A Princess, A Dragon, And A Qwerkywriter

Posted on | September 20, 2014 | 40 Comments

Finally scraped enough Amazon gift certificates together to order S.M. Stirling’s The Golden Princess, which is the latest in the series of “Change” novels that began with Dies the Fire. It’s the sequel to The Given Sacrifice, in which Mike Havel’s bastard son Rudi Mackenzie (a/k/a the High King of Montival) dies at the hands of Koreans who have come all the way across the Pacific in pursuit of the Emperor of Japan. Now Rudi’s daughter, Crown Princess Orlaith, and the new Empress, Reiko, must overcome their fathers’ deaths and plunge into the heart of the Death Lands formerly known as Los Angeles in pursuit of one of Japan’s Sacred Treasures – with not only savage cannibal Eaters but, apparently, the evil that once manifested itself in Montival’s deadly enemies the Cutters. Some reviewers at Amazon complained that this book basically just sets the table for the next arc in the Change series, in which we’re acquainted with the sons and daughters of the heroes and heroines of the war against the Prophet as they set off with Orlaith, Reiko and her household guards on an adventure that sounds only slightly less deadly than Rudi’s own cross-continent quest for the Sword of the Lady.
I for one am just as happy to have a book like this now instead of a fat volume thick enough to stun an ox two years from now. Unlike certain other authors I won’t name, but whose initials are Harry Turtledove, I can rely on Stirling not to lose track of his characters or endlessly repeat the same facts over and over again until you want to throw the book out the window. That having been said, while The Golden Princess stands on its own just fine, you really ought to at least read The Given Sacrifice if you don’t have time to read the other nine books in the series.

Also, while I normally don’t review stuff you can’t find on Amazon (because, like Stacy, I am all about the Shameless Capitalism) I am making an exception for Rory Modena’s Sparrowind (available through Lulu, and hopefully soon on Amazon) which is a cute little tale about a nearsighted dragon, the runt of his clutch, who decides to become a knight and hoard books, since he’s clearly not cut out to be a normal dragon. Hilarity and triumph ensue; I would unreservedly recommend this if you’re looking for something to read the kids as a bedtime book, or if you want something light and fluffy with a dash of humor. I’ll be reposting a link for this when it appears on Amazon – but why wait? You can always convert it from EPub format to Kindle or Nook using Calibre – which is freeware.

I was sent a review copy of Auntie Jodi’s Helpful Hints, which reminds me somewhat of P.J. O’Rourke’s infamous The Bachelor Home Companion except that Jodi Adler’s advice is more about high society (interpret that as you will) in LA and New York, and how one deals with the innumerable tedious people encountered there. Some of the advice is serious, but half the fun is guessing which of the many nuggets in this slim volume those might be. In the meantime, it’s a light and amusing read, especially recommended to those fond of snark and sarcasm.

Finally, we come to the Qwerkywriter. Spotted on Facebook in the feed of some steampunk-obsessed friend of mine, I at first mistook this for the USB Typewriter (“A groundbreaking advancement in the field of obsolescence!”) which I had half-seriously recommended to Stacy some years ago while he was struggling with TweetDeck and other annoyances of the 21st century*. Qwerkywriter is just a keyboard, though, without the annoying requirement to actually own an iPad or some other tablet. We can preorder one for just $309 before they hit the market next summer – just in time for the 2016 Presidential campaign, when a durable keyboard like this will be an indispensable asset to the Shoe Leather Campaign Fund! Who’s with me?

* I thought it was this post, but actually it was this post. Welp.

