What #Feminism Hath Wrought

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@LauraKipnis is an expert on why men deserve your contempt.

Just in time for the holidays, feminism is the gift that keeps on giving, and another academic sadist tells us what’s wrong with men:

Laura Kipnis begins her preface to Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation . . . with an interesting idea: Writing about someone marks a special kind of intimacy. And just as any relationship that’s full of projection, there’s a lot of projection when you’re writing about someone, especially someone who’s been your lover.
“When writing about a relationship, you’re writing about the collusion of two psyches,” she tells me. Explaining further, Kipnis continues, “You project your fantasies on to the person. That’s the most interesting part about writing about someone. You find out things about yourself.” . . .
Women invent notions of men all the time, even if we’re not writing books about them. But why do we do this? And, more to the point, when we invent notions of men, is this empowering, or does it have the opposite effect on us?
Kipnis weighs in.
“I would think it is a powerful position to be in, inventing notions of men. You get to tell the story and in the same way you’re inventing the man, you’re constructing yourself, your persona at the same time.” . . .
“Masculinity seems more of a question mark than a given at the moment,” concludes Kipnis. . . .

You may read the rest of that without gaining any actual insight into who or what Professor Kipnis is. What she is, actually, is another careerist cog in the wheel of the Feminist-Industrial Complex, a combination of academia, media, political power and money that provides feminism absolute hegemony in elite culture. Her official bio:

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her five book have been translated into fifteen languages. The most recent is How to Become A Scandal; previous books include Against Love: A Polemic and The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. She is a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University where she teaches filmmaking; she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the NEA and Yaddo; and has contributed essays and reviews to Slate, Harper’s, Playboy, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. She has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program. She lives in New York and Chicago.

Do you notice anything about this brief curriculm vitae? She is a tenured professor at an elite university (Northwestern tuition 2014-2015, $47,251) despite the fact that she lacks a doctoral degree. (If you can name any male professors who hold such lofty sinecures with only an MFA, please do so.)  The average salary of an assistant professor at Northwestern University is $110,815 and we see that, not content to scrape by on her six-figure academic salary, Professor Kipnis has been busy hoovering up cash from “philanthropic” foundations like Guggenheim and Rockefeller, to say nothing of her (undoubtedly large) fees from major New York publishing firms.

However, the barren middle-aged spinster — never married, never a mother — wants readers to know that men actually like her:

“Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation” . . . started out as a fight that writer Laura Kipnis had with her longtime boyfriend over whether she talked too much about her exes. (She doesn’t, she insists.) But the conversation made her realize that regardless of how much she talks about former lovers in private, she’s spent most of the last 15 years writing about men, over and over. . . .
“Men have fascinated me,” her book begins, “maybe too much.” Although her essays catalog a lot of bad male behavior — divided into categories of operators, neurotics, sex fiends and haters — Kipnis is far more intrigued than offended by the “jagged edges” of modern masculinity, and the anxiety over shifting power dynamics she sees poking out from those misdeeds like loose wires. . . .

Pause, dear reader, to imagine a publisher commissioning a book by a male academic who proposed a similar examination of women in the 21st century. Imagine this author (for we can only imagine such a person, as he is non-existent) beginning his book by describing a fight with his girlfriend about his numerous ex-girlfriends.

Now try to imagine a critic for a major newspaper gushing uncritically about that book and that author, as Laura Hudson does in her Los Angeles Times puff-piece interview with Kipnis:

Your book often resists making declarative statements, but what do you see as the status quo for masculinity today?
Power relations have shifted considerably and the economic hit that men took in the last recession was a huge aspect of it. Everything that’s been going on in the last 40 years has really changed the power dynamic in a macro sense, from women’s entry into the workforce and the reshaping of the family structure to the economic hit that men took in the last recession. I think there’s a lot of underlying male anxiety about that. I was interested in the subterranean ways that anxiety manifests itself.
There are several moments where you say you should be offended by male bombast but instead find yourself compelled by its vulnerability. Is this just contrarianism, or is there more to it?
I’m always surprised when women are offended at men like [Norman] Mailer, because he’s kind of hilarious and also self-parodying…. The problem with taking all these things seriously is that it puts you in a reactive position that just reinforces the power of the thing you’re reacting against. I’m a believer in irony, because it gives you two positions; it gives you more latitude to think different thoughts.
The problem with being pissed off at men all the time is that you’re in the same position. You’re just spinning your wheels. . . .

