Police: Lesbian Teacher Had Sex in Cemetery, Spent the Night With Teen Girl

Posted on | May 14, 2016 | 14 Comments

Public education news from rural Minnesota:

A fourth-grade teacher and junior varsity athletics coach at Aitkin Public Schools is accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female student.
Kristy Lynn Hoge, 24, was charged [May 6] with four counts of felony criminal sexual conduct in Crow Wing County District Court. . . .
Hoge worked as a fourth-grade teacher at Rippleside Elementary School and a coach with the high school’s junior varsity girls’ basketball and softball programs.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Hoge, her alleged relationship with the student became sexual in March.
In a taped statement made to an investigator on May 3, the student detailed the evolution of her relationship with Hoge, which she said began in December 2015 as a friendship. The student said Hoge was easy to talk to about issues in her life.

(When a teenage girl has “issues in her life” and the person it’s easiest for her to talk to is the lesbian basketball coach? Trouble.)

In the middle of March, the student said she and Hoge started having feelings for one another and began kissing.

(Like I said, trouble.)

Over the course of the next couple weeks, the alleged relationship evolved into first touching over the clothes, and then touching under the clothes. The student said she and Hoge met five or six times at a cemetery south of Aitkin and at a residence in Aitkin.

(“Hey, coach, wanna go parking and make out — uh, I mean, talk about my life issues — in the cemetery? Because education and stuff?”)

The student’s mother told the investigator she became aware of the alleged relationship between her daughter and Hoge on May 2, when another coach approached her with concerns. At the beginning of March, the student’s mother said her daughter asked if Hoge could spend the night while she and the student’s father were on vacation. The mother said she explained at that time it would not be appropriate for Hoge to spend the night. The student later said Hoge spent three nights at the residence and slept in her bed.

(“Your honor, this is merely an unsubstantiated allegation. My client, Ms. Hoge, denies this, and unless there is video evidence . . .”)

After receiving statements from the student and her family, the investigator contacted Hoge and asked her to come to the Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office. A little more than a half-hour later, a medical call alerted the sheriff’s office to Hoge’s alleged suicide attempt. . . .

(A victim of homophobia, obviously.)

Charges against Hoge include two counts of felony third-degree criminal sexual conduct, when the accused is in a position of authority and more than four years older than the 16- to 18-year-old victim. These charges each carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, a $30,000 fine or both. Hoge also faces two counts of felony fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, which each carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, a $20,000 fine or both. . . .

(It would be terrible to send a lesbian to a prison full of women.)

Hoge was a high school athlete at Aitkin High School and went on to play college softball for the University of Minnesota-Morris. She was hired as a fourth-grade teacher in Aitkin for the 2015-16 school year.

This explains everything, of course. Are there any heterosexual women playing varsity softball in college? It’s like majoring in Gender Studies — one occasionally hears rumors of heterosexuality, but such reports are difficult to prove. Please excuse my sarcastic tone about this very serious criminal allegation, but what do we expect? Every public school in America now teaches children that approving of homosexuality is mandatory. The federal government requires schools to support transgenderism. Students are being taught that it is impermissible to express disapproval or moral opposition to sexual perversion — words like “perversion” and “abnormal” are now considered hate speech — and if “education” includes pro-homosexuality seminars in kindergarten, does anyone believe this will have no effect on student behavior?

This is just another isolated incident . . .

Laura Garrigus

Police in Fayetteville, N.C., say Laura Garrigus, 30, had sex with a 17-year-old girl who was her student at Cumberland International Early College on the campus of Fayetteville State University. Garrigus was charged in February with four counts of taking indecent liberties with a student and two counts of sexual offense with a student.

Kimberly Naquin

Kimberly Naquin, 26, was arrested Jan. 15 after it was learned that the high school geography teacher had sexually molested a teenage student, according to police in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Naquin had sex with the girl on at least 10 occasions over the course of nearly a year beginning in September 2014 when the girl was 16, police said.

Johnna Feazell

In December, former Missouri teacher Johnna Feazell, 48, was sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually molesting a 16-year-old girl she had known since the student was in seventh grade. Feazell, who had coached sports at a Webster County junior high school, was also convicted of tampering with evidence.

Tiffany Howard

In December, police in Austin, Texas, arrested former Bowie High School teacher Tiffany Howard, 41, on charges that she sexually molested a girl during a three-year period that began when the victim was 13. Howard had coached the girl in seventh grade.

Patricia Hermann

Gymnastics coach Patricia Hermann, 48, was charged in October with sexually abusing two girls, ages 10 and 13. Police say Hermann molested the two girls while their Special Olympics team from Illinois was staying in a hotel in Cobb County, Georgia, for a competition.

