The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday: Levitation

Posted on | September 21, 2014 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Sleep cycle completely hosed, so no clever intro or cute intro pics this week. Don’t click links in public, and if you do don’t come whining to me.

Randy’s Roundtable leads off with Ellie Gonsalves, followed by Goodstuff talking like a pirate, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot stiffing us on the Kaley Cuoco nude pics, and Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, God Bless America!, and Girls with Guns.

EBL this week was all about the Scottish Independence, Skepchicks, the Elder Edition of the Rule 5 Lifestyle, more Scottish (non-)Independence, Eartha Kitt, Spanking, and some Rule 5 Falcon Fan Style.

A View from the Beach brings us The Girl Of Summer 2014 – Emily Ratajkowski, Cutie Rethinks Union with Frontman of World’s Worst Band, When All You Have is a Red Balloon…, Fear and Loathing on Chesapeake Bay, Iggy Azalea, Iggy Azalea, Iggy Azalea!, “My Friend”, Keeping Abreast of the News, Fight Fiercely Redskins!, and A Little Culture

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your morning coffee creamer, It’s That Time, Morning Motivationer Furlette, And Thereby Hangs A…, Tuesday Titillation Timea, New Window Dressing, Humpday Hawtness Destiny, Overnighty Extreme Cameltoe Upskirt, Falconsword Fursday, Corset Friday, Arrrgh,  T-GIF Friday Invitation,  Weekender Rachel, and Bath Night Shower Scene.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Evangeline Lilly, his vintage Babe is Susan Cabot, Sex In Advertising is covered by Guess, and of course there’s the obligatory 49er cheerleader. At Dustbury, it’s Emily Deschanel and Sophia Loren, whose 80th birthday was this week. Three Beers Later also chipped in Rule 5 Rednex: The Way I Mate.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 roundup is midnight on Saturday, September 27.

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

Thoughts on Ideology

Posted on | September 21, 2014 | 10 Comments

Readers will pardon my long blog silence today, which is likely to continue a while as I am (of course) knee-deep into the radical feminist craziness as I prepare the next installment of the “Sex Trouble” series. (Hit the Freaking Tip Jar!) Because feminist ideologues propose theoretical conceptions that are so contrary to basic common-sense understanding of human nature, reading this stuff could easily cause a person to question their own sanity. Either we’re crazy or they’re crazy, but there is simply no way to reconcile the claims made by feminists with what most normal people believe about human life.

It is helpful, then, for me occasionally to set aside this stuff and emerge into the real world, communicate with normal people and double-check to make sure I haven’t completely lost my mind. Anyway, during a break from my research, I sent out a few thoughts on Twitter.

You don’t know what kind of craziness inspired those observations, but with any luck, by this time tomorrow I will have published another 5,000 words that will help explain it. In the meantime, remember me in your prayers and please, Hit the Freaking Tip Jar!




 

 

Category: Intellectuals

The Vichy GOP Thinks Tea Parties Should Just Shut Up & Fall In Line, Or Something

Posted on | September 21, 2014 | 64 Comments

by Smitty

One must borrow Her Majesty’s dead horse in response to the Fox News question:

Will Tea Party, GOP establishment be ‘mending fences’ to win Senate in November?

After a long, unapologetic effort to defeat Tea Party and other so-called “unelectable” candidates in GOP primaries, the Washington establishment will likely need Tea Party voters in November to help swing several tight Senate races and win control of the upper chamber.

Here I go:

What difference, at this point, does it make?

One can understand that, yes, there are still two years of #OccupyResoluteDesk to endure. But

  • ObamaCare is still a river of lies, with no hope of repeal
  • The IRS is an affront to all things American
  • Ground truth on Benghazi remains elusive
  • We have no hope of a reasonable budget
  • The Federal Reserve is still running amok
  • The immigration sellout seems a question of when, not if
  • Border and national security seem a shambles

The GOP can’t just argue: “We may suck, but we’re all you’ve got” and “SCOTUS” and expect the base just to roll over like so many moderate Congressional panhandlers waiting for the deal to be cut.

Actual conservatives are wondering things like: “Where is the leadership?” and “What is the reform course?”

The gut feeling amongst the irregular troops who should be supplying the bulk of the momentum for a wave election is that there may not be a point to it. That the real mission of the GOP is to be a shock absorber for reform. That the substantial difference between Boehner and Pelosi is that Cryin’ Johnny never equated Tea Partiers Nazis. That those who cautioned against leaving the GOP for a brand new party (and I’m still in that camp, barely) may have been just wrong. That it may be time for our version of UKIP. There are a couple of proto-Nigel Farage figures in circulation, but breaking them loose of the Vichy GOP would seem unlikely at the moment.

