The Other McCain

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

The ‘Self-Abnegation of … Gender Identity’

Posted on | August 12, 2015 | 49 Comments

“I’m proud of being trans and queer and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Emily Sommer concludes her decidedly weird column at the feminist blog The-Toast.net, which is chock full of the trendy jargon of feminist “gender theory”:

I consider my perspective as a trans woman versus hers as a cis woman. I explain, abstractly, how self-abnegation of one’s gender identity may lead to vulnerability, that the ethos of transmisogyny leached into me like a virus and even when I learned to value myself I was left with the small, irrational fear that a mere verbal attack could blink me out of existence. . . .
Gendering is a common courtesy. Did you know that you’re more likely to be gendered while involved in a transaction? Gendering gives a sales associate a statistical edge. Or perhaps, it’s that our terms of respect (ma’am; sir, miss) are tied to the gender binary.
The sensation of negating your identity, your very existence, for decades until the dissonance, the dysphoria, from self-abnegation becomes so great that you choose to live authentically in a sort of limbo, for a time, and then having a stranger see plainly, validate plainly, who you are is surreal. . . .
The word “navigate” is commonly used to describe how we manage personal and professional relationships to find a place for ourselves in the world. . . . Navigation is often the belief in one’s self despite media narratives meant to erase any and all challenge to traditional gender.
Media stories of transgender women focus on a range of demeaning tropes meant to label us caricatures of femininity; label us as mentally ill and otherwise erase us from the conversation. . . . A common example is the notion gender identity is a mental disorder. It’s not. Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was removed from the DSM V that was published in 2013 (homosexuality was removed in 1973). GID was replaced with Gender Dysphoria, which means it’s sort of rough when our gender identities are abased for decades. . . . What media sources often fail to portray is self-possession, a sense of agency and outspoken critiques of the status quo. . . .

You can read the whole thing if those excerpts are not enough to fill your daily quota of crazy feminism. What we perceive in “transfeminism” is how, like all other feminism, it is an attempt to tell us what we are permitted to think by tell us what we are allowed to say. The feminist must always lecture us about our alleged bigotry.

We are inferior. We are ignorant and backward and in need of feminist lectures to enlighten us about how we contribute to oppression simply by failing to speak the Officially Approved Language. Of course, the feminist lexicon is continually updated to reflect the latest theories — “Gender Identity Disorder” being replaced by “Gender Dysphoria” — so that we can be condemned as a haters if we use a term that was accepted as scientific fact until two years ago.

Feminism is a shell game, a three-card monte hustle, and the question we must ask is, “Who appointed these people to be society’s Arbiters of Moral Truth?” By what authority do these people presume to tell us what we are allowed to say? You can call Emily Sommer a “transfeminist,” or you can call him a ridiculous sissy. Feminists will say that the more accurate description is offensive simply because it is true: Facts are hate!

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Feminism’s Attack on ‘Institutionalized, Normative Heterosexuality’

Posted on | August 11, 2015 | 19 Comments

If you’ve read my book Sex Trouble, you understand how I focus on the gap between feminism’s exoteric discourse (what feminists say when seeking support from the general public) and feminism’s esoteric doctrine (the beliefs shared among intellectuals and activists who lead and control the movement). Like other movements of the radical Left, feminism preaches one thing to outsiders while teaching something else to insiders, and this deception is both deliberate and necessary. Feminists must conceal the truth about their agenda, because if taxpayers knew the ideology that is being propagated in our universities, this would cause such a political uproar that legislators would zero out the budgets of Women’s Studies programs and eliminate funding for much of the “research” done by academic feminists. Please read this very carefully:

Over the last decade and more . . . feminists have been analysing how normative heterosexuality affects the lives of heterosexuals (see Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1993; Richardson, 1996; Jackson, 1999; Ingraham, 1996, 1999). In so doing they have drawn on earlier feminists, such as Charlotte Bunch (1975), Adrienne Rich (1980) and Monique Wittig (1992), who related heterosexuality to the perpetuation of gendered divisions of labour and male appropriation of women’s productive and reproductive capacities. Indeed, Rich’s concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ could be seen as a forerunner of ‘heteronormativity’ and I would like to preserve an often neglected legacy of the former concept: that institutionalized, normative heterosexuality regulates those kept within its boundaries as well as marginalizing and sanctioning those outside them. The term ‘heteronormativity’ has not always captured this double-sided social regulation. Feminists have a vested interest in what goes on within heterosexual relations because we are concerned with the ways in which heterosexuality depends upon and guarantees gender division. . . . [T]he analysis of heteronormativity needs to be rethought in terms of what is subject to regulation on both sides of the normatively prescribed boundaries of heterosexuality: both sexuality and gender. With this in mind, this article re-examines the intersections between gender, sexuality in general and heterosexuality in particular. How these terms are defined is clearly consequential for any analysis of linkages between them. There is no consensus on the question of definition, in large part because gender, sexuality and heterosexuality are approached from a variety of perspectives focusing on different dimensions of the social. . . . Sexuality, gender and heterosexuality intersect in variable ways within and between different dimensions of the social — and these intersections are also, of course, subject to historical change along with cultural and contextual variability.