In June 2015, former high school teacher and swim coach Leah Eames, 33, was sentenced to 30 months probation in Illinois after she pleaded guilty to having sex with a 16-year-old girl she coached.
In May 2015, a Michigan judge sentenced Erin Katharine MacDonald to a year in jail after the former Grant High School science teacher pleaded guilty to having sex with a teenage student.
In April 2015, Texas officials arrested Heather Lynn Packwood, 25, on charges that she sexually molested a girl who was a student at New Braunfels Christian Academy.
Geraldine Alcorn, 28, was arrested in March 2015 in Pittsburgh after police say she became obsessed with an 11-year-old student at Beechwood Elementary School, where Alcorn was a pre-kindergarten teacher.
Meghan Colleen Daugherty, 36, was charged in February 2015 with criminal sexual conduct with a minor in South Carolina. The arrest warrant said the Hillcrest Middle School physical education teacher committed sexual battery on a 14-year-old girl.
Shakyla Wilson, 22, was charged with one count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse after police in Naperville, Illinois, say she had sexual contact in February 2015 with a 14-year-old girl from Hill Middle School, where Wilson was volunteering as a girls basketball coach.
High school dance teacher Michelle Smith White, 37, of Durham, N.C., was charged in October 2014 with having sex with a 16-year-old female student. Police said White had the student’s name and initials tattooed on her body.
Dance teacher Sabrina Epps, 19, was arrested in October 2014 after police say she admitted having lesbian sex with a 14-year-old girl who was a student at the Tennessee studio where Epps taught.
Gaile Supp, 25, pleaded guilty in September 2014 to sexual battery, a third-degree felony. A former teacher at Clearfield High School in Utah, Supp had originally been charged with object rape, a first-degree felony, in April 2013 for allegedly committing a sexual act on an unwilling 17-year-old female student at her West Haven home.
California teacher Rebecca Eileen Diebolt, 35, was arrested in June 2014 after a woman told police that she and Diebolt had a four-year sexual relationship that began in 2004, when the victim was 15 and Diebolt was her language arts teacher and swim/water polo coach.
Dance teacher Nichol Marie Phelps, 30, was sentenced to prison in June 2014 after she pleaded guilty to having lesbian sex with a 15-year-old student at the Florida academy where Phelps taught.
Andrea Michelle Cardosa, 40, was charged with 16 felony counts in February 2014 after two former female students accused her of sexually molesting them. One accuser said Cardosa started having sex with her when she was only 12.
Tonya Drueppel was arrested in January 2014 on charges that she had sex with a middle-school girl beginning in October 2012, when the victim was 13.
Amanda Michelle Feenstra, 32, pleaded guilty in October 2013 to having sex with a 17-year-old girl who was a student at the Texas high school where Feenstra was a dance teacher.
Kelly O’Rourke, 42, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in October 2013 for having sex with a 16-year-old girl.
Linda Wallace was sentenced to prison in September 2013 after pleading guilty to having had a four-year sexual affair with a female student that began when the girl was 13.
Nicole Wooten was arrested in February 2013 on charges that she had sex with a girl in 2005 and 2006, when the victim was a 12-year-old eighth-grader.

But it’s not like there’s a trend here or anything . . .

The kind of "rape culture" feminists never notice, for some reason. https://t.co/K0TJGyKGnF @Sargon_of_Akkad pic.twitter.com/cWMXObaCA5

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 14, 2016

Category: Crime, Education, Gays

Feminists Against Heterosexuality (@CarolineHeldman Edition)

Posted on | May 14, 2016 | 23 Comments

Stop objectifying her with your male gaze, misogynists!

Years ago, Professor Donald Douglas of American Power began a sort of blog feud with Occidental College Professor Caroline Heldman, and at the time I had no idea who she was. Back in the day (circa 2008-2012), I treated academic feminism as a joke, the way all conservatives did. Those were the years when I was up to my eyeballs in campaign politics, the Tea Party, etc., and it wasn’t until 2014 that I began seriously researching feminism. Among the weird concepts I encountered was object relations theory, a concept explored at length in a 2011 book Fixing Gender: Lesbian Mothers and the Oedipus Complex by Natasha Distiller. This brain-straining attempt to adapt Freudian psychoanalysis to feminist purposes has an ideological ancestry, as it were, traceable to Nancy Chodorow’s 1978 book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychology and the Sociology of Gender. Not to delve into this too deeply, but because feminists believe everything is “socially constructed,” their attack on men, marriage and motherhood required them to develop a theoretical refutation both of (a) the idea that sexual behavior is a matter of biology, and (b) Freudian theory about the developmental origins of sexual behavior. Since the 1970s, basically, feminists have been blaming patriarchy for whatever they don’t like about men and sex (which is to say, everything about men and sex), and this is where Professor Heldman’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual propaganda becomes relevant.

How old was I the first time I rolled my eyes at the phrase “sex object”? No older than 19, I’m sure. “Everybody Loves a Pretty Girl” (Rule 5) is a fact of human nature, and all complaints about it are futile. Lecture all you want and write yet another book criticizing “objectification” as “sexist,” and still the fact will remain: Beauty exists, and men will always prefer beautiful women to ugly women. Nevertheless, despite the already vast library of feminist nonsense on this subject — Femininity and Domination by Sandra Lee Bartky (1990), The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1990), Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys (2005) — the same basic arguments continue to be endlessly recycled. To recite the main points of this dreary theme, there is no such thing as “beauty,” nor any reason (other than “sexism” and “misogyny”) why anyone would notice the difference between Kate Upton and Jaclyn Friedman.

Jaclyn Friedman, feminist (left); Kate Upton, supermodel (right).

According to feminists, it is wrong for men to admire Ms. Upton’s beauty, and also wrong to think maybe Ms. Friedman should lose a few pounds. Feminists insist there is no objective basis for preferring one to the other — no biological fact of human nature is involved — and anyone who disagrees is a victim of patriarchal brainwashing:

Overtly, the fashion-beauty complex seeks to glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence. More important than this is its covert aim, which is to depreciate woman’s body and deal a blow to her narcissism. We are presented everywhere with images of perfect female beauty . . . These images remind us constantly that we fail to measure up. . . . The female body is revealed as a task, an object in need of transformation. . . . Every aspect of my bodily being requires either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it.

So wrote Professor Sandra Lee Bartky in 1990, and this claim — women are victims of a sinister “fashion-beauty complex” — is one that feminists never get tired of repeating, as if repeating it could make it true.

