Bailey Poland (@the_author_) reacted rather predictably to my noticing her typical feminist expressions of sadistic cruelty. You see, if you read what a feminist writes, and then express criticism of what she has written, you are “inciting harassment,” because no one can ever be permitted to disagree with a feminist. Once you understand the rules of feminist discourse, you expect these reactions. Feminists are certain that they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, which is why we are in need of their lectures. You need Bailey Poland to tell you what to think, and if you don’t enjoy being tutored in this manner — if you are a literate adult weary of these jargon-filled gender-theory sermons from 24-year-olds — your objection to her ideological harangues will be interpreted by Bailey Poland as proof that you are an ignorant bigot.
When a feminist deigns to acknowledge the existence of others, it is only so that she may talk down to them.
No feminist ever apologizes for insulting the intelligence of her readers by this high-handed pose of superiority. Bailey Poland knows everything about “toxic masculinity” and “benevolent sexism,” whereas you are obviously a cretinous dimwit who can’t even spell “misogyny.” The young feminist is omniscient, possessed of infinite knowledge, so that we are expected to be grateful that Bailey Poland has condescended to share with us mortals her cosmic and eternal wisdom.
Atop the stack of books on my desk are the following titles: Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation by Mary Daly (1973), Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence and Women’s Lives by Dee L.R. Graham (1994), The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, edited by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond (1990), and Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus by Peggy Reeves Sanday (Second Edition, 2007). These titles are among the more than 70 feminist books I’ve read during the past year-and-a-half of research, and certainly there is nothing a 24-year-old can tell me about this subject. The only reason I noticed Ms. Poland at all is because a commenter on an earlier post had mentioned how obnoxiously self-righteous she is. Indeed, Bailey Poland responds to criticism by complaining of “the torrent of misogyny,” which she attributes to the unwillingness of males “to seriously engage with a woman’s opinions.” Her critics are “deliberately misreading content taken out of context,” and I myself am afflicted with a “complete lack of reading comprehension.” You see that feminism must always be a lecture, and can never be anything like a civil conversation, because SHUT UP!
Disagreement is hate, according to Feminist Logic™ and nothing any man says in his own defense is ever valid, because SHUT UP!
Ask yourself, why does any woman become a feminist? Because she is a narcissist who views males as being so vastly inferior to herself that she finds routine social interaction with normal men offensive. This is what Bailey Poland’s “nice guy” column was really about: “How dare these repulsive heterosexual men act friendly toward me in hope of becoming more than friends?”
We may acknowledge that the “nice guy” — what pickup artists would call a “Gamma male” — is an annoying type, without resorting to feminist theory about the nice guy’s “misogyny.” Bailey Poland’s use of this term implies that male heterosexuality is inspired by hatred for women, a rather startling claim. Whenever we encounter the words “misogyny” or “misogynist” in feminist discourse, we must remember what these words actually mean. To call a man a “misogynist” is to accuse him of hating women, which is a different thing than merely saying he is a “sexist,” i.e., someone who believes men and women are different. Most people, including most women, are “sexist” in this sense of the word. They recognize that the differences between men and women are both real and socially significant, and therefore do not see evidence of patriarchal oppression everywhere they look.
“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . . to come to see oneself as a victim.”
— Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)
Feminist discourse about male heterosexual behavior is intended to humiliate men, to make men feel ashamed of being normal.
Any man who enjoys the sight of a good-looking woman is guilty of objectifying her with the male gaze. You will never see Bailey Poland criticize gay men for their sexual attraction to men, nor would any heterosexual feminist dare to criticize as “problematic” the sexual feelings and behavior of lesbians. No, gay men and lesbians are exempt from Bailey Poland’s criticism, because their behavior does not inspire in her the distinctive contempt that all feminists feel toward normal male sexuality: Fear and Loathing of the Penis!
Ever since the very first Women’s Liberation protest against the 1968 Miss America contest, feminists have been trying to eradicate every source of normal male happiness. Men cannot look at women, because that is “objectification,” and men cannot talk to women, because that is “harassment.” A man cannot kiss a woman without risking a sexual assault charge, and intercourse is rape. Men should never have wives, because marriage is slavery, and men should never be fathers because motherhood is a violation of a woman’s “right to choose.”
“Pregnancy is barbaric.”
— Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970)
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, 1975
“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . .
“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, 2014
Bailey Poland hates the man who acts “nice” to her, because (a) he is a man, (b) no man is actually “nice,” and therefore (c) acting “nice” proves that he is dishonest. From a feminist perspective, everything a man does is always wrong, because all women are victims of male oppression. His mere existence is an injustice against women.
