Feminism and Sex: ‘Bad, Dumb, and Desperately Unfun and Unsexy’

Posted on | January 12, 2015 | 65 Comments

Anna Merlan’s verdict on a destined-for-infamy scene in Girls can best be understood as a verdict on Lena Dunham’s feminist ethos.

Dunham’s ethos, in turn, can best be understood as an expression of the decadent cultural values of 21st-century “progressives”:

They are the Nowhere People — rootless, without loyalty to family, community or religious tradition, and thus “free” to create for themselves imagined identities and idiosyncratic belief systems. Although they usually think of themselves as unique individuals, they are really sheep in a herd, predictable and therefore ultimately boring. Any politics, as long as it’s not conservative politics; any religion as long as it’s not Christian religion; any sexuality as long as it’s not normal sexuality.

So when HBO provides a dishonest pervert like Lena Dunham a platform from which to promote these values, our objections and criticisms are automatically rejected as illegitimate if expressed in terms of our own preferences — Christian, conservative, normal.

Dunham deliberately degrades the most attractive actress on the show — Allison Williams, daughter of NBC News anchor Brian Williams — by depicting her engaged in a shameful (to say nothing of unhealthy) kind of depraved sexual activity, and why? Because it is necessary, in the feminist mind, to believe that human beings are incapable of finding pleasure in sex that is healthy, wholesome and consistent with traditional morality. A husband and wife happily having normal intercourse together? This is impossible, according to feminist theory, which construes heterosexual love is inherently oppressive to women.

“Male sexual violence against women and ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . There are numerous examples of ways that heterosexual practice establishes male domination in women’s most private and personal spheres. . . . Men see women as objects for their sexual gratification.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

Heterosexual intercourse — note how Professor Graham placed “normal” inside scare-quotes — is a horrific experience inflicted on women through “male domination,” you see. If a male obtains “sexual gratification” from a woman through “heterosexual practice,” this means she has been victimized by his “sexual violence.”

Feminism’s implacable hostility to marriage and motherhood — especially as these institutions are understood by Christians — inevitably produces a rhetoric that is anti-male and anti-heterosexual. Male sexuality must be demonized, and women’s universal victimhood asserted, in order to justify the feminist project of destroying the basic institutions our society. The feminist rhetoric of “gender,” aimed at subverting our normal understanding of masculinity and femininity, is an integral part of this project. Normal women prefer masculine men and normal men prefer feminine women. Therefore, if feminists can teach young people to reject their normal “gender roles” by teaching them that these roles are oppressive, this androgynous “equality” will make it more difficult for young people to form normal relationships as adults.

“Social constructions of gender, like power, stem from patriarchal ideologies . . .
“Environmentally speaking, gender is independent of sex . . . and signifies the social constructedness of what maleness and femaleness mean in a given culture. The hierarchy that implicitly positions men above women due to reproductive difference, is a harmful one.”
— Amy Austin, “Patriarchy and the Problem of Being Born Female,” Aug. 9, 2014

Parents who wish their children to be successful and happy adults, and who therefore encourage boys to be masculine and girls to feminine, are seen by feminists as part of a system that oppresses unhappy weirdos and miserable failures. In order to satisfy the resentments of unattractive women, the normal admiration of beauty must be prohibited — the “male gaze” reduces females to being “sex objects.” In order to compensate unhappy women for their personal failures, male achievement must be derogated as social injustice — men’s success is presumed to be unfairly obtained through discrimination against women.

These feminist beliefs serve the function of telling unhappy women that they are never responsibile for their own unhappiness, and the propagation of this belief system provides career opportunities for women like Lena Dunham whose only claim to fame is her devotion to feminist ideology. No matter how wretched Girls may be — it’s supposed to be a “comedy” — critics feel obligated to praise it, because Dunham presents herself as a feminist and the show’s themes are therefore interpreted as feminist messages, even if this involves the celebration of Allison Williams getting a “desperately unfun” rimjob.