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Category: Blogging, Books, How This Here Internet Thingy Works

Essential Feminist Quotes: ‘Most Women Have to Be Coerced into Heterosexuality’

Posted on | September 19, 2014 | 84 Comments

Audre Lorde (left), Marilyn Frye (center) and Monique Wittig (right)

“I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .
“I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .
“The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
“For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.”
— Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 1979

“I want to ask heterosexual academic feminists to do some hard analytical and reflective work. To begin, I want to say to them:
“I wish you would notice that you are heterosexual.
“I wish you would grow to the understanding that you choose heterosexuality.
“I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual — that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice.
“I wish you would stop and seriously consider, as a broad and long-term feminist political strategy, the conversion of women to a woman-identified and woman-directed sexuality and eroticism, as a way of breaking the grip of men on women’s minds and women’s bodies, of removing women from the chronic attachment to the primary situations of sexual and physical violence that is rained upon women by men, and as a way of promoting women’s firm and reliable bonding against oppression. . . .
“There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and this pressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied, that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”
— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies,” speech to the National Women’s Studies Association conference, 1980

“A materialist feminist approach to women’s oppression destroys the idea that women are a ‘natural group’ . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a ‘natural group.’ A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .
“Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man). . . . For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude . . . a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. . . . [O]ur survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression.”
— Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” 1981

Two of these quotes (Lorde and Wittig) are excerpted from The Essential Feminist Reader, edited by Estelle B. Freedman (2007), while the quote from Frye is from her 1992 collection Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism. Readers will notice that all three of these quotes were from the same era, 1979-81. Thus you see how early radical lesbians began consistently demanding that the feminist movement must challenge heterosexuality as “natural” for women, insisting that what Audre Lorde called the “real connection” of “lesbian consciousness” was “feared by a patriarchal world.” Marilyn Frye called for “a broad and long-term feminist political strategy” by Women’s Studies professors of converting their students to lesbianism “as a way of promoting women’s firm and reliable bonding against oppression.” Why? Because only by “the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system,” Monique Wittig said, can women “escape” their “servitude” and “oppression” by men.

Do you think these are obscure “fringe” feminists? Do a Google search for Audre Lorde and you get more 500,000 citations. Marilyn Frye was a professor at Michigan State University for more than 30 years who “was chosen as Phi Beta Kappa’s Romanell Professor in Philosophy for 2007-2008.” Google Monique Wittig and you get nearly 200,000 citations.

Are you tempted to reply, “So what?” OK, then, why don’t you Google the name of the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader — that’s another 200,000 or so citations — and you’ll learn from the Wikipedia biography of Estelle B. Freedman that she is “the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University,” that one of the books she coedited “received the 2013 John Boswell Prize from the Committee on LGBT History of the American Historical Association,” while another book co-edited by Professor Freedman “was cited by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his 2003 opinion for Lawrence v. Texas, with which the American Supreme Court overturned all remaining anti-sodomy laws.”

Do you still want to say, “So what?” Or are you ready to admit feminists mean what they say, and that feminism should be taken seriously?

BTW, Professor Freedman’s latest book is Redefining Rape, in which she “demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege.”

People had better wake the hell up.

Category: Sex Trouble

Friday Night Unwind: “Whoop De Doo”

Posted on | September 19, 2014 | Comments Off on Friday Night Unwind: “Whoop De Doo”

by Smitty

Mark Knopfler stays around for the guitar, but I think Buffet brings a twist of lime and a smile to the lyric in this cover version of a tune that just looks at a rough weeks and says: “Yeah, shag all that.”

Not to disrespect Knopfler’s original, more gravelly lyric. Mark’s is still too close to the break-up, and drips more regret on the floor.

Category: Music

Slate Scrapes the Bottom

Posted on | September 19, 2014 | 171 Comments

Or maybe “Slate Spanks the Bottom” would be a better way to describe the nadir of editorial judgment whereby the desperate quest for traffic — let’s face it, they’ll do anything to get hits — led them to publish Jillian Keenan’s perverted prose:

Once again, I’ve been accused of pedophilia. Well, to be technical, my sexual identity was called “somewhat pedophilic.” But we’re talking about one of the most loathsome things a person can be accused of, so why split hairs? I’m also regularly told that my sexuality is “repulsive,” “damaged,” and “abusive.” But all of those feel like Valentines compared with “pedophilic.”
People say this to me so often because I’m kinky, and I’ve written about it. I have a spanking fetish. In my case, that means I like to be spanked, usually with a hand, belt, hairbrush, wooden spoon, switch, or paddle. It sexually gratifies me. I’ve had submissive fantasies for as long as I can remember, and it’s part of my identity. I consider my kink to be my sexual orientation. . . .