A repeat of 2010 should be a no-brainer, but we may first need a no-Boehner.

Category: Republicans

FMJRA 2.0: Midnight Rider

Posted on | September 21, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Thanks to the Watcher of Weasels for its nomination of “Erection Equals Consent” this week!


Feminism: The Final Solution?

‘Erection Equals Consent’?

Rule 5 Sunday: The Man Who Saved Britain

Sudden Onset Lesbian Syndrome

FMJRA 2.0: Not Now John

Steyn Distills Obama To < 10 Characters

‘I Was Drunk. After That, It All Gets Kind of Blurry…I Know We Had Sex.’

Is Scotland A Symptom?

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.15.14

Kirsten Gillibrand’s Phony ‘Courage’

Rotherham Update

HIV-Infected Music Teacher Arrested for Sex With 15-Year-Old Boy

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.16.14

Senate Poll Wars

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.17.14

The Mythic World of Women’s Studies

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.18.14

Slate Scrapes the Bottom

Why Do They Make It So Easy?

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.19.14

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

Friday Night Unwind: “Whoop De Doo”


Top linkers this week:

  1. Batshit Crazy News (19)
  2. That Mr. G Guy (16)
  3. Regular Right Guy (7)
  4. A View from the Beach (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is noon on Saturday, September 27.


Amazon.com – Read eBooks using the FREE Kindle Reading App on Most Devices

Category: FMJRA Award

Essential Feminist Quotes: ‘Rapists Serve All Men by Enforcing Male Supremacy’

Posted on | September 21, 2014 | 70 Comments

Left to right: Kate Millett, Ann Jones, Jenny Kitzinger

“Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. . . . [T]he family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient. As the fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal society the family and its roles are prototypical. . . .
“The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. . . .
“We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system of socialization, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society, that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation. . . .
“Historically, most patriarchies have institutionalized force through their legal systems. . . .
“Significantly, force itself is restricted to the male who alone is psychologically and technically equipped to perpetrate physical force. . . .
“Patriarchal force also relies on a form of violence particularly sexual in character and realized most completely in the act of rape. The figures of rapes reported represent only a faction of those which occur. . . .”
— Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970)

“When we consider the family, we have to talk about child sexual abuse, incest, and the area of family violence that I’ve focused on: wife abuse, marital rape, and battering — often culminating, in the cases I’ve looked into, in homicide. . . . Exploring our sexuality requires freedom, and for women the family structure is still a prison. . . .
“Family ‘stability’ in a patriarchal system depends upon sexual repression of women. …
“We know that men beat women because they can. No one stops them because to do so would be to interfere with the family. . . .
“Violence has always been an important tool for maintaining the family to serve the purposes of patriarchy. . . .
“Susan Brownmiller’s [1976] book, Against Our Will, is a milestone in the women’s movement because it demythologized — desexualized — rape. We learned . . . that sexual and physical violence against women is not ‘sexual’ at all but simply violent. Men use it to dominate women. . . .
“Susan Brownmiller showed us that the rapists serve all men by enforcing male supremacy. . . . [W]e should be clear that our quarrel is not only with certain abusive men but with male supremacy. Our goal should be not merely to redefine our sexuality but to redefine the world and our place in it.”
— Ann Jones, “Family Matters,” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, edited by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond (1990)

“The professionals who diagnose women’s sexual maladjustments never question the politics of these ‘problems.’ They rarely address fundamental issues such as: Why should women get married? Why should we enjoy ‘feminine’ clothing? What is wrong with ‘homosexual tendencies’? . . . Indeed, why should women want sex with men at all? . . .
“Radical feminist practice is concerned about recognizing our fear, and anger, and refusing to dismiss those reactions as simply ‘dysfunctional.’ It is about organizing collectively to challenge the institutions that deny women’s rage and pain. It is about questioning ‘common-sense’ understandings of the world. Radical feminists have examined the institution of heterosexuality, the social construction of desire and the links between rape and ‘consensual’ sex. These analyses question the existence of ‘truly chosen’ and ‘egalitarian’ heterosexual relations by focusing on the compulsory enforcement of heterosexuality; they are suspicious of appeals to some ‘authentic female sexuality,’ hidden deep within ourselves and uncontaminated by the rule of heteropatriarchy.”
— Jenny Kitzinger, “Sexual Violence and Compulsory Heterosexuality,” in Heterosexuality: A Feminism & Psychology Reader, edited by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (1993)

Men are to feminism what Jews were to Nazism. As a species of hate propaganda, feminist literature is remarkably resourceful in the ways that these ideologues demonize — and otherize, as post-modernists might say — all males as the universal scapegoats on whom all evil is blamed.