The editors of Huffington Post are required to heap unmerited praise on “the incisive, witty and hilarious dialogue that Dunham and the rest of her writing team come up with every week,” and cite as examples these lines from the first episode of the HBO show’s fourth season:

Hannah on preparing to move: “I don’t usually pack. I usually leave my crap in a pile and hope it makes it to where I’m going.”
Shosh on life after college: “I finished my degree. And now I’m just in the world, trying to get ‘er done.”

How incisive! How witty! How hilarious! Between this alleged brilliance and Allison Williams getting a rimjob, we can expect Lena Dunham to collect another pile of Emmy Awards for Girls.

No one can be permitted to criticize this phenomenon as what it actually is — a deliberately perverse insult to our sense of human decency — because telling the truth about feminism is a hate crime.

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

65 Responses to “Feminism and Sex: ‘Bad, Dumb, and Desperately Unfun and Unsexy’”

Fail Burton
January 13th, 2015 @ 10:18 am

Well, the problem there is the original version included a lot more equal rights stuff like Title IX and getting into military schools. This version is just a sick KKK for women vs. men. Ignoring it is difficult because they are actually moving gov’t policy that has wrecked the careers of men in college. By an amazing coincidence, when you read pieces like Heather MacDonald’s about UCLA, it is never women who suffer.
Ivan
January 13th, 2015 @ 10:32 am

It’s a state sponsored ideology. Majority don’t realize that feminism and gay rights are designed as a social divide and conquer tactic.
Quartermaster
January 13th, 2015 @ 11:52 am

If RS’s comment sounds “Nazi” to you, that’s a comment on you, and not him.
Quartermaster
January 13th, 2015 @ 11:54 am

The father is sicker than the daughter. No decent man wants his daughter engaged in such depravity.
Finrod Felagund
January 13th, 2015 @ 2:02 pm

It’s all about ratings in Hollywood. Many studios avoid releasing R-rated movies let alone NC-17 simply because the market is smaller. The G rating used to be avoided as well, but Pixar has done a great job of reducing the old stigma that G-rated movies were only for children.
Jerry Beckett
January 13th, 2015 @ 2:04 pm

Does it not seem somewhat odd that the two most attractive women to appear on the show (Allison Williams and Shiri Appleby) are the ones to have had their characters be subjected to the most degrading sexual scenes?
Finrod Felagund
January 13th, 2015 @ 2:05 pm

I would have upvoted you based solely on the Pink Floyd _The Wall_ reference.
Finrod Felagund
January 13th, 2015 @ 2:30 pm

I didn’t investigate too closely, but if they’re depicting a rimjob where a dental dam is not being used, then that’s a pretty serious safe sex violation. You’d think someone on the Left would make note of that.

Also, IANAL but that could run afoul of California’s “must use condoms in porn” law if it was done for real there.
Jim R
January 13th, 2015 @ 5:02 pm

You said it, brother. I’ve got a little girl; it’s incomprehensible to me that ANY man would be happy with his daughter doing this sort of thing. Yeah, Allison Williams is an adult and can make her own (poor, dubious, ill-considered) choices and I would expect her father to continue to love her, but I HOPE that, behind the scenes, he’s expressed… dismay… with her career choices.
Fail Burton
January 13th, 2015 @ 6:43 pm

The point is there is an ocean of difference between gender feminism and equal rights feminism. They’re not even in the same ball park. One is a supremacist KKK, the other about equality in cultural custom and practice.
tricknologist
January 13th, 2015 @ 8:51 pm

Here’s something on the topic that you might be interested in reading.

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/07/03/politics/robbed-of-beauty-by-the-left/
tricknologist
January 13th, 2015 @ 8:56 pm

This is actually being pushed in Sweden. It’s not a law yet, but they’re working on it.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2012/06/11/Swedish-party-wants-sit-down-urination/UPI-70041339439528/
RS
January 13th, 2015 @ 11:29 pm

Good article. Of course, many commenters take issue with the author claiming–falsely–he is attacking all modern art. Not so. He comments on the assault upon the aesthetic of Beauty and bemoans the aesthetic relativism which has gone hand-in-hand with moral relativism.
Bob Belvedere
January 14th, 2015 @ 9:32 am

http://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true
Bob Belvedere
January 14th, 2015 @ 9:37 am

The word ‘asinine’ being especially appropriate now.