The Other McCain

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

The Naïvietê of a ‘Skeptic’

Posted on | May 28, 2015 | 37 Comments

@The_SkepDick is a partisan Democrat masquerading as an objective observer, which is to say that he is no different than about 90% of American journalists except for the fact that he is just an anonymous troll account on the Internet and not a multimillionaire celebrity like George Stephanopoulos, but I digress . . .

@The_SkepDick posted on his Tumblr blog (yes, of course he’s on Tumblr) a photo of graffiti outside The Women’s Library that said, “MEN READ BOOKS TOO, C**T,” which he captioned, “MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISM.” This was posted to Facebook, and someone then called it to my attention. Hmmm.

My first comment:

1. Where was this graffiti written?
2. I would presume that this bookstore is in an urban liberal area.
3. Does it seem likely, therefore, that some right-wing “Men’s Rights Activist” would have traveled to such a place, armed with a can of spraypaint, to create this graffiti?
4. All things considered — including the history of feminists faking “hate” incidents — isn’t it MORE likely this graffiti is another such hoax, a la “Haven Monahan” and the “gang rape” at UVA?
5. You call yourself a “skeptic.” Try being SKEPTICAL, please.

My second comment:

A quick Google investigation indicates that the Women’s Library is an institution affiliated with the London School of Economics, and that this graffiti was painted in 2013. Does anyone suppose that the urban vicinity around this elite campus is crawling with thuggish misogynists? The likelihood that this graffiti is a HOAX would seem quite high, and given that London has a nearly panoptical closed-circuit surveillance camera system, one would think that, if this graffiti were a REAL example of vandalism inspired by anti-female hatred, the police would have apprehended and prosecuted the culprits. Let the SKEPTIC attempt to find news accounts of any such prosecution. Good luck.

My third comment:

Further investigation determines that The Women’s Library had formerly been located in London’s East End, in a former warehouse purchased and renovated with a £4.2m Heritage Lottery grant in 2002. It would seem, however, that this windfall was insufficient, so that by 2012, The Women’s Library was shuttered and, in 2014, the LSE came to the rescue. So this graffiti was, evidently, painted outside the East End location in 2013, AFTER the facility had closed.

Anyone with the most minimal research skills — really, can these idiots even spell Google? — could have found that information easily, nor would it have been hard for them to research the long history of left-wingers (including feminists) faking “hate” incidents, however . . .

If liberals were concerned with facts, they wouldn’t be liberals. They choose always to live inside a cocoon of prejudice and partisanship where, merely by posturing as “progressive” and parroting the latest left-wing slogans, they manufacture a belief in their own intellectual and moral superiority. Anyone who does not kowtow to them, anyone who does not flatter them and applaud their childish tantrums, the liberal will smear as “bigots” and mock as “ignorant.”

Yet who is genuinely ignorant here? Who is the real bigot?

Does @The_SkepDick provide any evidence — any evidence whatsoever — that this graffiti outside The Women’s Library was genuinely the work of a Men’s Rights Activist? He does no such thing. Why not? Quite likely because no such evidence exists and he never even bothered to research the matter. He is not a skeptic at all, but is just an ax-grinder, a partisan propagandist who lacks even the minimal level of curiosity that would cause him to wonder, “Is this for real?”

Alas, our country is rapidly filling up with idiots like that, “educated” in public schools run by unionized bureaucrats who have been indoctrinated with the prevailing progressive dogmas that exercise hegemonic control in academia. Because every textbook now is edited (and every TV show is now produced) by fanatic disciples of this worldview, it never occurs to the typical young public-school graduate that maybe not everything he has been taught is actually true.

Not once in his entire life has he encountered a book like Friedrich Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice or Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed that might cause him to re-examine the belief system into which he has been indoctrinated. No, only “bigots” read books like that and, besides, the typical Democrat voter hasn’t read a book since the day he graduated school (or dropped out).

A vast ocean of ignorance and naïvietê has been created, at taxpayer expense, by our government’s “education” system. This may be why 65,918,507 people voted to re-elect Barack Obama.

We are Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption.





