tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89725958381383832492024-03-14T10:10:50.299+00:00Adventures In Antimisandryஜ۩۞۩ஜஜ۩۞۩ஜ ஜ۩۞۩ஜஜ۩۞۩ஜByronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.comBlogger296125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-47493752939414838272021-03-27T09:23:00.000+00:002021-03-27T09:23:03.728+00:00Why Abigail Shrier Took on the Transgender Craze Amongst Teenage Girls <p><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="320" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6MYb0rBDYvs" width="477" youtube-src-id="6MYb0rBDYvs"></iframe> </p><div class="_2m1qj"><p>I remember seeing the full podcast of this last year, and the part that has stayed with me the most is where she says:</p></div><blockquote class="_2m1qj _1pexr"><em>“When [Dr] Lisa Littman looked at the [transgender] prevalence rate she found that it's </em><b>70 times</b> <em>what we would expect within a friend group, which means it's highly concentrated in </em>groups of <b>friends</b>..<em>. we wouldn't expect that if it were randomly distributed among the population.</em></blockquote><blockquote class="_2m1qj _1pexr"><em>“If we’re just reverting to normal, now that there’s greater societal acceptance... if we’re just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender women, where are all the women in their 40s and 60s coming out as trans? They should be coming out! Now’s their time! We should see tons of women in their 40s and 60s and so on coming out as transgender. We’re not seeing that: we’re seeing the same population that gets involved in cutting... anorexia, bulimia... and convinces themselves there’s a problem”.</em></blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In Britain there has been a four <em>thousand </em>percent increase in teenagers identifying as transgender the past decade, and three-quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls.</div><p></p>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-22618285281856372402021-03-27T09:15:00.004+00:002021-03-27T09:15:57.221+00:00Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzLM9MQpyhlCRy9r3K_ciolhINRmATaf-0mBBG1phHpr7k53qDhPAbN7LfMqzt-nNlevF1v9ihT6IAgrcHjtJyBuwxKpyTEi7sKqIdUKgIgLI4Ao_Li6mN3Ze6FW3dueaoaDosWDmMoWU/s600/irreversible+damage+large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzLM9MQpyhlCRy9r3K_ciolhINRmATaf-0mBBG1phHpr7k53qDhPAbN7LfMqzt-nNlevF1v9ihT6IAgrcHjtJyBuwxKpyTEi7sKqIdUKgIgLI4Ao_Li6mN3Ze6FW3dueaoaDosWDmMoWU/w400-h400/irreversible+damage+large.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> When I think back to my own high school years in the 1990s, no one came out as “trans.” And until the last five years, that is precisely what the statistics for gender dysphoria would have predicted. Somewhere around .01 percent of the population means that you probably didn't go to high school with anyone who was "trans" either.<p></p><div class="_2m1qj"><p>But that didn't mean that girls were a monolith, or that we all expressed girlishness in the same way.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>I had been a "tomboy", which basically meant I excelled at sports and preferred the comparatively straightforward company of boys. Friendship with girls so often seemed unnervingly like breaking into a bank vault, all those invisible lasers shooting every which way, triggering alarms of sudden offense.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>But there is no such thing as a "tomboy" anymore, as any teenage girl will tell you. In its place is an endless litany of sexual and gender identities - public, rigid and confining. As sixteen-year-old Riley, a young woman who began identifying as a boy at thirteen, put it to me:</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>“I think being a masculine girl today is hard because they don’t exist. They transition.” Transition, that is—to boys.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Years after my high school graduation, some of us who had dated the cutest boys would come out as gay. Others we might have silently suspected of being gay turned out not to be. None of us then felt pressured to make any identity decisions we couldn’t easily take back.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy—long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are and what they desire. Long before they my have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, "Are you trans?"</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Many of the girls now being cornered into a trans identity might, in an earlier era, have come out as gay. “You’ve got a situation where young lesbians are being pressured if they don’t give into this new idea of what it is to be a lesbian,” prominent gay writer Julia D. Robertson told me. That “new idea” is that lesbians do not exist: girls with more masculine presentations are “really” boys.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Some adolescents today do identify as lesbian, but it’s hard to miss that this identity has considerably less cachet than being trans. Riley told me that fifteen students in her British all-girls' school of five hundred have come out as transgender. "How many girls are lesbian?" I asked her. She thought about it for a moment, and I watched her be surprised by the answer: "None," she said. </p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p><em> - from “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier (Swift Press, 2020)</em></p></div>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-45482385243758469972021-03-22T09:19:00.009+00:002021-03-22T09:22:16.831+00:00To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are <i>By Glenn H. Reynolds