That is from a 2006 article in the journal Feminist Theory by University of York Professor Stevi Jackson. It is one of 77 citations that Google Scholar shows for The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power, a 1998 book by Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson. The authors are not “fringe” figures within academic feminism. Professor Holland (London South Bank University) and Professor Ramazanoglu (Goldsmiths College, University of London) co-authored the 2002 textbook Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices, while Professor Thomson (Director of the University of Sussex Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth) is author of the 2009 textbook Unfolding Lives: Youth, Gender and Change. The influential academic authors of The Male in the Head describe their work as a “detailed investigation of the social construction of sexuality” in which they “develop a feminist theory which shows the power of heterosexuality as masculine” — a theory that is certainly not new. Let’s recite a few examples of feminist theory.

“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy.”
— Margaret Small, “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, edited by Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron (1975)

“I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”
— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies,” speech to the National Women’s Studies Association conference, 1980

“Since sex is something men do to women . . . men dominate and control women. . . .
“In other words, heterosexuality is the foundation of the social structure of male dominance, and successfully attacking it could bring down the whole house. . . .
“The need for a unified feminist theory of sexuality is clear. If one concludes, as many feminists have, that heterosexuality is the primary and most powerful mechanism of social control, then understanding its meaning in all forms is imperative if male dominance is ever to be overcome.”
— S.P. Schacht and Patricia H. Atchison, “Heterosexual Instrumentalism: Past and Future Directions,” in Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader, edited by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (1993)

“There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege. . . . [T]he interconnections of systems are reflected in the concept of heteropatriarchy, the dominance associated with a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm. . . .
“As many feminists have pointed out, heterosexuality is organized in such a way that the power men have in society gets carried into relationships and can encourage women’s subservience, sexually and emotionally.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

Feminism’s anti-male ideology necessarily becomes an anti-heterosexual ideology. When I describe feminism as a war against human nature, I’m not exaggerating. The final chapter of The Male in the Head — as I’ve shown, a widely-cited book by respected academic feminists — is entitled, “Unnatural Heterosexuality,” and these eminent British professors advocate resistance to heterosexuality:

Men are routinely accessing male power over women, whether or not they . . . intend to exercise such power, but they are also constrained by the construction of adult heterosexuality as masculinity. We argue that sexually young people are all in the same boat, in that heterosexuality is masculinity only thinly disguised but . . . that resistance is possible and heterosexuality could be otherwise. . . .
Resisting heterosexuality is not only a question of how young people choose their sexual partners; resistance includes a critical exploration and disruption of desire, embodiment and gender. Although very few of the young people in our studies identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual, such identities, while not freeing them from the gender relations of heterosexuality, can afford them a degree of freedom in the invention and negotiation of their sexual relationships.
Some young people are clearly resisting the pressures of heterosexuality and searching for other ways of being sexual. . . .
While young people’s resistance to heterosexuality can be socially constructed in varying ways . . . the potential for young people to have a subversive or transformative effect on sexual relationships appears to be limited. Analysis of the strategies of resistance . . . became important in our understanding of the location of male power in heterosexuality.

These claims are based on research that was funded by British taxpayers under the pretext of AIDS prevention (!!!) and let me ask the reader to imagine what kind “research” is produced when feminist professors get taxpayer money to study rape, domestic violence, prostitution or any other subject pertaining to sex (or “gender”) for which they may be able to obtain a government grant. When researchers begin with an ideological bias against men (as all feminists do), we can expect them to find the shadow of sinister “male power” wherever they look. This routinely results in research calculated to influence policy (including policy affecting school curricula) in ways that “have a subversive or transformative effect,” as the professors say, so as to undermine “male power” and “the gender relations of heterosexuality.”

When I quote what feminists actually write in their books and journal articles, most people — including people who call themselves “feminists” — are astonished. What is revealed by these quotes is not merely feminism’s implacable hostility toward “institutionalized, normative heterosexuality” (i.e., what most of us think of as human nature), but also the yawning gap between feminism’s exoteric discourse and its esoteric doctrine. Academic feminists have succeeded in concealing their work from external scrutiny in large measure because critics of feminism have failed to understand the importance of what is being taught in university departments of Women Studies. Even though the total number of students in these programs (about 90,000 annually in the United States) is a small fraction of overall undergraduate enrollment, they have a large influence within the feminist movement. Furthermore, because Women’s Studies is an “interdisciplinary” program, the ideology promulgated by these professors has an influence throughout the curriculum in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

While the adherents of feminism benefit from taxpayer subsidies and grants from major philanthropic foundations, what resources are available to those who oppose this radical ideology? You.

