Check Your Monosexual Privilege!

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Birds of weird feathers flock together, and when Melissa Fabello decided to engage in a Twitter colloquy with me (of course I mean, not me), she accidentally introduced me to her friend, Australian freelance writer Catherine Bouris, who has degrees from the University of Sydney and UCLA. Tempted as I am to snark about this ridiculous level of overcredentialization — you don’t need a master’s degree to be a freelance writer — that would be an irrelevant digression. Ms. Bouris made a remark about Ms. Fabello’s boyfriend, who is a secularized Muslim SJW (not a Hitachi Magic Wand), but that is also irrelevant.

My point is that Melissa Fabello’s relentless promotion of LGBTQIA sexuality at Everyday Feminism attracts to the site (surprise!) a lot of LGBTQIA feminists. What dopeheads are at a Grateful Dead concert or fat people at an all-you-can-eat buffet, weirdo women are at Everyday Feminism. (Miriam Mogilevsky’s latest: “5 Ways to Maintain Your Queer Identity in a Relationship People Read as Straight.”) There are women who claim to be both heterosexual and feminist, but good luck finding one among young devotees of Third Wave feminism, which is “inclusive” of everything except being normal. Meanwhile, in Australia . . .

 

Catherine Bouris wants the world to know she is bisexual:

It’s taken me quite a while to get to the point where I’m comfortable writing and being open about something like this. For a long time, I had tricked myself into believing I wasn’t really bisexual, because there’s so much literature out there that reinforces the notion that it’s ‘just a phase’ or ‘just hormones’ or simply ‘not real’.
It’s so exhausting existing in a world that repeatedly tells you your identity is invalid, or a phase, or a front to attract heterosexual men. . . .

(Oh, the protestations of reluctance to disclose her bisexuality! Oh, victim of a cruel world that won’t stop invalidating her identity!)

As one queer friend said, “there’s definitely a cultural thing around not being Gay Enough” that monosexual people — that is, those who are attracted to only one gender — reinforce within queer circles, to the detriment of bi- and pansexual folks. Some are convinced you’re merely going through a phase, just experimenting, and you’ll use them and abandon them once you’ve realised you’re Really Heterosexual. . . .

(“No matter how many times I tell people I’m a permanently perverted, they continue to insist I might yet turn out to be normal.”)

Some argue that because you occasionally enter into opposite-sex relationships . . .

(How often is “occasionally”? And what do you mean by “relationships”? The answers to these questions might be important. But never mind.)

. . . you benefit from ‘straight-passing privilege’, in that you aren’t in a visibly queer relationship, and therefore won’t have to deal with homophobia from wider society. While this is true, a friend of mine pointed out a downside to this, and that is that ‘passing as straight’ comes at the cost of your identity. I’m not arguing that passing under homophobes’ radar is worse than blatant homophobia, but when you know that entering into an opposite-sex relationship may damage your reputation within the LGBTI community, it can weigh heavily on you.

OK, let’s stop here to contemplate what Ms. Bouris is saying. Why should she care that her “reputation” will suffer “damage” in the “community”?

Exactly where does this “community” exist, and what authority does it wield, that Ms. Bouris worries they’re talking about her behind her back?

“Did you hear about Catherine?” she imagines one lesbian whispering to another. “She betrayed the LGBTI community! Saturday night, I saw her at the movies with a cishet male! She was even holding hands with him!”

To this bit of gossip, the other lesbian replies sadly, “They’re probably having PIV. You know how those bisexual women are.”

“Yeah,” sighs the gossipy lesbian. “They’re all like that.”

Since when did this “community” acquire the small-town pharisaical self-righteousness of the Harper Valley PTA? Would any sane person care about losing their “identity” because of “straight-passing privilege”?

By the way, how finely tuned is the “radar” of homophobia that Ms. Bouris attributes to “the wider society”? How paranoid do you have to be, to spend so much time worrying about other people’s opinions? And since we’re asking questions that no Third Wave feminist ever seems to ask, exactly what is the point of proclaiming your bisexuality to the world?

Never mind. Please continue, Ms. Bouris:

It’s the little things that add up and become too much to deal with. Other queer people describing you as ‘not completely straight’ in a dismissive tone. People of all sexualities telling you you’re either gay or straight and in denial, or insisting bisexuality simply isn’t real. Heterosexual men insinuating you’re only in a same-sex relationship for their attention. . . .
This type of rigid, binary thinking isn’t necessarily shocking when expressed by society at large, but it definitely should not have a place in the LGBTI community.

