Fear and Loathing: An Oberlin Feminist on Men, Republicans and Heterosexuality

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“I hope men realize that we (women) actually fear for our safety every time we walk by you on the street.”
— Kaela Elias, Aug. 4

“when i was younger, i thought i was straight because society makes you think that. it’s sad.”
— Kaela Elias, Aug. 9

“. . . luckily i have parents who accept me for whatever i am and i live in berkeley and have plenty of friends who aren’t straight so it’s not that big of a deal. but sexuality is something that changes a lot, so i guess i’ve accepted that it’ll keep changing as i get older and it’ll never stop being confusing.”
— Kaela Elias, Sept. 19

“So many cishet white boys make misogynistic comments around me purposefully because they know I’ll react, but don’t worry everyone!! It’s okay because it’s just a joke 🙂 saying offensive things to a girl that make her uncomfortable is A+ humor, 10/10.”
— Kaela Elias, Nov. 18

“I recently learned that the guy who lives next to me and literally never even makes eye contact with me is a REPUBLICAN. I am scared.”
— Kaela Elias, Dec. 14

Kaela Elias attends Oberlin College (annual tuition $50,586) and describes herself on Tumblr as “a queer introverted feminist” whose “blog is a space for me to unapologetically love myself.” Being from Berkeley, California, where so many of her friends “aren’t straight” and her parents are “accepting” of her “confusing” sexuality, Kaela’s feminism is inspired by her “fear” of males, especially “cishet” males. As incredible as this may seem, some male students at Oberlin College are actually Republican, so she’s “scared.” Feminist Tumblr is full of frightened young women like Kaela Elias, and we must ask whether:

A. Tumblr is an effect, and this easy-to-use blogging platform more or less accidentally became popular with a certain type of feminist;
or
B. Tumblr is a cause, and this hive of LGBT activism actually facilitates the adolescent sexual confusion that so often accompanies the self-described “feminist” identity.

There is a certain type of brainy, socially awkward girl, of which Kaela Elias is an excellent example, whose tendency to overthink everything makes them vulnerable to the kind of “bisexuality” she describes as “confusing.” While I don’t want to play amateur psychoanalyst here, anyone who has read my series of posts about Feminist Tumblr knows how often the same set of factors overlap.

What we might call Feminist Tumblr Syndrome is manifested by a cluster of symptoms that typically include depression and/or anxiety, an inability to form stable romantic relationships, an irrational fear or hostility toward males, and the expression of a non-heterosexual orientation as a basis of personal and/or political identity.

Excessive involvement in online social media, to the detriment of real-life interaction with people, can be seen as both cause and effect of Feminist Tumblr Syndrome. The more she isolates herself alone in her room with her laptop, the more she identifies with the like-minded feminists she encounters online, and the less she is able to relate to ordinary people around her, especially heterosexual males, who are constantly the object of scornful denunciation on Feminist Tumblr.

Kaela Elias uses “bossy-feminist” as her Tumblr URL and calls her blog “Professional Killjoy.” Here is what she wrote in answer to someone who asked her if she “hates” men:

I hate male entitlement; I hate the things men are expected to do and think; I hate how much space men take up and that they don’t even realize it; I hate the way men oppress others and create violence and the fact that it’s often unintentional; I hate that I often don’t feel safe around men but still feel pressure to seek their approval.

So, she doesn’t “hate” men, she just hates everything they do or say. She hates men for being so . . . well, masculine, basically.

Men “oppress others and create violence” — even at an elite liberal arts school like Oberlin College, where Kaela Elias encounters “cishet white boys” who say “offensive things to a girl that make her uncomfortable.”

Kaela Elias is “scared” of the Republican guy who “literally never even makes eye contact with me,” but can you imagine the terror she would experience if he did make eye contact? My hunch is that the Republican guy never makes eye contact with any female student at Oberlin because he knows they’re all paranoid feminists who would accuse him of “objectification” and “harassment” if he ever so much as looked at them. (Smart boys avoid unnecessary interaction with women who exhibit an attitude of hostile suspicion, as crazy feminists usually do.)

