The Other McCain

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

Worth Reading Carefully

Posted on | May 10, 2015 | 75 Comments

“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

It is not often you’ll find me quoting a New Englander like Emerson, whose philosophy was typical of how the Yankees — who in the 17th century had hanged witches and whose penchant for fanaticism gave rise to every manner of antinomian heretical sect in subsequent generations — by the mid-19th century came to prefer secular moralism to anything that might be learned from the Bible. Well, Ideas Have Consequences, but at this point in our nation’s descent into degenerate anarchy, there’s no need to resurrect ancient grudges and lost causes. Everyone who is willing to fight against the onlaught of terror is a potential ally, and is welcome to join the Camp of the Saints.

“We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Do the young read Emerson anymore? Do they know anything about Teddy Roosevelt? Are they taught anything at all about our nation’s actual history and cultural traditions? We have abundant evidence that youth have been plunged into Stygian darkness, an endless night of permanent and incurable ignorance. Not only do they know almost nothing, they have no curiosity about any of the things they do not know — which, as I say, is nearly everything. Rarely does one meet a person under 40 who isn’t virtually destitute in terms of actual knowledge.

Youth nowadays believe they don’t need to know anything, because they have what educational bureaucrats call “learning skills.” As long as they are capable of finding something with a Google search, what does it matter whether or not they ever actually do Google it? Their entire mental life is built around the idea expressed by every apathetic student taking a required course in college: “Is this going to be on the exam?”

So we have many millions of allegedly “educated” Americans, people with college degrees who haven’t opened a book since they received their diploma. They went to college in order to obtain a credential that would qualify them for an office job with a salary, benefits, paid vacation and everything else deemed necessary to middle-class life. Once they got the requisite credential, their interest in “education” ended, and so they spend their leisure watching Netflix or playing XBox or in some other amusement. Read a book? Why would anyone want to read a book?

“Is this going to be on the exam?”

Speculative philosophy never really interested me. If I learned anything in college about Plato or Rousseau, it was only enough to pass a test. Other people’s opinions don’t impress me much. Just give me the facts, and I can form my own opinions, thank you. This is also why I don’t read much fiction. History has always fascinated me. Literature? Meh.

Anyway, a commenter quoted that Emerson passage in response my post about “Feminism’s Mirage of Equality.” His point about intellectual “duplicity and falsehood” as a sort of counterfeiting — “a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults” — struck me as quite relevant to the way feminists parasitically defraud “the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.”

The piling up of theory as a substitute for actual knowledge is the characteristic humbug of our age. We are expected to heed feminist gender theory about the development of human identity when the authors of these theories typically have never raised a child and, quite often, are temperamentally averse to participation in the natural process by which human offspring are generated. Today is Mother’s Day, and what the average mom knows about “gender” as a natural fact is far more trustworthy than any feminist professor’s intellectual theory.

 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: Station To Station

Posted on | May 10, 2015 | 12 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Welcome to another addition of Rule 5 Sunday, a staple of this blog since the days when Our Founder received the vision that became known as The Underpants Gnome Theory of Blogging, and its Five Rules, perhaps the most important of which is Rule Five, which requires the adoration of attractive women and the mockery of humorless feminists who find such “objectification” objectionable. Thus, as an appetizer for the following links, Mrs. David Bowie, perhaps better known as Iman.

Just think of how many gorgeous babes like this Somalia could show off if the place wasn’t such an anarchistic hellhole full of crazed Muslim douchebags.

As usual, many of the following links depict women with few or no clothes on, and these may be considered NSFW where you work. This being the case, avoid mockery, ostracism and/or termination by exercising discretion with regard to when and where you click.


Goodstuff leads off this week with a celebration of burlesque featuring Dita von Teese, Sally Rand and Lucille Ball; also, cool retro & vintage stuff FOR SCIENCE! Animal Magnetism is next up with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, followed by First Street Journal with some Glamour Girls from the IDF.

EBL’s herd this week includes feminists chasing Joss Whedon off Twitter, Sophia Vergara, Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones, Shelley Fabares, and Emily Van Camp.

