The Other McCain

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

Matt Hickey: Anti-#GamerGate Writer Allegedly Tricked Teens in Porn Scam

Posted on | June 11, 2016 | 39 Comments

 

Matt Hickey is a Seattle-based writer who was once an editor for TechCrunch and Gizmodo, and has spent the past three years as a writer for Forbes where, among other things, he threw a journalistic tantrum because Microsoft hired dancers for a party at a gaming conference.

Just hours after hosting its annual “Women in Gaming” luncheon at the 2016 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft MSFT -0.27% threw a party at a local club that featured half-naked dancing girls on raised platforms. Understandably, this is problematic for the maker of the Xbox.
The games industry has been under scrutiny lately as more and more women gamers have been calling it out on blatant sexism. New research show that the majority of video game players may well be women, yet the games themselves are still seemingly targeted at teenage boys. Female characters — especially in fantasy games — are traditionally clothed in next-to-nothing attire while the male characters are generally covered completely.
That has been changing recently, which is a good thing. 2013’s Rise of the Tomb Raider features its headline character Lara Croft in a sensible jacket and khakis outfit, a far different outfit from the revealing tank-top and short-shorts she was known for.
This is the way the industry should be going, and not just for moral reasons; many women are turned off by the prevalent sexism and thus don’t game.

Oh, “women are turned off by the prevalent sexism”? This is the classic Anita Sarkeesian/Randi Lee Harper anti-#GamerGate feminist propaganda that has been fraudulently foisted on the videogame industry which (a) employs a lot of men, and (b) makes billions of dollars a year. This is all just a scam to impose “diversity” quotas on a successful industry, and also to get giant tech companies to pay protection money to clever hustlers like Sarkeesian who, in return for contributions to their non-profit groups, will vouch for the feminist bona fides of these hugely profitable corporations. The whole “Women in Gaming” hustle is a variation of the shakedown racket Jesse Jackson used to run against banks and other Wall Street companies: “Give us money, because it would be a terrible thing if somebody sued you for discrimination,” basically.

The #GamerGate “ethics in journalism” angle began with accusations that Nathan Grayson, a writer for Gawker-owned videogame review site Kotaku, provided free publicity to Zoe Quinn, with whom he was allegedly involved. Beginning with the Grayson/Quinn scandal in August 2014, #GamerGate became a wide-ranging war against the pernicious influence of so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who were seen as crybaby enforcers of politically correctness in the videogame community.

Matt Hickey sided with the SJWs and in October 2014, when his fellow SJW Chris Plante proclaimed “Gamergate Is Dead” — “a hate group . . . associated with bigotry and cruelty” — Hickey rushed to praise Plante and declared: “Don’t be a part of Gamergate, people. It’s a bad gang.”

 

Meanwhile, an online character named “Deja Stwalley” was soliciting teenage girls in Seattle who wanted to become porn performers, arranging for them to have sexual trysts with her photographer friend:

In 2013, Deja Stwalley friended 19-year-old Allysia Bishop on Facebook. Stwalley sold Bishop the same pitch she gave Shearer, and Bishop agreed to a shoot with Matt. Bishop says that after working out the details of the audition shoot with Stwalley, she took a cab to Matt’s apartment on Capitol Hill.
“He had a little checklist of things I was comfortable doing in the future, like are you fine with bondage, are you fine with whatever,” she tells me over the phone. Bishop also remembers Matt making vodka screwdrivers. “He checked a little checklist off and said fine, all right we’ll take some pictures. All the while, I was drinking. He was just making me more drinks and more drinks.”
Bishop says she drank so much that she nearly blacked out. And that’s when she claims that Matt said they had to have sex. “He was like, ‘Well, we have to have sex, because if we don’t then how am I going to know you’re for real and you’ll actually be able to do this in the industry? So you have to prove to me you’re not going to bail out.'”
Bishop says that she never would have had sex with Matt if she didn’t think it was for the audition. She wasn’t attracted to him. Bishop left Matt’s apartment upset but didn’t quite understand why. All she knew was that she felt violated.
That same day, Bishop slit her wrists in a bathtub. . . .

According to reporter Sydney Brownstone, “Deja Stwalley” and her photographer buddy Matt were the same person, Matt Hickey, who allegedly scammed at least three young women into having sex with him under the false pretense of auditioning them as porn performers.

