The Other McCain

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

Star and Co-Writer of Slave Revolt Movie Were Accused of Raping Girl in College

Posted on | August 28, 2016 | Comments Off on Star and Co-Writer of Slave Revolt Movie Were Accused of Raping Girl in College

Nate Parker (left) and Jean Celestin (right) were Penn State wrestling teammates.

A much-praised new movie about an 1831 slave revolt, which had been considered a possible Oscar contender, is in trouble because of revelations that the film’s star and director was accused of raping an 18-year-old college student in 1999. Birth of a Nation star Nate Parker was acquitted in that case, but his friend Jean Celestin, who co-wrote the film’s script, was convicted. The victim killed herself four years ago.

Parker and Celestin were college roommates and members of the wrestling team at Pennsylvania State University in August 1999 when, according to court documents, both of them had sex with a freshman girl who had been drinking heavily. A third roommate, Tamerlane Kangas, testified that Parker had a “smirk on his face” when he signalled Kangas and Celestin “to join him when they observed Parker and the woman having sex.” Celestin accepted the invitation, but Kangas declined, later explaining in court: “I didn’t believe that four people at one time was — you know, it didn’t seem right.”

Controversy about the case — which was part of a lawsuit a feminist group filed against Penn State — has engulfed Birth of a Nation this month. The film about the antebellum Nat Turner Rebellion got high praise at the Sundance Film Festival and won a $17.5 million distribution deal from Fox Searchlight, but news accounts of Parker’s role in the 1999 rape have spurred criticism and tarnished the new movie’s prospects.

‘You Put Yourself in That Situation’

The victim in the Penn State case twice attempted suicide in the months after she said Parker and Celestin raped her. When the case finally went to trial, Celestin was convicted, but Parker was acquitted because the victim acknowledged she previously had consensual sex with Parker:

According to Parker’s police statement . . . the sex was consensual and his “ordeal” began on Oct. 13, 1999, when the accuser called him “out of the blue” claiming to be pregnant.
During the phone conversation, the accuser falsely claimed to be pregnant, which she later explained was an attempt to get Parker to identify the third sexual partner in the room that night, according to Deadline. Police later monitored a second call during which both Parker and Celestin admitted to having consensual sex but denied any wrongdoing.
At the end of the first phone call, Parker said he told the accuser, who admitted to raising her voice, “to call me back when you are ready to talk to me like an adult.” Parker then confided in a wrestling coach about the phone call, and was told to be “very nice to her when she [calls] again.” Parker said the coach also warned that “these things come up from time to time with girls who feel guilty … or may even find themselves pregnant with a multiracial child and rejected by their parents.” (The accuser is white and Parker is African-American.) . . .
When she asked how Celestin became involved in the sex, Parker replied that his roommate “was still [in the apartment]” when they were having sex, and that “it started happening and you didn’t do anything to stop it.”
“But Nate, I was so out of it,” she replied. “My whole body was numb, I couldn’t do anything about it.”
When she later complained that the sex had left her with a “bad pelvic infection for a month and a half,” Parker replied, “I’m not … trying to be mean, but I felt like you put yourself in that situation.”

In a 2002 lawsuit, a feminist group accused the university of failing to punish Parker and Celestin, accusing them of harassing the victim:

The Women’s Law Project sued Penn State on behalf of a former female student who went to police in 1999 to say that she was raped by two university wrestlers, identified as Jean Celestin and Nate Parker.
The female student also said the two men began stalking her.
“They followed her. They called her names. They publicized her name. They tortured her. And the school’s response was a slap on the wrist,” said Frietsche.
The university allowed the two men to remain in school and as members of the wresting team under scholarships.
Both men were charged. Parker was acquitted, but a jury found Celestin guilty and he was sentenced to six months in jail after receiving letters of support from university administrators. . . .
The university settled the case with the female student, paying her $17,000.

Negative publicity for Parker’s movie became harsher after the victim’s brother told Variety magazine his sister committed suicide in 2012:

She died at a drug rehabilitation facility, where she was found unresponsive by staff with two 100-count pill bottles of an over-the-counter sleep aid with ingredients similar to Benadryl by her side. “It’s just a horrible life’s progression,” the coroner told Variety. “She was a young woman.”
In court, she testified that she had attempted to kill herself twice after the reported rape. Her brother said that she suffered from depression after the incident. Her death certificate, obtained by Variety, stated that she suffered from “major depressive disorder with psychotic features, PTSD due to physical and sexual abuse, polysubstance abuse….”
“If I were to look back at her very short life and point to one moment where I think she changed as a person, it was obviously that point,” [the victim’s brother] Johnny told Variety. He said that prior to entering college, his sister was an outgoing, popular girl who loved animals and school. He envisioned a career in marketing or media for her. “The trial was pretty tough for her,” he said. . . .
“I think by today’s legal standards, a lot has changed with regards to universities and the laws in sexual assault,” he said. “I feel certain if this were to happen in 2016, the outcome would be different than it was. Courts are a lot stricter about this kind of thing. You don’t touch someone who is so intoxicated — period.”
After the trial, the victim left college before graduating, and received a settlement from Penn State of $17,500. “She was trying to find happiness,” Johnny said. “She moved around frequently and tried to hold a job. She had a boyfriend. She gave birth to a young boy. That brought her a good bit of happiness. I think the ghosts continued to haunt her.”

Controversy about the rape accusation prompted the American Film Institute to cancel a planned screening of Parker’s movie “and Oscar voters (and others) are already debating over whether or not to even see the movie. Statements by Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte indicate that some think the resurfacing of allegations and Parker’s subsequent trial are an attempt to suppress [the movie], and to discredit Parker because he is black.” In an attempt to quell the criticism, Parker gave an interview to Variety Aug. 12 in which he said, “I was cleared of it. That’s that. Seventeen years later, I’m a filmmaker. I have a family. I have five beautiful daughters. I have a lovely wife. I get it. The reality is … I can’t relive 17 years ago. All I can do is be the best man I can be now.”