The Commissar has spoken! Down with kulaks and saboteurs! We must rid The People’s Democratic Republic of LGBTI of “rigid binary thinking”!

When I tell you Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, do you see what I’m talking about? This kind of dictatorial insistence that everyone must have Correct Opinions — which is what Catherine Bouris is really saying — is characteristic of all varieties of 21st-century identity politics, and the echo of Marxist-Leninist ideology and rhetoric in contemporary feminism is no accident.

How many times must I recommend to readers Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements? Speaking of the “successful techniques of conversion” used by such movements, Hoffer explained that “a proselytizing mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind.” This tactic of inciting resentment and frustration has a magnetic appeal to certain types of personalities, whom Hoffer describes in Part 2 of The True Believer, particularly in chapters VI (“Misfits”) through XI (“The Sinners”). Once you understand this, everything we see in contemporary feminism becomes familiar. The feminist — by which I mean a woman for whom allegiance to the movement defines her worldview — is different from other women in ways that are non-random. There is a definite pattern discernible in the movement’s core membership. Feminists lament negative “stereotypes” about their movement, but exactly who is to blame?

“Women are a degraded and terrorized people. Women are degraded and terrorized by men. … Women’s bodies are possessed by men. … Women are an enslaved population. … Women are an occupied people.”
— Andrea Dworkin, 1977 speech at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in Letters from a War Zone (1993)

“Women’s heterosexual orientation perpetuates their social, economic, emotional, and sexual dependence on and accessibility by men. Heterosexuality is thus a system of male ownership of women . . .”
— Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory From Feminist Theory” (1994) in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 2002)

“Heterosexism is maintained by the illusion that heterosexuality is the norm.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”
— Radical Wind, August 2013

“So radical feminism saw heterosexuality under patriarchy as massively problematic, because it benefited men and it disadvantaged women. . . . I hope heterosexuality doesn’t survive, actually. . . . And I am sick of hearing from individual women that their men are all right. Those men have been shored up by the advantages of patriarchy. . . . I would love to see a women’s liberation that results in women turning away from men.”
— Julie Bindel, 2015

What part of the phrase “anti-male hate propaganda” does anyone need me to explain here? Yet no matter how many examples of such hateful rhetoric I cite, no matter how famous or obscure the source, no matter whether the quote is from the 1970s or the 1990s or this week, from a blogger or from a Women’s Studies textbook assigned in university classrooms across the country, feminists will continue to blame their enemies for the negative “stereotype” of feminists as man-haters.

Do you see how the feminist movement “deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind,” as Hoffer said?

If a woman declares herself a feminist, she must certainly feel frustrated to realize how far the “wider society” is from the movement’s ideal of “equality.” She will feel frustrated that most of her friends and family “just don’t get it.” She will feel frustrated by “stereotypes” of what a feminist is. Her feelings of frustration, however, serve only to increase her commitment to The Cause. She must fight harder! Once the movement has triumphed over “rigid, binary thinking,” she tells herself, her courageous fight for equality will be recognized and rewarded.

Men are the feminist movement’s enemy — “the agents of our oppression” — and thus anti-male rhetoric becomes a virtue-signaling gesture among feminists. It is considered a marker of “courage” among feminists to express their thorough contempt of men. Behold how Melissa Fabello delights in insulting men as intellectually inferior:

 

You are a “troll” if you disagree with Melissa Fabello. You are an uneducated idiot, incapable of logic, ignorant, hard to talk to because you’re always wrong, your opinions are not needed, and you lack the mental acuity to debate her. But don’t you dare say she hates men.

The purpose of this rhetorical tactic is transparent:

Being constantly insulted by feminists — “Heterosexuality Is the Structure That Keeps Sexist Oppression in Place” — is something men are expected never to notice. Any man who objects to feminism’s anti-male hate propaganda will be instantly branded a misogynist. This is “Kafkatrapping,” whereby the denial of guilt is cited as proof of guilt.
No feminist ever wants to hear a word any man has to say, because men are always wrong about everything, and the only “right” a man now has is his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

Feminism confers on its adherents an unlimited entitlement to monopolize the conversation, to exclude from consideration any possibility of error, and especially to prohibit any male from contradicting them. Disagreement is proof that you are a sexist, and therefore one marvels at the existence of that misbegotten latter-day chimera, The Male Feminist, the Bicycle a Fish Doesn’t Need.

