‘Rape Culture’ Rhetoric as Bad Poetry

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Alleged poet Rupi Kaur (@rupikaur_)

Just when you think feminism cannot possibly become more absurd, they always manage to push beyond the limits of imagination.

sex takes the consent of two
if one person is lying there not doing anything
cause they are not ready
or not in the mood
or simply don’t want to
yet the other is having sex
with their body it’s not love
is is rape

That is a “poem” by Rupi Kaur, a young Toronto-based feminist whose work has been celebrated by the Huffington Post:

Rupi Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey is the poetry collection every woman needs on her nightstand or coffee table. Accompanied by her own sketches, the beautifully honest poems read like the everyday, collective experiences of today’s modern woman. She experiences love, loss, pain and healing in different chapters of her life. Sometimes she feels as though she has shattered in a million pieces but eventually, she finds strength after picking up the pieces and ultimately survives. Reading the book, is like getting the hug you need on a rainy day, the catharsis you crave after a tragedy.

Just kill me now, please. I’ve seen too much.

If you were to subject this to the kind of mockery it deserves, you would certainly be denounced as a misogynist. But why must such insipid expressions of mundane emotion be treated as if Rupi Kaur has said something profound? What is it about feminism that makes it function as a force-field protecting this kind of mediocre dreck from criticism and ridicule? Surely, there have been excellent women poets in history, and there must be genuinely talented women poets alive in the world today. Rupi Kaur is not one of them, however, and it is an insult to women to expect them to pretend that Rupi Kaur has real talent.

Permit me to observe that Rupi Kaur is saying less, and saying it much less persuasively, than any good pop song would say. Back when I was a kid, we didn’t need feminism — or any kind of campus orientation lecture about “affirmative consent” — to make sense of our feelings about love and sex. We had rock-and-roll and soul music written and sung by some of the greatest lyric poets in the history of the English language.

There’s a rose in the fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove,
And if you can’t be with the one you love,
Honey, love the one you’re with.

OK, so it’s not Shakespeare or Longfellow, but neither of those guys ever had a Top 40 hit. Here’s another classic:

Well, I’m running down the road,
Trying to loosen my load.
Got seven women on my mind:
Four that want to own me,
Two that want to stone me,
One says she’s a friend of mine.
Take it easy.

Hey, you may not think that’s profound, but when I was 17 years old, I could totally relate to that. Here’s another one:

Always and forever,
Each moment with you
Is just like a dream for me
That somehow came true.
And I know tomorrow
Will still be the same,
‘Cause we’ve got a life of love
That won’t ever change.

You’re never gonna get something like that from Rupi Kaur. No feminist is ever going to write the kind of poetry that you want to put to a slow jazzy six-eight beat, so couples can hold each other close and sway together under the magic sparkling light of a rotating mirror ball.

Back in the day, our romantic expectations were expressed through a shared musical vocabulary. You could ask a girl, “What kind of music do you like?” And her answers would tell you a lot about her. When I was a teenage boy learning to play guitar, I sang a lot of Beatles songs — “In My Life” was one — and eventually figured out that old Sam Cooke tunes had a special magic. Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys — you could learn a lot about love from the classics of rock-and-roll, lessons you’ll never get from the grim ideologues of feminism, who expect us to believe Rupi Kaur is a poetic genius.

Nah, sweetheart. You don’t know nothing about poetry.

Tonight you’re mine completely.
You give your love so sweetly.
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes.
Will you still love me tomorrow? . . .

Tonight with words unspoken.
You tell me I’m the only one.
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

That, my friends, is poetry. Rupi Kaur has never written anything nearly as true or beautiful as that, and I doubt she ever will.

(Hat-tip: @DateOffCampus on Twitter.)

UPDATE: Charles Hill wrote about the moral aspects of that 1961 Shirelles classic — co-written by the immortal Carole King — more than a decade ago. Time flies in the blogosphere!




 

89 comments

  2. Let me also say, I spent close to a decade of my life studying literature from the earliest epic poems in German and English to modern works by some well-known authors. The fact that this person is receiving accolades for her crap, demonstrates conclusively why the liberal arts are dying. There is no craft; there is no imagery, no subtlety. There is only one metaphorical and literal “upchuck” on page, then wait for some moron to pat you on the head. “F” me, I’d rather listen to three hours of Rod McKuen than read any more of Ms.Kaur’s oeuvre.

  3. Well I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday
    Parking by the lake and there was not another car in sight
    And I never had a girl looking any better than you did
    And all the kids in school, they were wishing they were me that night

    I typed that from memory. I bet no one has ever typed anything she wrote from memory.

  5. Also, I haven’t done a study or anything, but pretty sure the vast majority of love songs are written by men, not by untalented feminists.