Perhaps you get the general idea here. Professor Kipnis ignorantly speaks of “women’s entry into the workforce” as though it were something that only happened “in the last 40 years,” which is to say that prior to 1974, no woman ever earned a paycheck.

My mother, my grandmother, my aunts — they were all just attending Garden Club meetings and baking cookies until feminism came along and then, in 1974, all women entered the workforce. Never mind the decades my grandmother worked at a textile mill in LaGrange, Georgia. Never mind my mother’s job as a bookkeeper at Mergenthaler Linotype and later RCA Records. Above all, never mind the women school teachers who were wielding absolute authority over children long before anyone heard of Women’s Liberation.

The past must be re-written so that deracinated young people, alienated from their familial communities and thus having no direct knowledge of their ancestors, are taught to believe whatever the intelligentsia finds it politically convenient for youth to believe.

Our mothers’ careers have disappeared behind the fog of feminist rhetoric, and our daughters are taught to believe that their grandmothers and great-grandmothers were helpless victims of a hateful and all-powerful system of slavery, The Patriarchy.

Feminism’s deliberate derogation of the past, its insistence that women groaned under the yoke of male oppression prior to the rise of modern feminism, is necessary to prevent young women from asking questions about feminism itself. Is this ideology really about “empowering” all women generally? Or is it the case that feminism is actually about empowering a certain class of women, namely the academics, activists and authors who are well-paid for their services on behalf of this movement of which they are the elite vanguard?

“Follow the money,” and you learn that the Feminist-Industrial Complex provides lucrative opportunities for those women with the necessary skills (and necessary lack of conscience) to succeed as propagandists for this anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology.

Of course, Professor Kipnis and other feminist intellectuals hasten to deny that they are man-haters or lesbians. Professor Kipnis begins with a humble-brag anecdote, the fight with her long-term boyfriend about her (too-numerous-to-count) ex-boyfriends and, alas, these men have “fascinated” her, “maybe too much.” See? Professor Kipnis really likes men, she dishonestly seeks to convince her naïve readers, before proceeding to write about males as if they were a disease, their behavior symptomatic of their “vulnerability.” Professor Kipnis isolates the masculinity virus and examines it, inviting readers to share her contemptuous pity for the pathetic male.

Feminists are unloved because they are unloving, too selfish to care for others. When this yields predictable results (loneliness, marital failure, childlessness) the feminist blames men for her problems. Feminism means no woman is ever to blame for anything, because everything bad that happens to a woman or anything a woman does wrong must ultimately be blamed on The Patriarchy.

Feminist theory is nothing but a vast rationalization, a psychological defense mechanism, an all-purpose excuse and justification.

It’s not about equality, it’s about revenge.

Look at what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard University. An economist with impeccable liberal credentials, Summers merely suggested the possibility that “innate differences” between men and women could help explain the relative shortage of women working as top research scientists. For this, he was denounced as a misogynist and ultimately forced to resign as Harvard’s president.

When I describe feminists as totalitarians and sadists, this is what I mean: Any suffering they can inflict on any male is always justified by their ideology. Mere disagreement with feminist theory is taken as proof that a man hates women, and any professor calling herself a feminist may therefore be sure that no man will dare ever contradict her. Because this ideology and its adherents exercise unlimited authority in elite culture (of which Harvard is an eminent bastion), the feminist intellectual is a latter-day Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who inspired Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil.”