At A View from the Beach, it’s Not a Con Job – Constance Jablonski, Practice, Practice, Practice, Thursday with the Wombat, The Left Eats Its Own, Gisele’s Husband Cheated, Government Bugs Track Chesapeake Bay Residents, Wombat’s Tales of Tuesday, Tequila Tuesday with Kate Upton, Wombat’s Monday News Review, Piranha Invade Clinton Country, “Real Love”, and Not Even Yes Means Yes.

Soylent Siberia offers your morning coffee creamer, Overnighty Chain Drive, Monday Motivationer Mystery Date, Evening Awesome Wood Nymph, Tuesday Titillation Luscious Leopard, Overnighty Feathered Friend, Humpday Hawt Rail Rider, Happy Hour Hawtness with lesbians, Fursday Fuego Houserocker, Fursday Evening El Fuego, Corset Comestibles, T-GIF Friday Counterbalance, Weekender Fleur-de-lis, and Bath Night Pitcher Perfect.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Juliana Lopes Leite, his Vintage Babe is Marilyn Maxwell, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret. At Dustbury, it’s Tammy Wynette and Nadia Comaneci.

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery, and for helping make last week’s Rule 5 Monday top post in the FMJRA! Deadline to submit links to the
Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next weekend’s roundup is midnight on Saturday, May 16.


Station To Station
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

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

Posted on | May 10, 2015 | 5 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

The War Against Human Nature: Feminism and the Mirage of ‘Equality’

Posted on | May 9, 2015 | 66 Comments

“As far as feminist endorsements are concerned, this was the holy grail: A word with a complicated history reclaimed by the most powerful celebrity in the world. . . . Beyoncé would become the subject of two-thirds of all tweets about feminism in the 24 hours after her appearance [at the 2014 Video Music Awards].”
— Jessica Bennett, Time magazine, Aug. 26, 2014

“Beyoncé is . . . idolised for her feminist credentials in the November 2013 [Australian] edition of Cosmopolitan. The ‘first lady of awesomeness’ is praised for her ability to ‘influence the global conversation on feminism, race, sexuality, philanthropy, justice, marriage, love and friendship’ via the ‘booty-popping’ way that she gets her fans involved in the politics of empowerment.’ . . .
“The fact that she ‘still reserves the right to be a Feminist in Heels’ . . . is presented as the main reason to love her.”
— Kate Farhall, in Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism, edited by Miranda Kiraly and Meagan Tyler

“Feminism teaches women that to be normal is to be inferior.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature

No intelligent person imagines it was mere coincidence that one of the world’s biggest pop singers decided to help “re-brand” feminism in 2014. Two years earlier, feminism had proved a valuable political weapon that helped re-elect President Obama after the accusation that Republicans were waging a “war on women” enabled the Democrat to score the largest “gender gap” advantage among female voters ever recorded by Gallup. With Hillary Clinton generally coinsidered a shoo-in favorite to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2016, a relentless push to popularize the “feminist” label has been underway in the liberal media, who are always willing to tell any lie that will help elect Democrats.

As much as any Republican might be offended by the media’s dishonest marketing of “pop feminism,” however, there is another group even more offended — actual feminists, the kind who believe in the movement’s political philosophy and radical egalitarian theory. This kind of feminism, the academic dogma promoted by professors in university Women’s Studies program, has nothing to do with the “booty-popping” celebrity “Feminist in Heels” act that Beyoncé displayed during her 2014 VMA performance. Determined to fight back against this vacuous “re-branding” of feminism, a group of radical scholars have published a new book Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism. Edited by two Australians, author Miranda Kiraly and university researcher Meagan Tyler, the book is a collection essays by the editors and 17 other writers, 11 of whom are Australian, three Canadian, two British and one American. Of the 19 contributors to Freedom Fallacy, 14 are associated with universities either as faculty or as graduate students. The others work for non-profit organizations, except Meghan Murphy, proprietor of Feminist Current, “Canada’s leading feminist website.”