 

It turns out that there is a real Deja Stwalley who “went to middle school with Matt Hickey in Olympia,” and who said of her childhood acquaintance with Hickey: “He had a weirdo crush on me.”

Predictably, when contacted for comment, Matt Hickey made a reference to “my lawyer,” and then shut down his Twitter account. Maybe he could be in a bathtub slitting his wrists, for all we know.

Stories like this almost make it seem as though we need a movement that will call attention to ethics in journalism, or something.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

From Balticon to the EDC

Posted on | June 10, 2016 | 4 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


So over the Memorial Day weekend I packed my bags and flew to Baltimore for Balticon 50, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary by inviting back all its former Guests of Honor, headlined by some guy who’s famous for writing a lot of medieval rape scenes. Frankly, I was more interested in some of the other authors, namely Michael Flynn (still recovering from a horribly broken arm, but cheerful) and Connie Willis, who always gives good panel, even at the hideous hour of eight in the morning. Since I was mainly there to socialize with my Washington-area friends, I didn’t catch much of the panels or other programming, but I got the general impression that the move to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from Balticon’s traditional suburban home at the Hunt Valley Inn went well, despite some unavoidable elevator problems and predictable whining from a minority of fans.

I hadn’t intended to buy any books while I was there, but nonetheless I came home with three: Drakas! edited by S.M. Stirling, which is a collection of short stories by other authors set in Stirling’s alternate history where South Africa winds up hosting refugeee Tories and Confederates and becoming the Domination of the Draka. You wouldn’t want to live there, and some of the stories are fairly horrific; others, surprisingly, are somewhat humorous, in a grim sort of way. I also picked up Michael Flynn’s Lodestar, which I thought was the first book in the series (it wasn’t) and which I’m setting aside until I get and finish Firestar, which is. Finally, I bought Breach The Hull, part of the “Defending The Future” military SF anthology series, which includes stories by James Daniel Ross, Jack Campbell, and others; the handful of stories I read while at Balticon seemed good to me.

On the way out to Balticon, I started and finished (hey, it was a four-hour flight!) Sarah Hoyt’s Through Fire, the sequel to A Few Good Men, and it’s just what it says on the label: a tale of a darkship pilot stranded on Earth who has to survive a rerun of the French Revolution and hopefully stop it in its tracks. If you liked the tales Hoyt’s been spinning in this series, you’re going to like this one, too. I also downloaded and started on A Meep In Manhattan, an autobiographical look back at New York in the 1990’s by Mary Pat Campbell, whose posts at STUMP on pensions and public finance are a frequent feature of In The Mailbox. Worth a look if you want to see how Manhattan has changed in the last two decades.

Also downloaded to the Kindle (and maybe, just maybe I’m going to find some time to read them this coming week) were Outies by Jennifer Pournelle, which is a sequel to The Mote In God’s Eye by her dad and Larry Niven, and The Praetorians by Jean Larteguy, which Penguin has finally republished after sixty years with a new foreword by General Stanley McChrystal. It’ll be interesting to see if I do manage to carve out any time for reading this week, what with the primary on Tuesday, the Electric Daisy Carnival coming to town next weekend, and the implosion of the Riviera Hotel & Casino next door forcing me to decamp for a day to the Circus Circus a couple blocks away. Fun week ahead, to be sure.


Category: Books

Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Feminists

Posted on | June 10, 2016 | 27 Comments

 

If you study history, you learn to see patterns. What happened in the French Revolution was replicated in the Russian Revolution — destruction in the name of “equality,” and the implementation of “reforms” according to a radical ideology, followed by a bloody nightmarish failure. Last night I received an email from a reader:

What would a feminist-approved rape trial look like?
I know what the verdict would always be 100% of the time, but I just want to know what the procedure would be in order to reach that verdict. We all know that current justice system is not good enough for feminists and that the campus sexual-assault system isn’t quite up to the feminists’ liking either. So… then what? What would a feminist-approved system look like?
I imagine a dunce cap might be required at some point. Thoughts?

