 ON POLITICAL BLINDNESS, HATRED, PORNOGRAPHY AND RAPE, OH MY! or "JOY TO THE WORLD"
When most people hear the word "politics," they first thing they imagine is an old white guy lying to them. While that is a significant (and the most fun) part of politics, it is far from the complete picture.
Politics is the system by which a nation-state manages its relationship with its citizens. Further, it is the management of any relationship. Everything, in its own way, is political. Some people know that, some people don't.
If you accept that everything is essentially poltical, it would then follows that each and every thing you believe is at some level political. Most people think that denying this somehow makes them a better person when, in fact, it only makes them stupid.
Several once noble political movements had, by the 1960s, started to become professional victims associations. These include the abolitionist movement of the 18th century, which has degenerated into a silly case for slavery reparations, and the sufferagette movement of the early 20th century -which brought women a fundamental right in a democracy, the vote- has become an open war on the free expression of anyone who does not happen to be a feminist.
People think there's nothing more compelling than their own sense of victimhood, and the use that as a justification to engage in inexcusably savage behaviour. If I cared at all for 99.9% of the human race, I'd be saddened by that. Fortunately, I'm a prick so I'm endlessly entertained by it.
A few days ago a link to this blog post was left in the comments of the stellar Seven Inches of Sense. If you don't read Joan religously, you were born wrong. The only way to get yourself right is to read it eight times a day, like I do. That's why I'm going to heaven as all of the rest of you burn forever, because I love Joan and Jesus smiles on me for it.
The blog in question, "I'm Not a Feminist But...", and the post in question, "Hate", is so shocking as to be one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've ever read. Unless, of course, the author is kidding, which I can't completely rule out. If that's the case, then Laura is a staggering genius of comedy - Andy Kaufman returned to live amoung us again and given a blog. This could be the most brilliant comedic creation since Tony Clifton.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that Laura isn't kidding. I've known enough people like her in my day to know that she's probably completely serious. And that scares the fuck out of me and reinforces my long-held belief that humanity is doomed.
If you've read my shitty little blog for any more than three or four days, you might have noticed that I'm very, very conservative on some issues and very, very liberal (although I'd prefer liberatarian) on others. You might also have noticed that I like to throw around phrases like, "liberals are stupid" or, "conservatives are evil." I do this for two reasons. Firstly, because it's fun. Secondly, it's true enough to be hilarious. And if I didn't at least try to be funny, I doubt that any of you would have stuck with me for as long as you have.
But there is an underlying point to statements like that. That would be that most doctrinaire people simply aren't all that bright and are frequently scum. I'm sure that we've all met someone that loves to talk about how George Bush is always right or how Michael Moore is never wrong.
Ever notice how those people are almost always idiots? Those folks decided that they no longer need to think because everything they thing they need to know has already been laid out for them by the Republican National Committee or divined to them in "Dude, Where's My Country?" If President Bush or Michael Moore were holders of some great truth, neither of them would need lie as frequently as they both do about virtually everything.
Well, Laura's post in "I'm Not a Feminist, But......" exposes her as one of those people. "Hate" is one of the most nonsensically doctrinaire things I've read in my life. And I've read "Mein Kampf", for Christ's sake. Okay, that's not entirely true. I tried reading "Mein Kampf", but gave up. Turns out that Hitler put on a better live show. Who knew?
Even the title of Laura's blog, "I'm Not a Feminist, But....." is an almost Orwellian excercise in language. In that one post, she runs through so many feminist fallacies that it would make Catherine MacKinnon squirt. Hard. And I know a little bit about the ramifications of that, because one of her squirts made a total mockery of the entire Canadian justice system. That she did this from Ann Arbor, Michigan is all the testimony to the strength of her keggle muscles than anyone needs.
 The good and great Joan did an admirable job or tearing Laura a new asshole from a personal persective, so I won't do that here. I want to take down the intellectually weak underpinnings of her arguement. I know that I'll be labelled as a sexist prick for some of what I'm about to say, and that this post is littered with pictures of tits, ass, and babies reading Playboy probably isn't going to help my case, but what are you going to do? This is plainly how I roll.