Freedom Fallacy got a rather ironic plug last week when #GamerGate scourge Anita Sarkeesian tweeted out a link with this message:

“Feminism is about the collective liberation of women as
a social class. Feminism is not about personal choice.”

This rejection of “personal choice” contradicts everything most people who call themselves “feminist” claim to believe, of course, but as I explain in the introduction to Sex Trouble:

Almost everyone claims to accept feminism if they can be permitted to define it in the most commonly accepted understanding of “equality” as basic fairness. Especially in terms of educational and employment opportunity, no one argues in favor of discrimination against women. Yet this widely accepted idea of feminism, as a concern for equality in the sense of fairness and opportunity, is not the goal of the feminist movement today, nor was this the goal of the movement when it began in the late 1960s. The leaders of the Women’s Liberation movement were radicals — many of them were avowed Marxists — who advocated a social revolution to destroy the basic institutions of Western civilization, which they denounced as an oppressive system of male supremacy, often labeled “patriarchy.”

So-called “Second Wave” feminism burned hot and then flamed out, even as its radical ideas were misunderstood by many of those who embraced the Women’s Liberation banner as a trendy political fashion statement.

The contributors to Freedom Fallacy recognize a similar problem with what Kate Farhall calls the recent “explosion of a new, popular feminism . . . rebranded and marketed to a younger, more pop-culture oriented generation.” A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne, Farhall examines how “pop feminism” is presented in women’s magazines that “consciously align themselves with this popular feminism, lauding the achievements of openly feminist celebrities, explicitly engaging with feminist issues and applauding strong, empowered women” even while continuing to emphasize conventional ideas of beauty:

Feminist research consistently shows the objectification of women and the pressure of feminine beauty ideals to be problematic and limiting to women. Consequently, the dueal emphases of women’s freedom and adherence to feminine beauty standards seemingly render this popular form of feminism, not only internally incoherent, but counterproductive to women’s equality. . . .
On the one hand, popular feminism applauds strong women and seeks to empower young women to achieve their goals, become educated and attain a greater level of self-respect. On the other hand, beauty ideals that are unattainable for most women are still held up as a standard to emulate and those who vocally support popular feminism are often those who also objectify themselves in order to conform to a male-driven understanding of what is ‘sexy.’ . . .
Feminism in its current, popular form, then, would seem reluctant to confront or criticise male power. These tensions between a ‘sexy’ popular feminism and more substantive challenges to the patriarchy are also played out in women’s magazines.

Permit me to interrupt Farhall here to say that I have always considered women’s magazines to be degrading, insipid trash. Why would any literate person waste their time reading Cosmopolitan?

The very fact that these magazines are so popular with teenage girls tells you something about the failure of public education to inculcate civilized tastes and decent morality in youth. If you want your daughter to be a shallow slut, just buy her a subscription to Cosmo. Being a shallow slut is certainly not “empowering,” yet such is the “feminism” marketed by women’s magazines. Farhall quotes a young columnist from the May 2013 Australian edition of Cosmopolitan celebrating the fashionable popular brand of feminism:

“I shave my legs, I own red lipstick, I wear five-inch heels. I love my job and I love men. . . . I’m a feminist and I’m proud of it. I hope you are too.”

Can the reader guess which part of that declaration is most disturbing to Farhall? If you guessed, “I love men,” you win the prize:

Popular feminism is rebranded as fun, flirty and feminine and actively placed in direct opposition to alternative iterations of feminism that are labelled as outdated and unattractive. . . . It is difficult to see how conforming to traditional notions of heterosexual femininity will bring about equality.

Here we have the radical War on Human Nature, the “gender theory” attack on our understanding of masculinity and femininity as the normal traits of normal people in normal relationships. To distill this theory to its essence (as articulated by Professor Judith Butler) it’s the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix. I explained gender theory in “Feminists Against Heterosexuality”:

To translate this to plain English, if you are a normal (feminine) woman who feels normal (heterosexual) attraction toward normal (masculine) men, this means that you have been brainwashed by society into accepting your own oppression under the system of male supremacy. Feminists believe that heterosexuality is imposed on women by the patriarchy — women are “coerced into heterosexuality,” as Professor Marilyn Frye explained — and feminine behavior is simply the performance of inferiority. Gender “glamorizes the subordinate status of females” and creates an artificial appearance of male-female difference in order “to clearly mark the subordinate class [i.e., females] from the privileged class [i.e., males].”
Thus, there are no natural differences between male and female, according to feminist theory, only the oppressive hierarchy of “gender” by which society enforces male supremacy.

This anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology is what students learn in university Women’s Studies classes, where textbooks edited by lesbians are taught by professors who, typically, are either lesbians or Marxists or both. The curriculum is openly hostile to Judeo-Christian morality and the traditional family, and the purpose of this intellectual assault is, as Professor Butler says, “the subversion of identity.” No one should be surprised when a student in an “Introduction to Feminist Theory” course at SUNY-Buffalo leaves the classroom exclaiming, “Every time I walk out of this class I just become more sexually confused!”

If human identity is “socially constructed,” as feminists insist, then it may also be deconstructed and, because opposition to feminism is effectively prohibited within academia, no student on the 21st-century is likely to encounter an articulate criticism of these theories.

“The fanatical rigidity of the feminist worldview can permit no dissent. Critics must be silenced and opponents must be demonized as ‘haters.’ Feminism encourages the young True Believer to think of herself as intellectually and morally superior to others. She possesses the extraordinary insight necessary to obtain the radical gnosis, and is therefore qualified to enlighten others.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “What Feminists Mean by ‘Equality,'” April 4

In the atmosphere created by feminist hegemony in academia, sexually normal students (especially those from Christian homes whose worldview has been shaped by biblical teaching) become doubtful and confused because they encounter no intellectually respectable authorities responding to the challenge of gender theory. By contrast, sexually deviant students — including promiscuous heterosexual women as well as everyone whose preferences are officially represented on campus by the rainbow flag of LGBT groups — are incited to an attitude of radical certainty about their own oppression.

No one may “slut-shame” the college girl who sleeps around, for disapproval of promiscuity can only mean you are a misogynist, and any expression of disapproval toward LGBT preference is proof that you’re a homophobe. Within the parameters of Correct Thought established by the rules of acceptable 21st-century campus discourse, the only sexual behaviors that can be criticized are:

  1. The chaste behavior of women who refuse to participate in the booze-and-sex rituals of college “hook-up culture”;
    and
  2. Male heterosexuality.

In effect, the feminist influence on college sexual attitudes amounts to a direct reversal of the old sexist double-standard that celebrated the promiscuous male “stud” while denigrating the promiscuous female “slut.” Now, feminism’s insistence on female “sexual autonomy” justifies the woman in being as promiscuous as she pleases, while the attitudes of the promiscuous male are condemned as “rape culture.” Under no circumstance, however, do feminists endorse or advocate the most obvious alternative to the hook-up culture — chastity within a system of courtship directed toward the goal of lifelong monogamous heterosexual pair-bonding, i.e., traditional marriage. In the climate that currently prevails in academia, a woman can be celebrated for being either a slut or a lesbian, but is targeted for ridicule as a “prude” (or a religious bigot) if she is a virgin. Meanwhile, the only males whose sexual behavior merits praise on campus are gay men. Male heterosexual college students are classified by feminists into three categories:

  1. Rapists;
  2. Potential rapists waiting for a suitable opportunity to rape;
    and
  3. “Rape apologists” who, while lacking the masculine appetite for predatory violence necessary to commit rape themselves, nevertheless are alleged to admire rapists as sexual outlaws enacting all men’s secret fantasy.

The feminist conception of male sexuality involves a paranoid hostility I call Fear and Loathing of the Penis, so that it is impossible for them to imagine that men’s attraction toward women can be inspired by sincere admiration. Nor, for that matter, can feminism accept as “natural” a woman’s pleasure in being romantically pursued by a male suitor. No, the academic feminist tells us, all that wooing and courtship — moonlight walks and intimate dinners, hugs and kisses, etc. — is a deliberate illusion that conceals the true nature of male supremacy, an oppression that obtains its most direct expression in phallocentric sexuality.