‘A Threesome Is Normal … Fun’ at 19

Those comments, however, only incited further controversy that Parker attempted to address when he gave an exclusive interview to Ebony magazine this week, blaming “male privilege” for his behavior:

When I think about 1999, I think about being a 19-year-old kid, and I think about my attitude and behavior just toward women with respect objectifying them. I never thought about consent as a definition, especially as I do now. I think the definitions of so many things have changed. . . .
Put it this way, when you’re 19, a threesome is normal. It’s fun. When you’re 19, getting a girl to say yes, or being a dog, or being a player, cheating. Consent is all about — for me, back then — if you can get a girl to say yes, you win. . . .
I called a couple of sisters that know that are in the space that talk about the feminist movement and toxic masculinity, and just asked questions. What did I do wrong? Because I was thinking about myself. And what I realized is that I never took a moment to think about the woman. . . .
What do I need me to do? What do I need to get?
All I can do is seek the information that’ll make me stronger, that’ll help me overcome my toxic masculinity, my male privilege, because that’s something you never think about. You don’t think about other people. It’s the same thing with White Supremacy. Trying to convince someone that they are a racist or they have White Privilege–if it’s in the air they breathe and the culture supports them, sometimes they never have to think about it at all. I recognize as a man there’s a lot of things that I don’t have to think about. But I’m thinking about them now. . . .
I think there is having a behavior that is disrespectful to women that goes unchecked, where your manhood is defined by sexual conquests, where you trade stories with your friends and no one checks anyone. At 19, that was normal. As a 36-year-old man, if I looked at my 19-year-old self as my son, if I could have grabbed him earlier before this incident, or even just going to college. Because for me, it’s about this incident, but it’s about a culture that I never took the time to try to understand. I never examined my role in male culture, in hyper masculinity. I never examined it, nobody ever called me on it.

Four of Parker’s former university classmates released a statement Thursday blaming the charges against him and Celestin on “a violently hostile racial climate that thrived in the Penn State community,” claiming Parker is the target of a “gross and blatant misinformation campaign.”

 

Category: Crime, Education, Hollywood, Movies, Sex Trouble

Behavior Matters: Why ‘Rape Culture’ Rhetoric Is Dangerous Hate Propaganda

Posted on | August 27, 2016 | 1 Comment

 

Feminist “rape culture” discourse “brands half the human race — males, and especially white males — as rapists or rape facilitators,” Wendy McElroy says in her new book, Rape Culture Hysteria: Fixing the Damage Done to Men and Women. By falsely claiming that there is a “campus rape epidemic” at U.S. colleges and universities, feminists are perpetrating a “slander” against male students that “would be denounced as hate speech” if it were targeted at any other group. McElroy concludes: “The rape culture is not only a myth but also a barrier to preventing rape. Adherents show a disregard for victims whenever they excoriate crime-prevention advice and conflate it with slut-shaming.”

As a survivor of sexual assault herself, McElroy is deeply angered by feminist claims that anyone who advises college girls about effective rape-prevention strategies is “slut-shaming” or “victim-blaming.”

One of the slogans that feminists chant — and I heard this at the 2013 D.C. Slutwalk — is “Blame the system, not the victim.”

Question: What do feminists mean when they say “the system”?
Answer: “Patriarchy.”

Feminist rhetoric conveys the message that common-sense advice about avoiding risky situations — keeping yourself safe as an individual — is a waste of time because what really causes rape is “the system,” and what is therefore necessary is collective action to destroy “the system.”

 

“Smash Patriarchy!” Feminism’s mission is essentially destructive, aimed at “social change” that would eradicate “injustice and domination,” as University of Colorado Professor Alison Jaggar explained in her 2013 textbook, Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader:

Defining feminism as a commitment to gender justice means it cannot be reduced to a matter of personal ethics, choice or style. Instead, feminism is a commitment to social change. . . . “The personal is political” was a powerful slogan expressing radical insights. These included the insights that one’s so-called personal life can be a site of injustice and domination whose inequities stem from social arrangements rather than individual personalities. . . . Although these insights were, in their time, revolutionary, accepting them does not entail that feminism can be equated with “lifestyle” choices. To the contrary, taking seriously these insights suggests another popular slogan of second-wave feminism: “There are no individual solutions.” Personal choices are important, but feminism is more centrally concerned with transforming the social contexts within which such choices are made.

Because “individual solutions” cannot bring about “social change,” then, feminists are not concerned with advising young women to avoid behaviors that might put them at risk of sexual assault. To criticize the binge drinking and rampant promsicuity on university campuses as factors that put female students in danger would be “victim-blaming,” according to ideologues who are not concerned with individual safety, but collective action to achieve “gender justice,” as Professor Jaggar says.

“Rape culture” rhetoric is anti-male hate propaganda. By deliberately demonizing college boys as sexual predators, feminists encourage the college girl to view her male classmates with contempt and suspicion. Inspired with paranoid fear, she must monitor every interaction with male students for evidence of sexist attitudes. According to feminist theory, rape is a political action — an expression of male supremacy — and so the female student is encouraged to begin playing a mental game of “Spot the Rapist.” The rapist is a sexist and vice-versa; the two categories are conterminous. “Rape culture” rhetoric leads the college girl to believe that detecting a boy’s predatory intent is a matter of scrutinizing his appearance, mannerisms and attitude for signs of sexism.

Eradicate sexism — “Smash Patriarchy!” — and you thereby “End Rape Culture,” or so feminists would have the college girl believe.

“Rape culture is a pervasive part of our society because of social conditioning. . . .
“The dehumanization of women spans all areas of American life. . . . She is simply an object to be possessed. An object there for male desire and nothing more. . . .
“We need to focus on the messages that men are getting and about how they relate to women.”
— Zerlina Maxwell, “5 Ways We Can Teach Men Not to Rape,” March 11, 2013

You see, according to Zerlina Maxwell, rape is a result of “social conditioning” and “the messages that men are getting.” Nothing a women can do will reduce her risk of being raped. “Rape culture is a pervasive part of our society,” and we must therefore change “society.”