</i><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhOvQ2bZsa8Y7sA7tWLLdF2nuk7Pi3jWSI9JhzQYYEA7FERyMm6DBsAs5wR5RB41tK5xcVVSUXqBzKDDZNBb5oZ4C1PNC28GclaDkdd3i2tfBiEn840zIWyD5uDtTqLlDvcM-fjA3JLi0/s1024/pepe.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhOvQ2bZsa8Y7sA7tWLLdF2nuk7Pi3jWSI9JhzQYYEA7FERyMm6DBsAs5wR5RB41tK5xcVVSUXqBzKDDZNBb5oZ4C1PNC28GclaDkdd3i2tfBiEn840zIWyD5uDtTqLlDvcM-fjA3JLi0/w400-h265/pepe.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Most Americans hate woke politics — and most minorities don’t share “woke” priorities. Indeed, according to pollster David Shor, woke excesses are causing black voters to flee the Democratic Party. Despite endless charges of “racism,” former President Donald Trump took the biggest share of minority voters of any Republican in my lifetime. </div></div><div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Woke tyrants ride high, even so; according to a Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression. Only a tiny minority of consumers <a href="https://href.li/?https://nypost.com/2021/02/25/hasbro-reassures-fans-that-mr-potato-head-isnt-going-anywhere/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">care about Mr. Potato Head’s toxic masculinity</a>, about “Aunt Jemima” as a brand or about the #MeToo aggressions of Pepé Le Pew. Yet corporations, universities and governments rush to placate that minuscule slice of the population, trashing large chunks of our culture in the process. </p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>It’s happening not because anybody voted for it, but because a small but determined and vicious minority is bullying people to go along, relying on cowardice and groupthink to achieve ends that could never happen via majority vote: How do you think Dr. Seuss would have done in a referendum?</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>How does this happen? To some degree, the woke abuse the good nature of Americans. For the most part, Americans want their fellow citizens to be happy. If they hear something makes others unhappy, they generously look to change things.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>And there’s fear. Writing about the goings-on at New York’s Dalton School, <a href="https://href.li/?https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Bari Weiss notes</a> that even parents who think the political correctness has gone too far are afraid to speak out: They think their kids’ shot at the Ivy League could be at risk. And it’s not just Dalton.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Weiss quotes one mother: “I look at the public school, and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another says: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>In his book “Skin in the Game,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes about the surprising ability of small but intransigent minorities — 3 percent to 4 percent is enough — to change the direction of entire societies. He writes: “The most intolerant wins. . . . Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. . . . [I]t will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Does this mean we should be less tolerant of our own minoritarian tyrants? In a word, yes.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>I don’t mean that they should be forced into camps, or even driven from their jobs and from polite society, as the woke are all too willing to do to their opponents. But they need to be deprived of the thing that is most important to their self-image: moral credibility.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p>Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.</p><p>___________________</p></div><div class="_2m1qj"><p><em>Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.</em></p><p><em><a href="https://nypost.com/2021/03/11/to-beat-woke-tyrants-rest-of-us-must-treat-them-like-monsters/">Source</a></em></p></div></div>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-40500382691261438202020-12-25T23:45:00.001+00:002020-12-25T23:45:13.689+00:00Male Feminists Call out Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6VCESP9Ziek" width="320" youtube-src-id="6VCESP9Ziek"></iframe></div><br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBWjYZ9pYYXzka63ZUSmqAlwbd8pscA1tF758vpMe6LLVrQw63IouPEsdinW0btuVfm9MJ7_WajqzbPuEZIUWkUe-EubeeZL25pl-FZMZwlWVD6Vn7sbgj3oTsxIrV9oZv3aKPHTTXo3Q/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="61" data-original-width="527" height="37" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBWjYZ9pYYXzka63ZUSmqAlwbd8pscA1tF758vpMe6LLVrQw63IouPEsdinW0btuVfm9MJ7_WajqzbPuEZIUWkUe-EubeeZL25pl-FZMZwlWVD6Vn7sbgj3oTsxIrV9oZv3aKPHTTXo3Q/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-57453157977401533312020-12-15T18:41:00.008+00:002020-12-15T19:39:00.233+00:00How I Left the Social Justice Cult - Keri Smith<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="312" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uVSgVlZjk8c" width="482" youtube-src-id="uVSgVlZjk8c"></iframe></div><br />This is astonishingly on-point. I've not heard of this woman before but she extremely lucidly illuminates all the stages I went through when I deprogrammed myself from that echo chamber 10 years or so ago. I wish everyone could get to see this.<p></p>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-8503458911974020492020-02-27T06:46:00.001+00:002020-02-27T06:50:05.782+00:00The Privilege Pyramid<div class="col-md-6 col-lg-7 col-xl-8 Xd-inline-block d-md-block float-md-left">