Yes, that’s right: You, my readers, have made possible the months of research that have enabled me to bring to light the inner workings of the Feminist-Industrial Complex. The fact that readers are astonished by what I’ve found — e.g., Women’s Studies textbooks that quite literally promote witchcraft — is a clue to how far behind we are in doing the work that needs to be done to defend our culture from feminism, a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It.

While working on the second edition of Sex Trouble, I’ve frequently felt an uncomfortable sense of loneliness, as if no one else is paying attention to this problem, as if no one (besides my regular readers) understands why this work matters. So I have begun conversations with a few friends to create an organization that can expand and continue this project. However, that’s going to require time to accomplish and — right here, right now — I’m facing a serious cash crunch. The electric bill, the cable bill, and the phone bill must be paid, and amid the annual summer blog slump, this has produced a crisis to which the only solution seems to be a repetition of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Honestly, I hate having to do this, and am working to relieve the necessity of these occasional emergency tip-jar appeals, but right now whatever you can give — $5, $10, $20 — would be deeply appreciated. Thanks in advance, and thanks also for your prayers that reading all this crazy feminist stuff doesn’t melt my brain.

 

Category: Sex Trouble, Shoe Leather Fund

In The Mailbox, 08.11.15

Posted on | August 11, 2015 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Palinization Of Trump
Proof Positive: Nightmare At 20,000 Feet Redux
Da Tech Guy: Is The Iran Deal Obamacare II?
Doug Powers: Perfect – Bernie Sanders Lauds Seattle As Progressive Nirvana Before Rally Shut Down By Progressive Activists
Twitchy: “It’s OK, She’s A Democrat” – Melissa Gilbert’s Run For Congress Complicated By Unpaid Tax Bill
Shark Tank: Marco Rubio’s “Just Say No” To Marijuana Position


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Bernie Sanders Draws 28,000 At Moda Center In Portland
American Thinker: Obamism And Neo-Fascist America
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin – Hypocritical “Trumped Up” Outrage
Don Surber: The EPA Pollutes A River
Jammie Wearing Fools: Class-Action Lawsuit – Hillary Fundraisers Forced Interns To Work 50-Hour Weeks Without Pay
Joe For America: Black Lives Don’t Matter In Ferguson – Shots Fired At Police
JustOneMinute: When Even Krugman Has Lost Krugman…
Pamela Geller: In Sweden, “There Are Areas Where Swedish Law No Longer Exists”
Protein Wisdom: Obama’s DOJ Quietly Gives Plea Deal To Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s Murderer
Shot In The Dark: Nothing Here But Us Targets
STUMP: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Women’s Studies Majors
The Gateway Pundit: NM Governor – EPA Refuses To Tell Us What Toxins Are In The River; Didn’t Tell Us Of Spill
The Jawa Report: The ISIS Execution Video Al-Furqan Won’t Release
The Lonely Conservative: Despite Court Order, Clinton Aide Plans To Delete E-Mails
This Ain’t Hell: Nader Saadeh From NJ Wanted To Build An Army To Support ISIS
Weasel Zippers: Dems Terrified Of Racist #BlackLivesMatter Supporters Begin Removing Ties To Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson
Megan McArdle: Donald Trump Is The New Ron Paul
Mark Steyn: Death Wish


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Category: Linkagery

#DonaldTrumpsDiary Oh: Paul the Younger. Hey, Rinse Peabody! How About We Ditch ‘Curls’ & Bring In Carly, Who At Least Has A Clue About Business

Posted on | August 10, 2015 | 29 Comments

by Smitty

Category: Republicans

The ‘Free Stuff’ Party

Posted on | August 10, 2015 | 52 Comments

Democrats are Santa Claus, and it’s Christmas every day with lots of toys for good little boys and girls who vote Democrat:

With Americans shouldering $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, and about eight million of them in default, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will propose major new spending by the federal government that would help undergraduates pay tuition at public colleges without needing loans.
Mrs. Clinton does not go as far as her Democratic presidential opponents in promising to end tuition debt altogether, since her plan would still require a family contribution that could involve parents taking out loans to cover some tuition.
But her proposals, which would cost $350 billion over 10 years and include new refinancing options for those already struggling with debt, are an aggressive response to what many Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — see as a worsening crisis forcing young adults to move back home with their parents and struggle to get out from under repayment bills.

(Via Memeorandum.) As has been pointed out by economist Dan Mitchell, Hillary’s plan will actually increase tuition.