Any serious student of feminism understands that the only two things a man can do to please a feminist is (a) shut up and (b) go away. Nevertheless, some men want to be “allies” of the feminist movement. Here we have testimony from the bisexual feminist Catherine Bouris:

I’m close to entering the workforce, and I’m dreading it, but not because I’m scared of adulthood and responsibilities (although I’ll admit that is part of it). I’m scared of having to deal with boys’ clubs. If you’ve ever even remotely been involved in any sort of activism, either on or offline, you will have encountered the brogressives who grow up to establish these workplace gangs.
What is a ‘brogressive’, exactly? It’s the guy with ‘feminist’ in his Twitter bio. It’s the guy who clicks ‘like’ every single selfie he sees and pretends he’s supportive and not just extremely thirsty. It’s the guy who thinks feminists are too hard on Julian Assange. It’s the guy who uses misogynistic slurs like ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ to describe things or people he dislikes, only to get offended when you ask that he not. It’s the guy who talks over women in every single conversation, sharing ‘insights’ that he believes the world cannot go without hearing.
It’s the kind of guy who will bide his time, gaining your trust, only to send you an unsolicited d–k pic and ask for your nudes in return in ‘celebration of the human body’. It’s the kind of guy who resents the ‘brogressive’ label, because he is not a bro, thank you very much, he is a Nice Guy Who Respects Women.
In activist circles, brogressives dominate discussions, insert themselves into autonomous spaces and demand recognition. Their mere presence in these spaces means people are less likely to listen to anyone besides them, because society tells us every single day that white cisgender men are to be respected above all others. Brogressives know this. They rely on this.

Beware of any man who puts “feminist” in his Twitter bio. Better yet, beware of any man who, the minute a woman says she’s a feminist, doesn’t have the good sense and common decency to shut up and go away.

In June 2011, the Right Online conference and the left-wing Netroots Nation were both in Minneapolis, and there was some kind of “confrontation” involving Andrew Breitbart. Arriving belatedly at the scene of the “incident,” I was talking to Dave Weigel and some other blogger types about what happened when I looked up and noticed, about 150 feet away, a familiar-looking woman walking toward us.

“Is that who I think it is?” I said to Dave.

“Amanda Marcotte? Yeah.”

“See you later,” I said, and exited in the opposite direction.

The proximity of evil is something I try to avoid.




 


51 comments

  2. You can’t help but thinking this “Hi, by the way I’m genderqueer” is the new tattoo, the new social status, a combination of the dishonesty and delusion which produced Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King It’s a way of proving one’s street cred; no one can say you’re lying. You don’t have to ever act on it; just say the oath and you’re in. However you do have to constantly remind people of your new tattoo or it becomes invisible and your husband, boyfriend and even baby threaten your status.

    In Jane Eyre, Rochester remarks, “…offering a premium on incapacity, I shall now endeavour to fail”

    Offer a premium on oppression, and the oppressed come crawling out of the woodwork, all claiming some one-drop status in a race to the bottom, the very one-drop status one used to flee from. People don’t just come out of the closet anymore, they launch a raid on their own closet complete with searchlights, announcements and constant updates.

    In just sci-fi alone, the double Hugo-winning Kameron Hurley – married to a man – claims she’s a “member of a couple of groups that a lot of people would like to throw in a gaol or drag to death behind the back of a truck” and that she keeps an FBI file. Despite such fear, the only way anyone would suspect a married woman of being gay is if she made a public announcement. That’s the usual feminist pattern of public pronouncements followed by claims of harassment.

    Hugo nominee Foz Meadows – a married woman with child – claims on her bio at her publishers that she is “genderqueer” right off the bat. No mention of marriage or child.

    Hugo and Nebula nominee Saladin Ahmed – a half-Irish guy who looks like a leprechaun – constantly boosts his Arab Muslim status and harassment while virtually never mentioning his Irish background. SF author Tobias Buckell constantly reminds people he is “PoC,” though he looks like a typical white guy, in fact, because of it. Black female author N.K. Jemisin likes to claim her career was “strangled” at birth despite 5 Nebula nominations from day one.