Eventually, she gets to her point:

So I have a question: If it’s “somewhat pedophilic” when my adult husband consensually spanks me in a simulated “punishment,” what should we call it when parents do the same physical thing to actual children in an actual punishment?
I realize that many well-meaning parents will disagree with me, but spanking kids is gross. . . .

Stephen Green at PJ Tatler gives Keenan the spanking she deserves, but leaves unpunished the editors at Slate who thought it was “clever” to give Keenan a platform to parade her perversion. This is a perfect example of the 21st-century progressive sexual philosophy: Any Sex Is Good Sex, as Long as It’s Not Normal Sex.

Does anyone suppose the editors of Slate would be interested in an article headlined, “Making Babies With My Wife Is Awesome”?

Only if the author were a lesbian.

This is the logic of the post-Windsor age: Having secured recognition for same-sex marriage — so that everyone is now required to approve of homosexuality, or else — Our Moral Superiors in the cultural elite are hard at work undermining the legitimacy of normal sexuality.

It is not now, nor was it ever, “sexual equality” that the Left has sought during the Culture Wars. Rather, they seek for themselves uncontested power to define what is sexually acceptable, so that the cultural elite (a distinct class of people who include the editors of liberal publications, radical university professors, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, among others) displace the moral authority previously exercised in our society by Judeo-Christian belief.

What we are learning — what we should have anticipated, what we should have been warned against, had our leaders been astute enough to perceive the danger — is that no society can long sustain itself when two conceptions of moral idealism are in competition. One or another system of belief must ultimately prevail in government, in law, in social custom, and the subversive enemies of American civilization have always known this. Unfortunately, this cultural logic has seldom been made apparent by our most eminent conservative intellectuals who, wishing neither to appear intolerant nor to risk the accusation of inciting irrational fear, have tended generally to underestimate the danger and have failed to make clear the stark choices our nation faces.

This is what is taught in Women's Studies courses across America. https://t.co/jh3qZPXktx @CatherineDeveny

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 18, 2014

Don't say stupid things on Twitter. You might infringe @CatherineDeveny's trademark on Twitter stupidity. pic.twitter.com/eH5CMkfngo

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 18, 2014

Those who still cherish a traditional vision of the American Dream for themselves, their children and their grandchildren, must recognize that our society cannot forever continue this struggle between two competing moral ideals. We must contemplate the consequences of defeat in the Culture War. While traditionalists have long tolerated perverts like Jillian Keenan — what do we care how she gets her depraved private thrills? — we see that the perverts, once emboldened by the knowledge of their cultural authority in the post-Windsor age, are unwilling to extend to traditionalists a similar toleration. Nor can we afford to ignore the claims of radical feminists like Catherine Deveny, when every day brings further confirmation that their beliefs now enjoy hegemonic dominance within our institutions of higher education.

While producing the “Sex Trouble” series about radical feminism’s war on human nature, I have frequently deployed my habitual sarcasm to mock the absurdity of feminist beliefs. However, no one should assume from my cheerful good humor that I do not take this project seriously. As crazy as feminists may seem, as laughably wrong as their ideas may be, they are extremely serious in their purpose to destroy traditional morality in our society. They and their allies have seized power in the elite precincts of academia and have used that power to influence every institution of our society, from the Supreme Court to your local public school. If you don’t understand what is happening, and in what direction our society is heading, you have not been paying attention.

My advice to anyone who has been ignoring this menace is to wake the hell up. There may still be time to save our nation from destruction.