This never-ending something-for-nothing hustle — the Democrat Party’s remorseless expansion of the Welfare State, so that the government is supposed to give everbody everything, for free! — is unsustainable, and is corrupting our national character. It is immoral to believe what Democrats believe, and it is immoral to do what Democrats do. It is sinful, wicked and wrong and, hey, did I mention that feminists are promoting witchcraft in Women’s Studies courses? This is relevant, because if the federal government is going to throw $350 billion at college kids, you know a lot of those the kids will major in Women’s Studies. This is what Hillary wants, more college-educated witches.





 

Category: Education, Hillary Clinton

The Creepy Freaks of ‘Social Justice’

Posted on | August 10, 2015 | 173 Comments

 

Perhaps “Sarah” Nyberg (@srhbutts) thinks I’m stupid. Or perhaps Ms. Nygberg has been fooling people for so long now, Ms. Nyberg thinks that bogus little “victim” act will never fail. At any rate, after I was first suspended from Twitter for a five-month-old tweet about Ms. Nyberg, I had hoped that my response would caution Ms. Nyberg against further aggressions. Alas, as Benjamin Franklin said, experience keeps a dear school but fools will learn in no other. Some genuinely frightening people have tried to shut me up in the past, and have learned that I am not easily frightened. In fact, some of those people are in federal custody now because this is not a game that Homey D. Clown plays.

 

It appears Ms. Nyberg is leveraging friendships with Twitter support personnel in order to delete any mention of Ms. Nyberg’s male past and male name. You will call Ms. Nyberg “Sarah” on Twitter or else you will be shut down. The faux-female does not wish it known that he is faux, you see. And so it was that, after my first suspension on Friday, I was locked out of my account again Sunday. In order to log onto Twitter this morning, I had to delete two tweets:

 

This isn’t going to work, Sarah Nyberg. You are trying to evade the consequences of your own folly — using the pseudonym “Sarah Butts” while trying to shut down 8chan.net — and hope to conceal what was learned about you as a result of that blunder.

Just in case anyone has forgotten what we learned:

[“Sarah”] tried to shut down funding for the website 8chan.net, which had supported #GamerGate, by falsely accusing them of hosting child pornography.  However, he/she failed to anticipate the reaction,i.e., that the people he/she had attacked would figure out who he/she actually was, connect the dots, and expose [“Sarah’s”] unsavory background. It appears that “Sarah” had been something of a nuisance in various online forums circa 2006/2007, allegedly engaging in discussions about pedophilia and sex with dogs.
One of these discussions was about lowering the age of consent to 12, and Sarah said someone who had “a positive, fulfilling, non-abusive sexual relationship with an adult as a child are more likely to realize such relationships are not inherently abusive, and be more likely to admit they’re attracted to kids.” Sarah said that while “most people aren’t ready at 12,” this is not “a valid reason to outlaw sex at said age.” Sarah asserted that “most people” don’t understand “childhood sexuality,” because it doesn’t involve “full-blown intercourse” and therefore it is “inherently less dangerous and virtually impossible to lead to pregnancy, etc.” Sarah said “childhood sex play” is “nothing harmful” and that “what’s harmful is society pretending children are asexual.”

Have any of Ms. Nyberg’s friends ever asked him/her to explain that? Perhaps it was just a moot hypothetical discussion. Or not.

If we look at the forum where that discussion took place, we find that it was inspired by news about a fringe political party in the Netherlands, (Partij voor Naastenliefde, Vrijheid en Diversiteit, PNVD). Widely known as the “Pedo Party,” PNVD advocated lowering the age of consent from 16 to 12. It would appear Ms. Nyberg was enthusiastic about this idea, but perhaps I am misinterpreting his/her comments. The problem is that (a) it does not seem Ms. Nyberg has ever adequately clarified his/her views on the subject, but instead (b) is pretending to be a victim of harassment in order to (c) play a game of “Let’s Erase the Evidence” and also (d) depict anyone raising these questions as a hateful bully.

You may fool some people into believing your act, Nyberg, but you can’t fool everyone, and you sure as hell will never fool me.

DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — it’s a rather well-documented tactic, and when I see people (a) with sexual idiosyncracies (b) allying themselves with a “social justice” movement and (c) claiming that people who tell the truth about them are “bullies,” my suspicion is (d) they’re just angry their shady hustle got busted and (e) they’re trying to exploit sympathy by (f) posing as a victim.

A Martyr for the Sacred Cause! This is a game I’ve seen “social justice” types play many times before, and Homey don’t play that, see?

Was there a case a mistaken identity? Are you . . .“Sarah” Nyberg, the same Sarah who wrote so enthusiastically about “childhood sexuality”? If so, were your statements about having “a positive, fulfilling, non-abusive sexual relationship with an adult as a child” based upon your own personal experience?

