Rule 5 Sunday: Last Dance In Washington

Posted on | May 17, 2015 | 16 Comments

This will be the last Rule 5 Sunday post from the burrow in Springfield, Virginia; next Sunday I’ll be in Baltimore for Balticon and a farewell party with friends, and the Sunday after that, I should be in Las Vegas, God willing.
So it seems only appropriate that this week’s appetizer comes from the Washington Wizards’ dance line.

Wizards cheerleaders…dancers…whatever.
Looking good no matter what you call them!

Insert standard disclaimer here. If browsing this at work gets you in trouble, it’s not our fault.

Randy’s Roundtable returns to lead off with Helen Lindes, followed by Goodstuff with Jennifer Love Hewitt, Animal Magnetism with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, and Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns. Also, First Street Journal with A ~~Gun~~Weapon And A Smile!

EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes a Starship Troopers question, Columbia U. Trigger Warnings, Do You Know Me?, and Alexandra Wentworth.

A View from the Beach checks in with Chloë Sevigny – The Coolest Girl in the World?, Wombat’s Friday Fodder, The Neandertal in the Wood Pile (with cave girls, of course), Wombat’s Thursday News Feed, Morning Eye Opener – “22”, Chewing the Wombat’s Wednesday Cud, She Shoulda Gone to Rehab, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Old Fuddy Duddy Actress Hates Selfie Culture, Gisele’s Hubby Slapped With Suspension, Let’s Try Thai and “Highway to Hell” (with harps).

At Soylent Siberia, coffee creamer comes with room service, then it’s Monday Motivationer Morning Stretch, Overnighty First Linky Love Contender, Tuesday Titillation, Humpday Hawtness Ahoy, Marcel Duchamp Has Nothing On This, Fursday Two Fur Phone Phantasy, Latent Lingerie With Pearl Cameltoe, T-GIF Friday Flame On, Weekender Wakeup Call, and Bath Night Cocktail Shaker.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Britt McHenry; his Vintage Babe is Dona Drake, and Sex in Advertising this week is In The Paint. Dustbury has Phylicia Rashad and Cressida Bonas, and Loose Endz chips in with The Girls of Jurassic World and a brief history of Sex in Advertising.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 roundup is midnight on Saturday, May 23.

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

War Against Human Nature: What Feminists Pay $47,030 a Year to Learn

Posted on | May 17, 2015 | 87 Comments

“Feminism confuses many people who do not understand that the movement has a political philosophy — a theory — and that this theory is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. In fact, feminists do not believe there is such a thing as ‘human nature.’ Instead, they insist, all human behavior (especially including sexual behavior) is ‘socially constructed’ and, because feminists believe that the society that constructs our behavior is a male-dominated system which oppresses women, everything that we accept as ‘human nature’ is part of that oppressive system.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature, p. 3

It takes a lot of money to learn how to disregard — or condemn as “oppression” — ordinary common sense about human nature. When my wife and I went to the accountant to have our taxes done, one of my business expenses was the approximately $700 I’d spent buying feminist books from Amazon.com during 2014. This was necessary for my research into radical feminist gender theory in the book Sex Trouble. The research continues because, as I say in the introduction to the first edition, Sex Trouble is “a work in progress,” and my current plan is to publish a revised and expanded second edition in August. Here are the 10 most recent books I’ve purchased in the past two months:

Modern Feminist Theory by Jennifer Rich (2014)
The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution by Sheila Jeffreys (1993)
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich (1986)
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 by Adrienne Rich (1979)
Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 by Alice Echols, 1989
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left by Sara Evans, 1979
The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs, edited by Estelle B. Freedman, et al. (1985)
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 by Adrienne Rich (1986)
Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement edited by Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (1975)
Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism, edited by Miranda Kiraly and Meagan Tyler (2015)

Each of these titles was purchased for a reason. For example, Estelle Freedman is a Stanford University professor who is hugely influential in academia, being for example the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader (2007), an assigned textbook in many introductory Women’s Studies courses. That she was also editor of a 1985 collection of lesbian-feminist essays is not a coincidence and, when I encountered a reference to Professor Freedman’s earlier work in the notes of another feminist book, I decided to check it out. (Very interesting.) As to the 1975 book co-edited by Charlotte Bunch, well, you can Google her name and perhaps figure out why Professor Bunch’s controversial past might be highly relevant and newsworthy in 2016.