“PIV is always rape, OK?”

Feminist gender theory ultimately boils down to this lunatic derangement infamously expressed by the radical blogger Witchwind. Normal men enjoy having sexual intercourse with women. Because normal sex makes normal men happy, the radical feminist must believe, therefore normal sex is wrong. Abolishing male happiness is an essential goal of the feminist movement, which is why gender theory must exclude the possibility that normal women can also enjoy normal sex with normal men. You will never find a Woman’s Studies professor who endorses traditional female behavior oriented toward finding herself a good husband, having babies and providing domestic happiness for herself and her family. Any time a man comes home from work to find his wife has cooked a nice family dinner, the patriarchy wins.

Returning to Kate Farhall’s critique of heteronormative “pop feminism”:

Despite their recent engagement with feminist ideas, the majority of the content of contemporary women’s magazines remains grounded in mainstream understandings of femininity with an emphasis on content relating to appearance and relationships. . . .
A significant body of research addresses women’s magazines notes their focus on successful heterosexual relationships that lead to marriage as the ultimate goal for women.

Marrying men is bad for women, according to feminist theory, which has for many decades condemned women’s role in marriage as a form of slavery. Criticizing the “centrality of beauty and heterosexual relationships” in the content of women’s magazines, Kate Farhall rejects “pop feminism” as a self-contradicting sham:

Put simply, the goal of women’s equality and the achievement of beauty ideals, as defined within a patriarchal system, are incompatible. It is not possible for women to advance, to become the empowered women popular feminism both applauds and envisages, if ultimately their value is still based on their physical attractiveness and sexual attractiveness to men. An emphasis on the achievement on feminine beauty ideals is thus incompatible with women’s equality, as it serves to limit, rather than empower, women. . . .
Feminism should aspire to fight the overarching patriarchal structures that limit women, rather than teach women how to achieve success in a man’s world. Thus, a popular liberal feminism that remains committed to objectification, ultimately cannot achieve women’s freedom.

You see? Encouraging women “to achieve success in a man’s world” — the way Beyoncé did, by making millions of dollars, marrying Jay Zee and having a baby daughter — “serves to limit, rather than empower” feminists like Kate Farhall, who have no commercially valuable talent, who don’t like men and who, even if they did like men, could never develop the kind of “sexual attractiveness to men” that Beyoncé has.

Whether or not life “within a patriarchal system” is unfair to women in general, it is more unfair to some women than to others. Some women — the kind of women who get college degrees in Women’s Studies and consider that an “achievement” — can’t stand the fact that other women make more money in tips on a good weekend waiting tables at Buffalo Wild Wings than Kate Farfall gets paid for writing a 5,000-word essay about “objectification.” Then the waitress meets a guy with a good job and marries him and, by the time she’s 25, she’s living with her husband and their baby in a house in the suburbs, while the academic feminist is still grinding it out in grad school, living in a tiny apartment.

Winners win and losers lose, and guess who denounces the “system” and demands “equality”? Hint: Not the winners.

Kate Farhall is correct in saying that celebrity endorsements from Beyoncé don’t really do anything for the feminist cause, because truly successful women don’t actually need feminism. Anyone who has read Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism understands that the kind of “equality” feminists demand is one that would actually limit, rather than increase, opportunities for women. In particular, feminism seeks to limit opportunities for women to become what Beyoncé is — a married mother — because if women can choose that kind of life, most women will choose that kind of life, and feminists hate women for choosing that kind of life.

This is what should bother us most about feminism, its claim to speak for the interests of all women, implying the obverse, that (a) any man who criticizes feminism is “anti-woman,” and (b) any woman who rejects feminism is too stupid to know her own interests.