Simple questions, really. Why aren’t they being asked? Meanwhile, a Reddit commenter quotes the Twitter rule behind my suspension:

Personal information includes full names, locations, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. Things that aren’t linked together on social media count as personal information. For example, if someone’s name isn’t linked to their Twitter bio, it’s safe to assume that posting it would count as dox. If you’re uncertain of whether or not a post is as liability for including personal information, please message the mods.
This extends to posting links to pages which contain such information.

What this rule was presumably intended to do was to prevent “doxxing,” and I am anti-“doxxing,” but this rule is written so broadly that, if applied as written, I could change my Twitter identity to “Latonya Q. Robinson” with a photo of a black woman as my avatar and then demand Twitter punish anyone who mentioned that I am, in fact, a white man named Robert Stacy McCain. Ah, but you see, this rule is not applied consistently, and is being used by “social justice” activists to protect themselves from critical scrutiny. Favoritism has been alleged by supporters of #GamerGate who say that their enemies are unethically exploiting personal connections with Twitter personnel:

SushiLuLu (also known as Stephanie Greene) was forced to delete tweets critical of Randi Harper in order to have her Twitter account reactivated. Randi Harper has demonstrated her unusual control over Twitter support before, and it turns out that Randi Harper and Del Harvey, Vice President of Trust and Safety at Twitter, are connected.
She has . . . become vocal against anti-GamerGate personalities such as Randi Harper,proprietor of the GGAutoBlocker, which labels prominent GamerGate voices such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos as “shitlords” and their followers as “sheeple.” SushiLuLu even went so far as to write a three-part series solely on Randi Harper, focusing on the irony of someone who regularly flames her opponents (particularly Chris von Csefalvay, who did the statistical analysis on GamerGate) on Twitter having the gall to start the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative
Unfortunately, on the night of March 17th, SushiLuLu found out that Randi Harper has powerful friends. . . .
It appears on the night on March 17th, SushiLulu’s account became locked, and when she attempted to deactivate it, she was told to delete five tweets which were negative toward Randi Harper. . . .

You can and should read the whole thing.

Every responsible and intelligent person familiar with Randi Harper regards her as a disgusting and arguably dangerous individual. So far as I can discover, nobody actually likes Randi Harper. By striking a posture of victimhood and attacking #GamerGate, however, she made herself useful to the “social justice” cause which needs self-declared victims of “bullying” and “harassment,” because this is the argument they use to silence their critics. Randi Harper resorted to totalitarian tactics to suppress #GamerGate supporters, creating a videogame industry blacklist that “branded some 10,425 Twitter accounts, including those of journalists, as harassment ‘offenders’ in a humiliatingly ill-conceived attempt to provide a ‘blocking tool’ to its members”:

The blocking tool, which has been widely mocked online for its lack of sophistication and “blanket ban” approach, was assembled by Randi Harper, a persistent online agitator. The tool prevents users from seeing not only the tweets of users Harper has decided are implicated in harassment, but also many accounts who simply follow those users, by blocking a list of thousands of users with the use of an automated “bot.” . . .

Randi Harper is a clumsy, hateful thug, and you can click here to see Twitter conversations between Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts) and Randi Harper (@randileeharper). Bad causes attract bad people, and these two are part of a clique of bad people with no discernible talent who are using “social justice” politics in a dishonest attempt to shake down the video game industry. They are losing, because they deserve to lose, and they are desperately trying to silence #GamerGate supporters who have exposed them and their “social justice” allies as miserable frauds.


Well, let Harper and Nyberg run squawling to Del Harvey, whining about how mean Mister McCain told the truth about them. They are liars and creepy freaks who should never be trusted.

“God gave them up unto vile affections . . . God gave them over to a reprobate mind . . .”
— Romans 1:26-28 (KJV)

Beware of reprobate minds. Crazy people are dangerous.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: Good Witches

Posted on | August 9, 2015 | 23 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Stacy has been writing about the deranged feminazi witches infesting academia and Tumblr, so it seems only logical that our appetizer this week should be an unquestionably Good witch, Samantha Stephens from the TV series Bewitched, played by the late Elizabeth Montgomery.

Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens

As usual, I remind readers that many of the following links are to pages with content normally considered NSFW. Caution is advised in your clicking.

Goodstuff leads off this week with Jarah Mariano, sporting tan lines for SCIENCE! and science fiction. Ninety Miles from Tyranny checks in with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns; Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon. At First Street Journal, it’s the Lions of Jordan.

EBL kicks off with All The President’s Women, followed by Debate Cocktails, Megyn Kelly – Adorable When She’s Indignant, and Dance Off.

A View from the Beach takes a break from vacation to send us Another Brazilian – Miss Bum Bum 2014, Slim Pickins This Morning, Things To Do at the Beach, Go Fish, Just Walkin’ the Dog, Smile for the Camera!, A Fish By Any Other Name Still Smells Like a Fish, and I Spy Annet Mahendru.