Her basic premise seems to be that while her feminisim isn't predicated on her hatred of men, it justifiably could be. This is because everything men do is an experession of their views of her. Not her as a woman, mind you, but her personally. Laura clearly has closed her eyes and sees the world through her cunt. Not the Great Collective Cunt of a Utopian, Universal Sisterhood, mind you, but her's specifically. Until I read Laura's essay, I was pretty sure that I had invented putting narcissitic nonsense up on the Interwebs. I regret to admit that I was wrong.
The most commonly used phrase Laura uses her throughout her essay is "Men hate me when they..." I'm not entirely sure that this is a literary device or an indication of a personality disorder, and a pretty serious one at that. What I do know is that she turns misogyny from what I believe it is, a psychiatric disorder, into a political platorm to expouse nonsense and all-around lunacy. That she does so to propogate her own specific victimization is even more troubling. You see, it isn't rapists, pornographers, rappers or assholes that hate her, it is men as a whole. And we all hate her specifically and , presumably, equally.
I'm not sure if Laura is a dime-store Goebbels, an idiot, or a lunatic.
Let's take her points one by one, shall we? I'd be less than fair if I didn't let her speak for herself.
1. Men hate me when they rape. I am lucky enough not to have been raped (yet), but I still feel that hate. I feel it when I read that 60, 000 women a year are raped in the UK alone. I feel it when I know that, all around the world, women are being raped right this minute, right this second. I feel it because I know that we are not being raped by crazy psychopaths lying in wait in a dark alley as the media would have as believe, but by normal, ordinary, everyday men, by husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, friends, fathers, brothers, bosses, partners, ex partners, soldiers, policemen, the list goes on. Men hate me when they rape.
Laura, probably unintentionally, is actually making a mockery of rape here by pointing out that she's "lucky" enough never have to been raped. Wheeeeeeeee! Want a prize for that, honey? How about a cookie? Gold star?
I take this kind of personally. Throughout my life, several of the women that I've been closest to have been raped and/or molested. If I had the opportunity to be alone in a room with any of their attackers, make no mistake, it would be one of the great joys of my life to murder them as slowly and brutally as humanly possible. It is only through the good common sense of one such woman - who wouldn't give me her attacker's address - that I am not in prison right now. I had it all planned. I was going to break her rapist from the feet up with a combination of a tire-iron and a car-jack. Every bone that could have been destroyed, would have. Over the course of SEVERAL hours, maybe days if my CPR skills were up to par.
As you know, I'm not shy about joking about the taboo here. But I generally don't make rape jokes. There's a reason for that.
My trivial personal sidebar aside, Laura also makes a massive statistical mistake. In the United States (and most likely the United Kingdom as well), women are actually a likely minority of rape victims.
That is a hard assertion to factually prove, but given the reported incidents of male-male rape combined with with feminist pressure for rape shield laws, it is likely that male victims of rape almost never report their assaults.
Then there is this statistic;
In a well-known study of offenders and victims conducted by Nicholas Groth and Ann Burgess, one-half of the offender population described their consenting sexual encounters to be with women only, while 38 percent had consenting sexual encounters with men and women. Additionally, one-half of the victim population was strictly heterosexual. Among the offenders studied, the gender of the victim did not appear to be of specific significance to half of the offenders. Instead, they appeared to be relatively indiscriminate with regard to their choice of a victim -- that is, their victims included both males and females, as well as both adults and children (Groth & Burgess, 1980). The choice of a victim seemed to be more a matter of accessibility than of sexual orientation, gender or age.
Here's another cute fact.
Research indicates that the most common sites for male rape involving post-puberty victims are outdoors in remote areas and in automobiles (the latter usually involving hitchhikers). Boys in their early and mid-teens are more likely to be victimized than older males (studies indicate a median victim age of 17). The form of assault usually involves penetration of the victim anally and/or orally, rather than stimulation of the victim's penis. Gang rape is more common in cases involving male victims than those involving female victims. Also, multiple sexual acts are more likely to be demanded, weapons are more likely to be displayed and used, and physical injury is more likely to occur, with the injuries that do occur being more serious than with injured female rape victims (Porter, 1986).
