The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 07.13.15

Posted on | July 13, 2015 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Daily Signal: Sorry, Slate – Oregon Did Put A “Gag Order” On Those Christian Bakers
EBL: Jonah Goldberg – How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Donald
Doug Powers: What’s Government-Speak For “Devastating Computer Hacking”?
Twitchy: “Embrace The Suck” – Poor DeRay Has A Major Obamacare Sad, And We’re Lovin’ It!


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Political Left Is Very Nervous That The “Silent Majority” May Finally Have Found A Voice
American Thinker: Illegal Aliens Murder At A Much Higher Rate Than US Citizens Do
BLACKFIVE: Photo – M1A2 Main Gun
Conservatives4Palin: With New Documents, Stench Of IRS Scandal Extends Into Third Year
Don Surber: Americans Want Their Border Protected. Now.
Jammie Wearing Fools: As Crime Skyrockets, Racist Baltimore Mayor Tells NAACP Leader Not To Meet With Republicans
Joe For America: Call The Cops, I See A Rebel Flag
JustOneMinute: Social Justice Warriors Never Sleep
Pamela Geller: Ramadan In Paris – Muslims Ransacking, Rampaging In Barbes (Video)
Protein Wisdom: California Lets Me Know I’m No Longer A Wife
Shot In The Dark: All In
STUMP: Unpack Your Adjectives – Weekly Wrapup
The Gateway Pundit: Rock & Roll – Ted Nugent, Kid Rock Team Up To Record “Kiss My Rebel Ass”
The Jawa Report: Same Sex Equality At Last!
The Lonely Conservative: Expect A Big Liberal Push To Change Minds On Sanctuary Cities
This Ain’t Hell: Marine LTC Kate Germano Fired
Weasel Zippers: MoveOn Fundraising For Greek Bailout
Megan McArdle: Frozen Custard’s Last Stand
Mark Steyn: Last Stand Of The Old White Males


Southern Puddings, Custards & Ice Creams: Bread Puddings, Ice Creams, Homemade Puddings, Frozen Desserts & More! (Southern Cooking Recipes Book 9)

Category: Linkagery

Jay Laze Gets a Lesson in Rhetoric (Or, How NOT to Debate a Feminist)

Posted on | July 13, 2015 | 34 Comments

In 2013, Virginia Beach pizzeria owner Jay Laze gained notoriety by offering a 15 percent discount to customers who were exercising their Second Amendment rights. On his Facebook page last week, Laze commented on an article about an incident in Vietnam, where a water park offered free admission, leading to a mob scene in which “thousands” of men reportedly molested teenage girls wearing bikinis.

A girl is rescued amid the chaos at a Hanoi water park.

Laze compared the park’s error — exposing “80% naked women” to “instinctually driven men with no security” — to sharks in a “feeding frenzy.” And this is just common sense, really.

However, a feminist saw the comment and drew Laze into a debate on his Facebook page. She asked, “can you actually prove it’s human instinct or are you just projecting?” She screencapped the entire exchange and posted it to her Tumblr blog, saying that Laze “stated he’d rape women every time he thought he could get away with it, and that he thinks this is normal male behavior.” Did he actually say that? Well . . .

Laze wrote that this incident in Vietnam was a case of “instinct overriding self control,” and the feminist then asked, “how many times have been unable to stop yourself from raping and molesting?”

This insulting insinuation provoked Laze to respond, “You’re asking the wrong question. Ask ‘how many times would you have raped had there been no consequences?'”

The feminist replied, “that’s a great question. how many times would you have raped had there been no consequences?”

Laze then answered: “Since men have the instinct to ‘put their penis in a vagina’ I’d probably say every time.”

This is not how you win debates with feminists, sir.