However, what the reader should notice most in that quote by Zerlina Maxwell is her description of male heterosexual behavior. She accuses men of the “dehumanization of women,” because insofar as a man is attracted to a woman, he views her as “simply an object to be possessed.” In other words, it is wrong for men to be attracted to women.

Feminists have been saying this for more than 40 years, since the 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant, where feminists accused “society” of forcing women “to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards.” The protesters declared that women were “brainwashed” by beauty pageants, a form of “Thought Control,” the function of which was “to further make women oppressed and men oppressors; to enslave us all the more in high-heeled, low-status roles.”

In other words, feminists believe, women are oppressed because men prefer beautiful women to ugly women. If it is wrong for women to “compete for male approval” — if women are “enslaved” and confined to “low-status roles” because of “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards” — doesn’t this amount to a condemnation of heterosexuality, per se?

“The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference, something we are born like or gradually develop into, but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination, in particular through the way it channels women into marriage and motherhood.”
— Diane Richardson, “Theorizing Heterosexuality,” in Rethinking Sexuality (2000)

“Second-wave feminists argued that heterosexuality is an organizing institution containing multiple forms of oppression. Adrienne Rich . . . argues against heterosexuality as naturally occurring, asserting that heterosexuality is, instead, compulsory, constructed, and taken for granted. For Rich, the institution of heterosexuality serves the interests of patriarchy and male dominance. Monique Wittig . . . argues that heterosexuality is a political regime, again serving the interests of male dominance through the marriage contract.”
— Carrie L. Coakley, “‘Someday My Prince Will Come’: Disney, the Heterosexual Imaginary and Animated Film, in Thinking Straight: The Power, Promise and Paradox of Heterosexuality, edited by Chrys Ingraham (2005)

“A core dynamic of patriarchal sexuality . . . is the normalizing and sexualizing of male (or masculine) control and dominance over females (or the feminine). This dynamic finds expression in a number of beliefs about what is natural, acceptable, and even desirable in male-female sexual interaction: that the male will be persistent and aggressive, the female often reluctant and passive; that the male is invulnerable, powerful, hard, and commanding, and that women desire such behavior from men; that ‘real men’ are able to get sexual access to women when, where, and how they want it; that sexual intercourse is an act of male conquest; that women are men’s sexual objects or possessions; and that men ‘need’ and are entitled to sex.”
— Rebecca Whisnant, “Feminist Perspectives on Rape,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009)

“Heterosexuality and masculinity . . . are made manifest through patriarchy, which normalizes men as dominant over women.”
— Sara Carrigan Wooten, The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence: Critical Perspectives on Prevention and Response (2015)

Because feminism is anti-male, it is also necessarily anti-heterosexual, and it is from this radical ideology — condemning heteorsexuality as a “political regime” that “serves the interests of patriarchy and male dominance” — that feminism’s “rape culture” rhetoric emerges.

“Telling women that they can behave in a certain way to avoid rape creates a false sense of security,” Zerlina Maxwell insisted in 2012. “We need anti-rape campaigns that target young men and boys. . . . Let’s stop teaching ‘how to avoid being a victim’ and instead, attack the culture that creates predators in the first place.” However, if the vast majority of young men and boys are not “predators,” why do feminists insist we need campaigns to “target” them all? What do we actually know about rape?

 

“From 1995 to 2005, the total rate of sexual violence committed against U.S. female residents age 12 or older declined 64% from a peak of 5.0 per 1,000 females in 1995 to 1.8 per 1,000 females in 2005,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice report. “In 2010, females nationwide experienced about 270,000 rape or sexual assault victimizations, compared to about 556,000 in 1995.”

In other words, even at the “peak” of sexual violence in 1995, the vast majority of women (99.5%) were not victims of rape. Because of a decline in sexual violence, now 99.8% of women are not victims of rape. However, feminists claim 1-in-5 female college students are victims of sexual assault — a claim impossible to reconcile with the official numbers.

Why would the number of rapes be declining if, as Zerlina Maxwell insists, “rape culture is a pervasive part of our society”? And what do the official numbers tell us about victims of sexual assault?

Victims are most likely to be young women from low-income households. Risk is higher for girls 12-17, for black women and for unmarried women. How do these risk factors correlate with claims of a “campus rape epidemic”? Well, most college students are young and unmarried, but they are also more likely to be white and from upper-income households. Of the 16 million undergraduate students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2008, about 10.3 million (63%) were white, 2.3 million (14%) were black and 2.1 million (13%) were Hispanic. The typical college freshman in 2005 came from a household with a parental income of $74,000, 60 percent higher than the national average of $46,326. To accept claims that 1-in-5 female students are victims of sexual assault, we must believe that — contrary to a common-sense interpretation of data — university campuses are a high-risk environment for young women. Fortunately, we may clarify the matter by consulting a 2014 report from the U.S. Department of Justice entitled, “Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization Among College-Age Females, 1995–2013.”

 

What we see is that the college-age group (18-24) was a high-risk category for sexual assault, with a victimization rate of 4.3 per 1,000 in 2013, which was more than three times as higher than the rate (1.4 per 1,000) of females outside that age group. However, within this age group, women who were not college students generally had higher rates of sexual assault than women who did attend college. And since 2004, the rate of sexual assault for female college students has never exceeded 6 per 1,000 in any year, meaning that 99.4% of female college students were not victims.

Sexual assault is actually rare, contrary to Zerlina Maxwell’s assertion that “rape culture is a pervasive part of our society.” Yet what about college students who are raped? How did they become victims? According to a 1996 study, “90% of all acquaintance rapes involve alcohol.” A 2009 report based on a survey of more than 5,000 students stated: “Most sexual assaults occurred after women voluntarily consumed alcohol” — about 80%. Reporting on this alcohol-rape connection, Emily Yoffe of Slate headlined her article: “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk.”