It is this hideous contempt for the normal lives of normal women which inspires feminists in their campaign of hateful vengeance. Consumed by frustration and resentment, feminists condemn normal women as inferior and wage War Against Human Nature in order to destroy the happiness of others by creating a totalitarian Utopia of Misery where everyone will be equally unhappy.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: We’ve Got It Goin’ On

Posted on | May 9, 2015 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Monday: Lt. Commander Rand, RIP
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Muslim Anonymous
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

Feminists Chase ‘Avengers’ Director Off Twitter, Because … Gender Theory?
Batshit Crazy News
The Lonely Conservative
Dustbury
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

Rape Culture Means: Guys, Do Not Have Sex With Jordan Bosiljevac (Updated)
First Street Journal
Political Hat
A View from the Beach

Demetrius Blackwell, 35, Charged in Shooting of NYPD Officer Brian Moore
Batshit Crazy News
Da Tech Guy

TERROR IN TEXAS: Gunmen Attack @PamelaGeller Event in Garland
UPDATED: ISIS Takes Credit? ‘May Allah Accept Us as Mujahideen’
Da Tech Guy
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Illegal Alien Hermes Rivera Charged With Raping 10-Year-Old Louisiana Girl
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

FMJRA 2.0: For The Northern Lights And The Southern Comfort
Batshit Crazy News

Brother Of- & World’s Youngest Blogger Experience Patriarchal Oppression
Batshit Crazy News

Texas Teacher Heather Packwood Had Lesbian Sex With Teen Girl, Police Say
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

TERROR IN TEXAS: Garland Gunman Elton Simpson Was Muslim Convert
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Muslim Anonymous

LIVE AT FIVESEVEN: 05.04.15
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

LIVE AT FIVESEVEN: 05.05.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

The War Against Human Nature: What Does ‘Unreasonable Pressure’ Mean?
Living In Anglo-America
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

In The Mailbox, 05.06.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.07.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

Meanwhile, At The Library
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Muslim Anonymous

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (16)
  2.  Regular Right Guy (11)
  3.  A View from the Beach (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!


Halcyon Times

Category: FMJRA Award

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | May 8, 2015 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

“I forgave Betty decades ago,” I told her daughter Ellen. We entered my step-mother’s house. Time to fix it up, Betty having at last allowed she’d ride out her widowhood in assisted living.

“Good to hear,” said Ellen. “Mom said little of you, and what there was wasn’t nice.”

I picked up a plain volume from the shelf. Opened it. Dates around my angry departure:

“August 16, 1987: can’t take Jeremy anymore. That nasty dog of his only yelped once as it hit the canyon floor. Jeremy’s gotta go.”

She killed Lou-dog.

Raw hatred returned, with decades of interest. Forgiveness?

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction, Uncategorized

Meanwhile, At The Library

Posted on | May 7, 2015 | 14 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Two weeks until the movers come and drag off all my boxes of stuff, but I still have time to read. 🙂
This week’s book post is a little lean, because I actually did spend most of my time last week packing or catching up with friends, but there’s interesting news that may be relevant to your interests.

First, I finished Ryk Spoor’s Polychrome, which is a delightful sequel to the Oz books by L. Frank Baum and others. It’s not a Baum pastiche; Spoor rings some changes on the tired old trope of mortal adventuring in the land of faerie, and he does it very well. In some ways it reminded me of the Erfworld webcomic, except that you could actually read Polychrome to your kids. I enjoyed it tremendously, and I think you will too.

So far Chuck Gannon’s Trial by Fire is moving fast and hitting hard, and I’m liking it better than its predecessor, Fire with Fire. More about it next week, along with the new C.J. Cherryh novel Tracker and Orson Scott Card’s Shadows in Flight. Also also, Mad Mike Williamson’s A Long Time Until Now.

In related news, site selection balloting for the 2017 Worldcon is underway; this requires a $40 membership in the 2017 Worldcon, which is applied toward your membership in whichever convention wins the bid. Contenders are Washington DC and three locations in the colonies: Montreal, Shizuoka (Japan), and Helsinki (Finland). For obvious reasons, I’d prefer Washington, even though I’ll have long since moved to Las Vegas; the Wardman Park Hotel is pretty awesome and is also located on the same site as the 1974 Worldcon hotel, the old Sheraton Park. Neighborhood has a lot of decent eateries in a wide range of prices, and there’s a Metro station within a block of the hotel.

Also, the International Lord of Hate posted a Sad Puppies update along with a bunch of other stuff he has going on.