Rush Limbaugh’s famous term “feminazis” is usually seen as crude sarcasm. On page 13 of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash, she credits Limbaugh’s “broadsides” against feminism for making “his syndicated program the most popular radio talk show in the nation.” Nearly a quarter-century later, we might update Faludi’s phrase to say more accurately that Rush Limbaugh is the most successful broadcaster in radio history, period. And we ought not be so quick to dismiss Limbaugh’s coinage of the word “feminazi” as merely a joke.

Having spent the past several months immersed in the study of radical feminist literature as research for my “Sex Trouble” series, I know that Rush Limbaugh was speaking the literal truth.

It is not merely that feminists are devoted to an ideology of hate that is analogous in many ways to Hitler’s anti-Semitic worldview, but also that feminism is clearly totalitarian in its methods. Never is this more evident than when feminists are talking about rape. You would think, to hear the rhetoric that emanates from our nation’s colleges and universities, that sexual assault is now at an all-time high on campus. Yet all actual evidence indicates that quite nearly the opposite is true.

According to the Justice Department, the rate of sexual violence against females declined 64% between 1995 and 2005: “In 2010,
females nationwide experienced about 270,000 rape or sexual assault victimizations, compared to about 556,000 in 1995.” Do feminists want us to believe there has been a recent uptick of rape under the Obama Administration? I’m dubious. As far as rape on college campuses is concerned, however, every attempt to verify the widespread claim that 20% of college females are victims of sexual assault has failed, because the actual numbers don’t add up. But if Women’s Studies majors were good at math, they wouldn’t be majoring in Women’s Studies.

Once you understand that there is nothing like an “epidemic” of rape on college campuses, and that feminists are engaged in statistical dishonesty about the frequency of such crimes, a skeptic is immediately prompted to wonder, “What’s this really about?” In a word, power.

This is the classic totalitarian method: Whip up an irrational frenzy about an Issue, and convince people The Enemy is to blame. Your followers, a motley collection of dupes and crackpots who are predisposed to believe whatever you say, are willing to blame The Enemy not only for the Issue, but also for all problems experienced by The Movement, which you lead and in which they are fanatical followers. Your leadership is dependent on their followership, and vice-versa.

In the symbiotic relationship of totalitarian movements, your status as leader requires you to keep your followers convinced that any failure of the Movement is to be blamed either on (a) The Enemy, (b) the enormous challenges inherent to the Issue, or (c) the deficiencies, faint-heartedness and/or possible disloyalty of the followers. You must constantly reinforce these beliefs in the minds of your followers or else, given a quiet moment to reflect on the situation, they might wise up and begin to suspect that failure is due to (d) the incompetence of their leaders who have (e) deliberately misrepresented the Issue and misled the Movement. If ever those doubts begin to occur in the minds of your followers, they might even start to wonder if The Enemy isn’t really an enemy at all.

What I have just recounted are the psychodynamics of every radical movement since the French Revolution, a predictable phenomenon best illustrated by the career of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. A sociopathic thug who managed to shove aside every other rival to succeed Lenin as leader of the Bolshevik regime, Stalin turned his nearest rival, Leon Trotsky, into a scapegoated figure whose alleged conspiratorial perfidy was a permanent source of the paranoid suspicion necessary to the rationale of a police state. Within a decade of assuming power, Stalin began to turn this suspicion against those original Bolshevik leaders who had loyally served the regime since before the October Revolution and who, as such, were in a position to recognize the bloody failures of Stalin’s leadership. During the infamous Moscow Show Trials, one after another of the Old Bolsheviks were accused of wildly improbable crimes — treason! sabotage! Trotskyism! — to which they were forced to confess and then, in most cases, summarily executed.

As it was with the Bolsheviks, so it is with the feminists. Patriarchy serves in the feminist ideology that purpose which capitalism served for the Soviet revolutionaries. Anyone who questions the ideology of the movement becomes an ally of the Enemy. The duty of every True Believer is to echo the slogans of the movement leadership, as if the movement could be carried to victory merely by the fervor of its followers. The repetition of falsehoods, the faith in erroneous ideology — all the wrongs and failures of a totalitarian movement devoted to The Big Lie, which must ultimately be doomed to the ash heap of history — these are familiar tactics, and once you realize they are merely tactics, they lose their power to intimidate and terrorize you into silence.