 

Category: Culture, Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption, Education, Sex Trouble

The Dictatorship of Godless Perverts

Posted on | May 28, 2015 | 58 Comments

@GretaChristina is a middle-aged bisexual feminist cat lady atheist blogger. Wait — no, I have not verified that she and her wife Ingrid Nelson actually own cats, but what are the odds, right? However, there is no need to speculate about Greta Christina’s feminism, her atheism or her role as “co-founder and co-organizer of Godless Perverts.”

You are almost certainly wondering, what the heck is that?

Godless Perverts presents and promotes a positive view of sexuality without religion, by and for sex-positive atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other non-believers, through performance events, panel discussions, social gatherings, media productions, and other appropriate outlets. . . .
Godless Perverts is committed to feminism, diversity, inclusivity, and social justice.

So they like diversity in their perversity, you see. These advocates of “diversity” and “inclusivity” cannot tolerate dissent, however, as events at a November 2014 meeting of Godless Perverts proved:

Our topic for the night was the question of when it was appropriate to talk or behave sexually in public places. The discussion was inspired by the controversy over #Shirtstorm and we used it as a launching pad, but the evening wasn’t meant solely as a debate over the issue of Matt Taylor’s shirt.
Unfortunately, we had one attendee who wanted to make it exactly about that. He not only tried to make the case that the shirt was appropriate, but attributed the whole controversy to oversensitive “radical feminists.”
It’s one thing to have differences on the specific issues around #Shirtstorm, but in most contexts, “radical feminism” is one of those red flags that indicates that someone’s less interested in a critique than a dismissal of mainstream feminism. . . .
It became increasingly clear that this individual was not supportive of our mission, and was in fact actively hostile to it. . . . We therefore decided to tell him he was no longer welcome at our meetings.

So much for “inclusivity.” He was both Godless and a Pervert, but some ungodly perversions are more “diverse” than others. This is because, despite her protests that the phrase “radical feminism” signifies only the purpose of “a dismissal of mainstream feminism,” Greta Christina actually is a radical feminist who is engaged in a War Against Human Nature, as her 2007 argument for same-sex marriage made clear:

In order for our society to accept or even tolerate same-sex marriage, a lot of fairly basic, deep-rooted ideas have to change. The way we define family. The way we think of what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman. The importance of sex and sexual fulfillment. What we consider natural and normal. Etc., etc., etc.
All of these things shape our practice of marriage, our understanding of what it is and what it’s for. And in order for us to accept or even tolerate same-sex marriage, all of them will need to change.

This means that your “basic, deep-rooted ideas” are wrong, comrade, and your ideas “need to change.” Under the radical feminist regime, everyone must be forced to think exactly what the Godless Perverts tell us to think. No one may be permitted to speak of “what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman” except to confirm the radical feminist regime’s Official Truth, namely that “what it means to be a man” is that you are wrong about everything. Perhaps you have forgotten that The First Rule for Men in Feminist Movements is SHUT UP!

Feminists who say their movement is about “equality” are lying. Feminism is a movement about power — absolute and unlimited power . . .

The Dictatorship of Godless Perverts cannot permit anyone to question the regime’s absolute authority. The commissars of the regime will tell you “what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman,” and you are not permitted to talk back to them. There can be no discussion or debate. If you do not endorse the Official Truth, you must be silenced. You must be punished if you refuse to repudiate your opposition, because everything you “consider natural and normal” — your “basic, deep-rooted ideas” — “will need to change.”

In the post-Windsor era, Godless Perverts view “the lack of affirmation of [their] beliefs . . . as an act of aggression,” Kirsten Power observes. This is what I’ve called the Compulsory Approval Doctrine, in which the only moral truth is a fanatical certainty in the wrongness of “hate,” so mere disapproval is “hate,” and thus subject to legal sanction.

If you are a normal (feminine) woman who feels normal (heterosexual) attraction to normal (masculine) men, and if you think that being normal is also natural — that’s HATE! You’re obviously some kind of sexist homophobic right-wing religious bigot.

