The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What Must It Be Like …

Posted on | March 31, 2018 | 1 Comment

. . . to applaud one’s own “courage” in writing? How does it feel to celebrate your “strength” with the expectation that others will admire you as much as Laurie Penny expects to be admired? This question is inspired by a 6,000-word article in which Ms. Penny climbs up on the cross, then worships herself as a heroic martyr to the cause of feminism.

It’s pathological narcissism, to be blunt. Ms. Penny cannot seem to fathom why she is so hated, except to blame “misogyny” for her suffering:

After almost a decade of “awareness-raising” about online misogyny — just like your granddad’s home-grown misogyny, but on the intertubes — it hasn’t got any better. It’s got worse. And the most common response, by far, is still victim-blaming. Of course, nobody deserves death threats. But come on, princess. Didn’t you ask for this, even a little bit? You shouldn’t have been so ambitious. So forthright. So talented. So unapologetic. Careful, or they’ll make an example of you.

Evidently, it has never occurred to Ms. Penny that anyone who isn’t female could be targeted by harassment, either online or in the real world. Nor does she consider the Left’s punitive treatment of conservatives to be harassment. Never in a million years would Ms. Penny consider, for example, how the SPLC’s “hate map” inspired domestic terrorist Floyd Corkins to attack the Family Research Council office. Nor would Ms. Penny give any consideration to Becky Garrison, targeted by Obama’s IRS because of her role as a Tea Party leader. What about James Damore, fired from his job at Google for daring to criticize the company’s “diversity” agenda? No, anyone targeted by the Left deserves whatever harm befalls them, in Ms. Penny’s judgment, so that it is only her own suffering — as a left-wing woman — which is heroic and deserving of praise. Because misogyny!

Don’t bother Ms. Penny with the details of how her ideological allies have harassed and threatened Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Dana Loesch, Laura Ingraham, et al. It is too much to expect Ms. Penny to take notice of how many men on the Left have been abusive monsters (e.g., Communist historian Herb Aptheker or the lecherous Ted Kennedy), nor has she bothered to ask why all those “Occupy” encampments in 2011 seemed to attract so many predatory perverts. The reason Ms. Penny never notices any of this is because she is an ideologue, a comrade of Communists; in her 2014 book Unspeakable Things, she praised the work of Bolshevik commissar Alexandra Kollontai.

While pretending to be a victim of misogyny, ostentatiously writhing in agony on her self-made cross as a heroic martyr of the feminist cause, in fact the reason Laurie Penny is so hated is because she is a bad person — selfish, dishonest and cruel — as I explained in March 2016:

Laurie Penny is a hatemonger.
Let us cease mincing words about the kind of “feminism” that such monstrous creatures have popularized in the name of social justice.
Laurie Penny is to women’s equality what Richard III was to the British monarchy, a vile and loathsome stain. Her relentless vituperation of white males, like her celebration of “genderqueer” lunacy, expresses the infantile rage of a spoiled brat. Her antisocial personality traits are conveniently rationalized by a soi-disant “progressive” ideology that provides her warped mind with demonized scapegoats (white people, males, capitalists) whose alleged evils (racism, sexism, greed) she can congratulate herself for denouncing.

Nobody loves Laurie Penny, because she is unlovable, but her powers of rationalization are so well-developed that a couple of years ago she chose Valentine’s Day as an occasion to denounce “compulsory heterosexual monogamy” as a prison of “modern patriarchy”:

I have spent most of my twenties single, sometimes by choice, and sometimes because I was dating men and unable to locate one of those who didn’t try to hold me back or squash me down.

In other words, it’s not her fault nobody loves her, it’s those awful men — patriarchal oppressors who want to hold her back and squash her down.

As a coping device to resolve her cognitive dissonance, perhaps this self-flattering explanation suits Ms. Penny’s purposes. It would not be possible — she lacks the self-awareness necessary — for her to question the destructive ideas to which she has devoted her life. Instead, having celebrated her heroic suffering at such length, she took to Twitter to lament the effect on her dating life.

 

Having been doxed and SWATted and hate-listed by the SPLC myself, I might be able to muster some empathy for Ms. Penny, except that she never extends empathy to others. She is so intensely selfish that she is almost sociopathic in her indifference to the suffering of others. She wants to blame her “vague but tenacious reputation” for her misfortunes, without bothering to wonder if (a) she deserves her bad reputation, or (b) if men are “scared away” for other reasons.

“Only when we recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism. . . .
“Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle. In the end, feminists and the LGBT community have this in common: We’re all gender traitors.”

Laurie Penny, “How to Be a Genderqueer Feminist,” 2015

Gosh, Ms. Penny, I can’t imagine why men don’t want to date a “genderqueer feminist” who despises “compulsory heterosexual monogamy.” Instead, they’ll ignore you as you enjoy your heroic suffering there on your cross, surrounded by admiring feminist disciples.

It’s rather lonely being the Genderqueer Messiah, isn’t it?




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One Response to “What Must It Be Like …”

  1. What Must It Be Like … | Welcome to my Playpen
    March 31st, 2018 @ 2:45 pm

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