What nearly all of these books have in common is that they are either written or edited by Women’s Studies professors or else, as in the case of Adrienne Rich, are by authors whose works are included in the Women’s Studies curricula. As readers of Sex Trouble know, the book focuses on academia — the Feminist-Industrial Complex — because it is by institutionalizing their power in colleges and universities, with Women’s Studies departments as the engine of their influence, that radical feminists have gained hegemonic authority within elite culture.

“I am a gender abolitionist because gender is
a social construct that oppresses everyone.”
“The threat of violence alone affords
all men dominance over all women.”

Academic feminism has received relatively little critical scrutiny (Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge being a commendable exception), and most people have no idea what kind of bizarre nonsense students are being taught nowadays. If you think of feminism as mere “equality” in the sense of basic fairness, you need to read Sex Trouble and find out what feminism really means. And it’s only $11.69 in paperback, which is a lot less than you’d pay to study this stuff at college.

Friday, in discussing Kate Spencer (a feminist victim of “body shame” and other patriarchal oppressions), I mentioned that she had gotten a bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies from Bates College, an elite private liberal arts college where annual tuition is $47,030. Here is the official description of that program:

The goal of the Program in Women and Gender Studies is to enable learners to recognize, analyze, and transform gender relations as they appear in everyday life. The program provides the opportunity to study women as social agents whose identities and experiences are shaped by systems of race, class, sexuality, and national power. At the same time, to study gender is to refute simple assertions about women, men, and gender binaries, and to strive instead for richly detailed accounts of the political, economic, and technological conditions through which relations of power have been established and maintained.
Analyzing gender enriches our ability to apprehend the differing social roles assigned to individuals, the inequitable distribution of material resources, and the ties between structures of knowledge and larger systems of privilege and oppression. Courses examine women and gender relations in multiple cultural, historical, and material contexts, encouraging the use of transnational, multiracial feminist perspectives.

The chairwoman of the department is Professor Rebecca Herzig:

Historian Rebecca Herzig holds the College’s only full-time faculty appointment in Women and Gender Studies. She teaches an array of interdisciplinary courses on science, technology, and medicine, as well as the program’s required methods course, Methods and Modes of Inquiry. Her latest book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, is available now at nyupress.org.

A small school like Bates College (with fewer than 1,800 students) can afford only one full-time Women’s Studies professor, but because the field is “interdisciplinary,” it is also taught by faculty from other departments. By this cross-departmental influence, feminist ideology permeates the curriculum. Thus, the Bates College Women and Gender Studies faculty also includes Holly Ewing (Associate Professor, Environmental Studies), Leslie Hill (Associate Professor, Politics), Sue Houchins (Associate Professor, African American Studies), Erica Rand (Professor, Art and Visual Culture), and Emily W. Kane (Professor, Sociology). In case you’re wondering what kind of innovative scholarship these eminent academics are sharing with their students, I’ll point out that Professor Kane is author of The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls (2012) and Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood (2013). Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that Professor Kane is implacably hostile to “traditionally gendered childhoods” and “conventional gender expectations,” which she blames for “persistent gender inequalities.”

This is what feminism has been about for more than 40 years. In 1969, the feminist collective Redstockings declared:

We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . Men have controlled all political, economic and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. . . . All men have oppressed women.

The “inferior position” of women and the “power” which men use to oppress women — the source of those “persistent gender inequalities” denounced by Professor Kane — are simply the results of normal human behaviors, i.e., masculinity and femininity, love, marriage, sex, parenthood and the traditional family. Normal relations between normal men and normal women are both the cause and effect of women’s oppression, whereby women are “exploited as sex objects” and “breeders,” as the Redstockings declared:

We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied.

