The Other McCain

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

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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Category: Linkagery

‘Four Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!’

Posted on | June 8, 2016 | 18 Comments

 

“Some animals are more equal than others,” as everyone learns at the end of Animal Farm, but what would George Orwell say about this?

A lecturers’ union [in England] is refusing to let its officers take part in debates at an equality summit if they are white, straight, able-bodied men.
The equality conference of the University and College Union said that members must declare their ‘protected characteristic’ — whether they are gay, disabled, female or from an ethnic minority — when applying to attend.
Activists say that it means representatives who do not qualify cannot participate in all of the discussions — even though they have been elected by their union branch.
There are four sections of the conference — for women, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people, ethnic minorities and those with disabilities.
Though there were also some ‘joint sessions’ last year, for break-out discussions reps must have the relevant ‘characteristic’.
That means reps would be barred from debates on areas they were not affected by, and a straight, white man who was not disabled would be unable to attend any.
Yesterday critics branded the policy ridiculous — arguing that people from all walks of life can be dedicated to the cause of equality.
Emma-Jane Phillips, who sits on the UCU equality committee, said: ‘Equality reps are passionate about equality regardless of their own situation.
To infer that someone does not understand someone’s situation just because you don’t tick a box is insulting.’
The Northumbria University lecturer said it meant some reps would have to lie about having a protected characteristic to be able to attend — something she said they would be unwilling to do.
She told Times Higher Education magazine: ‘It is ridiculous that people who regard equality as their life can’t attend our equality conference.’
The issue was raised at UCU’s congress, held in Liverpool last week, when a motion was proposed to give equality reps the automatic right to attend conferences without having to ‘self-identify’. However, it was defeated — the only motion not to pass during the summit’s opening day. . . .
It comes amid a growing culture of students demanding ‘safe spaces’ in which people are banned who might express offensive views. . . .
Last year, Bahar Mustafa, diversity officer at Goldsmiths, University of London, was criticised for banning white men from an equality meeting and writing on Twitter: ‘Kill all white men.’
Students at Cardiff University tried to get feminist Germaine Greer banned from speaking because of her views on transgender people.

Here’s a little story for you kids: In 1970, when I was in fifth grade, we got a new English teacher at Lithia Springs Elementary School.

Tom Dowd was fresh out of Berry College. He had what was considered long hair by the standards of Douglas County, Georgia, at that time. Mr. Dowd also had a mustache — quite “mod” he seemed to us kids, who had heretofore never had such a young teacher — and he also had some interesting ideas about teaching English. Tom Dowd read Animal Farm to us.

For a full week or so, we sat there, about 30 fifth-graders, while our English teacher read aloud to us Orwell’s classic allegory of the Soviet Union. Mr. Dowd explained the symbolism to us — Old Major as Marx, Snowball as Trotsky, Napoleon as Stalin — and thus at the tender age of 10, I learned the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, and also learned from Animal Farm a profound understanding of totalitarianism that has stayed with me all these years.

The Soviet Union was an empire built on deceit and cruelty. The promise of “equality” under socialism was a Big Lie in 1917, and it is still a Big Lie in the 21st century. Not until I was a grown-up, more than a decade after I had watched on live TV as the Berlin Wall was torn down, did I begin to learn the full details of Bolshevik evil. It is estimated that 100 million people were killed by Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century, and what killed them? “Equality!”

There is no such thing as equality in this world. At no point in human history has anything like equality existed above the level of the rudest poverty and ignorance of primitive savagery, nor is there any prospect that “progress” will lead to equality in the future. As the Nobel Prize economist Friedrich Hayek explained, in his masterful refutation of Rawlsian egalitarianism, “social justice” is a mirage. Every political leader who promises to bring about “equality” is a liar, and every intellectual who attempts to mislead young fools with nonsense about “social justice” is a dangerous fraud. Ronald Reagan said this of the Cold War:

While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.
Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”

Where are today’s Tom Dowds? Where are the teachers who will remind children of a lesson the world should never be allowed to forget?

Thursday afternoon on Capitol Hill, there will be a discussion hosted by the Young America’s Foundation called entitled “President Reagan’s Principles and Philosophy: Now More than Ever.” Our nation is in peril in a world that has forgotten the great truths of history.