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your weekly coffee creamer, Monday Motivationer Righteous Redness, Tuesday Titillation Welcome, Humpday Hawt Linky Love Champion, Overnighty Heather, Fursday Snoochinator Flashback To 1986, Corset Friday Incidental Incidentals, T-GIF Friday Big Squeeze, Weekender Ebony Awesome, and Bath Night Cinnamon Sugar.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Abbey Clancy, his Vintage Babe is Claire Kelly, and Sex in Advertising this week is provided by Budweiser. At Dustbury, it’s Cilla Black and Ni Ni.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is midnight on Saturday, August 15.

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Category: Rule 5

Feminist Tumblr: Justifying Hatred With Radical Ideology and Also, Witchcraft

Posted on | August 9, 2015 | 88 Comments

Feminism justifies anti-male attitudes by promoting an ideological belief that I call feminism’s Patriarchal Thesis:

  1. All women are victims of oppression;
  2. All men benefit from women’s oppression;
    therefore
  3. Whatever.

Believing that normal human life is a system of injustice in which all women (collectively) are victimized by all men (collectively), feminists can justify anything they say or do as part of their struggle against historic oppression. Even hate is not a bad thing, according to Feminist Tumblr:

WOMEN ARE ALLOWED TO HATE THEIR OPPRESSORS
Society hates women. Misogyny is the societal norm. Society justifies men’s rape and abuse towards us, society lets men tell themselves that “boys will be boys” and their gender gives them the right to harass us, rape us, treat us as if we are their property.
Our society is founded upon a history of the destruction of women’s culture and heritage during the witch hunts, our society is founded on the institution of marriage as a system of property ownership whereby women are expected to use their time and effort to the benefit of males, to use their bodies to the benefit of males by bearing them children. . . .
This society we live in devalues the labor of women, that devalues our physical athletic ability, that devalues our minds and thoughts. It does not view us as complete people, it does not view us as whole humans without attachment to men.
After all that women have endured in this society, we deserve to hate those who have made it like this — especially lesbian women, who have no want or need of men yet society subjects to compulsory heterosexuality, as this patriarchy can not conceive of women who live full rich lives without male influence.
The anger of the oppressed is not the same as that of the oppressor.

There are several things to notice here, including the blogger’s claims about “the destruction of women’s culture and heritage during the witch hunts.” No matter how many times feminists repeat this, it is still false. The myth of witch hunts as “the destruction of women’s culture” was created largely by two 1970s radical feminists, Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly. Dworkin and Daly promoted a mythology of medieval witches as wise healers, depicting them as victims of a Catholic conspiracy to destroy these bearers of ancient wisdom and thus suppress an incipient revolution against the patriarchal order.

This feminist myth, which sometimes depicts witches as inheritors of an authentic pagan tradition of goddess worship that allegedly survived for more than a thousand after the advent of Christianity in Europe, was constructed from diverse elements. Among these were the 19th-century French anti-Catholic academic Jules Michelet, whose 1862 book La Sorciére (“The Sorceress,” available in English as Satanism and Witchcraft) was an imaginative work that waxed poetic about these allegedly wondrous women:

She is born a creature of Enchantment. In virtue of regularly recurring periods of exaltation, she is a Sibyl; in virtue of love, a Magician. By the fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles — often fantastic, often beneficent — she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.

Michelet’s hatred of the Catholic church — he hoped for nothing less than the “death of Christianity” — inspired him to depict witches as having been victimized by an ignorant clergy who were envious of the witches’ knowledge of nature and miraculous healing powers. This interpretation (witches good, Christians bad) was seized upon by an eccentric American suffragette, Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 book Woman, Church and State became the source for the oft-repeated feminist claim that 9 million witches were killed in Europe in a 300-year span between the 14th and 18th centuries. This preposterous figure (which, by simple math, would require the deaths of 2,400 witches per month, every month, year after year for three hundred years) is not merely a ridiculous exaggeration, but a gross libel against Christianity. As strange as it is to modern minds that anyone could be executed for witchcraft, in fact the total number of such executions in Europe during that era, according to the best historical estimates, was less than 100,000, and perhaps as few as 40,000, and fully a quarter of the victims were male. However, because feminists are willing to believe anything that depicts men as evil oppressors and women as innocent victims, this myth of the witch-hunts as a patriarchal atrocity continues to be recited even after it has been completely debunked by historians. (I recommend The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, a 1999 book by Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol in England.)

Daly’s celebration of witchcraft in her 1973 book Beyond God the Father relied heavily on the British academic Margaret Murray, whose books The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931) depicted witchcraft as benevolent paganism. Daly also cited Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1973) by feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, who claimed to show that the modern “medical establishment” was a system of male-dominated oppression that originated from European witch-hunters.  British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze (1969) was added as a source for Daly’s 45-page chapter on witches in her 1978 book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Dworkin, meanwhile, repeatedly cited British author Pennethorne Hughes (Witchcraft, 1952) in the 33-page chapter on the subject in her 1974 book Woman Hating.