Is this true? Was it true in 1969 or at any previous time? Did your father exploit your mother as a “breeder”? Was your grandfather the agent of your grandmother’s oppression? Was your great-grandmother’s humanity denied because your great-grandfather kept her in an inferior position as a “sex object”? This is what feminist theory teaches, that human history has been nothing but a gigantic patriarchal conspiracy through which men (all men) have oppressed women (all women), and the overthrow of this collective oppression requires a revolution:

Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman’s relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.

To achieve this solution, the Redstockings proclaimed, feminists must “develop female class consciousness . . . exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions.” They denied “the existence of individual solutions,” condemning what they described as the false assumption “that the male-female relationship is purely personal.” The co-founder of Redstockings was Shulamith Firestone who, in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, declared that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be . . . not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself” (p. 11). Firestone called for “an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family,” so that “sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticize our whole culture” (p. 55). She flatly declared “Pregnancy is barbaric” (p. 180), described women as “the slave class” (p. 184), and envisioned a “new society” in which “humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality — all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged” (p. 187). Firestone denounced the family because “it reinforces biologically-based sex class (p. 198) and asserted that “marriage in its very definition . . . was organized around, and reinforces, a fundamentally oppressive biological condition” (p. 202).

The fact that Shulamith Firestone was clinically insane (a paranoid schizophrenic who died alone in 2012 at age 67) might serve as sufficient rebuttal to her doctrine, but by the time her madness became evident — she was committed to a psychiatric unit in 1987 — the radical movement she helped launch had gained a solid foothold in academia, publishing, law and politics. Firestone and other early leaders of the Women’s Liberation Movement had been political activists of the New Left. Others were journalists (e.g., Marilyn Webb, Gloria Steinem, Jill Johnston, Susan Brownmiller). It was only after the radical feminist movement shattered into incoherent splinters in the mid-1970s that the creation of Women’s Studies programs at colleges and universities provided the institutional infrastructure around which the Feminist-Industrial Complex has since been built. Thousands of professors are now employed to indoctrinate students in this ideology, and no one in 21st-century academia dares criticize or oppose feminism for fear of being accused of “discrimination” or “harassment.” What the Women’s Studies major “knows” is never contradicted by any authority on campus, and what she “knows” is that all women are victims of male supremacy.

“Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime.”
— Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)

“Recognizing that the ‘personal is political’ allowed women to identify . . . that what they took to be their own personal failings . . . were not just individual experiences. . . . The ‘private’ world was recognized as the basis of the power men wielded in the ‘public’ world of work and government. . . . The concept that the personal is political enabled feminists to understand the ways in which the workings of male dominance penetrated into their relationships with men. They could recognize how the power dynamics of male dominance made heterosexuality into a political institution, constructed male and female sexuality, and the ways in which women felt about their bodies and themselves.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2014)

Because feminism now controls the terms of academic research and discussion about human sexuality, the university student today never encounters any articulate defense of normal behavior.

Love, marriage and motherhood are condemned by feminists, as is heterosexuality, per se. All of this is implicit in feminist gender theory — the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix. — and anyone who does not accept this theory is subject to denunciation as a bigot, a misogynist, a homophobe.

Read the departmental mission statement. http://t.co/NtqVFcWnPB I repeat: $47,030 a year you have to pay to learn that stuff. @CalebHowe

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 16, 2015

I started to say "Women's Studies is not brain surgery," but then thought, "Well, it's kind of like a lobotomy, eh?" @cdrusnret @CalebHowe

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 16, 2015

Parents pay for their children to learn how to think this way — tuition at Bates College is, I repeat, $47,030 a year — and the question is, “Why?”