Online debate can be a minefield, and many people make the kind of errors Jay Laze made, simply because they don’t have experience dealing with troll tactics of this kind. For the benefit of readers, permit me to offer a few suggestions:

  • You have the right to remain silent — If someone attacks you online, you are not required to respond. We are not accustomed to being mocked or insulted in real life, so when it happens to us online, our natural impulse is to defend ourselves. We are not racists or sexists, we are not ignorant or stupid, so when someone makes these kinds of accusations online — when our character is impugned — it is easy to be provoked into a defensive reaction. However, this will often have the opposite of the intended effect. By defending yourself against an accusation, you are pouring gasoline onto the sparks and, as illustrated by Jay Laze’s unfortunate incident, “everything you say can and will be used against you.” Sometimes, silence is the best defense.
  • Know your antagonist — It is evident to me that Jay Laze began this Facebook conversation without bothering to investigate who he was talking to. She knew who he was, but he didn’t know who she was, and this put him at a disadvantage, because Laze didn’t anticipate her skill in steering him into a rhetorical ambush.
  • Don’t get sidetracked — Jay Laze’s original point was a good one. As someone whose business is in a beach resort town, he is obviously aware of how inadequate crowd control can lead to dangerous situations. Yet the feminist, focusing on Laze’s phrase “instinctually driven men,” sidetracked Laze toward a more general discussion of instinct as a factor in rape, a topic that Laze had originally not intended to address. He was inadequately prepared for the debate he encountered on this sidetrack, where his antagonist expertly provoked him into a rhetorical error.
  • This is not about you — Jay Laze’s antagonist pushed his buttons by accusing him of “projecting” his own personal “instinct to rape girls” onto the mob of men at the Vietnam water park. This kind of insulting insinuation should always be regarded as a flashing alarm in any such discussion. The appropriate response to such an unwarranted insult is to call out the rhetorical foul and terminate the conversation. Clearly, your antagonist is not arguing in good faith. Yet it is often the case that people react to these kind of baseless insults the way Jay Laze reacted, by continuing the discussion as if being accused of criminal behavior was nothing unusual, and then cooperating with the antagonist’s interrogation of his personal motives.
  • Beware of hypotheticals — Having let his antagonist steer him onto a sidetrack and then personalize the discussion by accusing him of being at least a potential rapist, Jay Laze finally sets a rhetorically fatal trap for himself by proposing the hypothetical scenario where rape was possible with “no consequences.” That he proposed this as a devil’s advocate is obvious enough. His original point was about the inadequate security that caused the chaotic free-for-all at the Vietnam water park, and Laze himself is an advocate of armed self-defense because he understands the need to safeguard against such possibilities. Yet Laze also intended to make a point about sexual instinct being one of the unruly human impulses that so often lead to violence, and thus was willing to stipulate that, if there were “no consequences,” he would himself behave like a savage beast.

Oops. We know exactly why feminists love to talk constantly about rape, as Ace of Spades observed: “Minus rape, feminism is rather too obviously a list of trivial complaints by comfortable yet hysterical semi-affluent white women.” This why feminists have employed Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions to gin up a phony “campus rape epidemic.” Feminists deliberately exaggerate the incidence of rape, so that they can treat all men as suspects in a criminal investigation and thus silence critics of feminism: “Shut up, because rape!”

Feminism’s mantra, “The personal is the political,” operates as an invitation for women to tell their tales of being victimized by the oppression of male supremacy. Any man is a damned fool if he thinks he can play this game — trying to make a political point by telling a personal narrative — because however innocent he may be of any Sexist Thought Crimes, the mere fact that he is playing the feminist game will effectively put him on the defensive. Never fight a battle according to your enemy’s plan. Do not surrender the initiative by letting your enemy choose the time and place of battle. When you see that your enemy is attempting to provoke you into battle, always suspect an ambush.

As to the substance of Jay Laze’s comments, we can see that he was speaking of the Hobbesian nightmare of a lawless world — bellum omnium contra omnes, the “war of all against all” — and he is clearly against this kind of anarchy. Speculating what we might do in a hypothetical apocalypse, freed from the restraints of civilization, is one of those dorm-room debates that used to occur in the 1970s when everybody had done a few bong hits and was staring at the lava lamp.

Think about that scene in Animal House, where the Deltas have turned the homecoming parade into complete pandemonium — “Remain calm! All is well!” — and Bluto spies his dream girl Mandy Pepperidge amid the chaos. He swoops down like a pirate, abducts her in a stolen convertible and, we learn in the film’s famous concluding scene, they eventually become Senator and Mrs. Joseph Blutarsky.