Perhaps most interestingly, Vox Day seems to have shelved the Rabid Puppies second-strike capabilities, and instructed his Dread Ilk to stow the flamethrowers. For now. 🙂

And that’s about it for this week.


Category: Books, Culture

The War Against Human Nature: What Does ‘Unreasonable Pressure’ Mean?

Posted on | May 7, 2015 | 74 Comments

The Sexual Assault Task Force at the University of Kansas has some very strange (and by “very strange” of course I mean, typical feminist) ideas about what “sexual assault” involves:

Under “Recommendations for Policy and Process Improvement,” the task force recommends clarifying the definition of “incapacitation” in order to differentiate between “wrongful” and “permissible” conduct.
A university spokeswoman told The College Fix by email that the school defines incapacitation as an “inability to make informed, rational judgments.”
When substances are involved, “incapacitation” refers to how “alcohol or drugs consumed” can affect decision-making, including consequences and judgments, the spokeswoman said, responding on behalf of the Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access. . . .

(Fact: Young people commonly get drunk or high for the specific purpose of lowering their inhibitions, thus to facilitate or enhance sexual activity that they would be too afraid or embarrassed to initiate or enjoy if they were sober. This is what was meant by the old joke in which the “mating call of the Southern sorority girl” was described as, “Woo-hoo! I am SO drunk, y’all!”)

The Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access uses “incapacitation” as part of its multifaceted definition of sexual violence: “Taking sexual advantage of another person without consent, including causing or attempting to cause the incapacitation of another person.” . . .

(Fact: The legal drinking age is 21. If university officials are worried that “incapacitation” due to drunkenness is a contributing factor in sexual assault cases — as it obviously often is — the most obvious expedient would be to crack down on underage drinking by students. Yet because administrators at almost every university tolerate illegal underage drinking by freshmen and sophomores, we are told there is a “rape crisis” on campus when it usually seems more like a “drunk teenage sex crisis” on campus.)

The Kansas task force also acknowledges the vagueness in defining coercion as “unreasonable pressure for sexual access” because it does not distinguish between “coercive” versus “non-coercive sexual conduct.” . . .
The Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access uses the word “unwelcome” several times to describe prohibited behavior: One of those is “unwelcome efforts to develop a romantic or sexual relationship” or “unwelcome physical touching or closeness.”

You can read the rest of that.

Here, in the effort to add “coercion” to the definition of sexual assault, we see the real agenda behind feminism’s “rape culture” discourse. To put it bluntly, it is an attempt to criminalize male heterosexuality.

If you have studied feminist writing about sexuality, you know that they stretch the word “coercion” beyond recognition, so that male behavior which is entirely normal, customary and lawful is depicted as part of a “continuum of sexual aggression.” A presentation called “Understanding the Continuum of Sexual Violence” describes it this way:

Sexual violence is supported by the attitude or viewpoint that women are sex objects, and often takes the form of suggestive looks or actions, sexist comments, and sexual exploitation. All too often our society treats objectification of women as a cultural norm that does no real harm. Men whistling at and calling out to women on the street is tolerated, jokes or rude comments are the daily fare of talk shows and other media venues, and sexually pornographic material proliferates under the guise of freedom of speech and expression. All too often, none of this is considered “criminal” but is part of a largely accepted societal attitude towards women.
The level to which our society accepts sexual objectification creates a foundation where this becomes the absolute value of women.

What is involved in this, you see, is the creation of a connect-the-dots theory about “rape culture” in which anything that is deemed offensive, from “suggestive looks” to “jokes or rude comments,” is construed as part of a “societal attitude” that contributes to sexual assault. By this means, every double-entendre in an old Marx Brothers comedy becomes part of “rape culture,” while every vintage pin-up is also implicated in this “continuum” because it involves “sexual objectification.”

So now, in attempting to codify “coercion” and “harassment” as part of university policy, we find ambiguous phrases like “unreasonable pressure for sexual access” — how much “pressure” is “reasonable”? — as well as the use of the word “unwelcome” to describe “efforts to develop a romantic or sexual relationship” or “physical touching or closeness.”