As I say, I spent about $700 buying feminist books last year and probably understand it as well as any heteropatriarchal oppressor ever could. Yet the Sex Trouble project is a continuing effort funded by readers who understand the importance of “Taking Feminism Seriously.” Because I’ve been able to purchase many of these books used from Amazon, my total cost for the 10 feminist books I’ve purchased in the past two months was $136.42, and this library of lunatic literature will keep growing. Why? Because if God will grant me another few months of life, I expect to make some appearances at university campuses next fall, and it can be predicted that young feminists will challenge my analysis: “But you don’t understand feminism!”

Yet there will be a table beside me, and on that table will be these stacks of books, you see. So I’ll gesture to the table, and perhaps hold up a few of the books to cite the titles and authors by name, before answering the angry student: “No, ma’am. You don’t understand feminism.”

Doesn’t that make you want to hit freaking the tip jar?

"All that is necessary to defeat feminism is to tell the truth about feminism." — SEX TROUBLE, p. 116 #tcot http://t.co/RyoP9RUcm5

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 17, 2015

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: Roll With It

Posted on | May 16, 2015 | 20 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

‘Draw Mohammed’ Contest Winner Will Be Added to SPLC ‘Hate’ List
Batshit Crazy News
Instapundit
Cragin Media
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach
My Confessions from the Doghouse
Dyspepsia Generation

The War Against Human Nature: Feminism and the Mirage of ‘Equality’
Living In Anglo-America
Political Hat

War Against Human Nature: 100% Failure
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

FMJRA 2.0: We’ve Got It Goin’ On
The Pirate’s Cove
BlurBrain
Batshit Crazy News

Brother Of The World’s Youngest Blogger Brings It As Only He Can
Regular Right Guy

Worth Reading Carefully
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Dustbury
The Camp of the Saints

Rule 5 Sunday: Station To Station
Animal Magnetism
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

We Pity
Batshit Crazy News

On Da Campaign Trail
Batshit Crazy News

King of the Blues, R.I.P.
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

UVA Dean Files $7.5 Million Lawsuit Against Rolling Stone Over Rape Hoax
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.13.15
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Men Cannot Be Feminists
Batshit Crazy News
Dyspepsia Generation
Living In Anglo-America
Inoperable Terran

LIVE AT ~~FIVE~~SIX: 05.14.15
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Political Consultant for S.F. Democrat Mayor Likes Little Boys, Allegedly
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Kentucky Fugitive Charged With Sex Crimes Arrested in Identity Theft Case
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

The Hired Liars of Liberal Media
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.15.15
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Stephanopoulos Wishes He Could Get Over Macho Grande Like Brian Williams
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Jim-O-Rama
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Feminist Logic: Shut Up, Haters

Posted on | May 15, 2015 | 104 Comments

Did you know @KateSpencer has “self-inflicted body shame”? Yeah, your first thought is probably: Kate Who? But before we answer that question, let’s talk about her body shame:

Because I am thirty-three years old [she wrote in 2013], and I am still not comfortable in my own body. I haven’t been since I was eight and I sprouted breasts before everybody else . . . I wasn’t when I was twelve and towered over boys, slouching to bring myself down in inches. Nor was I at nineteen, skinny-dipping in the waters off of Long Island with my closest college friends. Even though I was drunk and stoned the shame was still able to find a way in . . .
I was not comfortable in my body in my twenties . . . And I wasn’t after I gave birth to my daughter at thirty-one . . .
The thing about self-inflicted body shame and self-loathing is that it seeps into other aspects of your life. It makes you feel unworthy in other situations . . . It’s a cycle of worthlessness that weaves its way into social interactions, sexual relationships, and random moments of your life.

You can read the whole thing, if you have a weird voyeuristic interest in watching someone publicly wallow in useless self-pity. But now let’s answer your question, Kate Who?