Yet even if it were true, and if by some magical power (an edict from the White House or the United Nations) all the advertisements for fashion and beauty were abolished, (a) men would still prefer good-looking women, (b) women would still want to enhance their beauty, and (c) feminists would still be bitching about it. So here is a 13-minute video of Professor Heldman lecturing about “self-objectification”:

She made this argument in a 2008 Ms. magazine article:

A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girl’s perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been recognized by social scientists as self-objectification — viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the male gaze. . . .
What would disappear from our lives if we stopped seeing ourselves as objects? Painful high heels? Body hatred? Constant dieting? Liposuction? It’s hard to know. Perhaps the most striking outcome of self-objectification is the difficulty women have in imagining identities and sexualities truly our own. In solidarity, we can start on this path, however confusing and difficult it may be.

Oh, “social scientists” say this? Well, that settles it! You can prove damn near anything with “social science,” but never mind whether this is true. Correlation is not causation, and the question Professor Heldman wants us to ignore is, “Why would a women want to be a ‘sex object’?” Also, we must ignore another question: “Why is ‘the male gaze’ thus specified?”

Like all such feminist arguments, Professor Heldman’s rhetoric is superficially a criticism of media “depictions of women,” a Trojan Horse within which she conceals an attack on male sexuality. This kind of “consciousness-raising” aims to incite women to resent men’s normal behavior, and to view male sexuality as inherently harmful to women.

Ladies, if you don’t like Cosmo and Vogue, don’t buy them. If a TV advertisement offends you, change the channel. Everybody is free to ignore any media “depictions of women” they don’t like, and I’ve been criticizing media since before Caroline Heldman was old enough to drive. But while Professor Heldman pretends she is merely criticizing media, what she is actually criticizing is heterosexuality, both in terms of mens’s desires (their admiration of beauty) and women’s response to male desire. Women should never seek to be beautiful in order to attract male admiration, Professor Heldman insinuates, and any male who admires a woman’s beauty is wrong for doing so. Every woman is equally deserving of admiration, feminists would have us believe, and anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist. However women themselves may judge each other, any scale of value applied to women is “sexist” if it in any way reflects male preferences. Whatever men want is always wrong, because men are bad — this is the unstated premise of Professor Heldman’s “objectification” discourse, as of feminist ideology generally:

This anti-beauty message has been a core component of feminist rhetoric since 1968, when the Women’s Liberation movement emerged from the New Left and staged its first public protest against the Miss America pageant. Beauty pageants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women,” the protesters declared, proclaiming that “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.”
Notice the words “forced,” “enslaved” and “conditioned,” used to imply that these “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards” are imposed on women against their will. Are women “forced” to play these “roles”? Do women “compete for male approval” because they have been “conditioned” to do so?

A careful student of rhetoric perceives how feminists employ tendentious language to depict men as evil oppressors and women as their victims. Similarly, we see how Professor Heldman employs the appeal to authority fallacy (argumentum ad verecundiam) by invoking “social scientists” as having proven the harmful effects of “self-objectification.” Whether or not this “research” proves what Professor Heldman says it proves, at what point does the ordinary human concern with appearance and grooming become that awful thing, “self-objectification”? Could we all improve our lives by ceasing to care what we look like? Should my teenage sons stop working out in the gym? Shave their heads instead of paying $20 for a nice hairstyle? Sit on the sofa and stuff themselves with Cheetos? Wear ratty old clothes instead of Abercrombie and Fitch?

Well, I could continue this argument further, but the shrewd reader perceives the basic point: Professor Heldman’s arguments are popular (that YouTube video has gotten nearly 1.3 million views) because she is telling unhappy women what they want to hear. “You are not to blame for your unhappiness,” feminists always tell women. “Blame the media! Blame society! Blame capitalism! Blame patriarchy! Blame men!”

Rationalizations (scapegoating and sour grapes) are attempts to evade responsibility for our own failures, to justify our resentments, or to explain away our disappointments. This is all feminism really is, a gigantic Excuse Factory, mass-producing self-justifying rationalizations for unhappy women. As Peter Lloyd says, “feminism teaches women they’re perennial victims and deserve whatever they desire.”

No paranoid conspiracy theory can compete with feminism when it comes to attributing unlimited evil to the all-powerful Them. Everywhere she turns, a feminist imagines herself confronted with the oppressive power of the patriarchy, and it’s amazing that any of the young women Professor Heldman teaches at Occidental College (annual tuition $49,278) can withstand all the social injustice they suffer, living under the constant hostile surveillance of the male gaze. Professor Heldman is promoting an attitude of sexual paranoia — “Fear and Loathing of the Penis” — which has become the core value of feminism in the 21st century. Feminists are against marriage, against motherhood, against capitalism, against Christianity, against men and thus, ultimately, against heterosexuality.

Could feminist theory ever succeed in changing men’s behavior? Is it possible that somewhere in the world, a lunatic pervert is now masturbating to depraved fantasies about . . . Jaclyn Friedman?

In a world gone mad, anything is possible, you sick freaks.

However, I see Ms. Friedman has only 10,700 followers on Twitter, while Kate Upton has 2.2 million, so I guess we know which of these two women is the greater victim of “objectification,” right?

My apologies to @KateUpton for objectifying her with the male gaze — another victim of social injustice! pic.twitter.com/EqVObiyqkU

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 14, 2016

Category: Sex Trouble

Rocky Horror Department of Education

Posted on | May 13, 2016 | 55 Comments

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
— Barack Obama, Oct. 30, 2008

Whatever you say, you can’t say America had no warning about this:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

(Never mind whether their “gender identity” matches their genitalia or their chromosomes. Ignore what you learn in biology class, kids.)