    The truth is the status these people receive far outweighs any fear of hate they’ll receive. The more hate they can claim to receive the more they like it. That makes them part of the in-crowd and boosts their award nomination hopes.

  3. You may mock Ms. Bouris, but she does have something to fear. Bisexuals and transexuals have always been an uncomfortable fit with the LG part of LGBT. (In fact, truth be told, lesbians are not always particularly fond if their gay male brothers who pull rank as males, but that’s another story.)

    Bisexuals were needed in the movement for their numbers. With the CDC estimating that only 2% of males are MSMs (men who have sex with men), and other studies only going as high as 3%, the gay movement alone would not have been able to muster up the crowds to get their destructive agenda off the ground.

    Bisexuals–especially people who perceived themselves to be bisexual due to some alcohol-laced experiences–were larger in numbers than those that were strictly gay. With bisexuals (and a tiny handful of transexuals), the GLBT movement could count itself as “10%” of the population (Kinsey’s ridiculous number, but one that rivaled African Americans at 12%). The GLBT movement could also claim to speak for more groups than gays, especially as they added more letters to the acronym: GLBTIQ…. (I=intersex, Q=questioning, etc.)

    I personally know straights supportive of gay marriage who were, nonetheless, shocked when a recent UCLA study (with hard stats) estimated the number of homosexuals (both genders) at around 1.6% of the population. I wonder if there would have been such support for gay “marriage” (as opposed to civil unions) if Americans had realized just how few people they were talking about.

    Bisexuals helped beef up the numbers, especially as more “gender-bending” heterosexuals, like Madonna, introduced the idea of experimenting with women, as she did with Sandra Bernhard, thereby augmenting the numbers of “bisexuals.” But, bisexuals had to hold a strict “pro-gay” line, including the idea of “inborn” homosexuality. Remember when Cynthia Nixon, a true bisexual actress from “Sex in the City”, made the “mistake” of saying that the sex of the person she loved was “a choice.” She was made to backpedal.

    But for bisexuals, there really is a choice. Cynthia Nixon was speaking her truth. But GLAAD–an activist group containing, ironically, some of the most miserable people in the world–could not have that truth spoken out loud, because it would have destroyed the quest for establishing the biological equivalence of homo and heterosexuality.

    When a bisexual ends up settling down with a person of the opposite sex, this is felt as a betrayal. Bouris does have something to worry about, especially among her lesbian friends. She may find herself losing her lesbian friends and settling into a more heterosexual lifestyle.

    Transsexuals can have an equal problem. Many years ago, at a rather uncomfortable party, I actually met a lesbian who was in the process of getting male hormones. This was in the late 80s, when such procedures were well below the radar, and I had never run into this sort of thing. I had been brought to this party by a lovely young woman who, unfortunately, spend most of her time working on Democrat campaigns. She had an unusually wide circle of friends, including feminist groups who helped with voter registration and phone banks.

    This lesbian getting male hormones was extremely narcissistic and spoke of nothing all night except her hormone injections and her pending surgery to anyone she could entrap into a long conversation. When I had gone into another room to get my date a drink, this lesbian grabbed her arm. My date did not want to be rude, thinking she might have another phone banker or voter outreach person. When I came back, the lesbian getting male hormones was bitterly complaining that her lesbian reading group (which was apparently reading Mary Daly’s dictionary (?) at the time) was furious with her for the sex change she was undergoing. Her fellow lesbians had told her that she would be kicked out of the reading group for being “another male chauvinist pig” once she had made the complete change.

    I kid you not.

    Meanwhile, my date had gripped my arm, and I was able to find an excuse for us to leave.

    The mistake we make with GLBTQRSTUV… is to assume that they are an entirely united front and not a somewhat ill-fitting coalition. Of course, mentioning this now is probably a “hate crime.”

  4. Yep. As a general rule, bisexuals get more flak from gays and lesbians than they get from straight people.

  5. The poor old B’s are the poor cousins in the LGBTQWTFOMGBBQ Coalition of Deviance. Yes their behavior is deviant, but not deviant enough and occasionally it falls back to the less deviant out of wedlock PIV stuff. Whereas the T’s (don’t get me started on the T’s)…for them it is not so much about where they stick their genitals and more about what sort of surgery they want for their genitals.