  6. I have spent the last year posting with Mark Steyn, Bob Belvedere and Pundette Frank Sinatra’s greatest songs for his centennial. As you can guess, a lot of the focus is not just on Sinatra but the songwriters who created those classics he sang: Berlin, Porter, the Gershwins, Rogers and Hart, Rogers and Hammerstein, Mercer, Carmichael, Cahn, Styne, Kern, the Bergmans, and VanHeusen (just to name a few).

    I can say this with absolute certainty: Rupi Kaur needs to keep her day job.

  9. Don’t get drunk
    Around strange men
    You’ll regret it
    Burma Shave – generic cool Hindu Muslim whatever

  10. What’s fascinating is the much of “protofeminist” literature was done a long time ago, better and by men. Off the top of my head, Madame Bovary,, Effi Briest, Buddenbrooks and Far from the Madding Crowd come to mind.

    As for female authors, Kate Chopin remains eminent readable to this day, not to mention the Brontë sisters. The strong female character struggling with the constraints of society is not exactly new. The fact that people like Ms.Kaur receive such praise for such crap, all seemingly without knowing they’re plowing old ground is beyond me.

  11. I for one believe this type of literary detritus is promoted in order to cut people off from anything transcendent, aside from promoting the tropes of feminism such as “rape culture” etc
    It’s the literary equivalent of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain which was also heralded as great art back in 1917.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg/851px-Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg
    Yep, that’s a urinal–and allegedly a great work of art.
    And Lena Dunham is a genius writer/director/actress too

  12. All right, it’s bad poetry.

    We’re all guilty of having written bad verse at some time or another. (High school comes to mind.) However, no one outside of a stoned or suicidal friend ever suggested that it was any good.

    The problem here is not Rupi, as godawful as her command of language is. It’s the Huffington Post, the publishers, the college professors, all of whom seem to back her drivel with competitive and frenzied alacrity.

    Ayn Rand pointed out that if you enshrine mediocrity, you destroy greatness. Since the mediocre will always be with us, the fault lies with institutions that seek to enshrine the mediocre at the expense of not only the great but of the society which needs those great to advance.

    Rupi’s mere kindergarten scrawl has been weaponized against not only males, but against the advance of all greatness.

  14. The Ellsworth Toohey speech in Fountainhead was one Rand’s good ones.

    Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You’ve destroyed architecture. Build Lois Cook and you’ve destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you’ve destroyed the theatre. Glorify Lancelot Clankey and you’ve destroyed the press. Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you’ll frighten men, Enshrine mediocrity – and the shrines are razed.

  15. Sounds like the creed of the LA Unified School District, eh?

    And yes, that was the quote that was running through my head. Thanks for posting it!

  18. Personally, if we’re talking lyrics as poetry, I thought this one was profound as a teenager, and as I grow older, it only becomes more so:

    Bla bla bla bla
    Bla bla bla bla, etc.
    Argh…Fuck…Kill

    Dayglo Abortions – Argh Fuck Kill

    Also:

    So, you’ve been to school
    For a year or two
    And you know you’ve seen it all
    In daddy’s car
    Thinking you’ll go far
    Back east your type don’t crawl

    Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia

    Zen fascists will control you
    A hundred percent natural
    You will jog for the master race
    And always wear the happy face
    Close your eyes, can’t happen here
    Big Bro’ on white horse is near
    The hippies won’t come back you say
    Mellow out or you will pay

    California Über Alles
    Über Alles California

    Dead Kennedys – California Über Alles

    It’s amazing how prescient the punks were in the 80s.

  19. At least with a McKuen reading, back in the day you increased your chances for romance significantly, especially if accompanied by some Righteous Brothers in the background. Not so much with Ms. Kaur’s work.

  20. …let’s face it, these harpies
    don’t want love and sex
    from men,
    because they are engrossed
    with their own
    self generated anger.
    They are totally inadequate
    to share anything
    so they are selfish
    and distant
    towards men.
    Live stupid,
    die alone.

  23. Well, perhaps the young lady in question simply needed to consider the basics of philosophy, before focusing on a single aspect of (her) philosophy. I offer a simple, yet penetrating example of poetry put to music, by the noted philosophers SuperTramp (hmm, perhaps they have more in common that just the implications of their name…)

    When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
    A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
    And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
    Joyfully, playfully watching me…
    But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
    Logical, responsible, practical.
    And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
    Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

    There are times when all the world’s asleep,
    The questions run too deep
    For such a simple man.
    Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
    I know it sounds absurd
    But please tell me who I am.

    Now watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,
    Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
    Won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re
    Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!

    At night, when all the world’s asleep,
    The questions run so deep
    For such a simple man.
    Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
    I know it sounds absurd
    But please tell me who I am…

  25. That is not poetry. It’s bad. It’s very bad. I don’t write poetry, any more, because I am not a good poet, but I’m better than she is!

    Second: Yay, Jackson Browne! I have trashed everything of his after Running on Empty, but Late for the Sky remains one of the best albums ever.