A letter to school districts will go out Friday, adding to a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue. The declaration — signed by Justice and Education department officials — will describe what schools should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against.
It does not have the force of law, but it contains an implicit threat: Schools that do not abide by the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law could face lawsuits or a loss of federal aid.

(Transgender totalitarianism, in other words.)

The move is certain to draw fresh criticism, particularly from Republicans, that the federal government is wading into local matters and imposing its own values on communities across the country that may not agree. It represents the latest example of the Obama administration using a combination of policies, lawsuits and public statements to change the civil rights landscape for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people.
After supporting the rights of gay people to marry, allowing them to serve openly in the military and prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against them, the administration is wading into the battle over bathrooms and siding with transgender people.
“No student should ever have to go through the experience of feeling unwelcome at school or on a college campus,” John B. King Jr., the secretary of the Department of Education, said in a statement. “We must ensure that our young people know that whoever they are or wherever they come from, they have the opportunity to get a great education in an environment free from discrimination, harassment and violence.”

(Via Memeorandum.) How did we get here? You have to go back to 1977, when the city of Miami passed an ordinance forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and Anita Bryant publicly opposed it. Bryant was a popular singer (her song “Paper Roses” hit No. 5 on the charts in 1960) who subsequently became famous as the celebrity spokeswoman for the Florida citrus industry. Her opposition to gay rights resulted in Bryant being demonized by the Left, but her Save Our Children campaign was prescient in recognizing that activists were using dishonest claims of “discrimination” to normalize abnormal behavior.

The question, viewed from a legal and political standpoint, exposed a widespread confusion between tolerance (most people don’t want to be bullies or bigots) and the far more radical concept of sexual “rights” advanced by gay activists. This parallels a confusion, which I note in the introduction of my book Sex Trouble, over the meaning of the word “equality.” Most people think of “equality” in terms of basic fairness, which is a much different idea than what feminists mean by “equality.”

Modern feminism, a movement originating in the radical New Left of the 1960s, advances a totalitarian notion of “equality” derived from Marxist-Leninist ideology. Many of the early leaders of Second Wave feminism (i.e., the Women’s Liberation movement) were so-called “Red Diaper babies,” the children of Communist Party members, and brought to the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s the conceptual framework of Marxism (historical materialism and class struggle) which were adapted to create what Shulamith Firestone famously called The Dialectic of Sex.

In the crypto-Marxist analysis of Firestone and her radical comrades, men were an oppressive “sex class” (analogous to the capitalist bourgeoisie in Marxist thought), women were victims of oppression (analogous to the proletariat), and feminists were the revolutionary vanguard, the sexual Bolsheviks who would overthrow the unjust tyranny of male supremacy.

This was dangerous insanity, of course, and was widely ridiculed at the time. How could such preposterous ideas ever succeed? Yet radical feminists had influential allies in the news media, academia and the entertainment industry, but more importantly in the Democrat Party. During the 1972 presidential campaign, George McGovern had won the Democrat nomination with the support of the New Left, and one of the things the McGovernites did at the 1972 Democrat convention was to change the party rules and platform to reflect a feminist agenda. After Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he was expected to advance this agenda, and in 1977 — the same year Anita Bryant began her Save Our Children campaign, and also the year I graduated high school — the “National Women’s Conference” controversy erupted.

The chairwoman of this taxpayer-funded event was Democrat Rep. Bella Abzug, a radical leftist from New York, and the pro-abortion agenda of the conference in Houston sparked protests from Catholics and other conservative Christians. Among other controversies emerging from this 1977 event were reports from the handful of conservative women delegates in Houston about the disproportionate number of lesbian feminists among the 20,000 or so attendees. Lesbian rights were on the conference agenda, a strategy that had been planned from the very outset, with the approval of the Carter administration. In an interview with Anahi Russo Garrido, included in a recent anthology on the history of gay activism, radical lesbian Charlotte Bunch explained how this happened:

I participated in the first White House meeting with LGBT groups in 1977 . . . where I spoke about the immigration problems faced by LGBT couples from different countries. . . .
One of the most important projects we organized was a lesbian caucus for the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977. Houston was the national event forr the UN International Women’s Year — the only one ever sponsored by the US Government. . . . We coordinated a national network of lesbians, who attended their state events and sought to be elected as delegates to Houston, as well as to get lesbian rights on the agenda. We built alliances with feminist organizations like NOW and worked with mainstream groups like the YWCA and the AAUW . . .
This broad feminist coalition was successful in getting agreement on a 26-point platform that included planks on sexual preference, reproductive rights, poverty, minority women, etc. It was a turning point for me in seeing that the future of sexual rights lay in building coalitions.

So, here in 1977, you have “mainstream groups like the YWCA and the AAUW” forming a coalition with Bunch, who had divorced her husband, formed a lesbian collective known as The Furies and authored the 1972 radical manifesto “Lesbians in Revolt.” What became apparent at the Houston conference was that feminists were not only determined to destroy the marriage-based family, but that in pursuit of that goal, they welcomed as allies radicals like Charlotte Bunch who were opposed to heterosexuality, per se. As early as 1977, it was apparent that the official feminist agenda was not about “equality” in the sense of basic fairness, nor was “the future of sexual rights,” as Bunch saw it, about mere tolerance toward “alternative lifestyles.” By 1977, feminists already had been saying this for years, and they have continued saying it.