Everybody applauds that scene, because when you get down to it, everybody understands what feminists call “rape culture.” We recognize the beastly impulses of human nature. Unless we are complete fools, however, we also understand that the fantasy of unrestrained sexuality is nothing like the reality of what would happen under conditions of lawless anarchy. As Hobbes himself explained, in such conditions, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Even worse than Baltimore, perhaps.

OK, so we climb into the Time Machine and arrive at a state university dorm room in 1978. A haze of cannabis smoke fills the air, and the blacklight posters on the wall give off an eerie glow. A Pink Floyd album is playing on the stereo and everybody’s staring at a lava lamp when somebody says, “Hey, man, what would you do if you were in a swimming pool full of Vietnamese chicks in bikinis and there was no security, no rules at all?” Imagining myself at age 18 in that dorm room, presented with such a hypothetical scenario, I am very grateful that (a) there is no such thing as a Time Machine, and (b) there was no Internet in 1978.

Never forget: You have the right to remain silent.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: The Persistence of the Bunny

Posted on | July 12, 2015 | 12 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It’s actually a tad cool in Las Vegas as I write this, which is to say it hasn’t reached 100. Still, the streets and casinos are amply supplied with tourists and locals appropriately dressed for the weather, which is another reason to be glad I moved here. Of course, some of the local workforce are dressed like that in line of duty, such as this young lady, a dealer at the Playboy Club in the Palms.

The magazine may be tottering, but the Playboy Bunnies persist.

As usual, many of the following links lead to pictures normally considered NSFW. Reader discretion is advised.

Goodstuff leads off again this week, informing us that the future is here, and it’s filled with robot strippers. Paging noted robosexual Instapundit! Also, Jamie Chung! Ninety Miles from Tyranny chips in with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress (featuring Cameltoe), and Girls with Guns, featuring Sofia Vergara and her double-breast machine guns. Animal Magnetism has Rule Five Greek Tragedy Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while First Street Journal has The Glam Life of American military women.

EBL’s thundering herd this week includes the Womens’ World Cup victors of Team USA, the Reddit Revolt, Logan’s Run, Sinatra at the Beach, Megyn Kelly (pretty when she’s angry), infamous doughnut licker Ariana Grande, and Marine heroine Colonel Kate Germano.

A View from the Beach checks in with The ABCs with Abbey Clancy, The One Minute Time Machine, More Naked News, POTUS Apprentices Daughter to Soft Core Porn Studio, Tuesday Telegram, “Stranger in My House” and Microaggression of the Week.

Postaldog returns with Maitland Ward, Charlie Riina, Zoey Deutch, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, and Elizabeth Olsen.

Having recovered from a Snoochinator 9000 malfunction* over the Independence Day weekend, Soylent Siberia submits your morning coffee creamer, Monday Motivationer Fur de Fleur, Tuesday Titillation DDumbfounded, Humpday Hawtness Sunny, Retro Fursday Fantasm Linda Lusardi, Trophy Rack, Corset Amalgam, T-GIF Friday Weekender Foreshadowing, Weekender Triple Play, and Bath Night Hunting Camp Story.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Lucy Hale, his Vintage Babe is Annette O’Toole, and in Sex in Advertising, Join The Lamb’s Navy! At Dustbury, it’s Kirsten Vangsness and Denise Richards.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is midnight (Pacific Time) on Saturday, July 18.

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

Why Do Drunk Sluts Get Drunk?

Posted on | July 11, 2015 | 69 Comments

“Campus sexual assault is an all-hands-on-deck epidemic in America.”
— Rep. Nancy Pelosi, July 7, 2015

Pardon the deliberately provocative clickbait headline, but the campus “rape culture” discourse keeps avoiding this issue. There is an obvious connection between (a) claims that sexual assault is an “epidemic” among college and university students; (b) the phenomenon of binge drinking among students, most of whom are below the legal drinking age; and (c) the adamant insistence of feminists that it is “slut-shaming” and “victim blaming” to suggest how (a) and (b) are most likely related.