“Feminism teaches young women that men are their enemies and that heterosexuality is a weapon of male supremacy. . . .
“Male erotic interest in women is, according to feminist ideology, the basic cause of women’s ‘humiliation’ as inferiors.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature, p. 35

Feminists believe marriage between men and women is a “relationship of slavery,” and call for a “revolutionary struggle” to end women’s “oppression” within “the institutions of male supremacy.” Feminist theory teaches that heterosexuality is not natural, that there is no biological basis for normal sexual traits and behaviors, and that there are no real meaningful differences between males and females. Instead, according to feminist theory, these differences are artificial, an illusion manufactured by the ideology of male supremacy, a “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix.

If you call radical feminism what it is, the Godless Perverts will decide you are “no longer welcome at our meetings.” Their response to criticism is invariably to call critics “misogynists” and “rape denialists” and to accuse opponents of “harassment.”

Feminism is a philosophy that is hostile to religion, hostile to freedom and ultimately, hostile to life itself. According to the bisexual atheist Greta Christina, life and death are meaningless:

In the most straightforward literal sense, when you don’t believe in God or an afterlife, there is no meaning of death. Not in any external, objective sense. In the godless universe, death just happens. It doesn’t serve a purpose — there is no purpose.

This is what feminists believe, because feminists are Godless Perverts.

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

Avoid conversations with Godless Perverts. Do not listen to them.





 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

A Moby in the ‘Manosphere’?

Posted on | May 27, 2015 | 87 Comments

Before getting to the point — the possibility that liberal trolls pretending to be Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) are creating fake “hate” against women — permit me to clarify something: I am both a journalist and a conservative and do not think those two things are contradictory in any way. I was a full-time newspaper reporter, editor and columnist for nearly a decade before I became a conservative in the mid-1990s, and so my perspective on politics and media bias is somewhat different than many other conservatives.

All that is preamble to explaining my attitudes vis-a-vis the whole MRA movement and the so-called online “Manosphere.” You go to war with the army you have, as they say, and the current situation regarding feminism — which has become the “Sex Trouble” project — clearly requires an institutional base outside the currently existing ideological/political system. It would be foolish to expect, inter alia, the Heritage Foundation or National Review to get down in the trenches of the War of the Sexes as it is currently being fought. There are a handful of conservative journalists (including Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner and Cathy Young of the Daily Beast) who “get it” in terms of the mutant totalitarian strain of feminism that has erupted into public spasms of raging insanity the past couple of years. However, there is generally a shortage of attention being paid to this by conservative media, and so we must build something new and different.

There is an existing network of online popular opposition to feminism, but this presents its own problems. Whereas mainstream conservative organizations allied with the GOP tend to be wimpy and prone to run for the hills the first time someone calls them ugly names, the grassroots “Manosphere” is the exact opposite: A lot of pissed-off-and-fed-up people who feel like they’ve been fighting a guerrilla war against feminism for years and who have a predictable tendency to Say Things You Wouldn’t Want to See Quoted in the New York Times.

No big deal, really. Grassroots is grassroots, and you cannot expect “message discipline” from random people on the Internet. However, the Left (of which feminism is a subsidiary) loves to play the guilt-by-association game, so when the spotlight suddenly shines over there where you’ve been fighting your guerrilla war, you can predict that they will do their “links-and-ties” tactic to try to discredit you. Trust me, my friends, I’ve got the scars of old battles and many tales to tell you about how this game is played, but let’s get down to a practical example.

Aaron Clarey wrote an article at Return of Kings highly critical of the new movie Mad Max: Fury Road. Because I almost never go to movies, I don’t really care about this any more than I care about any other vile poison emerging from Hollywood. Was it scripted by Catharine MacKinnon based on a novel by Andrea Dworkin, directed by Sheila Jeffreys and produced by Anita Sarkeesian? I don’t know, but it’s apparently got the whole Tough Action-Hero Chick thing happening, which is very much a feminist-approved theme, and Return of Kings is not down with anything that feminists approve.

However, it is not Aaron’s opinion of this movie, but rather a comment someone left on his article that caught my attention because it caught the attention of a left-wing “male feminist” Whose Name Shall Not Be Written Here. The comment by “TS77RP1” reads thus:

The only way back is to begin punishing ambition in our daughters and in all female children. They need to be physically and psychologically disciplined to be servile and deferential and they unfortunately need to have it beaten into them that they should NEVER trust their own judgement and always seek guidance and permission of their male headships.
My daughter would be turned out with nothing but a shirt on her back if she so much as looked at a college website or played with her brother’s educational toys.
She would be belted to the point of being unable to sit if she exhibited confidence in decision making.
I don’t want my wife to step foot out of the house unless her every dime and minute spent can be accounted for and executed in conjuncture with my approval. My daughter will exude obedience and timidity for whoever her future husband is and it’s imperative that all Christian Men demand nothing less within their own homes. Playtime for feminazis and the left is over. This is our world and our heritage to protect. Let the cultural war begin!