Is feminism a political movement or a personality disorder? Feminist Tumblr is an environment where it is impossible to draw an clear line between ideology and mental illness. Kaela Elias’ parents in California are rich enough to send her to a private college in Ohio where tuition is $50,586 a year, yet she has a weird fixation with “oppression”:

friendly reminder that it’s not the job of an oppressed person to educate someone who’s privileged. if someone who’s oppressed feels comfortable to inform a privileged person about that system of oppression, the privilege person should be eternally grateful and also not expect the oppressed person to be 100% polite. systems of oppression are literal shit, and if the privileged person did something to perpetuate that system, they shouldn’t expect the oppressed person to calmly sit down with them and explain way they’re offended. It’s not their job, and if they are kind enough to do that, the privileged person should be thankful rather than defensive.

But wait! There’s more:

Privileged people need to stop criticizing the way marginalized people react to their oppression. If you’re an oppressor, it is never your job to criticize the way others react to oppression that you perpetuate.

What inspired these particular bursts of jargon? She doesn’t say. She also doesn’t say what made her choose to attend Oberlin, rather than staying home to attend UC-Berkeley, where in-state tuition is only $13,432 a year. When you’re spending Daddy’s money, the sky’s the limit, so Kaela Elias locks herself away in her dorm at Oberlin, scared of that Republican guy next door, blogging about how “privileged” people should never criticize “marginalized” people about their “oppression.”

Perhaps you have noticed something about Kaela Elias:

people telling me I’m looking for a reason to be angry is ridiculous considering how many things in the world are worth being furious about. If you’re not mad, you’re not thinking critically. anger and productivity go together, and frustration makes me passionate, which motivates me to combat injustice. why is anger negative? anger is necessary. anger is a justified response to oppression.

Men have a problem with Kaela Elias:

I’m done trying to reassure men that the feminist movement benefits them. It absolutely does help men, but if the only reason you support a movement is because it directly affects you, then we have a problem.

Kaela Elias has a problem with men:

I have such low expectations for men, but 90% of them still don’t meet them

Men get defensive with a feminist like Kaela Elias:

if a woman expresses her opinion about the patriarchy, men freak the fuck out and get incredibly defensive, yet women are the ones who supposedly overreact about everything?

Other feminists need political advice from Kaela Elias:

Regardless of how problematic Hillary’s policies are, she’s a CONSIDERABLY better candidate than any republican running. If you think you’re protesting her policies by not voting or by voting for an obscure third party candidate, understand that you’re just making it more likely for us to have a republican president.

Despite her willingness to publish her angry rants on Tumblr for all the world to see, Kaela Elias is shy and awkward:

i want to get to know so many people but i’m too shy to talk to them

Again:

so many people to meet at my school, why must i be so shy?

And again:

i hate being shy. i hate feeling awkward or not knowing what to say because then people think i’m boring, but in reality there’s a lot going on in my head i just choose not to share it. i’m usually quiet around people whose opinions i care about and loud around people whose opinions don’t matter to me. so people who i don’t particularly like tend to like me, while people i like don’t always like me. it’s a constant cycle i wish i could stop.

Tempting as it is to recommend Wild Turkey and cocaine — a miracle cure, according to the famed expert Dr. Hunter S. Thompson — I’m not sure Kaela Elias could handle such strong medicine. Who knows how an introverted queer feminist would react to the gonzo treatment? Case studies indicate the effects can be unpredictable.

As I recall, back in the ’70s, a college girl with a steady supply of Daddy’s money could get herself into all kinds of trouble while trying to overcome her shyness. That was before the Internet, however, and now all the shy girls are on Tumblr ranting about “oppression” instead of partying with rock-and-roll outlaws. But I digress . . .

Feminist Tumblr is narcissism masquerading as political activism. Ranting inside an echo chamber about “cishet white boys” doesn’t persuade anyone or accomplish anything in terms of ending the “oppression” under which Kaela Elias imagines she is suffering. Rather than admit that she is the problem — she is privileged, not oppressed, and her shyness and insecurities are the real source of her own unhappiness — instead she uses politics as a rationalization, a defense mechanism that protects her damaged ego by externalizing blame. Her unhappiness is not her fault. She blames “society” for making her think she was heterosexual when she was younger and blames men for the irrational fear she feels toward them, even while she feels “pressure to seek their approval.”