Stipulate that some guys have deficient social skills, and are not good at “reading signals,” as we used to say, while other guys simply don’t know how to deal with rejection. Especially when we are talking about young guys (teenage boys, really, 18 or 19 years old, and away from home for the first time) it is inevitable that many of them will make awkward (“unwelcome”) attempts to “develop a romantic or sexual relationship.” This is inevitable, as I say, and unless you are engaged in a War Against Human Nature, you expect young women to be prepared to deal with male attention that is “unwelcome,” as well as “pressure” that is “unreasonable.”

Feminist ideology, however, demonizes male sexuality in such a way as to relieve women of all responsibility in negotiating the ordinary difficulties of normal sex life. Any attempt to advise females about avoiding sexual danger is condemned by feminists as “blaming the victim.” When confronted with the typical “he-said/she-said” cases that are cited as evidence of a campus “rape epidemic” — which usually involve what seems to be an unhappy misunderstanding between two drunk teenagers — your effort to discuss the ambiguities without presuming the guilt of the accused male could result in you being branded a “rape apologist.”

An 18-year-old college freshman starts knocking back tequila shots at a party, grinding on the dance floor with any guy who strikes her fancy and — surprise! surprise! — wakes up naked the next morning beside a complete stranger, with only the vaguest recollection of how she got there or why she’s feeling so sore and sticky. It’s impossible under the circumstances to prove she was raped, but her predicament (alas, too common in the binge-drinking “hookup culture” that prevails on many campuses) can be interpreted by a school disciplinary tribunal as sexual misconduct by the guy who “got lucky” with the drunk freshman and he may face expulsion as a penalty.

Is there a problem with sexual behavior on university and college campuses? Yes. It involves porn. It involves booze. It involves a decline of Judeo-Christian morality among youth. Even if you’re an atheist, even if you think illegal underage drinking is acceptable, even if you approve the Internet-driven flood of pornographic filth into the impressionable minds of adolescents — even granting all those caveats and exemptions for liberalism’s see-no-evil attitudes about such things, can’t we agree that this convergence of harmful influences creates a potentially dangerous sexual climate?

Although I know “Jackie” at UVA lied about being gang-raped at Phi Kappa Psi, I would never want my daughter to set foot in a frat party, or any other situation where college boys are getting drunk. Whether or not any of them could be trusted sober, they damned sure can’t be trusted when they’re drunk, and any college girl foolish enough to think otherwise is likely to wake up sore and sticky the next morning. You can go chant slogans at a “Take Back the Night” rally if you want, but you’re never going to win a War Against Human Nature.

Meanwhile, the attempt to criminalize male heterosexuality — which is what feminism’s “rape culture” discourse is really about — is likely to have consequences that neither the feminists nor their opponents can anticipate. Culture shifts often operate like Newton’s Third Law of Motion, where there is an equal and opposite effect. The degrading influence of pornography has inspired truly disgusting behavior among some young people (see paragraphs 16, 18 and 26 in the Nungesser v. Columbia lawsuit). Yet if that is the “equal” effect of the Newtonian equation, we can also perceive an opposite effect in the noticeable increase of women preferring lesbian relationships to such painful degradation in the contemporary “hookup culture.” We may observe that Emma Dawson, who was an ardent advocate of “sex-positive” feminism at Wesleyan University, thought it was a “good opportunity to remind everyone I’m queer” after she gained notoriety by making a public issue of her herpes infection.

The word “queer” has been popularized to include a wide range of sexual behaviors, so that a “queer feminist” is not necessarily a lesbian. Because she recounts various heterosexual exploits in her herpes narrative, we may presume that “queer” for Dawson signifies she’s a sort of bisexual Ado Annie. So, she’s a herpes-infected 22-year-old queer who paid  $47,972 a year to get a bachelor of arts in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Probably a Democrat, too.

Gotta be pretty bad out there, if any guy would resort to “unreasonable pressure for sexual access” to girls like that.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . .”





 

Category: Crime, Culture, Education, National Offend a Feminist Week, Sex Trouble
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