A blog post is probably not an appropriate forum to conduct a psychology seminar, but anyone familiar with the research knows how promiscuity correlates with low self-esteem, and how alcohol abuse correlates with depression. It is not necessary to consult the work of academic experts, however, to know that drunks commonly wake up with hangovers and feelings of profound remorse for the irresponsible behavior they engaged in during their night of extreme inebriation.

“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is data,” as they say. There is a negative feedback loop of low self-esteem, drunkenness, impulsive behavior, shame and depression involved in the typical downward spiral of the alcoholic’s life. Getting the drunk to sober up and stay sober is usually just the beginning of recovery, because there are always unresolved emotional issues related to this pattern of irresponsible behavior.

What does it tell us, then, when we repeatedly see stories about alleged “sexual assault” which, when subjected to close scrutiny, turn out to be variations on the same familiar tale of youthful misadventure? Two drunk teenagers hooked up, then the female drunk teenager claimed (often months after the incident) that she was raped by the male drunk teenager? This is actually becoming part of the “consent” message:

Jake was drunk. Josie was drunk.
Jake and Josie hooked up.
Josie could NOT consent.
The next day Jake was charged with rape.
A woman who is intoxicated cannot give her legal consent to sex, so proceeding under these circumstances is a crime.
It only takes a single day to ruin your life.
Think about it! Be responsible.

Are you kidding me? While we may say it is always “irresponsible” to get drunk and have sex, this is something college kids do quite routinely. When two people are both in “these circumstances,” how can anyone fairly assert that the male is guilty of a felony, while a drunken hookup makes the female a helpless victim? How does such a claim — that males bear 100% responsibility in heterosexual encounters, and that females never bear any responsibility — comport with the idea that feminism is about men and women being equal? Am I the only one who sees how “social justice” in this context becomes the exact opposite of justice?

[University of Minnesota student body president Joelle] Stangler describes yes means yes policies as “common practice.” But these policies are anything but common practice. People don’t have sex by asking “May I kiss you?” “May I touch you here?” etc. . . .
Really, anything the accuser decides later they didn’t like can become grounds for an accusation. And if the accuser was drinking, consent is automatically negated, even if the accused had been drinking as well (and would presumably therefore be unable to consent). The policy shifts the burden of proof onto the accused, meaning they have to prove a crime didn’t happen, which, short of a video recording, is impossible in a he said/she said situation.

Under “these circumstances” — where radical feminists are demanding the implementation of policies that have the effect of criminalizing heterosexuality on campus and denying male students their basic civil rights — every college boy who hooks up with a college girl should be advised to seek psychiatric treatment immediately, because any guy who has sex on campus in 2015 must obviously be crazy.

Any attempt to discuss the “affirmative consent” agenda, especially in the context of due-process rights and the climate of anti-male hysteria feminists have created on campus, results in skeptics being branded “rape apologists.” Shrugging off this slander is easy enough for an adult — what do I care what a left-wing Minnesota college kid thinks of me? — but what we must take seriously is how this rhetoric functions as a terroristic intimidation tactic that silences dissent on campus. Ms. Stangler’s student government produced a 20-page report entitled “Guys Don’t Get Consent” (PDF) which made no mention of false accusations and said nothing at all about the psychological factors involved in binge drinking and sexual promiscuity among college-age females. Instead, the UM report blamed “masculinity” and asserted (based on a survey of about 60 male students and focus groups with 18 of those) that male students at the university are all clueless creeps:

“Telling guys to ‘stop at no’ is useless. They already know that no means no. What they don’t know is that not-yes also means no. The idea of affirmative consent is foreign.”

Feminist crusaders like Ms. Stangler seem to believe new laws and mandatory lectures about “affirmative consent” are the solution, but parents of male college students can implement a far more effective solution: Tell your sons to avoid female students, period.

When your sons return to campus this fall, they will enter a climate where all male students are viewed as rape suspects, where new federal policies encourage rape accusations, where accusations are treated as tantamount to proof of guilt, and where university officials are under heavy pressure from the Obama administration to increase the number of punitive procedures against male students. Any heterosexual activity on campus poses a grave risk for male students in this climate of frenzied hysteria, where feminists are hunting for rapists with more fanatical zeal than 17th-century Puritans hunted witches in Salem.