Because she can never accept responsibility for her own problems, Kaela Elias needs a scapegoat and feminist ideology offers her “the patriarchy,” a “system of oppression” of which she may imagine herself a victim. Never mind all those poor people who can’t afford $50,586 a year to attend Oberlin — none of them are oppressed the way Kaela Elias is. They are “not thinking critically” like her. They are not full of the “frustration” that makes Kaela Elias “passionate . . . to combat injustice.”

And as for men, she has “low expectations” for them that 90% are unable to meet. Who could blame Kaela Elias for hating men, considering how they “oppress others and create violence”? In fact, she may considers it violent oppression for me to quote her blog. I just hope she doesn’t “freak the fuck out and get incredibly defensive.”

Merry Christmas, Kaela Elias.




 

217 comments

  2. Look at this: http://elsinore-snores.com/post/135351548330/neuroatypically-speaking-cultural-temmieism

    According to over 26,000 people on Tumblr it is no longer politically correct for non-Muslims to use the word “Jihad”, which only means, “struggle”, and not “holy war”. Of course, radical Islam is nowhere near as bad as the Pope, either.

    Amazing how suicidal, and destructive leftist ideology is.

    This lunatic thinks ISIS has free speech rights under the US Constiution and cutting off their internet access would be violating their rights! Mother of God!

    https://mobile.twitter.com/rabite/status/676960154806591488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

  3. Perhaps he has not made eye contact, but HAS made eye-to-boob contact, and is not impressed.

    Speaking of eye-to-something contact, I went to a 99% male STEM college in FL, where it was hot most of the year. In one of my classes, the prof arranged the desks in 2 rows facing each other, perpendicular to the front of the room. It was there where I, a young virgin, learned what the phrase “going commando” meant. And in many cases, I was not impressed.

    I asked the prof about the seating arrangement, and about having to stare* at nerds’ packages for an hour at a pop, and he said, “Better you than me.”

    *It was like a train wreck; I had to look. You believe me, right?

  5. “Ostensible” being the operative word re: parental acceptance. Perhaps the point to sending her to Oberlin was separating her from all the Berkley “friends”.

  8. If “jihad” only means “struggle”, then why would leftists care who uses it? Examples:

    My kid is jihading with his math homework.

    Getting into these size 4 jeans is quite a jihad.

    Marxism is about class jihad.

    We’re trying to conceive right now, and keeping a calendar has been a real jihad.

    Reasoning with leftists is a jihad.

  10. Her fear and anger at men indicates some form of strong coping issues one usually wouldn’t have in a healthy home environment relating to men. I’m guessing there was some severe assault in her recent past.

  12. This girl needs mental help, and her parents should be ashamed of themselves for creating a maladjusted, confused, bitter little misfit. But heaven forbid she look in the mirror for the answers to her “problems”.
    She has a promising future as a lonely womyns studies teaching assistant….

  15. Job? Job? She doesn’t need to do anything plebeian like work! As a Special Snowflake™, she should simply be supported, by tax dollars taken from white cisheteronormative men.

  16. This is because you are measuring her “equality” by white cisheteronormative patriarchal standards, which are not only invalid, but are Oppressive and Must Be Eliminated.

    Truly enlightened people understand that she is your moral and intellectual superior.

    I denounce you for your callousness toward Our Betters.

  22. So here is my question: what is the emotional and psychological cost of all this? I mean, all the rage and hatred? We know this precious princess cannot be experiencing any actual oppression and has not since her mother wouldn’t buy her that Hello Kitty halter top at age seven.

    So it’s obviously all an act, a show. But you cannot continuously simulate and express rage and hatred without it affecting how you view the world. And of course, there’s the pathetic disconnect between what she says and the actual world in which she says it, so cognitive dissonance has to be at work however mightily she strives to find masculine evil oppressing her.