It does not matter who a man is or what he does, the sadistic impulse of feminism invariably requires his humiliation as punishment for his male existence. Her vengeful appetite for unlimited cruelty toward males is what distinguishes the feminist from normal women. And nothing incites the feminist’s instinctive sadism more than a man who refuses to genuflect at the throne of the Bitch Goddess. The feminist’s rheteric about “equality” is in fact a demand for recognition of her superiority. She feels insulted by a man who acts as if he were actually her equal.
This is what inspires the feminist complaint about “mansplaining.” Any man who believes he has knowledge or experience that could be useful to a feminist is mistaken. Men know nothing, according to feminist theory, which is based on the belief that the experience and feelings of women are the only valid basis of knowledge.
“Women are an oppressed class. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men have oppressed women. . . .
“We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.”
— Redstockings, “Manifesto,” July 7, 1969
A man who claims to know anything is expressing “male supremacist culture,” because the only actual knowledge is that which is confirmed by women’s experience. This is true even with regard to men’s own lives and feelings. Go read Bailey Poland’s account of the “nice guy” — she knows that he secretly hates women. She knows that the only reason any man is ever “nice” to a woman is to get sex in return. There are no honest or unselfish men, from the feminist point of view.
Because every man is an agent of oppression, as the Redstockings explained, no man can be trusted. Everything a man says is either simply wrong (because men know nothing) or else it is a deliberate lie (because no agent of oppression would ever tell the truth to his victims). Feminism thus negates the possibility that a man could have anything useful to say about anything, and therefore SHUT UP!
See? Even my advice that males should avoid interaction with feminists must be mocked by Bailey Poland, who also ridicules the time I spent researching her work. She had claimed that men never “seriously engage with a woman’s opinions” and yet, when I took the time to engage her seriously, my endeavor only served as a basis for further insults.
She’s a grad student younger than my oldest daughter, but I am a male who knows nothing and, unless you agree with everything Bailey Poland says, you are also utterly ignorant. Feminists are Our Moral Superiors™ and our refusal to acknowledge Bailey Poland’s superiority can only be explained by our “complete lack of reading comprehension.”
Men who make negative generalizations about women are "sexists."
Women who make negative generalizations about men are "feminists."
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) August 21, 2015
Feminists are extraordinarily clever.
They created history's most successful hate movement
by presenting hate as "social justice."
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) August 21, 2015
Let me give you a hint, sugar:
Oppressed people don't go to grad school.
You are not a victim. Stop whining, you spoiled brat.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) August 21, 2015
Better yet, all criticism of feminism means you’re “obsessed” with a particular feminist, and now she “owns you” Pay attention to that last term as more, and more of these rags are letting the “equality” mask slip, appropriating language from the dominatrix community(especially Ms. Poland who seems absolutely enamoured of dogshit like Yeoshin Lourdes, and Elle Smith)and letting the real deal sadist out.
BTW, thanks for calling my attention to this particular example. It was your comment, I believe, on a post two or three days ago. Never heard of her before, but she seems extraordinarily articulate in expressing very bad ideas.
Very welcome, sir. Your blog has been enlightening to say the least. It’s very troubling though that so many men could interact with this person, and not see her for what she is. Never underestimate the power of propaganda in twisting the human mind, and keeping it utterly defenseless against those who seek to harm it is the lesson there.
The reason none of these people actually engage your ideas or critique, is that they are afflicted with stridency that can only come when you combine ideology with youth. Their positions are not derived from independent thought. They are merely reading from a script. Once you get outside the prepared lines, they’ve got nothing. That’s why they get so angry.
Problem is, there are a lot of 60-something second-wave feminists who are just as strident and dogmatic as these young ones. I suppose they never grew up.
Nice to see these comment strings hitting 100+ comments regularly.
I’m assuming eventually the guys (and gals) get shirts.
Yes it is one of the left’s many phantom “wars.” Since there is no genuine war on women, they have nothing.
They are hollow women, with no sense of self worth, taking up a “cause” because they will not look in the mirror. It makes them feel temporarily secure to hate with similar-minded women. They do not realize they are pawns for more powerful people with an agenda. Even if they did, then to most of them, the “ends justify the means.”
The only way out is in. Let them or encourage them to bring out their worst for everyone to see. Half the battle is de-legitimization, and they are bitter enough to do the hard work for us.