“Sexism is the root of all other oppressions … Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.”
— Ginny Berson, “The Furies,” 1972, in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, edited by Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (1975)

“Gay revolution addresses itself to the total elimination of the sexual caste system around which our oppressive society is organized. . . . The lesbian is the key figure in the social revolution to end the sexual caste system, or heterosexual institution.”
— Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973)

“The lesbian liberation movement has made possibly the most important contribution to a future sexual liberation. . . . What the women’s liberation movement did create was a homosexual liberation movement that politically challenged male supremacy in one of its most deeply institutionalized aspects — the tyranny of heterosexuality.”
— Linda Gordon, “The Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Three Stages of Feminism,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein (1978)

“To the extent that women harbor negative attitudes toward lesbians and lesbianism, we demonstrate identification with men. To the extent that women express negative attitudes toward lesbians in our words and deeds, we strengthen patriarchy.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“Because sexism is the root of all oppression and heterosexuality upholds sexism, feminists must become lesbians and lesbians must become feminists if we are to effect a revolution. . . . To state that feminists must become lesbians assumes that lesbianism is a matter of choice and conviction, not biological conditioning or sexual behavior. Moreover, lesbians must also become feminists, that is, they must ground their sexuality in a political discourse if any social change is to occur. . . .
“I believe it can be shown that, historically, lesbianism and feminism have been coterminous if not identical social phenomena.”
— Bonnie Zimmerman, “Confessions of a Lesbian Feminist,” in Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, edited by Dana Heller (1997)

“Heterosexuality is a category divided by gender and which also depends for its meaning on gender divisions. . . .
“The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference . . . but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination.”
— Dianne Richardson, “Theorizing Heterosexuality,” in Rethinking Sexuality (2000)

“From the beginning of second-wave feminism, sexuality was identified as a key site of patriarchal domination and women’s resistance to it. . . .
“While heterosexual desires, practices, and relations are socially defined as ‘normal’ and normative, serving to marginalize other sexualities as abnormal and deviant, the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality derives from its institutionalization as more than merely a sexual relation.”
— Stevi Jackson, “Sexuality, Heterosexuality, and Gender Hierarchy: Getting Our Priorities Straight,” in Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality, edited by Chrys Ingraham (2005)

“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)

“Heterosexuality and masculinity . . . are made manifest through patriarchy, which normalizes men as dominant over women. . . .
“This tenet of patriarchy is thus deeply connected to acts of sexual violence, which have been theorized as a physical reaffirmation of patriarchal power by men over women.”
— Sara Carrigan Wooten, 2015

Rationalizing and justifying this radical agenda required the development of feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — which in turn leads to the idea that it is “discrimination” to keep boys out of the girls’ restroom:

“Equal rights” sounds so wonderful. Who can be against equality?
Yet as Richard Weaver warned us long ago, Ideas Have Consequences, and the sledgehammer logic of “equal rights” brutally dismantles every common-sense objection. Even the most obvious facts — e.g., boys and girls are different — must therefore be suppressed to conform with The Equality Principle.

Because this radical conception of “equality” has become such an intrinsic component of the Democrat agenda, it is promoted by the liberal media and is also taught in public schools, because the schools are controlled by teachers unions that donate millions of dollars annually to Democrats. You will be accused of “hate” if you oppose this agenda.

“As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.”
— Anita Bryant, 1978

People called her crazy for saying that. However, when the Democrat Party owes its success to the support of gay activists, feminists, and teachers unions, and when everyone in the education system is required to support this bizarre anti-heterosexual agenda, is it any wonder that Democrats are imposing transgender cult ideology in public schools?

“Fundamentally transformed,” just like Obama promised.

Category: Education, Gays, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 05.12.16

Posted on | May 12, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.12.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
90 Miles From Tyranny: News From The Future – Dear Leader Reduces Rations To Combat Obesity
EBL: Don’t People Ever Learn? Don’t Trust A Clinton!
Da Tech Guy: Baldilocks – Meaning Has No Meaning Any More
The Political Hat: Free Range Children And The Nanny State
Michelle Malkin: Pop Quiz – Who Pissed Off The Left With This Terror Threat Truth-Telling?
Twitchy: Rep. Issa Undeterred By RNC HQ Fence During Trump/Ryan Meeting
Shark Tank: Harry Reid Tells Alan Grayson “I Want You To Lose”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: General Hayden – The Terrorist Threat Today Vs. 9/11
American Thinker: I’m A Traitor For Opposing Trump?
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The Outliers By Kimberly McCreight
Don Surber: Rock Guitarist Moves Because His Neighbors Are Too Loud
Jammie Wearing Fools: Thanks, Obama! Homeland Security Released Nearly 20,000 Convicted Illegal Immigrant Criminals In 2015
Joe For America: Ft. Worth School Superintendent Unilaterally Allows Boys In Girls’ Bathroom; Texas Lt. Governor Calls For Resignation
JustOneMinute: The Times On Hillary’s E-mails – Everyone’s Doing It
Pamela Geller: Muslim Gangs Impose “Sharia Zones – Threaten, Attack, And Extort Copenhagen Bars
Shot In The Dark: Those Who forget Stupid-People History Are Doomed To Repeat It
STUMP: The Connections Between Detroit And Chicago Public Schools
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – 25% Of Gen X Are Over 50
The Lonely Conservative: Happy Tax Freedom Day, New York
This Ain’t Hell: Beware IAVA’s Vetmoji
Weasel Zippers: Liberal Pollster Claims 49% Of Millennials Would Flee U.S. If Trump Wins
Megan McArdle: Facebook Doesn’t Like Conservatives, And That’s Okay

Semisonic – Feeling Strangely Fine
Shop Amazon – The Handmade Baby Store

Category: Linkagery

‘A Collective Blind Spot’

Posted on | May 12, 2016 | 68 Comments

The BBC reports:

Women in the UK are now 35% more likely than men to go to university and the gap is widening every year.
A baby girl born in 2016 will be 75% more likely to go to university than a boy, if current trends continue.
The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has published research examining this increasingly polarised gender divide.
And as university remains the gateway to better-paid, more secure jobs, Mary Curnock Cook, head of the Ucas university admissions service, warns that being male could be a new form of disadvantage.
“On current trends, the gap between rich and poor will be eclipsed by the gap between males and females within a decade,” she writes in an introduction to the report.
And she says while there is much focus on social mobility and geographical differences, there is a collective blind spot on the underachievement of young men.