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the cruel business of destroying humanity cannot be entrusted to morally sensitive people. Those with humane dispositions do not seek employment as pimps, abortionists or concentration camp commandants.

Feminists crave power, and the reason they crave power is because their resentments of men fuel their fantasies of sadistic revenge. They begin their careers grasping for the whip and, once having obtained it, they wield its punitive power with hideous glee.

And speaking of Amanda Marcotte . . .

Prior to Monday afternoon, the name “Laura Kipnis” meant nothing to me, until somebody on Twitter called my attention to Amanda Marcotte’s Slate.com review of Professor Kipnis’s book:

Kipnis doesn’t produce a grand theory of men, which is as it should be, since there’s little you can say definitively about a diverse group of more than 3.5 billion individuals.
But while it’s hard to come to a meaningful conclusion about men, the collective, there is a lot to be said about the idea of masculinity, a tyrannical concept that the whole group must grapple with, whether they like it or not. . . .

(How is “masculinity . . . tyrannical”? Never mind. She’s on a roll.)

[A] theme emerges: men trying to define themselves against the nebulous dictates of their gender, and all the expectations and privileges it implies.
Kipnis, with her keen eye for human failings, delights in the way this lifelong struggle adds an air of ridiculousness to the whole enterprise of manhood. Masculinity is an idealized state, so of course men are in a permanent state of failing at it, and yet they seem unable to quit. “Something about the poetics of masculine panic, old school and new, just draws me in,” Kipnis writes. . . .

You can read the whole thing, but again the point is obvious enough from a brief excerpt. Feminists being rejects and/or failures — no man will marry them, nor would any man trust one of these hateful creatures to care for his child — Marcotte and Kipnis are spiritual duplicates. They have “boyfriends” rather than husbands, pets rather than children, living lives of immature selfishness while pretending to be socratic archons, arbiters of our sexual morals and manners.

Even if their spitefully vindictive anti-human attitudes did not render them permanently unlovable, however, feminists have fostered such widespread discrimination against males that genuinely marriageable males — i.e., civilized heterosexual men with the economic wherewithal to support a family — are an increasingly rare commodity:

American women . . . are 33 percent more likely to have earned a college degree by the time they reach 27 years of age than their male contemporaries, according to the results of a longitudinal study published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At most colleges and universities nowadays, one finds that females comprise more than 60 percent of the enrollment, so that if higher education is a place where women expect to meet their future husbands, about one-third of female undergraduates are guaranteed to end up like unmatched socks in the laundry hamper. There simply are no college-educated males available for these women.

Dr. Helen Smith wrote an entire book (Men on Strike) about the multiple consequences of this problem. The fundamental cause is that our educational system during the past three decades has become so oriented toward promoting “equality” (i.e., favoritism toward females rhetorically justified as “empowerment”) that our nation’s K-12 schools now actively discourage male achievement. Christina Hoff Sommers’ book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is an excellent primer on this phenomenon.

Harming men has always been the basic goal of feminism; the harm feminism does to females is just collateral damage. Young males are being mentally crippled and economically punished because of a feminist agenda that deliberately deprives males of education and employment opportunities, diverting social resources (including federal, state and local tax dollars) toward females. Nothing so emphatically demonstrates the objectives of this feminist project as the proliferation of Women’s Studies programs at colleges and universities, employing ideologues who are devoted to teaching female students to hate their male peers.

The most widely assigned Women’s Studies anthology, Feminist Frontiers, is edited by three lesbian professors, and the pedagogical goal of teaching these anti-male/anti-heterosexual theories is scarcely a secret, as “raging lesbian feminist” Carmen Rios made clear.

If you think masculinity is a problem, feminism is the solution. If you think heterosexuality is problem, feminism can solve that, too.

What will result from feminism’s success, however, is not equality, but rather confusion, unhappiness and destruction. Feminism will eventually destroy our entire civilization. Why? Because there are more than 7 billion people on this planet. Our culture is being weakened by feminism’s orchestrated social sabotage, while the foreign enemies of Western civilization — particularly in the Islamic world —  are becoming more numerous, more powerful and more militant.