Well, this is a horrifying thing to read, but is it authentic? I did a search for “TS77RP1” and this comment has apparently been deleted from Return of Kings and, furthermore, the only places on the Internet where that handle can be found are all quoting the left-wing “male feminist” Whose Name Shall Not Be Written Here.

If it walks like a moby and talks like a moby, it’s probably a moby, and if you don’t know what a moby is, you should learn.

moby
An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.
The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

Was the commenter “TS77RP1” such a troll? I strongly suspect it. Having seen firsthand the insidious deceptions that the online Left is willing to employ, this would be par for the course. This doesn’t rule out the possibility Dictator Dad is real, but I’m extremely skeptical.

Anyway, let this be a warning to the grassroots opposition to feminism: Keep your eyes open for similar dirty tricks.

Team Clinton is playing for keeps, you know.





 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Who Is ‘Silencing’ Whom?

Posted on | May 26, 2015 | 150 Comments

Perhaps @juliezeilinger would care to debate this?

This is the dynamic at the heart of online harassment more generally, which, feminists have previously noted, is largely an attempt to silence women. Gamergate — a movement, ostensibly started to improve ethics in video game journalism, that morphed into a campaign of horrifying, misogynistic comments and threats directed at female gamers and critics — is one infamous example. This harassment, Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti wrote in October, is “the last, desperate gasp of misogynists facing an unwelcoming future” and is essentially the way “straight white men deal with a world that no longer revolves exclusively around them.”

Read the whole thing, which involves a story about a college feminist who was murdered. Police haven’t said anything about the motive for the murder of Grace Mann and, although there has been a great deal of speculation. it is not yet possible to know whether her murder was a consequence of her campus activism.

There is, however, another problem involved here. Neither Julie Zeilinger nor Jessica Valenti nor any other feminist will address the totalitarian climate fostered by feminism’s uncontested hegemony in academia. It is predictable that “straight white men” (why only white men, Jessica?) on university campuses don’t enjoy being constantly accused of misogyny simply because they are “straight white men.”

Exactly what are these young students, scapegoated for the crime of being male, supposed to do in reaction to such propaganda? Who will speak on their behalf? How is any student (regardless of whether they are male or female, whatever their ethnic identity or sexual orientation) supposed to obtain access to any articulate, factual and rational opposition to the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology taught in university Women’s Studies programs? Is there any faculty member who would risk disputing feminist gender theory — the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — after Larry Summers was purged at Harvard University merely for suggesting that there may be “innate differences” between men and women”?

Nobody on campus is allowed to criticize feminist theory nor to mention the hideous hatefulness of feminist rhetoric. Our universities are teaching feminists that they can lie with impunity, defame innocent people without consequence, and claim victimhood (“harassment!”) if anyone objects to their lies and insults. Every time Christina Hoff Sommers sets foot on a university campus, she is deliberately smeared, accused of being a “rape denialist,” and no one in authority — not a single administrator at any university — will dare say a word against the deranged fanaticism of the feminists who engage in these brownshirt tactics. As I explain on page 54 of Sex Trouble:

“Unless we are willing to oppose feminism now, we may find ourselves eventually living in a totalitarian society where such opposition is prohibited by law.”

And “eventually” could arrive much sooner than most people imagine.

 





 

Category: Sex Trouble

N.C. Schools Employ Radical Lesbian Who Called Marriage ‘Slavery’ for Women

Posted on | May 24, 2015 | 123 Comments

By Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain on Twitter)

A pioneering lesbian activist who called heterosexuality “the ideology of male supremacy” and condemned marriage as “slavery” for women is now working as a math teacher in North Carolina.