They consistently delegitimize themselves like claiming Emma Sulkowicz, or Lena Dunham is a feminist icon, defending UVA’s “Jackie”, or getting behind shit like #giveyourmoneytowomen, but then whine like Anne Theirault that author Jonathan Franzen is using the “crazy feminist narrative” in his new novel! these women are completely up their own privates.
I would buy a shirt.
“encourage them to bring out their worst for everyone to see.” I do believe Mr. McCain is quite the expert at that. He knows the subject of his post is also part of his audience. I’m betting this helps guide his writing.
I read the Sex Trouble posts regularly but don’t always scroll comments. Do the critiqued feminists ever deign to respond/debate here on this site?
Dear heart, the books on your desk!
I should send you a bottle of Jack Daniels to get through them. And I know: I’ve read my Mary Daly. I can’t imagine reading it as a man, although I suppose I could change my name to Caitlyn and find out.
I don’t know what masochistic streak keeps you going back to deal with these mentally colonized zombies, but bless you for shining the light. Really.
Have you ever watched a lecture by this woman?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD65wnDGuTg
It’s weird how I am driven to read books I hate. Today, the mail brought Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Peggy Reeves Sanday’s Female Power and Male Domination. Different flavors of crazy.
I’ve often said that I have read more Marx than the typical Marxist, and now I have certainly read more feminism than the typical feminist.
I have only recently discovered this blog, but from what I can tell, they don’t have the balls to debate anyone here.
So, I’ve been duly warned that “I’m hers,” whatever that means. A dreaded block? But for the record, I didn’t scroll her tweets for anyone but myself, to find out what her response was to this post.
What positive tangible contribution have feminists made to our society? Have they invented anything; fixed anything; discovered a new scientific theory; built a business empire? No, because they are parasites that feed upon the hopes and fears of women with little self worth and mental illness. They don’t create; they only destroy. This will be their legacy.
. . . and, her response was: your followers are fake/bots! That’s why your hate is so quickly spread!
2nd Wave Feminism is the worst possible type of feminism. Sexual attraction by a man to a woman is Crimethink to the 2nd Waver. Heterosexual intercourse, no matter how consensual, is “rape” to the 2nd Waver.
After years of 3rd Wave hookup culture, 2nd Wave is making a resurgence on college campuses with the “college rape” narrative that is being pushed, to pass laws like Affirmative Consent.
I haven’t seen it, but it’s possible I’ve missed comments.
I would buy one as well
Like I said below, “you’re mine”, is language she’s appropriating from the dominatrix community, which in a disturbing twist has dovetailed with the feminist community. She thinks she’s smart enough, and hard enough to play mind games, but truth is(as a commenter stated a few days ago, and I’m now paraphrasing)any man here could dominate 50 of her with nothing more than a sharpened pencil.
BTW, the “fake followers” meme is the result of a trick played on me in 2013 (at the same time Kimberlin first filed his lawsuit against me, just a coincidence I’m sure) where I was swarmed with fake followers purchased by some enemy. Then, immediately after my account had been clumped up with tens of thousands of these fake accounts, the same enemies went to an account-audit site and “proved” that 99% of my followers were fake.
In fact, I had 25,000 actual followers before this hacker trick was played against me, and that was two years ago, so that my actual follower count is now certainly above 30,000, but after I scraped off the first spam-wave fake bots, the same people hit me with 50,000 more. And all of this, you see, merely to undermine my reputation.
Oh, but only feminists suffer from online “harassment,” you know . . .
“Bailey Poland hates the man who acts ‘nice’ to her, because (a) he is a man, (b) no man is actually ‘nice,’ and therefore (c) acting ‘nice’ proves that he is dishonest.”
Yes. And this is based on her personal experiences and blinkered observations, not on an objective assessment of reality.
Good + man does not compute in Bailey World.
Therefore if a good man ever unwittingly wanders into Bailey World, Bailey must draw one of two conclusions: either the apparent goodness isn’t real goodness or the man isn’t a real man.
Every once in a while one or one of their fanclub will show up. They’re generally no more coherent in web page comments than they are on web pages generally.
Few people had heard of Amanda Marcotte before she reached age 30. Before Shulamith Firestone reached age 30, she had completely withdrawn from public view and was living a quiet life in the East Village of Manhattan, devoted, at least avocationally, to art. A certain number of articulate people advocate repellent things in their youth (as did. Whittaker Chambers).
I saw that, in response to one Twitter users criticism, Ms. Poland said she was married.