Three or four decades from now, when America’s daughters are enslaved as the concubines of jihadist conquerors, our elites will be able to congratulate themselves on feminism’s success: “Equality!”





 

59 comments

  4. Kipnis, with her keen eye for human failings, delights in the way this lifelong struggle adds an air of ridiculousness to the whole enterprise of manhood.

    So, let me get this straight. She’s had a few boyfriends and perhaps several handfuls of male lovers over the years, and from that limited experience, she pens an opus about the state of “masculinity” and males’ quest to obtain this Holy Grail-like, er, thing.

    Memo to Ms. Kipnis:

    Stop dating pussies.

  6. RSM, to facilitate your work on this, for the most part, a MFA is a teaching degree in the Arts types. In examining the available Arts faculty biographies at both your (Jacksonville State) and mine (St. Cloud State) I only found one Doctorate, in “Educational Leadership” for a Professor of Arts Education.

    Otherwise, good points.

  8. The chairman of the drama department at Jacksonville State during my years there was Wayne Claeren, Ph.D. The chairman of the art department was Marvin Shaw, Ph.D.

    Professors, especially full professors, are nearly always people with doctorate degrees. There were always junior faculty — instructors or assistants — with lesser credentials, but the Ph.D. was the expected norm for full professors.

    Of course, I despise credentialism per se, but universities (especially elite schools like Northwestern) are operated on this basis, so when I saw somebody with a Master’s holding the title of professor, it caught my eye.

  10. Men and masculinity seem to have gotten by for millennia without any problems. Thank the Lord that we have feminists with decades of experience to tell us where we’ve been going wrong.

  11. I usually make my own, but I had a great “trucker’s grilled cheese” not long ago. They made their own pimiento by adding peppers to cheddar, then put it on a good rustic Italian bread (tender with a flaky crust) with strips of bacon and a fried egg. It was kind of expensive, but worth it for the unique experience, which was surprisingly completely unlike a fast-food breakfast sandwich.

  12. No self-respecting man would surrender to be with such a negative woman, so all of her presumably condescending anecdotes are no doubt a reflection of her own toxic nature.

  13. I think we’re supposed to leave women alone, but not associate with other men without women around, and also not play any sexy video games, but just produce more cat food and cat litter?

  14. But I thought leaving them alone was considered (rape culture) rape, just like trying to engage with them. We can’t win…help!

  15. I know you’re making a joke, but they actually do have some pretty weird theories spun out of their Manichean victim/threat narratives, and you actually do always have the right to keep yourself to yourself.

  16. The more one reads about feminist theory it does kinda seem like what you say: an ideology formed around certain type of women who have some kind of shared phobia about men. In that sense “failed at being normal” would seem to define everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Carmen Rios. The fact they have to shout how normal they are all the time betrays the woman doth protest too much. What is then transferred onto men is the rationalization that masculinity is both not normal and failed.

    It seems that’s going to naturally leave radical lesbians as having the most complex ideological justifications to reconcile that, but there are many more types of feminism. The problem there is the most credible voice defaults to those with the most oppressions, so that would be gay non-white women, and that brings us to third wave intersectional gender feminism and people like Carmen Rios, who trumps Marcotte.

    The common denominator seems to be an insulated cult that believes they have some secret knowledge and that it is the world, mostly men, that is broken and not them. They move heaven and earth to explain why their sociopathy and even perversions are actually quite natural. That includes saying children have sexual needs and agency and that men have used the incest taboo to control women via arranged marriages. That includes the theory that masculinity and even heterosexuality itself is “performative” and not Mother Nature. That’s why gender feminism wants families and heterosexuality gone. They are all tools of oppression. A neat bunch of theories, and typical of insane people who construct meticulous worlds to rationalize their own madness.