This is why “rape culture” rhetoric is so dangerous. Promoting hatred of males and blaming the “system” as a way to promote the feminist agenda of collective action for “social change” does not prevent rape. Distorting the facts about rape misleads young women, encouraging them to ignore evidence that campus sexual assault is highly correlated to alcohol abuse.

It is not “victim-blaming” to tell the truth. “Teach men not to rape” may be a clever slogan, but the vast majority of men are not rapists and don’t need any feminist lectures about “rape culture.”

We need to teach feminists to stop lying.





 


Category: Sex Trouble

Human Nature and Rock-and-Roll

Posted on | August 26, 2016 | 4 Comments

“You can find more wisdom about love in old R&B records than you can find in all the gender theory textbooks in the Brown University library.”

Maybe the problem with “rape culture” is that college kids aren’t listening to the right music. That thought crossed my mind while I was pondering an article on Medium.com by Anna Hundert that went viral (and got an interesting response by a guy named Elliot Nichols). Ms. Hundert took exception to understanding sex as a transaction, an exchange in which women are presumed to give sex to men in return for dinner, diamonds, love or whatever. What Ms. Hundert may not understand, having not studied the history of feminism in such depth as I have, is that feminists themselves made this transactional understanding of sex the basis for condemning marriage as a degrading condition of slavery.

This was the argument, for example, of British suffragette Cicely Hamilton’s 1909 book Marriage as a Trade, and the anti-marriage rhetoric of the early (so-called “First Wave”) feminists was resurrected and expanded by the radical Women’s Liberation movement (i.e., “Second Wave” feminism) in the late 1960s and ’70s. Anyone may examine the 1973 anthology Radical Feminism and find Sheila Cronan’s “Marriage” (p. 213) and “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles” (p. 368) among other treatises condemning marriage.

Whatever else a feminist may be, she cannot aspire to be a wife without abandoning the core principles of feminist ideology. Most women who claim to be feminists don’t recognize this, or at least don’t wish to admit it, because if ever the fundamental logic of feminism could be discussed openly, most people would reject it in its entirety.

Anyone who cares to excavate down to the root of feminist arguments will find it necessary to agree with Professor Marilyn Frye who, in a 1990 speech to the National Women’s Studies Association, declared that “feminism, which is thoroughly anti-patriarchal, is not compatible with female heterosexuality, which is thoroughly patriarchal.”

To be a feminist, Professor Frye said, a woman “cannot be a heterosexual in any standard patriarchal meaning of the word — you cannot be any version of a patriarchal wife.” Instead, Professor Frye told her academic audience, to be a feminist, a woman must be “a heretic, a deviant, an undomesticated female, an impossible being.” My point in quoting Professor Frye is not to argue with her, but rather to express my enthusiastic agreement with her. The feminist project is incompatible with marriage, motherhood and heterosexuality — and until this fact is recognized, we can never have an honest discussion about feminism.

 

The feminist movement was founded and led by women who did not like men and did not like sex, and who especially did not like sex with men. This was obvious to opponents of the original women’s suffrage movement, and was likewise obvious to critics when feminism was resurrected from the radical New Left in the last 1960s. This fact was evident from the rapidity with which “Second Wave” feminism advanced from its first national protest at the September 1968 Miss America pageant to the emergence of the radical lesbian “Lavender Menace” at the Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970. There is an abundance of evidence and testimony on this subject, but I will merely cite three points:

  1. The most widely-assigned feminist anthology, a textbook in introductory Women’s Studies courses at many colleges and universities, is Feminist Frontiers, edited by three lesbian professors. You may research the careers of Professor Verta Taylor and Professor Leila Rupp (both of UC-Santa Barbara) and their colleague Professor Nancy Whittier of Smith College, and then examine the contents of their textbook Feminist Frontiers, and reach your own conclusions as to what the agenda of Women’s Studies is about. (As of 4 p.m. today, Feminist Frontiers was #6 in “Gender Studies” and #10 in “Feminist Theory” in the Amazon Bestsellers rankings.)
  2. Feminist “gender theory,” as taught in 21st-century academia, is based largely on a single influential book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Professor Judith Butler (UC-Berkeley). Of course, Professor Butler is a lesbian, and her arguments in Gender Trouble rest upon arguments made by other radical lesbians, including Monique Wittig, Gayle Rubin and Adrienne Rich. Professor Butler’s book is so often a required reading in colleges that Gender Trouble is more or less permanently ensconced in the Top 10 of Amazon bestsellers (as of 4 p.m., it was #6 in the category “History & Criticism, Women Authors,” and #10 in “Women’s Studies, Women Writers”).
  3. Charlotte Bunch was one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation movement. A participant in the 1968 Miss America pageant protest, she subsequently divorced her husband and started a lesbian collective that became known as The Furies. In 1975, Bunch was co-editor of a book, Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, a compilation of writing by members of The Furies, including Margaret Small’s declaration that “heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy.” Far from being a marginal fringe figure in the feminist movement, Charlotte Bunch became one of its most influential leaders, a tenured professor at Rutgers University and in 1999 was presented with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights by President Bill Clinton (whose wife is a great admirer of Professor Bunch’s work).

As I say, these are only three data points (although many, many more could be cited) selected to demonstrate the truth of Professor Frye’s statement that feminism and heterosexuality are incompatible. If anyone disagrees with this, they shouldn’t waste their time arguing with me, but rather try arguing with Professor Bunch, Professor Butler, Professor Taylor, et al. Perhaps all these lesbian professors could theorize a post-patriarchal heterosexuality that would be acceptably “feminist,” but the question is whether any males could be induced to participate in such a hypothetical relationship. Feminists are women who hate men and, even if a man hated himself enough to accept feminist ideology, what kind of woman would be attracted to such a pathetic wretch? Well, OK, Jessica Valenti and Andrew Golis, but that just proves my point. Most men would not even want to be in the same ZIP code as Jessica Valenti, much less live as a helpless slave under the sadistic whip of her merciless vengeance. Trying to find the “Feminist Man” is like hunting unicorns, a complete waste of time, since every example of this category ever discovered has turned out to be an illusion like the psychotic pervert Hugo Schwyzer.