Kate Spencer has been writing and performing at the UCB Theatre since 2002. She is a member of the improv team Reuben Starship and co-host of the pop culture panel show Shut Up! I Hate You! Kate is a Senior Producer/Writer and on-air correspondent for VH1, where she spends a lot of time yapping on TV and the internet about pop culture and celebrity news. She’s interviewed everyone from George Clooney to Kristen Stewart to Fleetwood Mac, and one time Connie Britton called her “adorable” and she almost cried. Writing credits include: Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vulture, Hello Giggles, College Humor and The Huffington Post, who named Kate one of their “18 Funny Women You Should Be Following On Twitter.”

Oh, right: Women full of self-loathing are so hilarious. But it was on Twitter where — har-de-har-har — she posted this:

“People who refuse to believe women are harassed online sure do love to make their point by harassing women online.”

Non sequitur much? Does anyone deny the existence of online harassment? Certainly not I, having been harassed by the deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, among others. But this “harassment” meme has been exploited by feminists as part of an attempt to paint their critics as dangerously violent haters, thus to (a) elicit sympathy for feminists; (b) discredit all opposition to feminism as inspired by misogyny; and (c) try to get their critics banned from Twitter and/or subjected to criminal prosecution. Because feminism is a totalitarian ideology, it can only succeed by silencing opposition. This is what has happened in academia, where Title IX has been weaponized and deployed to prohibit criticism of feminist dogma. (Remember that Larry Summers was forced to resign as president of Harvard University after he publicly speculated about “innate differences” between men and women.) After more than two decades of increasingly rigid feminist hegemony in higher education, most college-educated people under 40 have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the false premises of feminist ideology that not only can they not “think outside the box,” but they’ve never met anyone who could explain to them that there is a box.

Feminists now believe that only women are targeted by online harassment, and furthermore believe that any negative attention online is “harassment,” and SHUT UP, HATER! Having spent the past 17 months researching and writing about radical feminism — Sex Trouble, $11.69 in paperback, $1.99 in Kindle ebook — I’ve long since become accustomed to this reaction. Inside the Feminist Internet Bubble, everybody tells each other how awesomely clever they are, so that all any woman needs to do is to declare herself a feminist and she can immerse herself in a digital estrogen bath of self-affirmation. However, the minute anyone from outside this bubble calls attention to the absurdity or falsehood of feminist claims — ZOMG! You’re a hateful ignorant misogynist engaged in the Internet equivalent of rape!

The fool cannot stand to have her ideological folly held up to critical scrutiny and (perhaps you have noticed) the critic need not even offer a detailed analysis or a counter-theory in order to provoke feminists to shrieking panic and fury. Merely to quote what the feminist has said and expose it to readers outside the Feminist Internet Bubble is deemed hateful “harassment.” Why? Because the errors and falsehoods of feminism are generally self-evident, they inspire caustic mockery from any sane person with ordinary common sense. Nothing is more offensive to feminists than being mocked by ordinary people with common sense.

FEMINIST LOGIC™: You cannot disagree with @katespencer, because disagreement is "harassment," you misogynist bigots. pic.twitter.com/0zExCCDzwY

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 15, 2015

What we are not supposed to notice is the problematic premises asserted within what I call feminism’s Patriarchal Thesis:

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

In other words, when your worldview begins with the assumption that normal human life is a system of injustice in which all women (collectively) are victimized by all men (collectively), then it is possible to justify almost anything you do as part of your effort to overthrow this oppressive system. Smash Patriarchy!

The Patriarchal Thesis absolves feminists of any obligation to meet the ordinary requirements of intelligent discourse. Logic is unnecessary and, as for facts, they are (a) whatever feminists say they are or (b) irrelevant if they do not confirm the Patriarchal Thesis. Believing themselves oppressed, and believing that men universally participate in the oppression of women, feminists thereby justify themselves in telling blatant lies and insulting men. Anyone who dares call notice to the hateful dishonesty of feminism is presumed to be a dimwit with bad motives because, of course, feminists are the moral and intellectual superiors of anyone who disagrees with them.