    Marcotte’s “masculinity, a tyrannical concept” and “nebulous dictates of their gender” are the giveaways there that Marcotte has adopted by proxy a thing she has no emotional attachment to like Audre Lorde or Charlotte Bunch does: radical feminist queer theory as understood by Judith Butler. Marcotte is at several removes from queer theory and Kipnis even more so. It’s a form of slumming really, but from the outside it looks the same as the madness of Andrea Dworkin or Marilyn Frye. Ironically, Marcotte distances herself and her movement from Dworkin at the same time she apparently unwittingly uses those Dworkian and Beauvoirian quotes, as well as simply ignoring the existence of Carmen Rios.

    That indicates a level of cluelessness anyone who’s read Marcotte shouldn’t be surprised by since Marcotte has no idea how much she is despised by intersectional gender feminists as a privileged tool of the patriarchy and who do not disavow Dworkian. In effect, Marcotte embraces queer theory and rejects it at the same time, because she has no visceral understanding of the philosophical origins of it, only the end part about bad mens and gender.

    Meanwhile Time magazine this week lists pervert Simone de Beauvoir as all-time most influential feminist, so Marcotte might want to get her straw men up to date. In fact women like Dworkin, their Beauvoirian theories, and their man-hatred are as relevant as ever. Heterosexuality has to go, and that would include Marcotte.

    However you cut it, the unreasoning phobia of men is the unrelenting theme that comes across. Dworkin is anything but a now irrelevant straw man. She is still a representative of the seething heart of this hateful and supremacist insanity, and yes, we do like to drag her out and beat her witches and English fairies.

  18. For artists, an MFA is generally considered a terminal degree. It’s not unusual in creative writing programs to have tenured professors who have only an MFA provided they’ve published. There’s a distinction between the MFA and an MA in English, for example.

  19. “the barren middle-aged spinster ” … now that’s a phrase that’s going to make lot of feminists’ heads assplode. Well done, Robert.

  20. The lovely Miss Marcotte wrote:

    But while it’s hard to come to a meaningful conclusion about men, the
    collective, there is a lot to be said about the idea of masculinity, a
    tyrannical concept that the whole group must grapple with, whether they
    like it or not.

    Now, how does this make sense? We can’t come to a meaningful conclusion about men, she tells us, after which she immediately comes to a (meaningful?) conclusion about men!

    I assume that she must like at least something about masculinity, at least in the person of Marc Faletti, so she can’t be opposed to everything about men!

    The truth is that Miss Marcotte is’t really opposed to masculinity, but by her caricature of masculinity.

  21. The common denominator seems to be an insulated cult that believes they have some secret knowledge….

    Feminism is just a sub-cult of the larger Gnostic cult known as Leftism. All Ideologues consider themselves The Illuminated Ones, and, dammit, they’re going to Immanentize that darn Eschaton.

  22. A reviewer wrote:

    “Men have fascinated me,” her book begins, “maybe too much.” Although her essays catalog a lot of bad male behavior — divided into categories of operators, neurotics, sex fiends and haters — Kipnis is far more intrigued than offended by the “jagged edges” of modern masculinity, and the anxiety over shifting power dynamics she sees poking out from those misdeeds like loose wires. . . .

    Sounds very much like the description of a battered woman, who keeps coming back for more.

  24. Evidently, the English Department at UT-Austin wasn’t big on logical coherence in their English majors’ writing.

  25. I guess that, if it’s published in a book, rather than Cosmopolitan, that somehow gives it more class, but it doesn’t make it any better,

    Men have been trying to understand what women want and what women think into prehistoric times, and we’ve finally come to the realization that no (normal) man can do that, and now we just laugh about it. Women, on the other hand, have yet to realize that they can’t really understand what men think, so they continue to write books and articles for Cosmo, which is actually a pretty good racket, considering that some of them get paid for doing so.