And I'm not even bringing up the proponderance of rape in the prison system, of which statistics aren't even kept. But there are two million people currently in the American justice system. Let's assume that 20% of them are raped at some point in their incarceration, which I'm sure is a very low percentage. That's 400,000 rapes right there, the overwhelming majority unreported and far more violent than what all but a very small number of women will suffer through. Is Laura "hated" when those men and boys are raped? I somehow doubt it. In fact, I suspect that she's secretly thrilled by it. It really is amazing how quickly empathy can become sadism.
The important point that Laura misses is that rapists are criminal swine who don't tend to be particularly discriminating. If rape is about power rather than sex, as most sane people believe, then it follows that it doesn't really matter who the criminal swine has power over, now does it? Some people just don't build a cult of personal victimhood over it like Laura wants to.
2. Men hate me when they use porn. They hate me when they come to my sisters being abused and raped. They hate me when they reduce me to two hands and three holes. They hate me when they use porn as a manual for sex, when they equate my worth to my ability to act like a porn star. They hate me when they deny the harm that porn does to women. They hate me when they see the harm and rejoice in it. They hate me when they cause that harm. Men hate me when they use porn.
Really? Why just porn? Why not most of history's great literature, that frequently has used rape or sexually objectification as a plotline? Frankly, if you follow feminist ideology, then all of the world's great religions "objectify" women as either mothers or whores. I should think that, given current world demographics, that religion is a whole lot more pervasive than pornography is. Does anyone really think that pornography has much to do with the brutal practice of female genital mutilation so common in sub-saharan Africa?
Can a fuck movie really compare to that, Laura? Where's the real pornography?
Furthermore, Laura contends that porn harms womn because it harms her. Did you know that the fastest growing market for pornography is single white women in their thirties? Do those women hate Laura, too? Or are they just not as bright as she is? Not only is Laura the personal recipticle of the pain of a billions of women, she's also smarter than all of the others who don't know as much as she does. That really must be a burden.
3. Men hate me when they type 'rape virgens' into google, or 'cut breasts fuck', or 'three men brutally rape woman'. (Check out the sitemeter posts over at the Den if you really need more evidence).
4. Men hate me when they harrass women in clubs, on the streets, in the park, in bars, on the beach, at the bus stop. They hate me when they leer and make lewd comments and pinch arses and grab breasts and stare down tops and drive by in their cars beeping their horns at any tits and arse they go past and when think they have the fucking right to tell me to smile.
Okay, men are sick fucks and assholes. You win there, Laura. I award you two points.
5. Men hate me when they buy lads mags and calculate how much their girlfriend costs per fuck.
You know what, sweetheart? I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't put such a premium on that if you didn't first. I know, I know, men invented the "three-dates with dinner rule" and the whole "no anal till marriage and probably not even then" thing, but we were kidding! Honest. Once you stop appraising your fucking spam purse like a goddamn pair of earrings, I'm pretty sure we will, too. Okay?
6. Men hate me when they ask their girlfriends to get a boob job to spice up their sex life.
That's just flat out wrong. Most men who ask that are too busy not getting laid anymore to hate you, Laura. They might hate you in the abstract, but they're generally too busy hating themselves for bringing the subject up in the first place to bother much with you.
7. Men hate me when they make malicious, sexist jokes. Men hate me when they laugh at malicious, sexist jokes. You think I don't know that you really mean it?
Is that so? Ever laugh at a Hellen Keller joke? Does that mean you hate the handi-capable? What about involving Polish people and lightbulbs? Two Jews walk into a bar? Holy Christ, if Laura's right, my blog alone might lead to the annhilation of everyone!
 What makes women so fucking precious? Does Laura really think that girls are just too weak, defenseless and generally useless to be mocked like everyone else? And if that's the case, who does she really feel contempt for?
I would posit that women like Laura will start to be taken seriously when they stop taking themselves so seriously.
8. Men hate me when they question women's right to equal pay / to have an abortion / to have sex without getting pregnant / to do anything that they have the right to do.