For this is exactly the power that feminists seek with their deliberate lies about men, about patriarchy, about “rape culture”:

To distill their rhetoric to its totalitarian essence: “Shut up, because rape.”
The SlutWalk movement is about rape in pretty much the same sense Nazism was about the Versailles Treaty — it’s the legitimate grievance that empowers a movement of irrational hatred.

So I said last year after finding myself amid that rabble. I’d call them “brownshirts,” but they weren’t wearing shirts. Or pants, either.

It’s probably kind of hard to goosestep while wearing 3-inch heels and fishnet stockings, but the fascist vibe was so overwhelming I could almost hear the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass. My memories of the rally at the end of the march have faded, and I can’t find my notes of the speeches the SlutWalk leaders made, but then again, why bother translating them into English? Their speeches were much better in the original German. They made a documentary about SlutWalk. It was directed by Leni Riefenstahl.

Ah, I could keep riffing like this all night, you see. But why should I making jokes when it’s so much funnier just to quote feminists?

“This account of the politics of lesbianism locates it firmly within the framework of radical feminist ideology. The role of heterosexuality as an institution of patriarchal control, and the potential of lesbianism for subverting male domination are made explicit. . . .
“It is argued that a relationship between any individual woman and man cannot be understood without reference to the political structure of male supremacy and male domination, which invests each man with power over each woman. . .
“Thus the ‘personal’ (including romance, falling in love, sexual attraction, fantasy, and personal relationships generally) is ‘political’ in at least two senses: firstly that it is the personal experience of women that generates and informs feminist theory, and secondly in that feminist theory offers a structure within which individual experience can be interpreted and understood. . . . .
“In this account, men (rather than merely ‘society,’ ‘institutions’ or ‘conditioning’) are seen as the enemy. . . .
“In this account, the blame is put squarely on men, and separatism is represented as a legitimate strategy. . . .
“These are the views which underlie the theory of political lesbianism — the theory that women can and should choose lesbianism as part of the political strategy of feminism — and this account endorses constructionist theories of sexuality. . . .
“This factor, then, involves a constructionist version of sexuality in which heterosexuality is seen as imposed by men on to women, and in which lesbianism represents a challenge to male supremacy.”
— Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (1987)

OK, that’s not funny so much as it is deranged and frightening, but perhaps you see my point. Radical feminists have a clear ideology — a theoretical framework — which informs their rhetoric, and they have spend decades erecting this edifice of error, so that it is now deeply embedded in the belief system of elite academia. This one 1987 book by Professor Kitzinger, for example, has been cited nearly 900 times in scholarly literature. If Professor Kitzinger is wrong, her errors are widely popular among her academic peers.

Professor Kitzinger is not describing a “born-that-way” theory of lesbianism, and she explicitly rejects (as do radical feminists, in general) the claim that heterosexuality is natural. You can trace a direct narrative arc from Kate Millett’s claims in 1970 — where the patriarchal family “effects control and conformity,” where romantic love is simply “a means of emotional manipulation,” where rape is a political weapon of patriarchy — to the claims of Professor Kitzinger in 1987. And we see this direct line of thought continued forward to the present, expressed in feminist slogans which now emerge spontaneously from the Twitter account of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine:

You can see the New York Times account of Chrstine Pelosi’s marriage to Peter Kaufman and conclude that heteronormative patriarchy has been very good to her. Why, therefore, does she feel the need to speak as if “reinforcing heteronormative patriarchy” were a hate crime? Because these are the ideas that prevail within the culture of the elite, to which Christine Pelosi so clearly belongs. If this were 1962, she’d be talking about modern art and civil rights, but it’s 2014, so she’s talking about heteronormative patriarchy.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how “rapists serve all men by enforcing male supremacy,” as was explained by the eminent Ann Jones. She’s got all kinds of honors: “Her work has received generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she held the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellowship in 2010-11, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2011-12), and the Fulbright Foundation (2012).” Obviously, she’s so much smarter than the rest of us (especially me) that she understands how I am “served” by the crimes of rapists. Some creep I never heard of rapes a woman I never met in a distant place I’ve never been and don’t plan ever to visit — Boulder, Colorado, for example — and I am thereby “served,” you see, because this criminal is “enforcing male supremacy.”

While you’re trying to figure that one out, let me ask you to ponder another question: “Who benefits from feminism?”

Who profits, who is empowered, whose social prestige is enhanced by the promulgation of this anti-male/anti-heterosexual propaganda?

“Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”
— Rush Limbaugh

You got that one right, Rush. You damned sure got that right.




 

 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble

A Princess, A Dragon, And A Qwerkywriter

Posted on | September 20, 2014 | 40 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


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
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