 

Category: Education, History, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.07.16

Posted on | June 7, 2016 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Why The Brackets On Twitter Names?
Michelle Malkin: North Carolina Subsidizes American Worker Sabotage
Twitchy: Guess What Happened When Dana Loesch Challenged “Under The Gun” Director To Debate


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Sanders Leads Among Eligible Voters In California
American Thinker: Trump and the Judge – Not About Race, But Rule Of Law
Da Tech Guy: John Ruberry – Why Is Rahm Emanuel Letting Chicago’s Murder Crisis Go To Waste?
Don Surber: Man Who Beheads Gays Decries Islamic Extremism
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Defectors Begging Western Governments For Help To Come Home
Joe For America: VA Drives Quadruple Amputee Hero To Suicide
JustOneMinute: German Spoken Here
Pamela Geller: San Jose Police Chief Who Admits Allowing Attacks On Trump Supporters Affiliated With La Raza
Shark Tank: State Department Says Clinton Aide’s Emails Won’t Be Available For 75 Years
Shot In The Dark: Hillary Clinton, Spouse Abuser?
STUMP: Connecticut Update – No Billionaire Left Behind
The Jawa Report: The Good War Update – NPR Journalist Killed In Taliban Attack
The Lonely Conservative: It’s Like Trump Wants To Lose The Election
The Political Hat: Obama Administration’s Attempts To Reverse Temporally Impose Regulations Ruled Unconstitutional
The Quinton Report: Baltimore May Require Warning Labels On Soda
This Ain’t Hell: Lieutenant Deshauna Barber, Miss USA
Weasel Zippers: Two Groups Of Sandernistas Beat Each Other Up, Each Thinking The Other Supports Trump
Megan McArdle: Universal Basic Income Is Ahead Of Its Time (To Say The Least)
Mark Steyn: The Glass Is One-Sixteenth Full


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Category: Linkagery

‘Anatomy of Rage’: @mstiefvater and the Feminist Injustice Collector Phenomenon

Posted on | June 7, 2016 | 36 Comments

Maggie Stiefvater (@mstiefvater on Twitter) is a successful novelist, married with two kids, living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

In April 2015, she posted a Tumblr essay, “The Anatomy of Rage,” that begins with an incident in which a mechanic uses the phrase “little girl” while telling her husband that he’s going to fix her car as soon as possible. Now, it is fair to ask what the mechanic intended by his use of the diminutive term “little girl” to describe a 33-year-old woman. Is Ms. Stiefvater petite and youthful looking? Is the mechanic an older man, so that Ms. Stiefvater reminds him of his daughter? Or is he simply the kind of old-fashioned country boy who calls women “little girl” or “sugar,” the same way a Waffle House waitress down home is likely to call her customers “honey” or “sweetheart”? Never mind his intent:

I discovered that I was actually furious. I thought I was over being furious, but it turns out, the rage was merely dormant. I’m furious that it’s been over a decade and nothing has changed. I’m furious that sexism was everywhere in the world of college-Maggie and it remains thus, even if I out-learn, out-earn, out-drive, and out-perform my male counterparts. At the end of the day, I’m still “little girl.”
Possibly this is the point where some people are asking why this tiny gesture of all gestures should be the one to break me.

You can read her entire litany of sexist offenses, ranging from the annoying to the atrocious to the genuinely scary, culminating in this:

I’m tired of the media telling me that it’s mouth breathing bros and rednecks perpetuating the sexism. No: I can tell you that the most insidious form is the nice guy. Who is a nice guy, don’t get me wrong. I carry my own prejudices that I work through, and I don’t believe in demonizing people who aren’t perfect yet — none of us are. But the nice guy who says something sexist gets away with it. The nice guy who says something sexist sounds right and reasonable. The nice guy’s not helping, though. It’s been sixteen years, and the nice guys are nice, but we’re still things to be acquired. We are still creatures to be asked on dates. We are still saying no, still shouting NO, still having to always again and again say “no, please treat me with respect.”

Am I the only one confused by her diatribe? Why does being “asked on dates” by men reflect a lack of “respect”? If a bachelor encounters a woman he finds attractive, is he wrong to express interest in her? She describes being “cat-called every other time I’m at a gas station” and various other genuinely offensive behaviors, but why should (a) clearly unacceptable examples of sexual harassment lead to a denunciation of (b) the ordinary behavior of men asking women on dates? Like many other feminists, Ms. Stiefvater seems to aggregate within a single category — “sexism” — all overt expressions of male heterosexuality.