Category: Sex Trouble

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.19.14

Posted on | September 19, 2014 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

TOP NEWS
Scots Hae Voted Nae

Unionists celebrate referendum results at the Better Together headquarters in Glasgow

With two-thirds of the vote in, Unionists have 54% of the vote and the SNP has conceded defeat
Close vote in Glasgow doomed secession push
Pound hits two-year high against Euro on results

Five Big Takeaways From Xi’s Visit To India
One of them being promised investments falling $80 billion short

Alleged Arsonist Jailed As Wildfires Scorch California
Pollock Pines man charged with setting the massive King Fire

POLITICS
Immigration Worker Union Warns Of Serious ISIS Threat

Statement backs recent claims by lawmakers

Union chief Palinkas warns of porous southern border, lax visa enforcement

Obama Expresses “Strong Confidence” In Embattled DNC Chair Wassermann-Schultz

Bipartisan Call To Roll Back Defense Cuts Amid Ebola, ISIS Crises

Federal Probe Into “Bridgegate” Finds No Link To Christie

More Bad Polls For Senate Democrats

NY Man Denies Recruiting For Islamic State

Gov. Scott Walker Fights To Keep His Job In Wisconsin

Holder Announces Initiative To Study Racial Bias, Calm Tensions Between Police, Communities

THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Supply Glut Forces Asian Crude Further Down: WTI $92.87, Brent $97.55
Larry Ellison Steps Down As Oracle’s CEO
Alibaba Prices IPO At $68, Raises $21.8 Billion
US Housing Starts Tumble In August
Dow, S&P At Records As Fed-Driven Rally Continues
Stock Market Lifts US Households Wealth
Bug Infects iOS 8 HealthKit, Delaying Third-Party App Launches
Android L To Offer Default Encryption
Cloudflare Launches Open Source Keyless SSL
Qualcomm Announces Vuforia For Digital Eyewear
Wireless Is The Growth Engine At Verizon

SPORTS
Astros Waste Feldman’s Gem As Tribe Rallies To Take Finale

8 IP, 4 hits, one run, one walk, two Ks…and it wasn’t enough.

Indians win 2-1 on sac fly in 13th

M’s Beat Angels 3-1

Yankees Squeeze Out Win Over Jays On Lind Error

Cardinals Rally, Beat Brewers 3-2 In Extras

Former Rangers Manager Ron Washington Left Team Due To His Infidelity

Pirates 3, Red Sox 2

Rangers Complete Sweep Of A’s With 7-2 Win

Rockies Edge Snakes 7-6 On Sayonara Homer

Padres Take Three Of Four From Phillies With 7-3 Win

Dodgers Rally To Hold Lead In NL West

Stanton Talks About Beaning: “I Was Very Fortunate”

Hope Solo Sets Shutout Record While Awaiting Trial For Domestic Violence

Irish Cricket Handed Seven-Figure Boost By Billionaire

Former NZ Star Cricketer Cairns Cleaning Bus Shelters To Make Ends Meet

Gonzalez, Harper Lead Nats Over Fish, 6-2

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Duchess Of Cambridge Cancels Malta Visit; Morning Sickness To Blame

Kate and Wills

Prince William to pinch-hit

All Hail Vulvatron, GWAR’s Unlikely New Lead Vocalist

Andie McDowell Joins Cast Of “Magic Mike” Sequel

Darrell Hammond To Replace The Irreplaceable Don Pardo On SNL

Miley Cyrus Twerks While Getting Spanked With Mexican Flag; Mexicans Not Amused, Demand Fine And/Or Jail Time

Lindsay Price: It’s A Boy!