Responsible parents must sternly warn their sons going off to college not only to avoid sex with female students, but also never to speak to any woman on campus. The feminist campaign against masculinity, as evidenced in the University of Minnesota report, will have the effect of producing accusations of “harassment” against male students who attempt to flirt with female students, or who say or do anything that any female student may find offensive.

What do feminists find offensive? Men having sex with women.

“That consent rather than nonmutuality is the line between rape and intercourse further exposes the inequality in normal social expectations. . . . If sex is ordinarily accepted as something men do to women, the better question would be whether consent is a meaningful concept. . . .
“Sexuality, then, is a form of power. . . Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”
— Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory” (1982)

The Feminist-Industrial Complex of Women’s Studies programs on the 21st-century campus teaches female students to hate and fear men. Before parents send a son off to college, they should advise him to expect that he will be viewed with contempt and suspicion by every female on campus. No matter how handsome he is or how popular he was in high school, your son would be a fool to presume that any female college student might ever find him attractive. Your son’s confidence in his judgment, based on his previous romantic successes, could be the hubris that precedes nemesis in so many campus tragedies.

If anyone thinks I am exaggerating the dangers facing male college students, let them consider what happened to Paul Nungesser, what happened to Daniel Kopin, and what happened to Joshua Strange. Or consider the cases discussed by Professor K.C. Johnson at Minding the Campus. Over and over, we have seen these stories of male students who had no idea that they had encountered nemesis in the form of a female student whose emotional problems would result in accusations of sexual assault. Nor did these male students realize that such an accusation — often many weeks or months after the incident — would put them into the Kafkaesque nightmare of campus disciplinary tribunals where an accused student has none of the civil rights afforded to any common criminal in a court of law. Feminists have a cynical contempt for truth and no regard at all for the rights of innocent men destroyed by such false accusations. This dishonest campaign of deliberate cruelty is making more and more males casualties “in the Obama administration’s war on men,” as James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal said.

Promiscuity is rampant among female college students, many of whom are infected with sexually transmitted diseases. Wesleyan University’s Ella Dawson is infected with herpes, which is incurable, and a footnote on page 7 of Paul Nungesser’s lawsuit mentions that his accuser Emma Sulkowicz was reportedly treated for chlamydia. “According to Stanford University’s Sexual Health Peer Resource Center, 1 in 4 college students have an STD,” Dr. Laura Berman reports, and parents must warn their sons against this danger. Even if he were willing to accept such a grave risk to his health, however, the male student must be warned that many females on campus are psychologically disturbed.

Joelle Stengler reports that 25 percent of University of Minnesota students have mental health problems, and college-age women are particularly prone to these disorders. The student newspaper at the University of Michigan profiled a mentally ill female student they called “Maria” who has been twice arrested for assaulting police officers while in drunken blackouts. Maria is being treated with four different drugs:

The Klonopin treats her anxiety. The Lomictal and Seroquel act as mood stabilizers. The Vyvanse helps her focus. . . .
Over the last decade, it has become more and more common for college-aged women to be on the types of medication that Maria takes. The chance of a major depressive episode in 18 to 29-year-olds is three times higher than in individuals 60 years or older, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Most of these episodes occur in females. A quarter of American women take a drug for a mental health disorder, compared to 15 percent of men. The ratio of women to men on anti-anxiety meds is 2 to 1.

Whereas emotionally unbalanced young women were once institutionalized in psychiatric wards, now they are on university campuses and, like Maria at Michigan, many mentally ill female students “self-medicate” with alcohol. How can any male student know whether the girl he hooks up with at a college party — drinking, dancing, seemingly eager to be his sexual partner — is among the 1-in-4 with mental health problems? Wouldn’t he be safer if he operated with the assumption that every girl at the party is a psychiatric basket case, a deranged crazy-bomb just waiting to explode?





 

Category: Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: Wait, What?