My reply:

It’s like anything else with the Left: They are against the status quo. The existing society is unjust, and therefore …
Well, therefore what? Ever since the French Revolution we have seen a repetition of the same pattern: Destroy the system, replace it with something dreamed up by intellectuals and the result? Catastrophe.
The regime of Lenin and Stalin was infinitely more cruel than the czarist regime.
So, feminists want to destroy the current legal system and we ask, “What will you replace it with?”
The answers are always either (a) vague or (b) frightening, or (c) both vague and frightening.
What is clear, going back to Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s, is that feminists think the law is on the side of the rapist, and that the normal due-process protections of defendants shouldn’t apply in rape cases. We see the kind of kangaroo-court proceedings established on university campuses, where the accusation alone is tantamount to proof, and where exculpatory evidence is ignored, and if you point this out as an injustice, you are accused of being a “rape apologist.” We can therefore assume that this is what feminists would institute as the basis of legal “reforms” in our courts, if they had the power to do so — which they might someday get, if Hillary is elected.
Some people observing this step-by-step advance of feminism may think, “Well, I’m not a rapist. My son is not a rapist. This will never affect me.” Yet the secondary and tertiary effects of such policies are difficult to predict, and the Law of Unintended Consequences can take decades to work itself out. Many of the problems we see today are consequences of policy changes that happened in the 1960s and ’70s, such as the end of university administrators acting in loco parentis. Once upon a time, a boy caught in the girls’ dorm (or vice-versa) outside regular visiting hours was subject to expulsion. Now most universities have coed dorms, and no effort at all is made to curb sexual promiscuity, and then everyone acts surprised when rapes happen. But conservatives who opposed the coed dorm policy decades ago are not heeded when they say, “I told you so.” Some consequences are not intended, but they are to some extent predictable, and letting college kids run wild was certain to have negative results, even if not all of the results could be foreseen.
— RSM

Feminism fails because feminism is a War Against Human Nature.

In times of revolution, when society begins spinning out of control, the wise course is to protect yourself and your family from harm — insofar as this is possible — while warning others about the danger ahead. Prophets of doom are never popular, but when we see history repeating itself the way it is now repeating, we have a duty to sound the warning.

Study the life of Leon Trotsky. He sided with the Mensheviks when Lenin first split the Marxist movement in Russia, but when the crisis of 1917 erupted, Trotsky saw that Lenin’s strategy could succeed, and so cast his lot with the Bolsheviks. During the subsequent era, Trotsky’s leadership of the Red Army was decisive in saving the Leninist regime, but when Lenin fell ill, Trotsky was reluctant to push himself forward as Lenin’s successor. This enabled Stalin to gain the dictatorship, and Trotsky was subsequently purged and exiled and ultimately assassinated — a victim of the revolution he had helped make possible.

Now, consider this headline:

Millions of dollars in funding
to put men in women’s restrooms

The source for that headline is a radical feminist site. For more than two years, I’ve reported how radical feminists — especially including Cathy Brennan — have opposed the transgender movement. To a great extent, such feminists are like Trotsky, warning against the danger of Stalinism.

 

While it would have been difficult, if not entirely impossible, to predict such weirdness as Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner being named Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year,” still these bizarre developments are not altogether surprising to conservatives. “Equality” is a corrosive solvent, totalitarians are never satisfied by any compromise, and Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. If you grant every demand feminists make today, tomorrow they will return with a new list of demands. Once it was obvious that the Supreme Court would side with LGBT activists on same-sex marriage (and the Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003 was a clear signal of this intent, as Justice Scalia foresaw), the question was, “What next?”

No one predicted in 2003 that, as a result of the Lawrence ruling, by 2016, the White House would seek to impose gender-neutral restrooms on America’s schoolchildren but . . . “Equality!”

Radical feminists now see themselves depicted as bigots — lumped in with Christian conservatives in this regard — for insisting that separate public facilities are necessary for the safety of women and girls.

All of us who feel a sense of foreboding about the impending disaster know that we will be denounced as paranoid fearmongers if we speak bluntly about the kind of dangers that lurk in the future. The frog has been boiled slowly for a long time and I’m reminded of a once-famous title by Lewis Grizzard: I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962. Sure, I was only 3 years old in 1962, but I understand now what Grizzard was saying. The cultural upheavals of the 1960s unleashed destructive social and political forces, and every effort to put the genie back in the bottle — e.g., the so-called “Reagan Revolution” — has only occasionally slowed the tempo of catastrophe. We have had a few short periods of apparent calm, when it seemed that order was finally restored. Yet these are merely brief halts in our Long March to the Gates of Hell, because the forces of anarchy and depravity will never rest until America is finally destroyed.