Joan Rivers’ Personal Doc Denies Selfie Rumor

Lifetime Chooses Voice Of Grumpy Cat

“Doctor Who” Star Matt Smith Joins “Pride And Prejudice And Zombies”

Apparently Nobody Wants To Watch P. Diddy’s Revolt TV

FOREIGNERS
Chief of Thai Junta Apologizes For Bikini Comment
Mexico Sends Troops To Cabo San Lucas To Halt Post-Storm Rioting
Scottish MPs To Be Barred From Voting On English Laws
Aussies Uncover Islamist Plot For Mumbai-Style Attack On Parliament
Richard Rahul Verma Named US Ambassador To India
Tropical Storm Flooding Shuts Down Manila
Canada Quietly Takes Two Small Russian Banks Off Sanctions List
Fiji Coup Leader’s Party Set To Form Government Alone After Decisive Win
Israel Believes Syria Kept “Significant” Stocks Of Chemical Weapons
What The Missing Billions Say About Sino-Indian Relations

BLOGS & STUFF
Batshit Crazy News: Back From The Dead! ZomBlog Apocalypse! Go throw money at them!
Doug Powers: Have The Democrats Already Picked A Scapegoat For A Possible November Election Massacre?
Twitchy: How Moronic Is Sally Kohn? THIS Moronic.
American Power: How The Left Gave UK Girls To Muslim Rape Gangs
American Thinker: Where Are The Newspapers On Education?
BLACKFIVE: White House Press Briefing – GEN Dempsey Says “Boots On The Ground”
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin To Speak At Values Voter Summit
Don Surber: Scottish Independence And West Virginia
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Calls For “Lone Wolves” To Find Service Members’ Homes, Then “Show Up And Slaughter Them”
Joe For America: Remember Michael Brown? The Media Doesn’t.
JustOneMinute: Hey, Dude, Where’s My Gender Gap?
Shot In The Dark: Our National Monologue
STUMP: Public Pension Watch – More Reactions To Calpers Pulling Out Of Hedge Funds
The Gateway Pundit: Penn State Officials Threaten To Call Police On Students Handing Out Copies Of The Constitution
The Jawa Report: Good News! ISIS Openly Recruiting In Turkey On Istanbul Buses
The Lonely Conservative: Ezekiel Emanuel Thinks 75 Years Is A Long Enough Life For You Peasants
This Ain’t Hell: Army Private Arrested For Smuggling Illegals
Weasel Zippers: Dem Senator Blocks Ted Cruz Bill To Seize Passports Of ISIS Jihadis Returning To US
Megan McArdle: Boring Lives, Boring Television

Deadline to submit links for the FMJRA is tomorrow at noon.
DO IT.
Deadline to submit links for Rule 5 Sunday is tomorrow at midnight.
DO THAT TOO.

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Category: Live at Five

Why Do They Make It So Easy?

Posted on | September 18, 2014 | 51 Comments

Feminist blogger @joyintorah18 RT’d the above image on Twitter, which was noticed by MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) Mike Buchanan, and someone then called it to my attention. OK, so who is this feminist? Not the naked lady in the picture, I mean @joyintorah18?

Joy is a Canadian who runs a site called “Mancheeze,” which she describes as “dedicated to critiquing the Manosphere, a loose connection of anti-feminist/misogynist websites run by men.” And she recently put up a post with this headline:

Why I’m A Radical Feminist:
OPEN THREAD Without MRA’s UPDATED

It seems that Joy is running a sort of online clearinghouse for this stuff, in other words. To quote from her post:

A couple of female commenters, Wendy and chiiill, have expressed they are happily in relationships with men. One of the things MRA’s and other male supremacists like to do is say feminists hate men. This is clearly not true. Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.
Granted there are some women, like myself, who for political and personal reasons will not have a sexual relationship with men but it’s NOT the only relationship you can have with a person.
I have male friends. They’re just very few and far between and I don’t see them sexually so it removes much of the problem. Men who can carry on a great friendship with me are far more valuable to ME.
I consciously choose to have sexual relationships strictly with women but there is ONE man who I did have a sexual relationship with and who I fell in love with.
This whole ‘manhater’ line is just a cop out projection that they use to woman hate.

