school teacher molesting a student, I’ll turn that into an argument for the abolition of public education.The last one I read was out in Wyoming. She, the teacher, was 54 and her male student was 12. A pretty saucy story, mutual oral, anyone?
OK, where is Black Betty? I call utter and complete bullshit. A “black boy in the South?” Oh, fiddle-dee-dee! Everything this person writes is dripping with invidious, outdated stereotypes. She watched “In the Heat of the Night” a few too many times.
Awesome find, thanks! Now I can track down people selling my damned posters… without telling me about it, or more importantly, paying me.