Remember the Minnesota parents who are raising their 5-year-old son as a girl? We recognize this as Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, and yet we see how feminist theory can be used to justify this pathology:

For more than 40 years, radical feminists have advocated androgyny — the abolition of gender — as the means of achieving “equality.” . . .
Feminism condemns normal human behavior as “male privilege” and “tyranny” (Firestone), “patriarchal power” and “sexual repression” (Dworkin), “male sexual dominance” (MacKinnon), and “the systematic oppression of women” (Scanlon). Because of feminism’s hegemonic influence in academia, these ideas have become widely accepted on university campuses, and inevitably have begun influencing policy and curricula in public schools.

Just today, I was skimming a 2005 anthology edited by Professor Chrys Ingraham (SUNY-Purchase). This academic text includes an essay by Professor Diane Richardson (Newcastle University) in which she invokes “critical perspectives on the social construction of gender and sexuality” to condemn heterosexuality as an oppressive “system of privileged, institutionalized norms and practices.” In feminism’s “theoretical framework,” Professor Richardson explains, “sexuality is seen as a key mechanism of patriarchal control.” Because I know what feminist theory actually is — and can cite the sources by name — what am I to say of those feminists who insist that the transgender phenomenon is anti-woman?

When radicals decided to destroy the social order (e.g., “patriarchal power”), who could predict what would emerge from the chaos?

Promoters of “gender-neutral” childhood want to convince parents that our common-sense objections to their bizarre schemes are motivated by ignorant prejudice. Feminists now consider “normal” a synonym for wrong. Heterosexuality is the worst thing in the world, and parents who try to raise normal kid are obviously haters, guilty of homophobia.

Teaching girls to hate boys is perfectly OK with radical feminists, who likewise approve of deliberate anti-male discrimination in the name of “diversity,” and what did they expect would be the result? After radical feminists have waged a four-decade crusade to destroy families and undermine Judeo-Christian morality, to what system of values can they now appeal in opposing the transgender cult? “Social justice”?

Do feminists expect chivalrous courtesy from deranged perverts? Do they think transgender billionaire James “Jennifer” Pritzker gives a damn what happens to girls and boys subjected to sex-change “treatment”? Do they think George Soros actually cares about women and children?

Ignorance of history does not excuse the folly of radicals who have forgotten (or perhaps never learned) that Roberspierre went to the guillotine and Trotsky died at the hands of a Communist assassin.




 

 

Category: Education, History, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.10.16

Posted on | June 10, 2016 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Rape Culture At Elite Universities – It’s Been A Problem For A While
Michelle Malkin: RIP Thomas Perkins, The Tech Mogul Who Dared To Challenge Radical Lefties
Twitchy: Here’s Why lefties Crying Foul Over Gawker’s Bankruptcy Have A Serious Selective Outrage Problem


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Gawker Media Files For Chapter 11
American Thinker: Trump Gets It. The GOP Doesn’t.
Da Tech Guy: Does Land’s End Really Want To Become Zara?
Don Surber: Bill’s Girlfriend Describes Meeting Hillary The Hobbit In 1974
Jammie Wearing Fools: White House Calls FBI Probe Into Clinton E-Mails “Criminal Investigation” – On Same Day Obama Endorses Her
Joe For America: They Never Bothered To Investigate The Judge In The Trump U Case – But We Have
JustOneMinute: Another Voice Of Reason Heard From
Pamela Geller: Hundreds Of Muslim Women In Antwerp Pledge Allegiance To ISIS
Shark Tank: The Fate Of The Second Amendment Depends On Whether Trump Or Clinton Is Elected President
Shot In The Dark: Open Letter – “Starting A Conversation” With Katie Couric And Her Ilk
The Jawa Report: CAGE Totally 100% Broke This Ramadan
The Lonely Conservative:
The Political Hat: The Party Purge
This Ain’t Hell: Lapthe C. Flora Makes Brigadier General
Weasel Zippers: Iran Spends $1.7 Billion In U.S. Taxpayer Funds To Build Its Military
Mark Steyn: Deposition Drama


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Category: Linkagery

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Posted on | June 9, 2016 | 60 Comments

 

The title of a once-famous Keats poem came to mind when I saw this headline at Memeorandum:

Stanford sexual assault: judge facing
recall campaign over light sentence
The victim of a sexual assault by a former Stanford University swimmer said on Monday she was “overwhelmed and speechless” at the deluge of support for her as the judge who gave her attacker a light sentence faced a recall campaign.
Brock Allen Turner, 20, who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on campus, was sentenced to six months in county jail and probation — a punishment that is significantly less severe than the minimum prison time of two years prescribed by state law for his felony offenses. . . .
Further scrutiny on the judge’s remarks at sentencing appear to suggest he concluded the defendant had “less moral culpability” because he was drunk, and that a light sentence would be an “antidote” to the anxiety he had suffered from intense media attention on the case.
Michele Landis Dauber, a Stanford law professor who has been outspoken about sexual assault policies on campus, said she is launching the recall campaign against Aaron Persky, Santa Clara County superior court judge.
Persky, a Stanford alumnus, was captain of the lacrosse team when he was an undergraduate.
“He has made women at Stanford and across California less safe,” said Dauber, who attended the sentencing hearing and is also a family friend of the 23-year-old victim. “The judge bent over backwards in order to make an exception … and the message to women and students is ‘you’re on your own,’ and the message to potential perpetrators is, ‘I’ve got your back.’”

Is this a fair interpretation of the judge’s motives? Has he taken sides with rapists and against women?  Is Judge Persky objectively pro-rape?

No one would dare say a word in Judge Persky’s defense, now that feminists have targeted him for destruction, and he is to “rape culture” what Officer Darren Wilson was to “Black Lives Matter.” Everything that Judge Persky did prior to last Thursday suddenly becomes irrelevant.

“I became a criminal prosecutor for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, where I now prosecute sex crimes and hate crimes,” Judge Persky wrote on his campaign website in 2002:

“I focus on the prosecution of sexually violent predators, working to keep the most dangerous sex offenders in custody in mental hospitals. I am also an Executive Committee member of the Santa Clara County Network for a Hate-Free Community, where I helped create a county-wide law enforcement policy on hate crimes. In addition, I serve as an Executive Committee Member of the Support Network for Battered Women.”

Judge Persky lost that 2002 election, but was subsequently appointed to the bench by Gov. Grey Davis — a liberal Democrat, which suggests Judge Persky is also a liberal Democrat — and I suppose it would behoove a right-winger like me to point and laugh: “Hahaha! Liberal judges in California are pro-rape!” But is that an accurate reading of the evidence?

‘No More Fun of Any Kind!’

 

Some of the commenters on my Monday post about this case pointed out that, perhaps, I was reading this whole story the wrong way. What critics of the current “campus rape epidemic” hysteria have focused on is the fact that sexual assault cases are being treated as school disciplinary matters in kangaroo court proceedings where the accused are denied their due-process rights. The Brock Turner case — a criminal prosecution in a court of law — is the appropriate way to deal with all sexual assault charges, according to critics of the campus kangaroo court process. Therefore, discussion of a criminal trial must never suggest that the convicted rapist didn’t get a fair trial. The point I made was this:

The leniency of Turner’s sentence has outraged feminists, and it would be the better part of valor not to further arouse their indignation. However, it is worth pointing out that (a) Turner was an 18-year-old freshman, (b) his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and (c) why does Stanford University allow fraternities to serve alcohol to teenagers?
This is the dirty little secret of so-called “rape culture” on our nation’s college campuses. The legal drinking age is 21, but teenagers want to get drunk, and so university administrations — and police in college towns — simply refuse to enforce the law. . . .
If drunk teenagers are committing rape at Stanford, doesn’t the university have an obligation to prevent its teenage students from getting drunk?

Lax enforcement of existing laws against underage drinking is deeply implicated in the “rape culture” discourse, and this is a risk factor that even Professor Dauber cannot avoid acknowledging:

In her letter to the judge, Dauber wrote that Stanford’s surveys have found that 43% of female undergraduates have experienced sexual assault or misconduct, and that more than two-thirds of them said perpetrators took advantage of intoxicated victims. But only 2.7% of students who experienced assault or nonconsensual sexual contact reported it to the university.

Whoa! Forty-three percent? But never mind that startling statistic. If more than two-thirds of all sexual assault victims at Stanford (“Campus Rape Capital of the World”) are intoxicated, how many perpetrators of these crimes are also intoxicated, as was the case with Brock Turner? Why aren’t activists focusing on “drunk culture”? And the answer, if you carefully scrutinize feminist rhetoric, is that criticism of binge drinking implicates male and female students alike, whereas campus “rape culture” discourse is about demonizing heterosexual males — especially “privileged” middle-class white heterosexual males. Read more