 

As a graduate student in 1969, Margaret Small helped begin what became the Women’s Studies program at the State University of New York’s Buffalo campus and in 1972 co-taught a course called “Lesbianism 101” recognized as the first such class taught in the United States. Since 2009, Small has been employed as a K-12 Mathematics Curriculum Specialist for Buncombe County Schools in Asheville, N.C., according to her LinkedIn profile. However, in the 1970s, she was a member of a radical lesbian collective known as The Furies, co-founded by legendary feminist Charlotte Bunch. Small’s 1975 essay “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women” offered a Marxist interpretation of “lesbian consciousness” as part of a “revolutionary struggle” to end women’s “oppression” in the “relationship of slavery,” as she called marriage.

“Women’s oppression is based in the fact that she reproduces the species,” Small wrote in the essay, published in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, a book co-edited by Bunch and Nancy Myron. “The relationship of men to reproduction is defined by a single act of fucking at the moment of impregnation and ends at that point.”

Invoking the historical theories of Friedrich Engels (colleague of Karl Marx and co-author of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”), Small declared: “Class society arose because of the oppression of women. . . . The exploitation of all women by all men made possible the exploitation of some men by other men. The more exploitative the relationship between men and women becomes, the stronger and more vital become the institutions of male supremacy.”

 

After getting her master’s degree from SUNY-Buffalo in 1973 Small “worked for 8 years as a machinist, first in a shipyard in San Diego and then at several manufacturing plants in Chicago,” before returning to school at the University of Illinois-Chicago, according to an online profile. She became a math teacher in Chicago public schools, got her PhD. and, in 2000, became “a founding Director of the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School of Chicago (YWLCS),” the only all-girls public school in Chicago. Small moved to North Carolina in 2009 and, in 2013, married her lesbian partner Peggy Baker. Also a former YWLCS teacher, Baker runs an education non-profit, EASL Institute, whose clients include schools in North Carolina, New York and Chicago.

Margaret Small’s pioneering work in the feminist movement has been recognized in numerous books, including Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945-1985, edited by Kathleen Laughlin and Jacqueline Castledine (2010), and the Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements, by JoAnne Myers (2013). Her role in teaching the first lesbian university course (along with Madeline Davis) was cited as No. 10 on a list of “20 Notable College Moments in LGBT History” by Best Colleges Online.

Small’s 1975 essay condemning marriage and heterosexuality has been cited in such books as Separatism and Women’s Community by Dana Shugar and The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. The essay was adapted from a speech Small gave to the Wasington, D.C., think tank Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) on behalf of The Furies.

“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” Small wrote. “In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology.”

Under male supremacy, Small asserted, women “become defined as appendages to men” in a system “which maintains the ideological power of men over women.” Small’s article (the full text of which is embedded below) declares: “Heterosexual hegemony insures that people think it natural that male and female form a life-long sexual/reproductive unit with the female belonging to the male.”

Lesbians, Small wrote, were crucial to “the development of revolutionary consciousness” because they are “outside of the reality which heterosexual ideology explains.” Heterosexuality would become “irrelevant” as alternatives to sexual reproduction were developed.

“Male supremacy is what is attacked in lesbian ideology,” Small wrote. “What we are doing in revolutionary struggle is to make our consciousnesses different. When enough people’s consciousnesses are different, then we make a revolution.”

The Furies collective, which Small represented in her speech at IPS, was formed by Bunch and others in 1971, and announced its revolutionary feminist goals in early 1972. Bunch’s manifesto, “Lesbians in Revolt,” is included in many university Women’s Studies textbooks and curricula. Bunch became a distinguished academic at Rutgers University and in 1999 was honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights by President Bill Clinton. (Click here to see C-SPAN video of Hillary Clinton’s speech at the December 1999 ceremony.)

Lesbian Margaret Small 1975 by himself2462

 

John Hoge and Jeanette Runyon assisted in the research for this article, which is part of the Sex Trouble project that has been supported by contributions from readers. The first edition of Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature is available from Amazon.com, $11.96 in paperback or $1.99 in Kindle ebook format.