(Hat-tip: Ethan Ralph at The Ralph Retort.)

The important question is, “Why?” Two obvious answers:

The collapse of the marriage-based family. Boys from fatherless households have a tendency toward substance abuse, criminality and educational failure. In communities where fatherless is commonplace, this creates a vicious cycle in successive generations. In the United States, this pattern is most visible among those euphemistically called “urban youth,” i.e., black teenagers, especially the children of welfare-dependent single mothers. In England, by contrast, the “urban youth” are usually white, although young Muslims (most often the children of immigrants from Pakistan, colloquially called “Asians” in Britain) have recently become part of the UK “urban youth” problem. As social welfare programs replace working fathers as the source of support for children, many boys grow up with a sense of purposelessness. We see this in the street gangs that have turned Chicago into Murder City, U.S.A. (So far this year, 221 people have been murdered in Chicago, and another 1,075 were shot but survived.) Without fathers to provide discipline, guidance and role models for boys, bad things happen. It’s hard to get a college education if you’re strung out on dope or doing time in prison.
Anti-male bias in schools. This has been a serious problem for decades, and has in recent years become much worse. When I was a child, it seemed to me that the women who became elementary school teachers were drawn to the profession by their hateful resentment of boys, and a penchant for sadistic cruelty was a prerequisite to employment. So far as I could tell, school was a place where boys were sent to be scolded and punished by mean old ladies. “McCain, you were just a troublemaker,” says the skeptical reader. “Besides, haven’t Progress and Equality changed all that?” Yes, but not for the better. Nowadays, the mischief-filled boy is no longer subjected to the humiliation of paddling as punishment for his excess energy. Instead, the boy who misbehaves is prescribed drugs that turn him into zombie. The mean old ladies who run the schools have always viewed boys’ natural restless energy as a problem to be solved. How convenient (and profitable for major pharmaceutical companies) that being a rambunctious boy is now commonly diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder in need of “treatment.”

The school system is anti-male, which is why most boys are anti-school.

While I can’t speak for the U.K., I know that every attempt to explain these problems in the United States has gone unheeded by the policy-making elite and the progressives who run the educational bureaucracy. The influence of feminism has only aggravated the blatant discrimination against boys in our schools. Today’s young teachers are trained in universities where feminist gender theory prevails, and teachers today are far less likely to have children of their own than were teachers when I was in school in the 1960s and ’70s. If my teachers were mostly mean old ladies who hated me, most of them at least were mothers, and therefore were generally cognizant of the innate differences between boys and girls. Nowadays, the public school curriculum and pedagogy have been so irreparably warped by Third Wave feminist nonsense and other “progressive” theories that it’s a minor miracle if any child makes it through school without succumbing to the prevailing insanity.

Anyone who wants to understand these problems should read Christina Hoff Sommers’ 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men. I would furthermore recommend Dana Mack’s 1997 book The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family. Most parents fail to understand that the educational bureaucracy profoundly hostile to parental sovereignty. Your children are actually their children, the “progressive” educator has been trained to believe. The public school system in America is a union-controlled apparatus of the Democrat Party, operated by cultural Marxists who despise Christianity and capitalism. If you are a Christian who is trying to raise your children with decent moral values, keep them far away from the government education bureaucracy. Public school teachers hate you, and they consider it their professional duty to teach your children to hate you, too.

Beyond that, remember: Feminists hate your sons. Feminists want your sons to fail in school. Feminists don’t want your sons to go to college. Feminists don’t want your sons to have professional careers. Feminism is about achieving “equality” by destroying opportunity for your sons.

Category: Education

‘Male Feminist’? Don’t Waste Your Time

Posted on | May 12, 2016 | 35 Comments

Feminists are women who hate men, and men who support feminism do so because either (a) they don’t realize feminists hate them, (b) they hate themselves, or (c) they think they can be an exception to this hatred.

Feminism is a movement by women, for women, against men. Feminists regard the “male feminist” as a joke, or as an unwelcome intruder. However, a man can support feminism. It’s very easy:

To be an anti-feminist, a man simply skips Step One — just keep your money and avoid feminists. What kind of fool would waste time talking to women who hate him merely for being male? Alas, there is never a shortage of fools in the world, so we have “male feminists,” and feminists have to keep telling men they are not welcome in the movement:

Feminism Is Still Just For Women
Feminism is still just for women, okay? The last time I wrote about this, I recieved a lot of hate. . . . The consensus is growing that men are not needed here.
If men speaks out in defense of feminism, he risks nothing, but can gain everything. Now, I know some of you out there will claim I and other feminists hate men. That is not true, although it ultimately doesn’t matter if we all did hate men anyway. A lot of men turn man-hate into a self-fulfilling prophecy, so before you get into the whole “misandry” thing, you my want to know that are being self-defeating.
So yeah, feminism is a girls-only club!