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.09.16

Posted on | June 9, 2016 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Louder With Crowder: Liberals Sign Petition For Increasingly Absurd, “Free” Human Rights
Proof Positive: For Democrats Are Dark and Full of Error
EBL: The Lesson Of Venezuela And Socialism – It Doesn’t Work
Twitchy: This Tweet About Martin O’Malley’s Hillary Endorsement Is Just Plain Sad


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Race, Sex, and Ethnicity Of Judges Makes A Difference In Judging
American Thinker: What The CIA Did To Mike Wire, TWA 800 Witness #571
Da Tech Guy: Some Things Never Change – Well, Many Things
Don Surber: In Praise Of The Trump Voter
Jammie Wearing Fools: Guy Who Unleashed The IRS On Conservatives Claims He’s Concerned About The GOP
Joe For America: Obama Rips The Constitution For Not Mandating Socialism
JustOneMinute: They Shoot Horses Don’t They
Pamela Geller: London Invasion Crisis – Filthy Migrant Camps Spring Up Around London
Shark Tank: Local Leaders Want Kenny Leigh Out Of The Race
Shot In The Dark: Cop’s Gonna Cop, Grievance Pimp’s Gonna Pimp Grievance.
STUMP: Puerto Rico Roundup – Waiting For Decisions
The Jawa Report: Islamic State Encourages Muslims To Kill Christians For Ramadan
The Political Hat: Burn A Rainbow Flag, Get Prosecuted
This Ain’t Hell: Cristina Jackson Punished For Exposing A Fraud
Weasel Zippers: 9th Circus Court Rules Americans Have No Right To Carry Concealed Outside Their Homes
Megan McArdle: Five Reasons Decent People May Want To Back Trump
Mark Steyn: Snowflakes On The Rampage


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Category: Linkagery

Feminist Fantasies

Posted on | June 8, 2016 | 79 Comments

Several years ago — I could look it up — I interview Phyllis Schlafly about her book Feminist Fantasies. Mrs. Schlafly, in many ways one the most influential American woman of the 20th century, laughed about how “tough” feminists sometimes claim to be. Certainly few of them had the steely strength of Mrs. Schlafly who, during World War II, worked her way through college at a defense plant where her job included test-firing .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition. One of the columns collected in Feminist Fantasies is about the 1997 movie G.I. Jane, which Mrs. Schlafly correctly describes as “a psychological lesson designed to abolish the stereotype that men and women are different, and to make Americans believe the myth that women can perform in combat just like men.” Good luck winning a war with a military organized according to social justice ideology.

The title of Mrs. Schlafly’s book came to mind today when I saw a Tumblr blogger’s GIF sequence of a scene from Agent Carter a Marvel-inspired ABC series that ran for eight episodes before being canceled last month. The scene shown on the Tumblr blog was a tedious example of Hollywood feminism: A simplistic caricature of a sexist male — in this case a soldier — expresses a stereotypical sexist attitude toward the heroine, who then responds by knocking him out with one punch.

Let me begin my criticism of this by saying that I hate at least 90% of the “entertainment” produced by Hollywood over the past 25 years, and in general, I can’t stand the comic-book superhero fantasies that have become major profit generators in recent years. Spiderman, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, whatever — it’s all so much childish crap, as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t believe adults would pay money to see it. My disdain for fantasy is quite general, however. Whether it’s Harry Potter or Alien or The Matrix, I’ve never been a fan of science-fiction or “sword and sorcery” dramas. The original Star Wars movie and the first Indiana Jones movie were rare exceptions to this, primarily because those films were inspired by classic 1930s-1950s adventure serials, and also because Harrison Ford was perhaps the best wisecracking movie hero since Clark Gable. At any rate, I outgrew comic books when I was 14, and have never been a fan of superhero movies, so the Marvel-inspired Agent Carter wasn’t the kind of thing I’d watch, even if it weren’t for the feminist propaganda factor. How many more times are we going to see TV networks and movie studios invest in crap projects that get absurdly gushy critical reviews — because all critics are obligated to praise anything with the Feminist™ brand — only to watch the film or TV series fail as a commercial venture? Who wants to sit for two hours in a movie studio, or for an hour on their sofa at home, watching what is for all intents and purposes a feminist sermon in the Cult Temple of Social Justice?

This token “diversity” of many TV and movie casts nowadays — does every police homicide unit in America now have a Puerto Rican lesbian detective? — is a sort of low-level background noise TV viewers have become accustomed to, but why does it seem so many of the plot lines are being scripted by writers who studied Critical Theory in grad school?