There are so many things wrong with this “argument” that it could be mined endlessly — the Comstock Lode of feminist neurosis — but Joy is not significant enough to deserve such labors, and is not as creatively crazy as Witchwind. So let me just focus on this odd sentence: “Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.”

It is a fact that Andrea Dworkin was legally married to a man. She was a lesbian and her husband, John Stoltenberg, is a gay man who first met Dworkin in 1974. They lived together for about 30 years. But to say that Dworkin “was married happily” is to abuse the definition of “married” as well as to abuse the definition of “happily.”

Was Andrea Dworkin ever happy about anything? Perhaps her rants against men and sex made her “happy” in the same way the blitzkrieg of Poland made Hitler “happy,” but that’s about it.

“Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.”

A sentence like that could never be written by any honest person who cared about facts, but Joy is a Canadian feminist.

Let’s talk about John Stoltenberg, the gay man to whom Andrea Dworkin was, we are told, “married happily.” In 1989, Stoltenberg published Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, in which he “argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice.” In 1994, he published The End of Manhood, about which a reviewer wrote, “The notion of manhood itself, says Stoltenberg, is a sham, a trap — and those who would redeem it or remythologize it are kidding themselves, for manhood is a mask, incompatible with truly human selfhood.”

To put it as bluntly as possible, Stoltenberg’s attitude toward masculinity is the attitude of Aesop’s fox toward the grapes: He pretends to scorn that which he desires, but is unable to possess.

Any psychologist would recognize that Stoltenberg’s personality is warped by masochistic tendencies and — hey! — did I mention he lived with Andrea Dworkin for 30 years?

John Stoltenberg’s life, career and ideas are a testimony to the truth of something Glenn Reynold recently remarked:

I’m beginning to think that most lefty movements are just about broken people trying to manipulate the rest of us so they can feel good about their broken selves.

This is exactly right. Sane, happy, normal people don’t need “movements” to validate their self-worth. However, people who are “broken” — unhappy, abnormal and/or mentally ill — are continually chasing after some cause, some crusade, some source of secular salvation that inspires them to immanetize the eschaton.

If they can’t save the world, these deranged souls can at least make themselves believe they are morally superior to the rest of us — we who are sane, happy and normal. This would be harmless, were it not for the fact that such “movements” are supported by intellectuals who turn these crackpot crusades into powerful political forces that result in the enactment of policies that make life miserable for everybody. And so we return to the Canadian feminist Joy, and her weird claim: “Andrea Dworkin, an amazing radical feminist, was married happily.”

About six weeks after Andrea Dworkin died in 2005 — she was 58 and had been nearly crippled by damage to her knees resulting from her morbid obesity — Ariel Levy published a long article about Dworkin in New York magazine called “The Prisoner of Sex.” Go read that article (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five) and then tell me how “happily” Dworkin was married. It’s absurd even to argue about it, and if not for this Canadian feminist idiot Joy, I wouldn’t bother.

Go read Joy’s “radical feminist” post and laugh at the absurdity of it: She’s arguing with a blog commenter and, congratulating herself on what she considers her triumphant victory, she then struts before her readership: “Praise me, for I have slain the dreaded MRA!”

A cheap stunt, that. At least when I stomp a troll like Bill Schmalfeldt, I manage to make a clever joke or two. Joy is neither clever nor humorous. The fact that she’s got an entire blog devoted to trolling MRAs is a sad testimony to the pathetic emptiness of her life.

Category: Feminism

The Mythic World of Women’s Studies

Posted on | September 18, 2014 | 38 Comments

Are you tired of reality? Do you feel that you are being oppressed by facts and logic? Then you should consider majoring in Women’s Studies at one of our nation’s elite universities, where your liberated consciousness is protected from these hateful forces of patriarchy.