@rsmccain @katespencer pic.twitter.com/o5MhIbYicJ

— totenhenchen (@czed75) May 15, 2015

1. Feminist says something insultingly stupid; 2. Critic calls attention to insulting stupidity; 3. Feminist makes "joke"; and 4. BLOCKED.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 15, 2015

So, you may ask, exactly how oppressed is Kate Spencer? The crucible of her adolescent suffering was Dana Hall School (annual tuition $43,200), and she got her bachelor of arts degree in Women’s Studies from Bates College (annual tuition $47,030). In other words, she was a rich prep school kid who attended one of those money-no-object New England liberal arts colleges at which she never had to encounter any grubby commoners from places where people drive pickup trucks, listen to hillbilly music, believe in Jesus and vote Republican.

Kate Spencer‘s yearly prep school tuition bill was more than the median household income in New Mexico, Tennessee and seven other states, but she is oppressed because of her body shame. Don’t you dare doubt her victimhood, you sexist bigot, because her suffering makes Kate Spencer your superior. If you should express any objection to Kate Spencer’s insulting nonsense, why, that’s clearly illegal harassment!

Feminism does not seek dialogue, compromise or cooperation between men and women. Feminism seeks totalitarian power to silence dissent.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 6, 2015

Don’t ever bother hating Kate Spencer, you stupid Republican rednecks, because you could never hate her as much as she hates herself. And, of course, her self-hatred is your fault.

<br />

Category: Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | May 15, 2015 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Sirens now, after the gunshot. Scream captured, Munch-meets-Pollock style, on the wall.
Theirs had been a long relationship, full of pain, suffering, and degradation. They’d retained a twisted regard through all of the abuse. She certainly didn’t hate him, for all her wrist was still numb from the final recoil.
The lurid details would play out in court and the press. In the end, she’d stand exonerated. A book deal for certain; reality TV show? That would have to wait for the legal beagles to finish their barking.
Whipping up a Dominatrix-Assisted Suicide market sure was work.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction, Uncategorized

King of the Blues, R.I.P.

Posted on | May 15, 2015 | 12 Comments

America has lost a national treasure:

B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.
In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

It is worth noting that B.B. King’s biggest hit, recorded in 1969, was a cover version of a 1951 song by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell, but King made it his own. The elements of King’s trademark style — playing guitar “fills” between vocal lines, bending notes and adding vibrato — were not original to him, but he combined them in an unique way with sophisticated arrangements. Aware of his own lack of musical education, King at the outset of his career was shrewd enough to hire the classically trained Onzie Horne to write arrangements for his band, and hit the road with a vengeance. When it came to “paying dues” as a performer, nobody could dispute that King’s dues were fully paid:

He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

Anyone enthralled by the popular misconception that a working musician’s life is glamorous should contemplate what it was like for King and his band in the 1950s when, in addition to the ordinary hassles of life on the road, they also had to cope with the difficulties that Jim Crow-era segregation imposed. King’s hard-earned status as the most commercially successful blues performer in history, however, required him to endure the ups and downs of a career affected by shifts in popular music tastes. In the early 1960s, he was actually booed in Baltimore by a young audience that was there to see the soul crooner Sam Cooke. King kept working — playing more than 40 weeks on the road year after year — until a new generation rediscovered the blues. British rockers like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, who had traced rock-and-roll back to its R&B roots, inspired a blues revival in the late 1960s:

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough . . .
When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”
“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”

King was 43 years old and had already played more than 4,000 gigs before his “commercial breakthrough” in 1968.

Think about that the next time you see a spoiled rich white girl at an elite university whining about how she’s oppressed.

“Trigger alert,” my ass.

B.B. King was born the son of sharecroppers in Mississippi and bought his first guitar for $15 when he was 12 years old. Imagine how he must have felt in December 2006 when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush. Real achievement, earned through hard work and persistence, is the only kind of success any honest man should ever desire. I don’t care who you are or how much “talent” you’ve got, you damned sure ain’t better than the King of the Blues.