The self-evident contradiction — “I don’t hate men, but don’t want them in the feminist movement, because men are not needed here” — of this Tumblr blogger’s argument is indicative of the fundamental problem of feminism since the modern movement’s inception in the late 1960s. Like the appeasers dealing with Hitler in the 1930s, some men responded to the Women’s Liberation movement by acceding to their demands. Guys didn’t want to be called “male chauvinist pigs,” so they tried to maintain peace through compromise. They gave feminists money:

Women’s Studies professor and feminist author Susan M. Hartmann credits the Ford Foundation with being a substantive force that created the feminist movement. . . . It is safe to say that without the Ford Foundation, feminism would not have been successful in gaining such a strong foothold in academia, and by extension, politics. . . .
In 1971, a group of feminists approached Ford president McGeorge Bundy with a request to involve itself in the feminist movement the way it had in the Civil Rights movement, essentially, creating it out of whole cloth. The result of those early discussions was a full-fledged women’s project to fund the small number of existing women’s advocacy organizations, and also to create a whole new field within academia known as “women’s studies.” In 1972, Ford announced the first $1 million national fellowship program for “faculty and doctoral dissertation research on the role of women in society and Women’s Studies broadly construed.” A 1996 article by Heather MacDonald reported that women’s studies programs had received $36 million between 1972-1992 from Ford and other foundations.

Fools! You failed to realize that Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Give the feminist everything she demands today, and tomorrow she’ll be back with a new list of demands.

The classic victim of this was Alfred Conrad. A Harvard-educated economist, he married the poet Adrienne Rich and they had three sons. In the 1960s, his wife joined the feminist movement, and Conrad at first supported her. As she became more and more militant in her hatred of men, however, Rich’s feminism drove Conrad to commit suicide in 1970 at age 46. His friend Hayden Carruth later told the Guardian: “I don’t know what went on between them, except that Alf came to me and complained bitterly that Adrienne had lost her mind.” She moved in with her lesbian lover and wrote dismissively of her dead husband in her subsequent books, saying she only married Conrad “because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family.” Adrienne Rich made famous the phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” in a 1980 essay. Like other feminists, Rich condemned relationships with men as “oppressive” because of the way “male power manifests itself . . . as enforcing heterosexuality on women.”

Feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — denies that there is any such thing as “human nature.” Feminism rejects any claim that heterosexuality is normal, necessary or influenced by biological instinct. Men do not have any innate sexual needs or impulses, according to feminists, a point Rich emphasized by using ironic quotes around the word “drive” when she condemned “the socialization of women to feel that male sexual ‘drive’ amounts to a right.” Hostility toward male sexuality inspires feminists to describe heterosexual relationships (especially including marriage) as representing male “domination” and “control” of women. Feminists view sexual intercourse as “exploitation,” a means by which men humiliate and degrade women. Heterosexuality is imposed on women by “force” and “compulsion,” according to Rich, as well as through “control of consciousness” by the “idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage” in literature, art, movies and other forms of culture.

“Characterised by unequal power relations between men and women, patriarchy systematically oppresses those who are, through no fault of their own, born female. …
“Social constructions of gender, like power, stem from patriarchal ideologies …
“Environmentally speaking, gender is independent of sex … and signifies the social constructedness of what maleness and femaleness mean in a given culture. The hierarchy that implicitly positions men above women due to reproductive difference, is a harmful one.”
— Amy Marie Austin, 2014

Far from being limited to an extreme fringe within the feminist movement, this anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology is now promoted by feminist professors in Women’s Studies programs that enroll some 90,000 students annually on more than 700 U.S. college and university campuses. For example, in the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University, the junior-level course “Gender and Critical Inquiry” (WS301) in the fall 2007 semester included assigned readings by such radical lesbians as Charlotte Bunch, Monique Wittig and Audre Lorde, from the textbook Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (edited by Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 2002). Another assignment from the textbook was “Separating Lesbian Theory From Feminist Theory,” an essay by Cheshire Calhoun arguing that “from a feminist perspective, sexual interaction, romantic love, marriage, and the family are all danger zones,” being patriarchal institutions that “serve male interests.” Citing this essay, a student in the class wrote:

According to feminism the role of heterosexuality is what structures the male-female relationship. Heterosexuality is the structure that keeps sexist oppression in place in the private realm; where sexism in general operates to also oppress in the public sphere. In other words heterosexuality reinforces the hierarchy established by sexism to keep women dominated in “sexual interaction, romantic love, marriage, and the family.”

Taught by their professors that heterosexuality is synonymous with a “hierarchy” of “sexist oppression,” young feminists are apt to condemn any expression of male interest in women as “misogyny.” Unlike normal women, who enjoy being admired by men and are flattered by male attention, feminists condemn men’s admiration of female beauty. Complimenting a woman’s appearance is “harassment” to feminists, who denounce men for “objectification” merely for looking at women.

“Demonizing men’s admiration of women’s beauty (the ‘male gaze’) is one way in which heterosexual masculinity is ‘problematized’ in feminist rhetoric, which seeks not only to inspire women to view men contemptuously, but also to make men ashamed of their own desires.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 16

Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency asserted on Twitter that “because we live in a culture that routinely objectifies women . . . women’s perceived value as human beings is tied directly to their sexual desirability to men,” so that women suffer the “dehumanization of being reduced to sex objects.” Such an argument implies that men’s “perceived value as human beings” has nothing to do with men’s “sexual desirability” to women. Are there any men whom Ms. Sarkeesian considers sexually desirable? If so, on what basis? What is the “perceived value” of men, from a feminist perspective? None whatsoever, Ms. Sarkeesian would probably be compelled to answer, if she were honest, which she is not.