Marriage is about voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit, and in order for this to happen, some consideration must be given to what benefit a man obtains from marriage, but feminists never want to hear anything a man has to say on this subject (or any subject, for that matter). Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and its success requires feminists to impose silence on men. Feminists constantly mock and insult men, calling them “misogynists” who benefit from “male privilege” and participate in “rape culture.” Everything a man might say in his own defense is dismissed by feminists as “mansplaining,” so that what the feminist actually demands of males is quite simple:

  1. Shut up;
    and
  2. Go away.

Any intelligent person who studies the rhetoric and theory of feminism understands this, which is why few feminists are willing to speak as bluntly to the general public as Professor Frye spoke to her academic colleagues in the National Women’s Studies Association. Indeed, even most academic feminists are less candid about their agenda than Professor Frye and Professor Bunch, so that their students are sometimes left in a state of confusion as to what feminism requires. To quote one anonymous student in an Introduction to Feminist Theory course: “Every time I walk out of this class I just become more sexually confused!”

Well, Anna Hundert is only a junior at Brown University, and perhaps she hasn’t yet recognized the problem with her own “sex-positive” feminism, a confusion that I felt obliged to attempt to dispel:

Every good man ought to be honest, and not let himself be intimidated into silence by his fear of being called names for speaking the truth. No matter what any proponent of gender theory may claim, the difference between men and women is about biology, and the male tendency toward aggression is not a “social construct,” but rather a fact of nature. . . .
What needs to happen is that men must summon the courage to talk back honestly to the finger-pointing accusations of feminist “rape culture” discourse and get beyond the cliché of “Not all men.” We need to talk about the specific contexts in which so-called “date rape” typically happens. We need to talk about the climate of binge drinking and reckless promiscuity on college campuses where these “he-said/she-said” cases keep happening. We need to talk about the unrealistic expectations about sex that young people are absorbing from popular culture. We need to talk about peer pressure. We need to talk the decline of morality and the corruption of manners. . . .

You can read the whole thing at Medium.com. When I say “we need to talk,” what I mean is that these idiotic young feminists need to listen to responsible adults who have some experience of living in the real world, including men who have not surrendered their dignity in an attempt to appease feminist fanatics. Also, maybe it would help if these kids listened to some good rock-and-roll music. Certainly, it wouldn’t hurt.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 08.24.16

Posted on | August 24, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.24.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: American University In Kabul Under Attack
Michelle Malkin: Leo DiCaprio’s Dirty Dollars
Twitchy: So Is THIS The Pivot? Sounds Like Trump’s Anti-Amnesty Cred Just Took A YUGE Hit


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: On Homosexuality
American Power: #Crooked Hillary’s Inescapable Cloud Of Corruption
American Thinker: The Enemy Is Us
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – When The Music’s Over
Da Tech Guy: Cause And Effect – Louisiana’s Flooding MSM Coverage Edition
Don Surber: Detroit Is Pottersville
Dustbury: Quote Of The Week
Fred On Everything:
Jammie Wearing Fools: The Only Question left For Hillary – What Else Are You Hiding?
Joe For America: Black Louisiana Man Reveals The Real Reason For Obama’s Louisiana Visit
JustOneMinute: Florida Keys To Scientists – Bite Me
Pamela Geller: Pamela Geller Speaks At AFA Convention – “Can Islam Coexist With Western Civilization?”
Power Line: Annals Of Clinton Corruption
Shark Tank: Rubio Paints Doomsday Picture Of A Senate Controlled By Chuck Schumer
Shot In The Dark: Our Loathsome Media, Here And Everywhere
STUMP: Do The Hokey-Pokey – Chicago Public Schools Strike Threat And Debt
The Jawa Report: ISIS Using Child Bombs, Usual Dead Baby Porn Pushers Silent
The Lonely Conservative: #NeverTrump – It’s Not Moral Superiority, It’s Depression
The Political Hat: Hugo Awards – Child Molestation And Puppy Kicking
This Ain’t Hell: Veterans Administration IG Investigation Of Denver Regional Director
Weasel Zippers: LA VA Hospital Loses Thirty Cars, Fires Worker Who Reports It
Megan McArdle: Robbing The New (Uber) To Subsidize The Old (Taxis)


Category: Linkagery

How Much Does @JessicaValenti Enjoy Her Husband @AGolis’s ‘Male Tears’?

Posted on | August 24, 2016 | 4 Comments

 

Just about the time Jessica Valenti’s latest book hit the New York Times bestsellers list, her husband’s business venture went belly-up:

This, the awkwardly named share-one-link-per-day platform, is shutting down at the end of the month, founder Andrew Golis announced over email to users and in a Medium post. The site, launched in 2014, had generated some significant interest among media types, having been invite-only for most of last year. It opened to everyone last fall and began offering automated, curated email newsletters. It recently added a commenting option, and had been exploring sponsorships as well as premium membership options; a new version of its app was featured in the App Store just last month, and Golis was giving it a promotional push just 10 days ago.
Golis explained in his announcement that the lack of funding and any indication of sustainability prompted the decision . . .

You can read the whole thing, but I’m sure you’re less interested in why This ended up in the rubbish bin of bankrupt dot-coms than you are in congratulating Jessica Valenti on her husband’s failure. However, to repeat what I’ve said so often, never talk to a feminist:

There are 21 million women ages 20–29 in the United States, most of whom are not hate-filled anti-male ideologues constantly shrieking about how they are being oppressed by the patriarchy. Why, therefore, should the young bachelor bother arguing with a feminist? She hates the mere sight of a man, and certainly doesn’t care to hear any man speak. Learn to walk away.
Of course, feminists generally claim they don’t hate men, even while they’re busy dreaming of putting men in “some kind of camp” (Julie Bindel) or proclaiming their pleasure in “male tears” (Jessica Valenti).
Any man who disagrees with a feminist is a “misogynist,” so that her ideology has the effect of negating the opinions of half the world’s population. And what does Jessica Valenti’s husband Andrew Golis say about this? Nothing.
Well, what could he say? Male silence is necessary to feminism’s success. Feminism is not about equality, because if it were, a man might have the right to his own opinion. Yet any man who says anything to a feminist is condemned as “mansplaining,” in the same way that any man who expresses attraction toward her will be denounced for “objectification,” and if he claims he meant no harm, she’ll give him a lecture about “rape culture.”
Feminism presents men with exactly two options:

1. Damned if you do.
2. Damned if you don’t.

There is no way for a man to win this game, except never to play it, which is why smart men avoid feminists, rather than “crawling around on all fours” in a hopeless attempt to placate the cruel whims of a sadistic Bitch Goddess. . . .