Beyond their bogus claims about witches as intuitive healers, millions of whom had been martyred in a European “gynocide,” as Dworkin called it, feminists also promoted the false idea that witchcraft was a vestigal remnant of the worship of the “Great Goddess,” which was alleged to have been the religion of a neolithic matriarchal society. British writer Jaquetta Hawkes popularized this myth of a peaceful, nature-loving prehistoric culture ruled by women which, alas, had been conquered by violent adherents of patriarchal religion. This feminist myth of ancient matriarchy and pagan witchcraft functioned as propaganda against both Christianity and modern science, which were portrayed in feminist literature as elements of the male-supremacist conspiracy against women. Feminism thus not only promoted mystical superstition, in terms of neopagan Wicca as practiced by Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Ruth Barrett and others, but also encouraged belief in dubious (and possibly also dangerous) “alternative medicine” practices.

Feminist Tumblr blogger Wit Witch’s claims about “the destruction of women’s culture and heritage during the witch hunts” show how this myth fosters a belief in the oppression of women as systematic and historical. The young feminist — today’s 20-something woman born decades after Daly, Dworkin and others created this mythology in the 1970s — is encouraged to think of herself as inheriting the suffering of ancient witches as her legacy. This in turn helps the most privileged college-educated woman to believe she is victimized by a “society” that the feminist blogger declares “hates women,” a society that “justifies” rape and violence against women, “devalues the labor of women” and treats women as “property” to be used for “the benefit of males.” Because she thinks about the oppression of women is historical terms, it does not matter to the young feminist that she herself is extraordinarily privileged. She has inherited her victim status.

 

This sense of kinship with the victims of witch-hunters, and the rejection of Christianity as oppressive to women, is encouraged by academic feminists in university Women’s Studies programs. In the textbook Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012), Oregon State University professors Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee blame “religion’s oppressive function” (p. 596) for promoting the “underlying assumption . . . that men are more Godlike than women,” so as to “maintain women’s oppression very directly through church laws that . . . regulate women’s sexuality, and create highly defined gender performances” (p. 597). Professors Shaw and Lee portray this oppression as historical:

In the “burning times” (between the 11th and 14th centuries), millions of women in Europe were murdered as witches. for many of these women, “witchcraft” was simply the practice of traditional healing and spirtuality and the refusal to profess Christianity. For other women, the charge of witchcraft had nothing to do with religious practices and everything to do with accusations rooted in jealousy, greed, and fear of female sexuality. But in the frenzy of the times, defending oneself against an accusation of witchcraft was practically impossible, and an accusation alone generally meant death. (p. 598)

Having offered this condensed version of the Daly/Dworkin feminist witch myth (Daly is cited by name on pp. 608 and 635 of Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions), Professors Shaw and Lee provide students this encouragement on page 602:

In the early twenty-first century, many women participate in revivals of ancient women-centered religions and have become empowered through the revaluing of the feminine implicit in this spirituality. Wicca, or witchcraft (although not the witches we popularly think of at Halloween), is a Goddess- and natjure-oriented religion whose origins predate both Judaism and Christianity. Current Wiccan practice involves the celebration of the feminine, connection with nature, and the practice of healing. As Wiccan practicioner Starhawk suggests, witchcraft encourages women to be strong, confident, and independent and to love the Goddess, the earth, and other human beings. This notion of witchcraft is very different from the cultural norms associated with witches that are propagated in society.

This praise of Wicca — contrasting sharply with the professors’ condemnation of Christianity — is amplified by a quiz on page 603 of Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions, “How Well Do You Know the Goddess?” Here students are asked to identity 15 different female deities including Asherah (Mesopotamia), Astarte (Assyria), Demeter and Artemis (Greece), Freyja (Scandinavia) and Kali (India).

Feminism has become a sort of 21st-century pagan cult whose high priestesses are Women’s Studies professors like Susan Shaw and Janet Lee, who declare on page 170 of their textbook that sexual relationships are political “because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege . . . reflected in the concept of heteropatriarchy, the dominance associated with a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm.” This academic ideology is echoed by the Tumblr feminist’s claim that lesbians are victimized by “compulsory heterosexuality.” Hateful anti-male beliefs that are taught in the classroom are repeated by the blogger who argues that, because of “all that women have endured in this society, we deserve to hate those who have made it like this” — men.