    Good lord, Stacy, how do you do it? I’d be clawing my eyes out after trying to read that…thing.

  28. I would tend to agree, but then, my taste doesn’t run to most of the female song writers who spring to mind. For instance, I fled from a Mary Chapin Carpenter concert because she had a line about, “And I wonder where the ghosts of late antiquity go on a night like this.”

    I haven’t forgiven her, yet.

  30. It’s a terrible thing. All of the songs about thinking for yourself and now what little I see of him seems to show a run-of-the-mill leftist hack.
    All the heroes and legends I knew as a child have fallen to idols of clay.
    Someone said that once, sometime.

  34. I agree with this line completely.

    Rupi Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey is the poetry collection every woman needs on her nightstand or coffee table.

    Because seeing that on the bedroom table should act as the worlds most effective contraceptive to any bloke with 1/2 a brain.

    Heres a short piece from an Australian poet (conservative…boo..hiss) a haiku which is like a punch in the gut to any lover of history.

    The Springfields:

    Lead drips out of
    a burning farm rail.
    Their Civil War.

    Lefties criticized it as the ahistorical idiots they are, so he replied with another little poem.

    “Critics didn’t like it,
    said it was obscure –

    The title was the rifle
    both American sides bore,
    lead was its heavy bullet
    the Minié, which tore

    often wet with blood and sera
    into the farmyard timbers
    and forests of that era,
    wood that, burnt even now,

    might still re-melt and pour
    out runs of silvery ichor
    the size of wasted semen
    it had annulled before.”

    I fail to see any level of that sort of mastery of the poetic craft in MZZZ Kaurs output.

  36. It Makes No Difference
    by The Band
    ___________________________
    It makes no difference where I turn
    I can’t get over you and the flame still burns
    It makes no difference, night or day
    The shadow never seems to fade away

    And the sun don’t shine anymore
    And the rains fall down on my door

    Now there’s no love
    As true as the love
    That dies untold
    But the clouds never hung so low before

    It makes no difference how far I go
    Like a scar, the hurt will always show
    And it makes no difference who I meet
    They’re just a face in the crowd on a dead-end street

    And the sun don’t shine anymore
    And the rains fall down on my door

    These old love letters
    Well, I just can’t keep
    Just like the gambler says:
    “Read ’em and weep”
    And the dawn don’t rescue me no more

    Without your love, I’m nothing at all
    Like an empty hall, it’s a lonely fall
    Since you’ve gone it’s a losing battle
    Stampeding cattle, they rattle the walls

    And the sun don’t shine anymore
    And the rains fall down on my door

    Well, I love you so much
    That it’s all that I can do
    Just to keep myself from telling you
    That I never felt so alone before

  38. Hey, Mzzzz Kaur, try this…

    Let’s take it nice ‘n’ easy
    It’s gonna be so easy for us to fall in love
    Hey, baby, what’s your hurry?
    Relax ‘n’ don’t you worry, we’re gonna fall in love

    We’re on the road to romance, that’s safe to say
    But let’s make all the stops along the way

    The problem now, of course, is to simply hold your horses
    To rush would be a crime
    ‘Cause nice ‘n’ easy does it every time

    I got your consent right here.

  40. Somebody say ‘Cole Porter’?…

    My story is much too sad to be told,
    But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
    The exception I know is the case
    When I’m out on a quiet spree,
    Fighting vainly the old ennui,
    And I suddenly turn and see your fabulous face…

    I get no kick from champagne.
    Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.
    So tell me why should it be true
    That I get a kick out of you?

    Some, they may go for cocaine.
    I’m sure that if I took even one sniff
    It would bore me terriffff-ically, too.
    Yet I get a kick out of you.

    I get a kick every time I see
    You standing there before me.
    I get a kick though it’s clear to see
    You obviously do not adore me.

    I get no kick in a plane.
    Flying too high with some gal in the sky
    Is my idea of nothing to do.
    Yet I get a kick –
    Um you give me a boot –
    I get a kick out of you.

    _________________________

    Marvelous.

  44. Hey the left needs a diversity female poet since maya what’s her name died.
    Now there was affirmative action on display.

    This gal has less going for her but the misspellings are pretty good and of course the ideas she tries to convey are all that counts.

    Bless her heart.

  45. White male racist cis scum
    Entitled man-baby racists
    Please stop raping everything
    Rape culture blah, blah, blah
    Burma Shave

  48. I’m at the Stop & Rob
    Buying Morton’s
    And some Duracells.
    If the clerk gives me change
    That I don’t really feel like accepting
    Then that’s a salt and battery,

  49. Laughing eyes and smiling face

    It seems so lucky just to have the right

    Of telling you with all my might

    You’re beautiful tonight

  50. If you’re looking for rock n’ roll poetry with a punch look no further than “Creeque Alley” by John Phillips,
    “Cass was a sophomore,
    Planned to go to Swathmore…”
    A whole story in that short couplet.

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