You can read the whole thing at Medium.com. Did I mention I threw in a few Elvis Costello lyrics? Because I’m cool like that, you know.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 08.23.16

Posted on | August 23, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.23.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: How To Deport 11 Million Aliens And Not Spend A Penny
EBL: Hillary Clinton’s Feats Of Strength
Twitchy: Actor/Comedian Kumail Nanjiani’s Sick Of Your Racist Harambe Memes
EDIT A previous version of this post erroneously attributed the first link to Proof Positive. I regret the error.


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Encourage A Progressive To Breed!
American Power: Andrea Tantaros Sues Fox News
American Thinker: A Clinton Presidency Would Be The Political Equivalent Of An Extinction-Level Event
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily News
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The Shattered Tree
Da Tech Guy: The #Unexpectedly Chronicles – Reuters Deletes, Re-Edits Trump Louisiana Story To Create New Narrative
Don Surber: “Black Voters Are Not The Property Of The NAACP”
Dustbury: Oh, The Ex-Manatees!
Fred On Everything:
Jammie Wearing Fools: FBI Files Linking Hillary Clinton To Vince Foster’s “Suicide” Missing From National Archives
Joe For America: FBI Launches New Investigation Of Clinton Campaign, “Nothing To See Here” To Follow
JustOneMinute: Dark Shadows
Pamela Geller: Sharia Prez – Hillary Vows To Shut Down Opposition Websites If She Wins
Power Line: Ilhan Omar Stonewalls [Updated]
Shark Tank: Democrat Annette Taddeo’s Big Oops! TV Moment
Shot In The Dark: “You Can Keep Your Doctor” Update
STUMP: Public Pensions Returns – Can Public Pensions Beat The Market?
The Jawa Report: Feel Good Story Of The Day – Molotov Boomerang
This Ain’t Hell: Clintoon – “Colin Told Me To Do It.” Powell – “Um, No I Didn’t”
Weasel Zippers: Trump Slams Obama’s Upcoming Louisiana Trip – “Too Little, Too Late!”
Megan McArdle: Health Care Is A Business, Not A Right


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Category: Linkagery

Feminist Professor @MarcieBianco Says Academia Discriminates Against Women

Posted on | August 22, 2016 | 2 Comments

 

Two traits are necessary to become a successful feminist:

  1. Hate;
    and
  2. Dishonesty.

So long as a woman (a) despises men and (b) is willing to tell shameless lies in support of feminism’s anti-male agenda, there are no limits to how far she may go, particularly in the field of journalism:

Academia is quietly and systematically
keeping its women from succeeding

That headline, by Dr. Marcie Bianco, is the perfect feminist argument, which is to say that it is the exact opposite of truth. It is men whose career opportunities are actually targeted for systematic destruction in academia, and this has been the case for more than 20 years.

Men are only 43% of U.S. college students, and in many majors (including psychology, education and English), women get more than two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees. Consider the field of sociology. In 2000, women received 70% of bachelor’s degrees, 66% of master’s degrees and 58% of doctorate degrees in sociology. In fact, women have received a majority of Ph.D.s in sociology every year for the past 25 years.

Are these disparities evidence of anti-male discrimination in academia? Some would answer “yes” (see Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War on Boys and Helen Smith’s Men on Strike for evidence of bias against males in our education system), but Dr. Bianco’s claim that women are victims of academic discrimination would seem to contradict common sense.

Of course, feminists don’t give a damn about common sense. Or facts, for that matter. Feminists only care about “social justice,” a narrative in which women are always victims and males are always oppressors, and no one in academia would dare to question the core claims of feminist ideology. In 2005, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers had the audacity to suggest that there are “innate differences” between men and women. Barely a year later, Summers was forced to resign. In 2007, Harvard named its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust.

Are women “systematically” prevented from succeeding in academia? In recent years women have been hired as presidents of the University of Pennsylvania (Amy Gutmann, hired in 2004), Rutgers University (Nancy Cantor, 2014), Amherst College (Carolyn Martin, 2011), Brown University (Christina Paxson, 2012), Swarthmore College (Valerie Smith, 2015), Case Western Reserve University (Barbara Snyder, 2007), the State University of New York (SUNY) system (Nancy L. Zimpher, 2009), the University of Virginia (Teresa Sullivan, 2010), the University of Wisconsin (Rebecca M. Blank, 2013), the University of North Carolina (Carol Folt, 2013), the University of Connecticut (Susan Herbst, 2011), the University of Arizona (Ann Weaver Hart, 2012), the University of Alabama (Judy Bonner, 2012), the University of Iowa (Sally Mason, 2007), the University of Kansas (Bernadette Gray-Little, 2009), the University of California, Davis (Linda P.B. Katehi, 2009), the University of California, Riverside (Jane C. Conoley, 2012), The University of California, San Diego (Marye Anne Fox, 2004), Michigan State University (Lou Anna Simon, 2005), Alabama State University (Gwendolyn Boyd, 2014), Tennessee State University (Glenda Baskin Glover, 2013), Appalachian State University (Sheri Noren Everts, 2014), Bowling Green State University (Mary Ellen Mazey, 2011), Sam Houston State University (Dana L. Gibson, 2010), Ball State University (Jo Ann M. Gora, 2004), the University of South Florida (Judy Genshaft, 2000), the University of West Florida (Judith A. Bense, 2008), Florida Atlantic University (Mary Jane Saunders, 2010), Florida A&M University (Elmira Mangum, 2014) and the University of Miami (Donna Shalala, 2001).