Posted on | July 11, 2015 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Illegal Alien Who Murdered Woman Had Exploited S.F. ‘Sanctuary City’ Policy
The Camp of the Saints

Feminist Tumblr: Dreaming of Their Journey Across the Mytilini Strait
Living In Anglo-America

FMJRA 2.0: Independence Day Edition
BlurBrain
The Pirate’s Cove

Rule 5 Sunday: Independence Day Weekend Edition
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles from Tyranny
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 07.06.15
Proof Positive

Overwhelmed, Sad and Lonely
Dustbury

In The Mailbox: 07.07.15
A View from the Beach

Off The Shelf
Regular Right Guy

My SWATting: Perpetrator Reaches Plea Agreement in Federal Felony Case UPDATE: Investigation Is Continuing
Hogewash
A View from the Beach

Laci Green Talks Dirty to Girls
Living In Anglo-America
A View from the Beach

Sorry, @AsheSchow: ‘Due Process’ IS a Left-Right Issue — and Here’s Why
Living In Anglo-America
A View from the Beach

Feminist Tumblr: It’s Not As If They Hate Men or Anything Like That
Living In Anglo-America

Top linker this week was A View from the Beach, who checked in with five links the hard way. Something apparently went wrong with the pingback widget this week, because I’m pretty sure I saw some links from EBL at Batshit Crazy News while I was doing spam suppression. Apologies to anyone who got screwed by the software.


Shop Amazon – Off to College

Category: FMJRA Award

Are We Hiring Someone So Challenged As To Require A “Business Suit Onesie”?

Posted on | July 11, 2015 | 42 Comments

by Smitty

Mrs. Other Smitty brought this to my attention. As a generally slack-tacular kinda guy, I can follow the logic involved in this. Anything you can do to streamline a process, e.g. dressing, is worth doing. Note the shopping avoidance on display: you buy the one thing, and you’re done.
Two complications come to mind:

  • You need to make minor adjustments, e.g. doffing a jacket, to fit the office climate, and
  • You want to mix things up a bit, to get more wear out of the upper portion. Typically the trousers reach end-of-life ahead of the shirt or jacket.

Above all these practical considerations, there is this: you’re going home. There is a 1 year-old awaiting you. That one year-old is also wearing a onesie. WHAT. WERE. YOU. THINKING?

You weren’t. Let this blog help you. When someone tries to resurrect the jumpsuit, JUST. SAY. NO.

Category: humor

Feminist Tumblr: It’s Not As If They Hate Men or Anything Like That

Posted on | July 10, 2015 | 65 Comments

The fascinating thing about Feminist Tumblr is that it’s totally unfiltered. Nearly all of the participants are very young — a 25-year-old is a senior citizen on Tumblr — and also anonymous. There’s no adult supervision (your mother is not on Tumblr) and inside this feminist echo chamber, everything inside their zany brains comes pouring out. There is a constant competition on Feminist Tumblr to say the most demeaning things possible about males. Of course, no feminist ever says anything good about males, but the anti-male venom of Feminist Tumblr gives it a special edge.

“it’s so weird that women are seen as emotional and melodramatic when all the men i know are the most unbelievably melodramatic people on earth and also every time i express an emotion as a woman i feel guilty and apologize profusely but I’ve literally never once heard a man apologize for expressing an emotion even though they throw literal temper tantrums all the time”

This is the exact opposite of the usual feminist complaint about men who, allegedly, are emotionally stunted and incapable of anything like the intuitive and sympathetic feelings over which feminists claim women have a monopoly. However, you see here the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t aspect of feminism. Everything that men do is wrong, and so men who do show emotion are condemned as “the most unbelievably melodramatic people on earth” in a post that got more than 6,000 notes in a month.

Who is the author of this screed? Hannah Beth, a 20-year-old Florida State University student who is “majoring in literature and double minoring in art history/german” and also “queer as hell.” When she’s not busy denouncing males for their emotional melodrama, Hannah Beth has some emotions of her own:

I feel like books are a giant blanket I am wrapping myself up in. every morning lately when I wake up the first thought I have is about whatever I was reading before I went to sleep. it’s good to be corny about books on the internet I think. it’s good to have something I love this much. anyway, I felt really anxious all day today and had one of those Bad Days For No Reason and I cried a little bit in my car and I was scared to sleep alone but now I am curled up at 1am with my tiny book and I feel like it is the most reassuring hug on earth, like 100 angels whispering “it’s okay and it’s always been okay and it always will be” which is true and very good to hear from the universe. I wanna write a love letter to literature tbh.