Are people turning on prime-time TV to watch entertainment or to be lectured about race/class/gender oppression? Nowadays, network crime dramas and situation comedies are as predictably political as Soviet cinema during the Stalin era. It seems almost as if all the scripts are being issued by a Central Committee of the People’s Ministry of Correct Entertainment, a group of propaganda commissars consisting of representatives from the NAACP, the SPLC, GLAAD, the AFL-CIO and NARAL, under the guidance of David Brock and Anita Sarkeesian.

Of course, merely to mention how politicized entertainment has become is to invite the accusation that you are a sexist, racist homophobe, and I wouldn’t mention it at all, except for the fact that Hollywood’s liberal propaganda campaigns are harmful and dangerous. For example, the type of “Strong Empowered Woman” feminist morality tale in the Agent Carter scene — where she knocks a man unconscious with a single punch — is apt to induce in young women a sense of inadequacy: “Why can’t I be strong and brave like that?” One notices that, during the past 20 years or so, there has been a skyrocketing increase in reports of depression and anxiety among young women, and why? Among the several factors involved, I am certain that no small part of the problem is that girls are now under constant pressure (from parents, from peers, from schools, from media) to live up to a feminist ideal. Every middle-class girl nowadays is expected to aspire to the ideal of becoming an independent, successful career woman. She must be smart! Be strong! Be empowered! And if she doesn’t become high school valedictorian and graduate with honors from Yale, she considers herself a worthless loser.

That academic fast-track competition is a pressure cooker, and there’s a high burn-out rate among Boy Genius types whose parents insist they simply must go to an Ivy League school. Why on earth would parents want to shove their daughters into that kind of meat grinder?

Look, my daughters are both highly intelligent. My oldest graduated college summa cum laude and, at age 27, is already the vice-principal of an elementary school. My youngest has never made less than an A, and she scored 99th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Yet I don’t want any of my children, boys or girls, to enter that Nerd Olympics where they’re locked into an all-or-nothing academic gladiatorial combat against the overprivileged offspring of the decadent plutocratic elite.

Let the rich folks send their kids to Brown and Columbia, Stanford and Duke, Oberlin, Occidental, Georgetown and Northwestern. Having seen the kind of wicked immorality that typifies the students and faculty of such schools, I wouldn’t want my children anywhere near those “elite” campuses. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved. No responsible parent would let their kids attend an anti-Christian school like Harvard, and the road to Hell is paved with Yale diplomas.

From the warped value system promoted at our “elite” universities emerges the dangerous feminist fantasies promoted by Agent Carter.

It’s highly symbolic, you see: The American soldier is the villain in this scene. Beyond the standard feminist depiction of white heterosexual males as perpetrators of sexist oppression, the Hollywood elite never misses a chance to express its anti-patriotic, anti-military sentiment.

Feminism is a hate movement that calls itself “social justice.”





 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.08.16

Posted on | June 8, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.08.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Red Hillary
EBL: #CrookedHillary – Wrong Eight Years Ago And Wrong Today
Michelle Malkin: Measuring Life By The Spoonful
Twitchy: Priorities! Guess What The President Whose Job Is “Not Entertainment” Is Doing In NYC Today


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Trump Promises New Attacks On Clinton As GOP Campaign Season Ends
American Thinker: The Extortion Election Of 2016
Da Tech Guy: The #Unexpectedly Chronicles – A Documentary That Can’t Stand Up Under Fire
Don Surber: This Is Why We Left Europe
Jammie Wearing Fools: Chief Of NYC Correction Officers’ Union Arrested On Fraud Charges Tied To DiBlasio Inquiry
JustOneMinute: Final Primary Night – The Aftermath
Pamela Geller: Muslims Attack Waitress On French Riviera For Selling Alcohol
Shark Tank: Jamie Dimon Tells Americans “You’re Being Manipulated”
Shot In The Dark: A Matter Of Trust, And Lack Of It
STUMP: On Public Finance “Solutions”, Illinois Edition – Tax Everything!
The Jawa Report: ISIS Cyberlosers Declare Death Fatwa Against Arkansas Library Association
The Lonely Conservative: Taking A Few Days Off
The Political Hat: Trans-Women Vs. Little Girls
This Ain’t Hell: Navy Bans Drinking By Sailors And Marines In Japan
Weasel Zippers: Another Hate Crime Hoax – Louisville Muslim Charged With Vandalizing Own Mosque
Mark Steyn: Man And Identity


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