    So what happens? At what point does this turn inward and feed upon her personality? When does she become irretrievably warped and dysfunctional? Does she shut up and get a life before she ends up pushing a shopping cart, wearing a bathrobe, and shrieking at traffic? At what point do her lies become unsustainable and she collapses into hysteria or paralysis? At what point does she move into neurosis and then into psychosis?

  23. So they have be skewing the average even more then.

    Anyway, you read one or two pieces by Malkin and you realize she’s one tough cookie, nobody is oppressing her. Lena on the other hand is a spoiled child of privilege and would be sitting pretty wherever she went to school.

  26. It’s those toxic rays she emits. Were she to enter my presence I would make eye contact and keep facing her until she departed. Ideally I would maneuver to place a heavy object between us and never let her get between me and the only exit.

  27. My theory is that people keep cats because they’re not yet ready to have an abusive relationship with another human.

  28. I am unaware of any Islamic empire which voluntarily ceased expanding or gave up conquered territory without being expelled from it. Contrast that to the supposed “imperialism” of America which gave back Japan, Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan and has never conquered Mexico or Canada though it could easily enslave both. Were Islam as powerful as America none of those would be true.

  29. On the other hand, Dad might have thought it a bargain to put most of a continent between himself and Princess.

  30. That reminds me, I make it a point to reread Meditations and the Book of Five Rings every few years. Time to have another go.

  32. If he’s smart he’ll continue to ignore her the rest of the time he’s at Oberlin. She’s bad news.

  33. “You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it’s waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.” — Hunter S. Thompson

  35. In reading her “Thoughts” page I was struck by how she simply repeated nearly identical arguments I’ve seen over and over again in the radical feminist community. It’s like she copied them out of a text.

  37. Or she’s a self-dramatizing attention whore. Not every action is a reaction.
    There is some indication (via White Pages) that her family lives in Vallejo, Ca, which is about 20 miles north of Berkeley in Solano County. It’s a pretty expensive place to live. Median asking price for homes currently on sale is about $300,000. Vallejo itself is demographically dominated by non-whites and evidently has long had a large population of queers, which may account for what’s fashionable among her circle of late adolescent friends.

  38. Whoa whoa whoa there Sparky. You tread perilously close to suggesting that she take personal responsibility for herself.

    Victim shaming, that’s wot that is, squire!

  43. I agree. Even assuming that she was attacked or assaulted, then she should be aware that her views aren’t necessarily normal, in which case, her entire routine is just a dishonest scam to cover her shame.

  44. I was forward deployed to Subic Bay until mid ’92, when the US left.

    We left because the host nation asked us to. Yup, that’s imperialism for you!

  45. It’s akin to the mush mouthed platitudes the hard left voiced after 9/11: “We support the troops, but not their mission.”

    Riiiiight. They’re swell guys committing atrocities and war crimes in an illegal and immoral war for oil yada yada yada.

  46. I hope they accounted for that in their statistics. I’d hate to think they used a straight average and those two high-income figures are skewing the results upward.

  47. Just reading meditations now for the first time. Its a good little read which reinforces the idea you are commander of your own soul, those outside can affect your sense of self worth only if you let them.
    Its a book these tumberlinas should read instead of another “all men are bad’ screed from a lesbian recruiter on campus.

  48. How do so many people get so screwed up? It must take an Ivy League professor to cause this level of insanity….

  50. It’s like she copied them out of a text.

    Precisely. Her thoughts are merely a series of assertions borrowed from others without the slightest hint that she’s investigated them or contemplated what they actually mean. Consider this quoted above:

    Privileged people need to stop criticizing the way marginalized people react to their oppression. If you’re an oppressor, it is never your job to criticize the way others react to oppression that you perpetuate.

    Care to bet whether she has a coherent, philosophically consistent definitions of what constitutes “privilege” or “oppression?” Undoubtedly she view those terms as self-defining and the truth of her injunction to be self-evident. It’s the typical Progressive/Leftist rhetorical sleight of hand which elevates the purely subjective to the level of objective reality and precludes any critical examination of the underlying premises.

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