So, yeah, guys “throw literal temper tantrums,” and meanwhile Hannah Beth is crying in her car and scared to sleep alone.

Tumblr Feminists cry alone a lot, when they’re not busy plotting worldwide revolution, like 21-year-old Athena, a “Gemini bitch” from Sweden who describes herself as “stone cold lesbian, post-structuralist radical feminist, marxist communist” and also a bunny owner & advocate for proper animal care. So she loves bunnies, but hates men and capitalism, not necessarily in that order.

“I’m not interested in dedicating my feminist effort to making masculinity more comfortable for men, I could not care less; they created it, they uphold it, so they fix it. I’m not gonna wade through their toxic waste to try to awaken some core of softness and compassion in men. If men are supposedly as good at analysis and reflection as they like to claim then they can fix their own shit. Demanding that women use up our effort to do it for them in the name of feminism – a women’s movement – is just another facet of the same masculinity they supposedly disapprove of.”

We got your message, loud and clear. Got nearly 9,000 notes in three month for that. Cute selfies for a lesbian Marxist, though.

So “queer as hell” or “stone cold lesbian” — kind of a theme becomes apparent here. There may even be a pattern on Feminist Tumblr. Then there’s 24-year-old Jam, “bisexual and aromantic,” who is “half Jamaican half Finnish, first generation Canadian” and also — surprise! — has complaints about men:

“one part of the male gender role I can’t stand is thinking that being irritating and pissing women off is funny????
every man I’ve met thinks that’s hilarious and
gets mad when I’m not into it. like why did
no one teach them to shut the fuck up”

That got over 160,000 notes in five months, because Tumblr Feminists share a profound contempt for “the male gender role.”

Oh, and Jam also posts a lot of selfies. You might like her, if you’re into pierced noses and tattoos and know how to “shut the fuck up.”

Speaking of which, Kethrellan, 19, is studying Music Education and Voice at the University of Delaware and — thanks to a questionnaire she filled out — we know that she’s 5-foot-7, lost her virginity before she was 18, has never been in a serious relationship and is, of course, bisexual.

Question: Is bisexuality as common in real life as it is on Feminist Tumblr? Or is there just reflecting a trend among fashionable young people to identify as Something Other Than Normal? Then I remember — Feminism Is Queer!

 

The title of that 2010 textbook by a Women’s Studies professor summarizes the basic message of feminism in the 21st century.

Whatever she does, the Third Wave feminist cannot be normal, because being normal is oppressive. This came to mind particularly with Kethrellan because I was looking at her selfies — because posting selfies is why they invented the Internet, right? — and thinking “never been in a serious relationship”? Long curly hair, nice smile, wide-set eyes — not a Barbie doll-type beauty, but more like a pre-Raphaelite painting. Rosetti or Millais would have loved her, and yet Kethrellan has “never been in a serious relationship”? Maybe the Tumblr Feminists have got a point. Maybe young guys nowadays are just a bunch of clueless clowns. Maybe they lack a proper appreciation of beauty. And maybe that’s why Kethrellan wrote this on her Tumblr blog:

“overhearing straight boys talk about girls is so terrifying”

Seriously, what’s wrong with these guys? Did their mamas not raise them right? Were they dumped off in daycare when they were babies? Did they grow up without two loving parents? We they shuttled back and forth between their divorced parents or abused by stepparents? How is it that so many of these young men seem to be uncouth savages or feral beasts with no respect for women? It’s almost as if civilization is being destroyed, perhaps by a War Against Human Nature.

Somebody ought to write a book about this or something.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | July 10, 2015 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Granpda had a vision of his last look at the city. The hugest moon he’d ever seen, obscured by unnatural clouds. Bombers. A distant enemy had visited. A murder of ravens deployed from a lonely tree for the sudden necropolis.
That had been decades ago. The country hadn’t recovered from electing foolish leaders that brought ruin.

Grandpa dimly recalled references to a time when the people weren’t cowering in fear and scavenging like the ravens.

* * *

Time passed. People ceased to blame others. Instead, they looked within for strength. The ravens awaited the cycle.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction
« go back — keep looking »