 

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Gays, History, Marriage, North Carolina, Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: The Road To Sin City

Posted on | May 24, 2015 | 19 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

So, after getting through the last days of packing, shipping a truckload of stuff to Vegas, and stuffing the remainder of my worldly goods in the back of the Jeep, I’m chilling at Balticon, an SF convention slowly evolving into a geek culture con, and killing a little time between programming events by getting current on my blogging duties. In honor of Balticon’s home city of Baltimore, here’s Jaime Edmondson looking hot for the Ravens.

Former Playboy Playmate and Dolphins cheerleader Jaime Edmondson sporting other colors

As usual, many of the following links depict women with few or no clothes on. If you value your job and/or relationships, you might want to exercise a little discretion regarding when and where you click.

Goodstuff leads off this week with unaccredited Bond Girl Madeline Smith and some thoughts on Mad Max: Fury Road, followed by Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Girls with G-Great Big Swords! Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, and First Street Journal has Mostly Marines.


EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes Fury Road Rule 5, Princess Chelsea, Mad Men Rule 5, Pretty Little Liar, Hillary Mills Friday Night Document Dump, Hillary’s Monica Rule 5, Hollywood Canteen Rule 5, Tomorrowland, and How About Some Erotic Hillary Clinton? (possibly NMS)

At A View from the Beach, it’s Edita!, Well, That’s One Way to Pay, Unknown Hominid Left 3.3 Million Year Old Stone Tools – cave girls, of course, Dog’s Lives, Nice Lizard!,  I Usually Avoid the Reef. . ., Wombat’s Tuesday Ruminations, Pretty Strenuous…, Now That’s Mystery Meat!, Almost the World’s Shortest Marriage and Why Choose When You Can Have Both?

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe was Alicia Arden, his Vintage Babe was Tina Louise, and Sex in Advertising is (un)covered by Victoria’s Secret. At Dustbury, it’s Lindsay Ellingson and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next weekend’s Rule 5 roundup is midnight on Saturday, May 30.


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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Meanwhile at Balticon…

Posted on | May 23, 2015 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

War Against Human Nature: What Feminists Pay $47,030 a Year to Learn
Dyspepsia Generation
Da Tech Guy
Political Hat
Living In Anglo-America
A View from the Beach

Rule 5 Sunday: Last Dance In Washington
Batshit Crazy News
Animal Magnetism
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

Lesbian Harassment in College? Lawsuit Alleges ‘Sexually Charged’ Hazing
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Living In Anglo-America
IOTW Report
A View from the Beach

FMJRA 2.0: Roll With It
The Pirate’s Cove
BlurBrain
Batshit Crazy News

Cincinnatus and the Giant
Batshit Crazy News

Hating Babies, Hating Mothers
Regular Right Guy
Da Tech Guy

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 05.19.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

Suspect Named in Quadruple Murder
Batshit Crazy News

Tracinski Is Half Correct
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

It Purports To Survey Those Confused Concerning The Wedding Tackle–Why Would The Math NOT Be Queer?
Batshit Crazy News

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It
Batshit Crazy News
Living In Anglo-America

Virginia Democrat Lawmaker Admits Fathering Baby With Teenage Girl
Batshit Crazy News

Shorter Her Majesty:
Batshit Crazy News

Without Irony or Self-Awareness
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

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

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (13)
  2.  Regular Right Guy (5)

Plus the usual assortment of near misses…

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Posted on | May 23, 2015 | 73 Comments

Excuse my long spells of non-blogging this week, but I spent Wednesday and Thursday writing a 3,000-word post  that still needs a few final touches. My sloth is more apparent than real and, also, I keep getting distracted by, y’know, news. Just a few odds and ends before I return to the Siberian salt mines . . .

The phrase “Feminist-Industrial Complex” was first used, so far as I can tell, in a 2008 column about Sarah Palin by Jonah Goldberg. I began using the phrase in 2014 without realizing where it originated, and if Jonah swiped it from somewhere else, let the claimant step forward or otherwise Jonah gets the credit when I publish the revised and expanded second edition of Sex Trouble in about three months.