That's a post in and of itself and demonstrates that Laura might actually be retarded. I'll do my best to address each very briefly, but not as completely as I'd like.
- There is a difference is pay rates between men and women for the sole reason that any woman, at any given time, might exercise her right to choose motherhood and drop out of professional life for years at a time. I assure you that any man with five or six year holes in in his resume would face similiar challenges. By the way, a majority of women will at some point take a few years off to have kids. Despite the fact that women have made more professional progress in the last 40 years than any other group in human history, doesn't change the basic fact that the majority of women still have a very different career trajectory than do men.
- As a libertarian, I happen to agree with Laura about abortion and birth control. As a matter of fact, I love both. Some very religious people happen to disagree. They happen to think that these things are murder. Should Laura's hurt feelings take priority over their faith? I happen to think that they should, but I'm not demanding that they do. I disagree with religious conservatives, but I do not equate the love they have for their god with a personal hatred of me. They hate me for completely different reasons.
- "to do anything that they have the right to do" is just too non-specific and silly to comment on. "Rights", generally speaking, are carefully defined and Laura is not. Does this include the "right" of mongloids to be astronauts? How the "right" of dwarves to play in the NBA?
Look, I know that this is getting long-winded and stupid, but so is Laura. Sorry. 9. Men hate me when they buy women's bodies. 10. Men hate me when they sell women's bodies. 11. Men hate me when they pay money to control women in a strip club. Joan addressed this much more eloquently than I could have, so I refer you to her. But I will say that Laura's concept of a "woman's right to choose" seems to only extend so far, doesn't it? And here I was thinking that "choice" actually meant something. It should follow that feminsists should be the first ones to support the choice of a woman to strip, hook or anything else if it is in fact a free choice. But they don't. They like "choice" so long as said choice dovetails with their political dogma. And I'd be very careful about narrowing the definition of "free choice", because that can be a very slippery slope. Here's where we get to the part of the program that happens to be my favourite of all, Laura's hatred of freedom itself. 12. Men hate me when they write and profit from lyrics like this (Grab your titties for BIG) 13. Men hate me when they laugh at an anti-rape protest. 14. Men hate me when they attempt to justify/ deny /defend any of the above. If there's one thing that annoys me, it is the use of McCarthy-ite red herrings to regulate or demonize what I do or don't say, so, yeah, I hate Laura. I'm not sure if Laura knows this, but the Notorious B.I.G is sorta dead and otherwise preoccupied with things other than her feelings. These things would include being dead. Also, I can't imagine that there's a lot of laughing at anti-rape protests. I learned that the hard way when I tried out Henny Youngman's "take my wife....please" bit at a Take Back the Night rally in 1996. Some crowds are much tougher than others. My personal favourite of Laura's 14 points is the last one. Essentially what she's saying is that "you can't disagree with me, because it hurts my feelings. And my hurt feelings demonstrate your hate and therefore circumvent your right to free speech." Disagreeing with Laura makes you a hateful and less worthy person. And that, my friends, is how totalitarianism works. Most implicit in all of Laura's points is her complete lack of individuality. She seems to think that anything less that gentlemanly conduct toward any woman is an insult to her personally. She really IS every woman! Obviously, she's doing a better job of it that Whitney Houston has lately, but still! Or she's Jesus, feeling the pain of all the world's hate. I haven't decided which yet. Laura closes with the concession that all men don't naturally hate women. Well, not exactly. According to her we DO all hate them - and particularly her - because we were taught to. We're just too dumb to do otherwise. Now, if anyone were to suggest such a thing about women, Laura would likely go bouncing off the walls insane. Also, anyone who would suggest such a thing would naturally hate Laura. Tits and ass photos aside, I've never seen women as anything other than my full equals, and in several cases my betters. I don't see them as defenseless and weak, or so helpless that they can't fully participate in adult life. My biggest problem with Laura and people like her is that she seems to think they are. All images ruthessly stolen for the indespensible Save Manny Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Hey Ladies By: The Beastie Boys From: Paul's Boutique Permalink
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