This was certainly astonishing to me, but then again Jessica Valenti is not only married but also a mother. That these women embrace an anti-male ideology while also embracing males strikes me as inherently self-contradicting, but of course they do not recognize (or at least, refuse to admit the anti-male aspect of their own ideology. In their minds, we may presume, the feminist critique of “patriarchy” and “misogyny” is merely a sort of shorthand for (a) disliking certain kinds of male behaviors, (b) politically rationalizing their own personal grievances, and (c) VOTE DEMOCRAT!
This kind of feminism, however, cannot really change society — at least not in any radical or revolutionary way, producing “sexual equality” and/or the “liberation” of women, certainly not in any time-span of less than 40 years. We see that today, feminists are every bit as angry as they were in 1968, and why? Because the promised “equality” and “liberation” have done nothing to help women generally, but have only empowered a certain number of upper-class women (e.g., Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton) to enrich themselves and gain additional social status. Meanwhile, the problem of the poor or working-class woman is actually in many ways far worse than it was in 1968.
Feminism means never having to admit you are wrong. Whatever harms result from today’s feminist “reform” will be blamed on patriarchy when, in another 15 or 20 years, feminists demand new “reform” to cure the problems that their feminist predecessors have caused.
Feminism is a non-falsifiable theory, which explains nothing because it claims to explain everything by a single factor, “male supremacy.”
One other thing. de Beauvoir was past 40 when The Second Sex was published. Her daily life was also a caricature of French decadence.
I’m not seeing how the spinsterish Firestone, living alone in a seedy neighborhood in New York and bothering no one bar her neighbors (when she left the water running) really compares to these other creatures.
“There is none so blind as he who will not see.” — Ray Stevens
So . . . she manages to be creepy and yet pitiable at the same time. Kind of like that “nice guy” she wrote about.
First, JoeBee points out the fact she uses dominatrix lingo. Then Mr. McCain points out she is married. Two data points I simply refuse to put together. I don’t want nightmares.
[…] he’s done another fine job snarkbombing a whiny feminist who decided “SHUT UP/#BLOCKED” is a winning argument. I had a comment, but I decided […]
Tell her slavery was abolished over 150 years ago and why does she want to drag you back to the 19th century?
I’ve often found that the advantage to being a little bit crazy is that it inoculates you against lots of serious dangerous crazy.
“Let me give you a hint, sugar:
Oppressed people don’t go to grad school.
You are not a victim. Stop whining, you spoiled brat.” This just this — these young adults be they feminist, progressive, occupy wallstreet sympathizers, etc. are the most privileged group and yet they constantly prattle on about their oppression and victimization — they are beyond spoiled brats, they are pathological…
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.” — Ronald Reagan
$ell me a $hirt
See, this is where I tend to verge sharply from traditional conservatives, and take the libertarian stance. There is nothing about protesting an emerging fascist corporatist top down police state that makes you a “spoiled brat”. if more people stood up we wouldn’t be here now looking at yet another election between what will likely be two Wall Street/Globalist shills. In all the noise, liberty loving conservatives should have been absolutely outraged(just like in Ferguson)at the heavy handed, militarized police force used to break up an otherwise peaceful protest against state policy, and it’s marriage with the corporate and banking sector. A symptom of this is rising student debt. It was also a shock to me that traditional conservatives helped propagandize, and justify these kind of police actions by claiming the protesters were “rapists”, and “drug addicted”, even though the problems being addressed(but probably not the solutions) effect everyone. This was the same playbook Hoover, and local police used to crush student dissent against the disastrous Vietnam war. Why? The state is what should be under scrutiny for its policy’s and it’s unconstitutional response to protest, and that’s it. It was reckless state policy that birthed both protest movements. Falling for the divide and conquer by our corporate-government masters that puts left and right, and black, and white against each other is nowhere, and why we’re now here in a surveilled, unaccountable, poorly governed police state.
The problem is, it’s the same group of people going around to each of these events; Baltimore, Ferguson, etc. To boot, some of the protesters are there because they’re being paid.
Well Joe, be that as it may, these young adults don’t help their cause, about being oppressed, by showing up to Wall Street in Gucci loafers, Abercrombie&Fitch Che Guevara t- shirts and toting I-Phones and Mac Book computers to complain about the 1%ers. They were a bunch of spoiled brats, most of whom are still living on Mommy and Daddy’s money.