Dishonesty about their motives, methods and goals is as necessary to feminism as it is to any other totalitarian movement. Just as Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet empire by deliberate deceit, so also have feminists gained power through blatant lies and hypocrisy. Even while they constantly churn out anti-male propaganda — never speaking of men except as violent perpetrators of sexual oppression — feminist deny that they hate men. They are simply in favor of equality, feminists say, when confronted by critics. To accuse them of hating men, feminists will claim, is to prove (a) that you are too ignorant to actually understand feminism, or (b) that you are a misogynist oppressor who hates women, or perhaps (c) both. Attempting to argue with feminists is to encounter the textbook definition of circular logic. Simply disagreeing with a feminist is considered sufficient proof that you are wrong. Feminists believe they possess a monopoly on truth and moral virtue, and view men as their inferiors. Males know nothing and are always wrong. Whatever a man says is automatically ridiculed by feminists as “mansplaining.”

Feminist Men? No Thanks!
This question pops up right here on tumblr every now and then. Feminists men is almost a contradiction. No wait, it is a contradiction. It’s this weird idea that men can stand up against the oppression of women. . . . Even some feminists who think male feminists can exist will do so with apprehension and no small amount of wariness.
Men who identify as feminist don’t respect women. They can still rape. It’s very problematic. . . . And you gay men out there, don’t think you are out of the woods. There are still a lot of feminists who feel gay men are allies, but they can be just as problematic as any cisgendered heteronormative man even though we once supported each other in the past at a time when the whole world was against us. . . .
For any men out there, don’t fret; you can be allies but you need to know what’s expected of you. This amazing video by Melissa A. Fabello from a few years ago illustrates the many failings of male allies. They ultimately don’t know what it’s like to be women, which means they can never be true feminists.

Got it, guys? If you “identify as feminist,” this means you “don’t respect women,” because you “don’t know what it’s like to be women.” Men “can never be true feminists.” Feminism is the All-Girl Man-Haters Club.

Feminism begins with the assertion that women (all women) are oppressed by men (all men). @lifebythecreek

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 11, 2016

This assertion — the Patriarchal Thesis — is the premise of all feminist theory. @lifebythecreek https://t.co/4JlEndbQBg

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 11, 2016

The premise of the feminist syllogism is identical to its conclusion. @lifebythecreek https://t.co/doSiURbHfD

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 11, 2016

Premise A: Women are oppressed by men.
Premise B: { whatever }.
ergo
Conclusion: Men oppress women.@lifebythecreek https://t.co/4HQBW33w1K

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 11, 2016

Arguing with feminists is impossible, because arguments require facts and logic, which feminists reject to embrace the Patriarchal Thesis. The absurd spectacle of a young woman like Cora Segal, the daughter of a Harvard professor, claiming to be oppressed while attending elite Hampshire College (annual tuition $48,065) shows how feminist rhetoric routinely requires the rejection of reality. It is an odd idea of “social justice” that requires us to weep with pity for a rich girl Ms. Segal because she is victimized by “living in a white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal society,” as her mentally ill friend Jennie Chenkin claimed.

As crazy as feminists are, at least feminism provides mentally ill women who hate men (and capitalism, etc.) the Patriarchal Thesis to cling to, like a scared toddler hugging his favorite stuffed animal. What possible comfort does a “male feminist” gain from supporting such lunacy? Let any young man ask any old married guy, “Are you dominating and controlling your wife?” The old man’s laughter will be deafening.

In any long and happy marriage, the husband is domesticated. As a bachelor, I was proudly independent and, although I suffered the usual slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I was much more often the heartbreaker than the heartbroken. Certainly, I seldom had cause to complain of a shortage of female companionship. Through it all, however, I knew I was searching for exactly one woman, and when I found her . . .

Well, if you marry a good woman (and ask anybody, I married the best) you must do what it takes to keep her. Before he knows it, a man finds himself more dependent on his wife than he ever could have dreamed. That’s how a good wife is — resourceful and diligent and, to quote Proverbs 31, “her price is far above rubies.” When I was 16, my mother died, and I never imagined my father could cry so hard. To see a strong man cry that way made a profound impression on me and, for all my insuperable arrogance, I’m sure I would be nothing without my wife.

Knowing what I know, as a matter of direct experience, I have never understood feminism’s attacks on marriage as “slavery,” and their claim that women are “dominated” and “controlled” by their husbands. My wife is much better at being a wife than I am at being a husband, so maybe I’m just not very competent at this whole “cisheteropatriarchy” business. On the other hand, after 27 years of marriage, we have six children and two grandchildren, and obviously I must have done something right.

My wife and I are quite proud of our children, who are a blessing. @HBergHattie pic.twitter.com/0y8lcxRxTE

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 12, 2016

“Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the Women’s Movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.”
— Sheila Cronan, 1970

“The first condition for escaping from forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage.”
— Alison M. Jaggar, 1988

“The term motherhood refers to the patriarchal institution . . . that is male-defined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women.”
— Andrea O’Reilly, 2008

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

If I knew nothing else about feminists, their insane hostility to marriage and motherhood would be enough to make me despise feminism. What hope can there be for our nation’s future if feminists achieve their goal of destroying the family, the very fabric of society? Who would want to live in a lunatic nation run by Crazy Cat Ladies? And what kind of men would support this destructive madness? Certainly not good men.

Don’t be a male feminist. Nobody likes male feminists.

Feminist: { tells provable lie }
Man: { states contradictory fact }
Feminist: "Why do you hate women?"
Man: "What?"
Feminist: "HARASSMENT!"

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 11, 2016