Earlier, I quoted a Canadian feminist blog about “how bullies and abusers function” and then — having “set the hook,” as a fisherman might say — reeled off the history of the Brett Kimberlin case, without getting into the specific issues the Canadian feminist was talking about, which are interesting enough that they deserve their own post.
At issue is a new Canadian “progressive” web site called Ricochet (which is not to be confused with the established American conservative web site called Ricochet). The hardcore (but not lesbian) Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy explained her problem:
I could not and would not support any platform, publication, or organization involving an allegedly abusive man. And unfortunately I had been provided with information from more than one source that one of the men who co-founded Ricochet had been accused of abuse. . . .
When I learned that this man would be a founder and editor at Ricochet, I was livid. . . . I couldn’t name names but I knew full-well that the information circulating around this particular man had been communicated to many in the progressive community, yet he was still being allowed a position as some kind of leftist leader. No one was holding him to account.
(Yeah, Americans had a similar problem with a guy like that once. And now feminists want to elect his wife our next president.)
People who were willing to trash me publicly, simply because they disagreed with my feminist politics, were unwilling to cut ties with or call out a man who had been accused of abuse. . . .
I know these kinds of men. I lived with one. After I left him and began to tell my community about my experiences with him, he also threatened to sue me.
Now, here is where Meghan Murphy’s story takes an interesting sidetrack. She told the story of that relationship in October 2013:
When I was 26, I had what I sometimes call a quarter-life crisis. In typical 20-something form, I thought what I needed was to escape city life. To get closer to nature and eschew technology or some crap.
I subletted my apartment and hung around on some of the little islands off the coast of British Columbia. . . .
I lived in a tent for the summer. I stopped shaving my armpits and made a bunch of ugly hemp necklaces. I learned to play Janis Joplin songs on my guitar and read a lot of Anarchist pamphlets. . . .
(Everybody’s rolling their eyes at this part of Meghan’s story, but when I was 26, I was playing in a rock-and-roll band and dating strippers. Which isn’t the same as living in a tent and reading Anarchist pamphlets, but does show that 26-year-olds do crazy things that aren’t necessarily an indicator of their future.)
When I first met Dan, he seemed fun and smart, but he was 20 years older than me which, to a 26-year-old who’d only ever slept with men relatively close in age, seemed gross. . . .
He hung around the cafe, took me to local parties, and pretty much became my chauffeur. I hate to admit that I felt I was the one taking advantage of him. I felt I was the one in control.
This is, of course, the trouble with not having real power in this world. We take what we can get. Women learn they have power because men desire them, but it isn’t true. . . .
(Meghan: Your obsession with power, and your belief that women can never have “real power” — because patriarchy! — is the result of looking at the world through an ideological prism. But never mind that right now. Let’s talk about sex, eh?)
I slept with him one night after too many drinks, regretted it immediately and then regretted it even more when, about a month later, I learned I was pregnant. I scheduled an abortion, but suffered a rather traumatic miscarriage a week before my appointment. Dan took care of me while I recovered that week, bedridden and high on OxyContin, prescribed for the pain. Looking back, I see our relationship as one forged through a kind of trauma-bonding. . . .
(Oh, for crying out loud, Meghan, you’ve been reading Dee Graham, haven’t you? It’s probably only a matter of time until you’re screeching that PIV is always rape. But anyway . . .)
I quickly became dependent on Dan. But he was smart. He was able to engage in debates about the things I was interested in -– politics, feminism, progressive movements. He aligned himself with lefty causes and with women’s rights. He believed himself to be a progressive guy. I believed it, too. . . .
He made a point of telling as many people as possible about the thousands of dollars he’d donated to the local women’s anti-violence group. He would identify as a feminist and then talk over all the women in the room.
(Never trust a guy who makes a point of bragging what a huge feminist he is. Guys like that are psychologically defective.)
Eventually his true nature began to show through his carefully crafted persona, but he was a master manipulator and somehow I always ended up believing that either his behaviour would change or that his blow-ups were my fault. . . .
(Proving my point.)
He dominated every conversation and would practically foam at the mouth if anyone disagreed with him. He made excuses as to why he had a pattern of dating much younger women. . . .
At 47, he had all but retired. . . .
He’d memorized pseudo-therapeutic language, impressing women who were accustomed to men who were emotionally disengaged.
He was also always the victim. In past relationships and in life. He was “struggling,” he always said. He described the 10 years of his life spent as vice-president of A&R at a large record label as akin to serving time in a war. . . .
ALARM BELLS! RED FLAGS! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!
Sweetheart, anybody who knows anything about the music business will tell you: Never trust a record company executive. To compare those people to jackals would be an insult to jackals. To say that somebody spent “10 years of his life . . . as vice-president of A&R at a large record label” is like saying he spent 10 years peddling heroin to teenagers or writing speeches for Mitch McConnell.
Anyway, to continue Meghan’s story about that sociopathic creep Dan:
Explanations of his life were full of holes. . . . He would tell me about women he’d dated or slept with, and then months later I’d learn these stories were lies. He’d laugh it off: “Oh I was just joking about that.”
Through the year and a half we were together, we broke up constantly. The nonstop lying and mind games made me feel crazy and insecure. . . .
(Yeah, you were so “crazy and insecure” that you spent your summer living in a tent and reading anarchist pamphlets.)
I’d hear all sorts of stories from others -– sometimes about him cheating with other women, even younger than me. When I’d ask him about what I’d heard, he’d track down the people who ratted him out, threatening them and spreading rumors around the island that they were crazy and out to get him. Everyone was out to get him for some inexplicable reason.
I left him temporarily after he backhanded me across the face one night. . . .
One woman I’d told, a friend, I’d thought, responded: “Oh but you two were fighting, weren’t you?”
Well, yes. If you call being screamed at, called a “fucking cunt,” and then smacked across the face “a fight,” then yeah. I guess we were fighting. . . .
Well, you can read the rest of that. My point is, this is where feminism comes from — women hanging around wretched amoral “progressive” scumbags who treat women like dirt. And the weird thing is, Meghan Murphy already knows this:
I have a healthy and well-founded mistrust for the male left. . . . The radical feminist movement quite literally was launched, back in the 60s, in response to women’s disappointment in the New Left, who continually ignored and treated our sisters as second class citizens. Women tried to join the fight for equality and liberation only to learn that their own liberation didn’t count.
You can read the rest of that, too. The problem with the Left is that it is composed entirely of three kinds of people:
- Emotionally damaged and/or mentally defective losers desperately hoping that politics can solve their problems;
- Crackpot intellectuals craving world-historical significance, or at least a regular TV gig and a book contract; and
- Clever hustlers trying to score some action.
All of these people have bad motives, which they cannot admit. If they told the truth — “I hate successful, happy people because my mother dressed me in ugly clothes and kids made fun of me in school” — nobody would pay attention to them.
Dishonesty therefore becomes routine and habitual to leftists, and whenever leftists get together, the clever progressive hustlers prey upon the emotionally damaged losers who can be counted on to blame their misfortunes not on the individual creeps who screwed them over, but rather on some large, abstract “social injustice.”
Idiots willing to fight for Social Justice as volunteers are victims of professional leftists who get paid to fight for Social Justice. But if the idiots ever wised up to the hustle, there wouldn’t be a “progressive” movement at all. So the chumps just keep on chumpin’ . . .