You have it precisely right. In a con game like this, you can always tell as much about what they talk about as what they never talk about. There is no such thing as an objectifying sexual gaze when it comes to lesbians or gay men. That reversal of logic tells you the real game: these shit “feminists” hide behind that word but in fact have the very animus towards men they say all men have towards women. The problem there is all men don’t sit and hate Tweet about all women; only sick “feminists” do.
And as Mr. Felagund noted, a bunch of them were paid to show up.
What’s the old saying? Don’t shoot the messenger? And all the participants were there with Gucci loafers? That’s inane.
I’ve seen plenty of these man-hating feminists who were married. I have no idea what that means other than they may feel they got one of the “good” ones or have simply adopted a sociopathic ideology by proxy thinking it actually is social justice. It’s not like these internet mavins get out alot.
No. Some characters from some Stormfront-type forum showed up a while back and swarmed the place. One of the moderators had to delete all the bilge and ban them.
As a general rule, discussion here goes on within a certain range. You get a one off set of exhanges with some generic portside denizen, or perhaps a gaystapo member, or perhaps a truculent atheist. Otherwise, the outer boundary is represented by a fellow using the handle ‘Adjoran’ and by yours truly.
And that bothers you more than a militarized police force coming in to crush dissent against the corporate state? The outrage should have been over the bad policy, and greedy banks that melted down the economy, and left people destitute, and the heavy handed police response to shut up those who wanted some accountability over it. And that’s it because that is the real danger.
And that bothers you more than bad government-corporate actors and cops showing with machine guns and mraps to break up a protest by young unarmed civilians, and storing their faces in a government database? I would hope not. What’s that old poem, “when the came for the…I was not a..”I think you know what I’m driving at.
And you don’t think that a group of people going around paying people to gin up protest delegitimizes those protests? These are astroturf riots and should be treated as such.
A few people got paid to beef up numbers at a march, and it’s AstroTurf? I don’t even buy that, personally. no, I lived in NYC during that time, and knew many people that were involved, was down there myself once, or twice to observe, and trust me it was not a group of “paid protesters” regardless what propaganda you were dished in order to obscure the message. Unions sometimes pay people to beef up numbers, but that was not the case here in the numerous cities these protests, and campus’s these protests broke out on. This is just as bewildering as the conservative response to Edward Snowden.
You have a government agency conducting a mass surveillance program on American citizens with the help of the corporate sector(an aspect of a totalitarian police state), and completely violating your fourth amendment rights, and the person who blew the whistle is the criminal, his personal life is served up for scrutiny, and he’s labeled “mentally ill” like a subject of the Soviet Union who dissented by a few Fox News corporatist hacks disguising themselves as medical professionals? Really? The criminals were clearly your federal government, the telecoms, and the federal courts who pushed this lawlessness through.
I wish people wouldn’t attack these people on Twitter. McCain does a pretty damn good job of demolishing these peoples positions, and when that turns into twitter abuse it just kind of bolsters their sense of victimhood and makes McCain look like he sent his attack dogs out. It’s unnecessary.
I’ll bet you have read more feminism than the average feminist. Their ideas have horribly negative ramifications for men–they will for women as well, but women haven’t seen it yet. Most people don’t understand how rotten modern feminism’s core is because they hear the soothing political talk on TV which hides the rot.
It’s like Planned Parenthood telling you how they “provide healthcare to women”, “do mammograms” and “save women’s lives,” all in pretty pink colors and female spokespersons. It takes brave undercover activists like CMP to show us that what Planned Parenthood actually does is cut up baby parts and sell them. The revelations coming out of these videos are stunning in their horror. That’s why Cecil Richards and the media refuse to air the videos and are desperately trying to slam the pretty pink lid on top of the moral sewer it is hiding.
Oh, and Planned Parenthood doesn’t do and never did do mammograms. They pull a photocopied paper out of the drawer and show you the addresses of nearby clinics (real clinics) that do mammograms. (This is why Komen was pissed.) In the age of the iPhone, why in heaven’s name are we providing tax dollars for something you can Google or ask Siri for?
And the “breast exams” they claim to do are the ones women do themselves at home: you basically feel around your breast in a circle looking for lumps. Why anyone needs a Planned Parenthood assistant (often not medically certified) to poke around your boob when you can do this better yourself is not clear.
The best answer is that it’s all a smokescreen for the fecal matter and methane gas that will be released in a geyser when the lid comes off.
Meanwhile, watch the video by Dr. Janice Fiamengo (the one I posted). She’s mild mannered but incisive and clear. She’s put up with massive disruptions at her speeches at universities in Canada. And she’s wonderful. She gets it.
Perfect.