Readers who are shocked to encounter a Tumblr blogger justifying anti-male hatred as the “anger of the oppressed” may be tempted to dismiss this as an expression of fringe extremism. However, we see how this blogger’s rant expresses the same beliefs found in Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions, a textbook published by McGraw-Hill, which calls it a “leading introductory women’s studies reader.” The back cover of this textbook is emblazoned with endorsements by Utah State University Professor Camille Odell (who is affiliated with the university’s Center for Women and Gender), and by Profesor Maria Bevacqua, a lesbian activist who is chairwoman of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University. In academia, radical anti-male ideology is not “fringe” feminism or “extreme” feminism, it is simply feminism, and no one on the 21st-century campus dares to criticize the feminist cult for fear of being accused of sexism and misogyny.

“[T]here is simply no substitute for the intact traditional family. Meaning, when children are removed from the protection of an intact traditional family, the chances of bad things happening to them, of being mistreated and abused in whatever situation they find themselves placed in, go way, way up. . . .
“Leftists hate this sort of talk. They absolutely hate it. It just drives them into psychosis.”
— Oregon Muse, AOSHQ (hat-tip: Ed Driscoll)

Despite the Tumblr feminist’s assertion that society “justifies men’s rape and abuse” of women — because “their gender gives them the right to harass us, rape us, treat us as if we are their property” — such abuse is harshly punished by society. In fact, these crimes are in some ways abetted by feminism. In July 2008, a Connecticut judge sentenced Adam Gault to 50 years in prison after he was convicted of kidnapping a teenage girl and sexually assaulting her while keeping her captive for more than a year. Gault, 41, was assisted in his crimes by two women, Ann Murphy, 41, and Kimberly Cray, 27, who both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison. In addition to the help of his female accomplices, Gault also got assistance from Planned Parenthood. After impregnating his 15-year old captive, he forced her to get an abortion at Planned Parenthood in West Hartford, which did not report the procedure to authorities. The non-profit group Life Dynamics has reported more than 50 criminal cases in which sexual predators took their minor victims to abortion clinics that failed to notify police:

  • In May 2012, Vincent Gregory Wallace was arrested in Sarasota, Florida. Wallace was accused of sexually assaulting his two stepdaughters. When the oldest girl got pregnant at age 12, her mother took her to get an abortion at a clinic that failed to notify police.
  • Steven Rivas was 23 when he began molesting his girlfriend’s 12-year-old sister. When she became pregnant at age 16, Rivas took the girl to an abortion clinic in San Bernardino, California, which did not notify authorities. The girl became pregnant twice more before she turned 18, and each time Rivas took her to have an abortion, but the clinics never made any report. It wasn’t until 2007, when the victim was 20, that police learned of Rivas’ crimes. In 2009, Rivas was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
  • John Szorady was released from an Ohio prison in 2004 after serving 14 years for sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl. Four months later, Szorady began raping his girlfriend’s 13-year-old daughter. When the girl became pregnant, Szorady took her to an abortion clinic that failed to notify authorities, so that Szorady was able continue raping her for several more months before a school counselor learned about the situation and called police. In 2010, Szorady was sentenced to 74 years in prison.
  • In 2011, a Florida judge sentenced Jermaine Jones, 34, to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting the daughter of Janet Marshall, a woman he was dating. The girl was only 12 years old when the abuse began and she soon became pregnant. When her mother took the girl to an abortion clinic in Gainesville, however, it was learned that the girl was already almost six months pregnant. The Gainesville clinic could not perform such late-term abortions, but after contacting the hotline of the National Abortion Federation, the mother was directed to another clinic 300 miles away near Fort Lauderdale that could do the procedure. Neither of these clinics notified police of having treated a pregnnant 12-year-old, and it was not until after the girl was taken for a checkup by a pediatrician, that police investigated and Jones was arrested.

These are among dozens of cases documented by Life Dynamics that demonstrate how the abortion industry turns a blind eye to the sexual abuse of minors. Feminists oppose all efforts to regulate clinics or to hold abortion providers accountable for their criminal negligence that enables sexual predators to victimize minors. Even when undercover video showed Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing illegal traffic in the organs of babies killed in their clinics, feminists defended Planned Parenthood and instead demanded prosecution of those who produced the videos! When Republicans in Congress sought to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood — which gets more than $500 million annually from U.S. taxpayers — Hillary Clinton called this “a full-on assault on women’s health” and declared: “I’m proud to stand with Planned Parenthood, I’ll never stop fighting to protect the ability and right of every woman in this country to make her own health decisions.” Of course, the only “health decision” feminists care about is abortion, even when Planned Parenthood is helping sexual predators.

Contrary to what any feminist may claim on her Tumblr blog, it is not “society” which “devalues” women and “justifies” their abuse, it is their friends in the abortion industry who do this. Enraged by an ideology that can justify any evil, feminists celebrate the death of unborn children and defend this gruesome business as “women’s health.” Feminists hate babies and they hate men, but they hate God even more. If medieval witches really were feminists, no wonder people wanted to burn them all.

Loyal readers have been funding my research into radical feminism, thanks to the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

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Category: Sex Trouble
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