The Other McCain

 

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. Continue reading La Belle Dame sans Merci →

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.

Anti-American values: @ABC's "Agent Carter" punches a U.S. soldier in the face. pic.twitter.com/KyA1zMXZej

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 9, 2016

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.”

‘Four Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!’ https://t.co/hryU4hYnSX #tcot pic.twitter.com/13c0aqinJR

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 8, 2016

 

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.

Somewhere, a Women's Studies major is trying to figure out how to blame this on the patriarchy. https://t.co/YaTXo6Tg3b@KirbyMcCain

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 7, 2016