Because the book is focused on academia — specifically university Women’s Studies programs, where radical feminist gender theory is propagated — I have used “Feminist-Industrial Complex” to refer primarily to these institutions. Removed from marketplace pressures, subsidized by taxpayers and protected by Title X from any opposition or criticism on campus, the academic Feminist-Industrial Complex is the intellectual bulwark of the entire movement. Speaking of which, Mark Hemingway has a nice a feature about how Christina Hoff Sommers has sparked furious reaction in her recent appearances on campus:

Before Sommers’s speech at Oberlin, 150 feminists signed a letter to the campus newspaper claiming that, among other libelous assertions, Sommers was a “rape denialist” for daring to poke holes in the improbable campus rape statistics bandied about. (According to an article in Slate last year, the commonly spouted figure that one-quarter of college women are victims of rape or attempted rape “would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”) The Oberlin letter was titled “In Response to Sommers’ Talk: A Love Letter to Ourselves” and urged students to boycott the speech and attend another event hosted in a “safe space.” While Sommers went on to address a full lecture hall, the Oberlin Review reported that “the alternative event, ‘We’re Still Here,’ was attended by approximately 35 students and one dog.” Disappointingly, the Review did not elaborate on how exactly Sommers’s presence on campus had managed to traumatize the dog.
The intensity of the opposition Sommers is facing may be new, but its seeds were planted a few years ago. Sommers says some of the opposition to her is a logical consequence of government policy. In 2011 the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice told campuses they were obligated under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to protect women from harassment—even exposure to sexual language and innuendo—and that they had to lower their standards for determining guilt. “The colleges panicked, but it empowered that contingent. … The ‘drama feminists’ suddenly could hold the school hostage because they could threaten lawsuits under Title IX,” she says.

You can read the whole thing. The key point is that the sudden onlaught of “rape culture” discourse on university campuses in recent years did not happen coincidentally, or in response to an actual “crisis” or “epidemic” of sexual assault. Instead, federal authorities in the Obama administration undertook this initiative. Why? Believe it or not, because of National Public Radio:

[In 2010] reporters at National Public Radio teamed up with the left-leaning journalism organization Center for Public Integrity (CPI) to produce and promote a 104-page “investigative reporting series” (PDF) entitled “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice.” . . .
The executive director of CPI, Bill Buzenberg, summed up the plight of millions of young women on campus in a single word: “Nightmare.” According to the report, serial predators are roaming free on college campuses. . . .
The findings were widely and uncritically reported and won multiple journalism prizes, including a Peabody Award (known as the Pulitzer Prize for radio), as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Justice and Human Rights Reporting and the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma. . . .
Russlynn Ali, a little-known Education Department official, was galvanized by the NPR/CPI findings. . . .
On April 4, 2011, she sent her now-famous Dear Colleague letter to colleges across the nation providing detailed guidelines on the draconian steps colleges should take to fight what she called a “plague” of sexual violence. . . .

You can read the rest of that article by Dr. Sommers at the Daily Beast, including the fact that NPR broadcast the now-discredited claim that “one out of five college women will be sexually assaulted.”

This is simply not true, and yet if you point out what’s wrong with this bogus statistic (derived from a 2007 survey with serious methodological flaws) you are accused of being a “rape denialist,” as the feminists at Oberlin branded Dr. Sommers. The best estimates of the frequency of sexual assault on U.S. campuses put the number far lower. Even by the most elastic definition (e.g., “unwelcome” touching), it’s hard to find credible evidence that the number is worse than 1-in-40 which, as Dr. Summers notes, is “far too many, but a long way from one in five.”

Here we see a convergence of three separate but strategically allied forces — liberal journalists, campus activists and federal bureaucrats — whose combined efforts produced a myth about rape and, when the facts contradict the myth, feminists refuse to yield to reality. Instead, feminists falsely accuse critics like Dr. Sommers of being misogynists, indifferent to the suffering of victims.

“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . . to come to see oneself as a victim.”
— Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)

This is it, you see: Having obtained “consciousness of victimization,” the feminist makes victimhood the basis of her identity, so that she experiences an existential crisis if anyone points out that she is not, in fact, suffering from oppression. A student at Oberlin College (annual tuition $48,682) is actually a member of a privileged elite, yet feminists would have her believe — as she arrives on this picturesque 440-acre campus — that she is at risk of being enslaved by male supremacy and subjected to sexual brutality: Fear and Loathing of the Penis!