    What is the common denominator (as my maths teacher used to keep asking)?

  6. The poor old B’s are the poor cousins in the LGBTQWTFOMGBBQ Coalition of Deviance. Yes their behavior is deviant, but not deviant enough and occasionally it falls back to the less deviant out of wedlock PIV stuff. Whereas the T’s (don’t get me started on the T’s)…for them it is not so much about where they stick their genitals and more about what sort of surgery they want for their genitals.

    What is the common denominator (as my maths teacher used to keep asking)?

  7. “OK, let’s stop here to contemplate what Ms. Bouris is saying. Why should
    she care that her “reputation” will suffer “damage” in the “community”?”

    Well how about that. All these years of screaming for tolerance and it turns out that the gay community is completely small-minded. I mean, who wouldda thought it?

  8. “OK, let’s stop here to contemplate what Ms. Bouris is saying. Why should
    she care that her “reputation” will suffer “damage” in the “community”?”

    Well how about that. All these years of screaming for tolerance and it turns out that the gay community is completely small-minded. I mean, who wouldda thought it?

  9. Morons is more like it. These people either can’t figure out the simplest ideas or are liars. For example yesterday Larry Elder was pointing out a simple thing feminist have turned into a Rubik’s Cube: that there is no such thing as “institutional” or “systemic” racism without an institution or system. Or sometimes feminists use “structural.” Using such terms, I can say anything is anything. I can say not a lot of women writing adventure stories is “proof” women adventure story writers don’t get published because of sexism. Then the pie-charts come out and next thing you know some morons are retaliating with all-female adventure story anthologies no man can submit to. That, by the way, actually would be “systemic” sexism and discrimination. Other morons have a racially segregated “safer-space” at a convention, which makes that “institutional” racism.

  10. I read her tweets and this LGBTQIA with a masters degree can only spout “You don’t have logic! I have logic!” I bet she could wrestle Plato to the mat with that kind of argumentation.

    I love “logic lectures” from liberals.

  11. It says something nasty about the queer community that they want some kind of commitment in the first place, instead of actually taking people as they are. So what if there are LUGs (lesbians until graduation), for example? Even if someone is just using a sexual orientation as “one weird trick to be hip and avoid cads,” you’d have to be pretty solipsistic to get bent out of shape over that.

  12. Every time I read one of these litanies of “oppression” and/or protestations about the validity of one’s “Identity” as same usually pertains to some sort of dysfunction, I’m reminded of psychology’s flirtation with Transactional Analysis of the ’60s and ’70s. It’s as if all these people are vying for inclusion as a case study in the 21st century version of I’m OK. You’re OK. Now We Can Start..

  13. Their risible attempts at dialectic are a refreshing change from their bad statistics and worse science.

  14. What would she have to fear? First off, why tell anyone anything about her personal life? Secondly, is someone making her hang out with authentic gay people?

  20. A friend’s first wife was a doctrinaire progressive. Well, okay, they met in college and were dumb enough to really think that “love is all you need,” before he discovered that mutual respect is paramount.

    One thing she did that still bothers him to this day, thirty years later, is when they were having an argument and she’d say “I don’t buy into that logic.”

    As he says “I don’t understand that – logic is logic. It’s valid or invalid. Something is true or not whether you agree or disagree.”

  21. A friend’s first wife was a doctrinaire progressive. Well, okay, they met in college and were dumb enough to really think that “love is all you need,” before he discovered that mutual respect is paramount.

    One thing she did that still bothers him to this day, thirty years later, is when they were having an argument and she’d say “I don’t buy into that logic.”

    As he says “I don’t understand that – logic is logic. It’s valid or invalid. Something is true or not whether you agree or disagree.”

  22. Always remember and never forget that Male Homosexuality is inborn and Female Homosexuality is a choice.

  24. What bothers me the most about the queer community is their insistence that I give a rip, combined with their bizarre insistence that what they do in bed totally defines them in every aspect of life.

  25. Except that their version is “I’m more oppressed than you so shut up and let me be in charge.”

  26. Sometimes it gives me the galloping fantods just thinking about reading all of that crap. H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe combined on their worst days could not produce a more incoherent dysfunctional mess than SJW Grievance Theory.