In case you lost count, that partial listing of female university presidents includes 18 hired since 2010. Three Ivy League schools (Harvard, Penn and Brown) now have female presidents, as do the flagship state universities in New York (SUNY), New Jersey (Rutgers), Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and, of course, Virginia, where UVA was the scene of an infamous 2014 fraternity gang-rape hoax. The brothers of Phi Kappa Psi might be surprised to learn that President Sullivan — who shut down all fraternity activities on campus because of the phony story Jackie Coakley told Rolling Stone — is a victim of systematic discrimination.

And of course, “Haven Monahan” could not be reached for comment.

Exactly how or why would Marcie Bianco expect anyone to believe her claim that women are “systematically” deprived of success in academia? Well, journalism (like academia) is a field where facts are considered less important than “social justice” nowadays, so none of her editors would bother to question Dr. Bianco’s distorted logic:

Statistically . . . many more women work in the humanities than in the sciences, and over 55% of female humanities faculty are adjuncts, or “contingent” workers. And so the devaluing of the humanities in higher education is bound up with our culture’s larger devaluation of women’s work.
The backlash against the humanities began in the late 1980s with the institutional recognition of women’s studies, as well as other minority-based programs such as African-American studies. . . .
The late Harvard professor Barbara Johnson explained this “self-reconstitution of patriarchal power” in her book The Feminist Difference: “[J]ust at the moment when women (and minorities) begin to have genuine power in the university, American culture responds by acting as though the university itself is of dubious value. The drain of resources away from the humanities (where women have more power) to the sciences (where women still have less power) has been rationalized in other ways, but it seems to me that sexual politics is central to this trend.”

The reader may ask, “Who was Barbara Johnson?”

Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives — including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory — into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the “Yale School” of academic literary criticism.

Johnson was a proponent of Derrida and “critical theory,” you see, part of a trend in late-20th-century academia that was more to blame for “the devaluing of the humanities” than any patriarchal “backlash.” Any reader who investigates critical theory will discover that it originated in the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. During the 1980s, while the Soviet Union was tottering toward its final catastrophic failure, this crypto-Marxist philosophy was taking over American higher education. Since the Berlin Wall collapsed, it has been remarked, there are more Marxists on U.S. university campuses than anywhere in the erstwhile “Evil Empire.” Nowadays, you’d have to go to Pyongyang, or perhaps Tehran, to find anyone who hates America more than does the typical Ivy League professor. Old-style Bolshevism, however, has been replaced by postmodern identity politics, in which hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality are used to determine who is most oppressed, and who is the most privileged. These hierarchies are the basis of who is allowed to speak (the victims of structural oppression) and who is required to be silent (the privileged beneficiaries of oppression).

The people who actually pay for higher education — students, parents, alumni, taxpayers — do not support this divisive ideology:

Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings.
Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will.
“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.
Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech.

Will parents pay to send their kids to college to study “social justice” ideology and engage in protest politics?

After raucous protests last fall, the University of Missouri has “a dark cloud hanging over the institution — we can’t sugarcoat that,” vice chancellor of operations Gary Ward told faculty [in April].
The university’s grave outlook became clearer [May 2], as the data rolled in on freshman enrollment for the Fall 2016 semester, showing steep declines.
Compared to last year, 1,470 fewer students had paid their $300 enrollment fees by the May 1 deadline — and with cancellations rolling in over the weekend, the numbers may be even more grim, the local TV station KMIZ reports. That’s a drop of about 25% from last year’s freshman class of about 6,200.

Declining enrollment will translate to a $32 million decrease in the budget at the University of Missouri, which has already closed two dorms. If there has been a “backlash against the humanities,” isn’t this because the humanities departments have been taken over by radical professors like Dr. Bianco who have turned their classrooms into political indoctrination seminars? Is anyone surprised that male students are only 32% of English majors, when the professors are anti-male ideologues like Dr. Bianco, who also hates Christianity and heterosexuality?

American culture is beginning to experience the ethical turn in how it understands sexuality. . . . The progressive move away from identity categories negates the need for the normative, “born this way” narrative that has been used to socially validate them. . . .
I am an atheist and harbor no religious ascetic values like shame or guilt about who I have sex with or how I have sex. . . .
Despite the necessity of identity politics in procuring equal rights, I understand sexuality to be a choice through feminism. With roots in materialist, ethical and existentialist philosophies, my feminism draws from Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre and Foucault; Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson. . . .
Feminism also influenced my sexuality through the interrogation of heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution. Adrienne Rich was just one of many lesbian radical feminists to decry heterosexuality as fundamental to women’s oppression. “Compulsory heterosexuality,” she contends, is not natural or a biological certainty, but rather a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. Her ideas cohere with those of French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig, who, in her seminal essay “One Is Not Born a Woman,” unpacks the fallacy that heterosexuality is natural, or normal. . . .
It is empowering to take possession of my identity and my acts. Women break the cycle of oppression through their sexual liberation. Our power manifests through our freedom to make choices and to take responsibility for those choices. And that includes sexuality.

Marcie Bianco graduated in 2002 from Harvard University, where she majored in government. She then attended Oxford University in England, where she got a master’s degree in Women’s Studies. She returned stateside to Rutgers, where in 2007 she got her master’s degree, and in 2012 got her Ph.D. in English (with certification in Women’s Studies). This qualifies Dr. Bianco to make declarations of Official Truth:

“Melissa Harris-Perry is undoubtedly the greatest public intellectual in contemporary America. Period. I can’t even see how this is debatable. Who else holds a candle to her?”