This paranoia has made it extremely hazardous for male students to pursue romance on the modern campus, as Paul Nungesser discovered at Columbia University. One of his accusers told her tale of oppression at the feminist blog Jezebel:

The incident happened my junior year at Columbia, when Paul followed me upstairs at a party, came into a room with me uninvited, closed the door behind us, and grabbed me. I politely said, “Hey, no, come on, let’s go back downstairs.” He didn’t listen. He held me close to him as I said no, and continued to pull me against him. I pushed him off and left the room quickly. I told a few friends and my boyfriend at the time how creepy and weird it was.

Creepy and weird, yes. Criminal? Therein lies the problem.

No one would condone the behavior alleged here — it’s clearly wrong — but as it happened at a party where, we may assume, everyone was drinking, this isn’t exactly startling. Back when I was in college in Alabama, a drunk guy who tried to “get fresh” that way might have gotten punched by the girl’s boyfriend, but I guess students at Columbia (annual tuition $51,008) aren’t the redneck type. At any rate, this girl didn’t decide to complain to university officials until after Emma Sulkowicz filed her claim that Nungesser raped her:

Then, a year later, a friend approached me and asked if we could speak privately. She told me she’d heard that Paul had apparently raped someone, and that the story had reminded her of what he had done to me a year before. . . .
My friend gave me the name and number of someone at Columbia I could talk to if I wanted to file a complaint. I wondered if what had happened between me and Paul was really sexual assault: there was no penetration, I had no bruises, I got away. But Columbia defines “Sexual Assault—Non-Consensual Sexual Contact” as “Any intentional sexual touching, however slight, with any object without a person’s consent.” That is exactly what happened to me, and so I decided to file a complaint.

Dear God in heaven! She admits here to joining a conspiracy, a vendetta inspired by Sulkowicz’s desire for revenge against her former “love,” Nungesser. (Click here to read the Nungesser civil rights complaint against Columbia.) Her incident with Nungesser at the party — which, as I say, is nothing we would condone, if it happened as alleged — was just a “creepy and weird” encounter that she shrugged off until a friend of Sulkowicz encouraged her to file a complaint. However, universities now effectively criminalize “touching .  . . without a person’s consent,” which would seem to require either:

  1. Romance devoid of spontaneity or impulse, in which lovers seek explicit verbal consent prior to each touch;
    or
  2. A clairvoyant ability to know in advance whether any specific touch was welcome.

We try to imagine the conversations required by this policy: “Having complied with your prior request that I kiss your neck, Tiffany, may I now have permission to caress your lower back?”

Back in the day . . . No, I’m not going to waive my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The Justice Department might institute some new policy where my alma mater would be forced to begin an investigation and retroactively prosecute me for trying to get to third base on the first date — if, hypothetically, I had ever done such a thing, which I can neither confirm nor deny until I have consulted with my attorney. These allegations that I engaged in sexual activity at Jacksonville State University are mere hearsay, your honor! I object to this line of questioning, and demand that this testimony be stricken from the record! Also, I must remind the jury that I was under the influence of dangerous hallucinogens during my undergraduate career, and therefore I was legally insane the whole time, as numerous witnesses will testify.

Having established my innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, then, what advice do I have for college boys nowadays?

  • Think ahead. Regard all females as potentially hostile and always keep in mind that any girl who tries to flirt with you could be setting you up for a sexual assault complaint. Approach every male-female encounter with extreme caution, and always consider whether you could defend your actions in a court of law.
  • Only speak when spoken to. Males have no right to initiate communication with females on the modern campus. Your attempt to make friendly small talk with a girl could be construed as harassment, potentially resulting in expulsion.
  • Avoid elite schools. It seems that false rape accusations mostly occur at expensive private schools. Save your money and go to the nearest community college for two years, then transfer to a state university. Your diploma may not have the prestige of a degree from Oberlin, Georgetown or an Ivy League school, but you are less likely to encounter a raging feminist lunatic at a state school and it’s entirely possible that you could meet a normal woman who doesn’t consider heterosexuality a hate crime.

There are still normal women out there, allegedly. However . . .

Inmate who won order for sex reassignment
surgery recommended for parole

Be careful, guys. You live in an increasingly dangerous world.





 

Category: Sex Trouble
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