    Men and women simply think differently; it’s not only our biological differences, but the differences in our culture, history and experiences. Men can’t really understand women, because we didn’t grow up as women, and completely lack their frames of reference, and men understand that. The opposite is true for women, except that some of them don’t understand those differences.

    The feminists’ complaints about masculinity really stem from their inability to truly understand it, because they lack the frames of reference that men have. So, instead, they try to psychoanalyze it, and combitch that men ought to have to sit down to pee and other silly stuff like that, to behave more like women — except, of course, the men with whom they copulate — just so they could better understand us.

    Men and women even handle these things differently. For a lot of men, the fantasy woman is the one who can keep up physically, the bad-ass chick who can kick other men’s butts. You see this character in online gaming and newer sword-and-sorcery fantasy books. The fantasy women have the rock-hard abs, but still have killer tits. It’s a fantasy where men get to copulate with women who behave like men, but are still hot-looking chicks.

    But there is no reverse of that; women don’t fantasize about men who are soft and feminine and behave like women, just with penises; that image will never get them warm and moist.

  26. I think you are confusing this with micro aggression racism. To single out blacks because they were black was racist and now to ignore their color is racist.

  27. “concept that the whole group must grapple with, whether they like it or not. . . .”

    But it’s masculinity that’s the tyrannical concept. Alrighty, then.

  30. Women have a frame of reference? For most their frame of “reference” is entirely emotional. Too many women don’t what they want or understand much of anything beyond their emotional wants. The overwhelming majority those are feminists. They never grew up beyond their boy hating days in elementary school, and never will.

  31. Of course they have a frame of reference; everybody does.

    This is part of the problem with transsexualism. It doesn’t matter what a person like the despicable Bradley Manning says, all of his experiences, everything he has done, was done as a man male. He can have himself castrated and get some quack to stick fake boobs on his scrawny chest, but he’ll never be a woman because he didn’t grow up as a woman, never had the experiences that women have growing up.

  34. …and their greatest sin is that they are universally boring. These persons are as interchangeable as LEGO blocks. “Oh, horrors…another feminist having an argument with a man about all of the prior men in her life!” – That hasn’t happened ten-trillion times before. Did I say boring? I meant tactless…and boring…and predictable…and neurotic…

  36. I discovered these babies and I use them on grilled cheese all the time.

    http://www.mezzetta.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/MZ_ProductImage_Ecommerce_lrg_Green_Chili_Peppers.png

    They have excellent pepper flavor (the good kind, not the “green bell pepper” kind). They aren’t hot, though.

    As in, “no heat, whatsoever.”
    So you have to add jalopeños or better.

    If you buy good bread with guts, and put cheese on both slices as you grill them, then sandwich the peppers in between, it’s a major treat that stand up to the more serious kinds of bread.

    (My point being that plain grilled cheese works better on plain white bread, but this combo works really well on flax/multigrain, heavy breads.)

    Add a slice or two of ham, and you have a serious meal.

  37. Nice! I use pepperoncini that way, but sometimes I don’t want the heat. That looks perfect, thank you.

  39. They usually over-vinegar pepperoncini. Makes them taste a bit medicine-y. Of course, they taste great if you grill them separately. But I find these green chilies to be a better flavor.

    They are probably made with anaheim chiles.

  43. After my first NewOrleans muffaletta sandwich from the Central Grocery, I started making my own marinated olive relish at home in Florida.
    The stuff’s great on everything. No set recipe just wing it!

  46. Me, too! Scrambled eggs, Chili, Cornbread, Hot dogs, hamburgers, all kinds of stuff.

    My local store hides them in the “Mexican Foods” aisle. All the other Mezetta products are with the pickles. That’s why I only learned about them this year.

    I love Mezetta’s stuffed olives (they have five different kinds, I think), jalopeños, and roasted red peppers. So I always have a bunch of that stuff on hand.

    I do NOT like their “garden mix” though. Weird.

  47. Looking at it from the opposite direction, that is damn near definitional. If they could prefer solitude over disrespect, they wouldn’t be beta.

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