Thus saith Dr. Marcie Bianco, who is also a “public intellectual” because she said so, and who are we to argue with her? Ignorant plebeians like ourselves aren’t qualified to make these judgments, which is why we must depend on experts like Dr. Bianco to tell us what to think. You and I need Dr. Bianco to tell us that heterosexuality is a patriarchal institution and a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. If we didn’t have public intellectuals to tell us these things, how could we possibly know? You and I are so vastly inferior to Dr. Bianco that we might not even recognize the greatness of Melissa Harris-Perry.

 

Dr. Marcie Bianco is not merely an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual, she is the atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual. Did I mention she’s a Democrat who supports Hillary Clinton?

You might think that being an anti-heterosexual atheist man-hater would qualify Dr. Marcie Bianco for a tenured professorship at Harvard or some other elite university, but instead she’s merely a part-time instructor at Hunter College in the City University of New York system.

As a CUNY adjunct I’ll make less
over my career than my coworker
Paul Krugman does in a year
Like over 75% of professors in America, I am an adjunct, or, in corporate-speak, “contingent” or “part-time” faculty. I have been teaching in the City University of New York (CUNY) system—in the English departments of both John Jay and Hunter Colleges—for a couple of years.
At the moment, with a few years within the CUNY system under my belt, I earn $73.53 per hour. Generally, adjuncts, unlike other faculty, are paid by the hour—and we are only paid for the hours spent in the classroom. We are not paid for class preparation, or grading papers, or email correspondence with students, or writing students letters of recommendation, or attending sometimes mandatory faculty seminars/meetings. We do not receive benefits, like health insurance. If we teach at more than one school, we are limited to teach a total of three courses a semester, which, at my current rate, means I’d earn approximately $13,200 before taxes each semester. Which is impossible, since CUNY has told me there are no courses available for the fall semester, because enrollment is down and the system, apparently, is strapped for cash. So I’ll actually be earning zero dollars. . . .

That was Dr. Bianco’s reaction to the news that CUNY had hired liberal economist Paul Krugman as a Distinguished Professor with an annual salary of $225,000. Of course, Krugman has a Nobel Prize and is a columnist for the New York Times, so that his value to CUNY in terms of prestige is not a negligible factor, but why is it that a Harvard alumna like Dr. Bianco finds herself stuck with the part-time status of adjunct?

There are Women’s Studies programs at some 700 colleges and universities in the United States, enrolling more than 90,000 students annually. Why hasn’t one of these schools hired an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual like Dr. Marcie Bianco for a full-time job? Is there some kind of discrimination at work here? Or, as some of us ignorant plebeians might suspect, are Dr. Bianco’s problems a function of supply and demand? That is to say, in 2016, there is no shortage of atheist lesbian feminists with Ph.D.s. Really, are there any feminists with Ph.D.s in Women’s Studies who are not also atheist lesbians? Are heterosexual Christians even allowed to enroll in the Ph.D. program at Rutgers?

The supply of atheist lesbian feminists with Ph.D.s available to teach Women’s Studies, however, is far greater than the demand, with unfortunate consequences for “public intellectual” Dr. Marcie Bianco:

Student debt in America is crippling — it’s crippling students’ capacity to learn and to have the academic freedom to develop their critical mind. . . .
Meanwhile, the digital age has created a media boom that relies on freelancers and non-unionized “staff writers” who work for peanuts and beer. Now America’s predominantly corporatized universities are eradicating the professoriate in one swoop, hiring their own hordes of similarly non-unionized, part-time labor known as adjuncts. . . .
I am currently unemployed with a not too terrible $25,000 in student debt. On the other hand, one of your brothers—the dastardly middle child—did not go to college and is now earning close to six figures pushing pharmaceuticals along a conveyer belt at a plant in South Jersey. You know what he has in lieu of student debt? A house. Two cars. A boat.

Thirty-six years old, unemployed, with $25,000 in student loan debt. But she’s got her Ph.D., with plenty of hate and a talent for lying, so I predict a great future for Dr. Marcie Bianco in the world of feminism.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

The Hugo Awards Are Dead; Long Live The Dragons!

Posted on | August 22, 2016 | 1 Comment

— by Wombat-socho


First, the obligatory commentary on the just-concluded Worldcon, which will be diminishing in importance from here on out with the advent of the Dragon Awards, from our Supreme Dark Lord and the International Lord of Hate. All I have to say is that I’m glad I didn’t waste $50 on a supporting membership, much less splurge on an attending membership, hotel costs, etc. With respect to the Dragon Awards, if you haven’t signed up and voted, why not? Don’t cost nuthin’.

The long-awaited John Ringo entry into Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter universe, Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, is out, and while there’s a lot less sex than your average John Ringo novel, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This novel is set in the 1980s, and its hero is an ex-Marine killed in the Beirut bombing – which is where the novel STARTS. If you liked Larry’s MHI novels, you’ll like this a lot. Two thumbs up and five stars.

It’s been out for a few years, but Tom Kratman’s A State Of Disobedience seems unpleasantly more timely these days; this tale of a (mostly) non-violent rebellion by Texas against a Federal Government headed by a President very reminiscent of Grandma Clinton reads like it might be ripped from next year’s headlines. If you’re too cheap (or too broke) to throw me a couple of shekels by buying it on Amazon, you can also find it for free at the Baen Free Library, which also has a lot of other good SF & fantasy by great authors, offered under the proposition that “the first taste is free”.

I also re-read Frank Herbert’s The Dosadi Experiment, a tale of forced evolution, human/alien experimentation, and the law which in my opinion is better than its prequel Whipping Star. YMMV. Also re-read: Tim Powers’ Last Call (ridiculously cheap at 99 cents) and Expiration Date. Also also, Geobreeders, a manga that crosses harem comedy and supernatural thriller genres. Desperate salaryman Yoichi Taba winds up hiring on with Kagura Security – and finds out too late their mission is to hunt the lethal “phantom cats”…but he can’t quite bring himself to resign. Amusing, and one wishes both that Akihiro Ito had finished the manga and Central Park Media hadn’t gone bankrupt so they could have finished translating it.

Category: Books
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