  28. And none of them see the irony in the fact that if they were truly oppressed, there would be no nominations after such admissions. And it makes a mockery of those who are legitimately oppressed (if any such individual actually exists in the present PC culture. Well, maybe Christians; if not now for that group, then soon.)

    That is why I’ve long said that all of us…every last one…ought to claim at least one sort of sexual/gender/minority status and its attendant oppression status. Then, suddenly, oppression counts for nothing because we are all oppressed. It’s the only way to rid society of these bogus, self-serving claims.

  30. You’re right, of course, about the reversal of systemic discrimination. And how blind fools don’t see the irony (and falsehood) of their claims.

  31. You’re right, of course, about the reversal of systemic discrimination. And how blind fools don’t see the irony (and falsehood) of their claims.

  33. This is a game of trying to claim importance in a world that frankly doesn’t give much of a sh*t about how special anyone is. I remember seeing the captain of our football team and big shot from high school at college and he just looked lost. No one cared. The internet gives people the illusion of being able to be celebrities, but it is really fake–just go to the airport and see if anyone notices you. And instead of being a celebrity because you saved someone from a fire, served in combat, or created a business that employs 50 people, these yahoos want to be famous because of their sexual orientation. But because we can’t tell there is anything special about them from looking, they have to tell us over and over. How tiring.
    What is indeed praiseworthy is to overcome adversity. Like the blind guy I knew who was nevertheless married and attending college and trying to get around on the bus without help. Or the black man or gay man who is publicly a conservative–talk about getting abuse. These “queer” folk I would bet don’t get a second look and don’t suffer any discrimination whatsoever on a campus, but just make up their oppression. Even with blue hair, does anyone beat them up or refuse to serve them? I doubt it. Maybe they think that the world should be honoring them and telling them they are wonderful and wise….but why? How have they earned this right? Even people who have really accomplished a lot in life don’t get public praise and fame–that isn’t how the world works. Expecting the world to praise you and to be famous is to be a child.

  35. I noted right away in college the huge number of shell shocked high achievers who suddenly were very small fish in a big pond. Suddenly you’re no longer a standout as the smartest or best… it’s like waking up in Lake Wobegon, where all of the children are above average.

    Fortunately I always considered it a fluke, gaining admission to what was supposedly a top public university, and so never experienced that odd disorientation when you’re not that much different from everybody else, or rather that you’re on a suddenly level playing field for maybe the first time in your life. But I did feel a twinge of pity for those who did.

  36. I noted right away in college the huge number of shell shocked high achievers who suddenly were very small fish in a big pond. Suddenly you’re no longer a standout as the smartest or best… it’s like waking up in Lake Wobegon, where all of the children are above average.

    Fortunately I always considered it a fluke, gaining admission to what was supposedly a top public university, and so never experienced that odd disorientation when you’re not that much different from everybody else, or rather that you’re on a suddenly level playing field for maybe the first time in your life. But I did feel a twinge of pity for those who did.

  37. If she is currently identified as bisexual, she will have a whole circle of both Real Life and Facebook friends that are gay. When she decides to hook up in a heterosexual relationship, that will be noticed right away in RL and she’ll certainly post photos on Facebook. And as far as the term “authentic” goes, Bouris may, in fact, be an authentic bisexual.

  38. “… the huge number of shell shocked high achievers who suddenly were very small fish in a big pond. …”

    When I was at The Washington Times, the editors made a point never to hire any grass-green rookies fresh out of college. Generally speaking, a reporter had to have at least two or three years’ experience in daily journalism just to get hired on the Metro staff. To get to the National staff, which was the Big Leagues, you either had to (a) be an award-winner somewhere else with 5 years’ experience, or (b) someone who had started on out on Metro and absolutely killed it for 2 or 3 years.

    That was back in the day, though. The advent of the blogosphere has convinced every hotshot college kid that they ought to be a Pundit by the time they’re 25 and a paid “contributor” at some cable-news outlet before they’re 30, and nobody wants to do any actual reporting any more. All of this, is to explain may perspective on these Juvenile Genius types. I was 38 had had more than a dozen years in the newspaper business before I ever made it to D.C. Failing to understand fully the depraved culture of the place, all I’ve got to say now is, I’d sleep a lot better if not for all these knives in my back.