Just ask Sarah Blugis of George Washington University:

Why you should take a women’s studies class
On the first day of a women’s studies class, instead of spending the first few minutes evaluating the professor, students’ eyes immediately focus on those considered the bravest students in the class — the men.
Spotting male students in these classes is fairly rare. Most have only one or two men, who are consistently asked for “the male perspective” or need substantial warning before discussion of the menstrual cycle. . . .
Only a small percentage of the GW student body — about 90 to 100 students each year, according to the women’s studies department — choose to take introductory-level women’s studies classes at all. . . .
Learning about past hardships is how we come to appreciate the status of women today. Courses like Athletics and Gender, A Study of Women and Media, and Women and Politics also enlighten students to the disadvantages with which women continue to struggle.
Most people are familiar with the statistics: one in five women experience an attempted or a completed sexual assault in college, and women earn 77 percent of what their male counterparts do for the same work. But there are other issues not so obvious to the untrained eye: These include sexual objectification of women and girls in the media, everyday examples of rape culture like street harassment and the lack of female representation across the political spectrum. . . .

See what I mean? Those statistics with which Sarah Blugis says “most people are familiar”? They are both provably false, as Christina Hoff Sommers has demonstrated. But at George Washington University (annual tuition $48,760), the so-called “facts” don’t matter! This is the beauty of Women’s Studies, where you can send your daughter to spend four years in a mythic world of unicorns, leprechauns and phony statistics that prove to her how horribly oppressed she is.

How does life on the campuses of our nation’s elite universities differ from life in the oppressive “real” world? For one thing, the mechanisms of patriarchal heteronormativity are inoperative at any school where tuition exceeds $40,000. Emory University in Atlanta (annual tuition $45,008) has an Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life. The Office of LGBT Life proudly lists the university’s proudly LGBT faculty and staff, from which I’ve culled this list of female Emory employees who call themselves “lesbian”:

Leslie Harris (Associate Professor, History and African American Studies);
Beverly Walker (Assistant Supervisor, Building & Residential Services);
Joy Wasson (Academic Degree Program Coordinator, Department of Religion);
Valerie Molyneaux (Director, International Programs, Goizueta Business School);
Danielle M. Steele (Assistant Director, Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life);
Marsha Howard (Assistant Operations Manager, School of Medicine, Division of Animal Resources);
Bonnie Jean Woolger (Manager, Digital Imaging Group of the Woodruff Library);
Kim Fugate (Associate Director, School of Medicine, Simulation Lab);
Rachelle Lehner (Assistant Dean for Staff Development, School of Medicine);
Anne Rector (Program Director and Administrative Professor, Law School);
Kathy Britt (ILL Lending Coordinator, RW Woodruff Library);
Melissa Gilstrap (Manager of Communications, Laney Graduate School);
Johanna Hinman (Associate Director of Education, Department of Surgery);
Catherine Shiel (Senior Research Analyst, Development);
Rebeca Quintana (Program Administrator, Master’s in Development Practice, Laney School of Graduate Studies);
Michelle Hammond-Susten (Clinical Care Coordinator Social Worker II, Emory Trauma & Anxiety Recovery Program, Dept of Psychiatry, Emory School of Medicine);
Laura Zajac-Cox (Instructor, Division of Physical Therapy, School of Medicine);
Deb Floyd (Director of Student Affairs, Law School);
Lauren Gay (Special Assistant, Carter Center);
Patricia Del Rey (Adjunct Professor, Women’s Studies, Oxford College);

This list of self-declared lesbian faculty and staff at Emory does not include three other women staffers who described themselves as bisexual, nor does it include another 11 women (at least, I think they’re all “women,” but gender is a social construct) who prefer the label “queer,” a category that includes Dona Yarbrough, director of the Center for Women at Emory, as well as Lynne Huffer, a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

So, 20 lesbians, 11 queers and three bisexuals. We have not been able to confirm rumors that Emory may begin a “diversity outreach” program, if they can find any heterosexual women willing to work there.