Ms. Stiefvater doesn’t articulate the source of her resentment beyond reciting a list of grievances, but to speculate rather generally, I think feminists view male sexuality as essentially immature. That is to say, a man who glances too long at a good-looking woman who walks past is perceived by the feminist as an oversexed perpetual adolescent. A mature man should be utterly indifferent to beauty, the feminist believes. It is not merely that her egalitarian ideology leads her to believe that all people should be treated exactly alike, but the feminist also views male sexuality as a fundamentally hostile force, antagonistic to her own interests. Males are her moral inferiors, the feminist believes, because their sexual behaviors and attitudes are inherently immature and selfish. On this basis, therefore, she begins keeping a mental catalog of examples of men’s “sexist” behavior, which is the only male behavior a feminist ever notices. Perhaps a hundred men drove past the gas station while Ms. Stiefvater was pumping gas and paid no attention to her, but that one guy who cat-called her becomes a representative, a symbol, proof of how All Men Oppress All Women Under the Patriarchal Tyranny of Male Supremacy.

Feminism provides an analytical framework within which almost any aspect of male behavior can be viewed as “problematic” — yet another example of misogyny, “male entitlement,” etc. — so that every man the feminist encounters is viewed as a suspect, a likely perpetrator of sexism, and she is a detective on the case, gathering evidence to indict him.

This hostile and suspicious attitude toward men can lead the feminist to become a paranoid type that psychologists call an injustice collector:

An injustice collector is someone who magnifies trivial “injustices” (real or imagined), believes the injustices are “intentional and purposeful” and collects them until he forms an encompassing perspective of himself/herself as a victim of bullying, discrimination and disrespect.

What happens with the feminist injustice collector is that she begins classifying male behavior according to a continuum of sexism. All men are her moral inferiors, the feminist believes, but the evidence of their inferiority can be difficult to find, because their sexism is not always overt. There are subtle shades and degrees of sexism, and the feminist injustice collector becomes an expert at detecting the tiniest bits of evidence, like a forensic investigator scrutinizing a murder scene for latent fingerprints and microscopic traces of DNA.

This suspicious mentality, rooted in an attitude of profound resentment toward males, is apt to metastasize into dangerous irrationality.

Did I mention Maggie Stiefvater has obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Also, she’s a self-righteous pharisaical hypocrite:

I generally try to be a decent person on the internet. Approach life with a semblance of humor, try not to stomp on a whole lot of toes, share a bit of myself with the world. Sometimes I fail to be tactful or harmless, and I try to own up to it when I do. That said, my sense of humor and my range of interests are very specific.

Shes a “decent person” who doesn’t “stomp on a whole lot of toes,” but doesn’t hesitate to denounce all “nice guys” as sexist, and stigmatizes men for the human-rights violation of asking women on dates.

Glass house, stones, some assembly required.

My problem with the Catalog of Sexist Behavior form of feminist rhetoric is that no literate person needs to be told, for example, that cat-calling is offensive. Generally speaking, if you’re reading a feminist blog — or op-ed columns in the New York Times, for that matter — you’re intelligent enough to understand that these behaviors are wrong. We must therefore ask, for whose benefit are these lectures about sexist behavior delivered?

Isn’t it just about feminists signifying their membership in the tribe?

It’s the Feminist Existential Theory of Oppression, wherein being a victim of the sexist patriarchy defines what it means to be a woman.

We heard you the first time, OK? For more than four decades, feminists have been lecturing men about what rotten sexist swine we are — all of us, especially “nice guys” — and we realize that there is nothing we can do about it, because everything men do is wrong, according to feminism.

It’s all one gigantic exercise in “kafkatrapping,” and the only way men can make feminists happy is to avoid feminists altogether:

Guys: Learn to take a hint. Learn to walk away.
If a woman tells you she is a feminist, say nothing and walk away.
No feminist wants to hear what a man has to say, and life is too short to waste your time taking to feminists. Just walk away.
Leave feminists alone, and then they can complain about that.
God knows, they’ve always got to have something to complain about.

Feminism is the Two-Minute Hate, and all men are Emmanuel Goldstein.




 

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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