  39. It’s been my experience that that’s very true for non-straight people that are left of center, but not for the ones that are right of center. Most of them keep their sex lives and their political and personal lives very separate.

  40. I once had a roommate who had a girlfriend that told me in all seriousness “You math majors may say that 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + … = 1 in some mathematical sense, but us liberal arts majors know better.”

    She didn’t like it very much when I told her that the only sense that mattered was the mathematical sense.

  41. Trying to find the key parts and sort them out into a coherent picture — well, it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting.

  42. ” So what if there are LUGs (lesbians until graduation), for example?”

    Unfortunately, LUGs are a non-random cohort. A certain type of young woman gets involved in that type of thing, and one ought to be careful about assuming that there are no long-term differences between the LUG and other women, post-graduation. This is not to say that people do not ever truly leave behind them a youthful “queer” phase,” but there is a difference between those who do and those who don’t have such phases, and anyone sizing up a potential spouse ought to keep that in mind. Choose wisely.

    As tempted as I am to share a few anecdotes about acquaintances, I’ll desist. But if you’re a parent of a young person, you should remind them that “experimenting” with sexual activity is playing with fire. You don’t have to be a prude or a spoilsport, just urge them to be prudent.

  43. You will never hear a conservative or libertarian say “The personal is political.”

    Proggies are like fundamentalist Muslims in that regard. There is no dividing line between daily life, politics, and their religion – for proggies their church is The State and we are all required to pay it due obeisance.

  44. Truth is relative.

    And if you believe that, you can believe anything you set your mind to. I think that explains the short lived fascination in progressive circles for chaos theory and quantum physics some years back, they got the idea that what they really meant was that everything was in flux and indeterminate, nothing was fixed, and we could never know anything for certain.

    I also suspect that they fell away from that fascination on discovering that fractals were relentlessly mathematical constructs and that even in quantum physics 1+1=2.

    Or, in the immortal words of Barbie, Math Is Hard.

  45. Hence the earnest and dogged striving by naifs like Ezra Klein or Spencer Ackerman to “explain” the news to all us stoopid Dopey McDopertons.

    As I say when encountering their ilk “Kid, I got underwear older than you.”

  46. “Everything you think and do, changes you.” — Me

    We are all sinners in a fallen world, with highly plastic brains, and it is very easy for us to break ourselves in a dyscivic and even dysgenic way.

    Christ has been our scapegoat and paid our price, but it is foolish to take that for granted. Sin can leave stains that persist.

    So for example, the Slut Walk activists should actually be slut shamed, for their own good and ours.

    But we sinners can hope to do better, with Christ in our hearts.

    I’m not really arguing.

  47. I am (slightly) amused by the expression “straight-passing privilege.” When we were told that what people did in their bedrooms was nobody else’s business, I accepted that, because I believe it to be true.

    Yet, for it not to be my business what other people do in their bedrooms, I have to not be told what other people are doing in their bedrooms; the notion that a bisexual woman would be condemned for her “straight-passing privilege” is also the notion that she is somehow failing her lesbian sisters by not telling us, or otherwise communicating to us, that she is a (part-time) lesbian. It isn’t enough for a lesbian to be a lesbian; she must let everyone know that she is a lesbian, she must make it everyone else’s business.

    This is, in the end, a demand for affirmative discrimination. I cannot discriminate against a lesbian for being a lesbian if I do not know she is a lesbian. If it is the duty of lesbians to communicate their homosexuality to me, then it must, inter alia, mean that I am expected to consider the lesbian’s sexuality in any interactions I might have with her. Since I am expected not to discriminate against lesbians for their homosexuality, and they seem to require that I know about their homosexuality, the only thing left is that they are demanding that I discriminate positively for lesbians, based on their sexuality. It is a demand for Affirmative Action.

  48. Joe wrote:

    With bisexuals (and a tiny handful of transexuals), the GLBT movement could count itself as “10%” of the population

    Except that that’s not true, either: the CDC estimates were 1.6% homosexual, and 2.3% bisexual.

  50. The CDC estimated that MSMs (Men having Sex with Men) were at 2% of the population. This INCLUDES bisexuals:

    “Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM)a represent approximately 2% of the United States population”

    http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/msm/

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