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<span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter"><a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-privilege-pyramid" target="_blank">by <span style="background-color: white; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Eddie Scarry </span></a></span><span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDzouTNZ1nlnTIEOyDZCz0a1KW3ebCTEstWN_LGuwTKiK4X9pFSE5UsyvKev9GyciWFzmASABdCpmN_M2_Pq0BdHP_timHuDS3kQF80SX-NmnsvEh2rfx7E0WqCQGH23VDphV8bJr7StU/s1600/87514708_890690294702501_4725820535185866752_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="818" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDzouTNZ1nlnTIEOyDZCz0a1KW3ebCTEstWN_LGuwTKiK4X9pFSE5UsyvKev9GyciWFzmASABdCpmN_M2_Pq0BdHP_timHuDS3kQF80SX-NmnsvEh2rfx7E0WqCQGH23VDphV8bJr7StU/s640/87514708_890690294702501_4725820535185866752_o.jpg" width="545" /></a></div>
<span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter"><br /></span>
<span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter">P</span>rivilege
is an outgrowth of the social justice movement, that branch of
political activism that asserts there’s an inherent unfairness, and
prejudice, rooted in American life. This unfairness manifests itself in
the oppression, grievance, and victimization of women, nonwhites, gays,
lesbians, and even transsexuals. It’s an ideology that demands that the
country’s very foundations, customs, and norms be reordered to right all
of its wrongs. The goal of the movement isn’t always clear because it
frequently changes, depending on which set of people is deemed to have
suffered adequately and which set is guilty of some form of privilege.
Because the movement operates largely by using shame, it can sometimes
seem that shame is in itself the objective.<br />
<br />
Friedrich Nietzsche directly influenced today’s version of
social justice by asserting that there is an inseparable link between
morality and power. He wrote in his 1887 book <i> On the Genealogy of Morality</i>
that those who wished to overthrow the established hierarchy intended
to invert it so that the bottom would become the top and vice versa.
This wasn’t his prescription for society, but rather a severe criticism
of the tendency to view society’s subordinates as inherently moral.
“Only those who suffer are good,” he wrote with acrimony. “Only the
poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived,
the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved,
salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful,
you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will
also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!”<br />
<br />
Nietzsche was identifying and criticizing the notion that
those at the bottom of civilized societies should be presumed virtuous
and admirable simply by nature of their suffering and disadvantages. But
that concept is precisely what forms the basis of the present social
justice movement. According to the movement and its ideology, the good,
virtuous, and admirable are those who claim to have been aggrieved on
account of their race, gender, or sexuality. Under social justice,
asserting grievance and claiming oppression earns an individual a higher
moral worth than those who are deemed “privileged.”<br />
<br />
Who has the power in America’s culture now? The social
justice movement does, and that power is reinforced by Hollywood, the
news media, academia, and much of the Washington political
establishment. Social justice ideology first spread through the
universities and from there, to the other hubs of American culture. It
went from university academics, who taught it to their students, and
then flowed from them to screenwriters and journalists. What’s seen in
Hollywood entertainment and in national newspapers, on the TV news, and
on the internet becomes a piece of our collective culture. With enough
repetition, it’s then absorbed into the mainstream. This is how social
justice ended up everywhere.<br />
<br />
The ridiculous notion that individuals hold their own
truths, as reflected in the asinine “live your truth” mantra, is a key
feature of the social justice movement’s ideology. It’s linked to what
early 20th-century Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs called “standpoint
epistemology.” Epistemology is the philosophy of understanding human
knowledge. Standpoint epistemology, or standpoint knowledge, holds that
the perspective of a certain person can lend that individual access to a
unique truth that others don’t have and can never obtain. Lukacs
developed the concept in his 1923 work <i>History and Class Consciousness</i>,
in which he refers to a kind of “knowledge” held by people of the
working class that “stands on a higher scientific plane objectively.”<br />
<br />
In essence, depending on an individual’s identity — race,
gender, sexuality, or any combination thereof — he or she will have
access to a truth unobtainable to anyone who doesn’t share that
identity. Furthermore, social justice dictates that these truths must be
acknowledged as unchallengeable and that the “victims” who profess to
hold them are to be regarded with reverence. <br />
In America, the earliest signs of social justice in its
current state began in the 1960s. Postmodern theories and ideas about
class resentments and struggles made their way from Western Europe,
spread among academics, and eventually gave birth to the third-wave
feminist movement, according to New York University professor Michael
Rectenwald. They spun off from there, creating the things that normal
people now dread: political correctness, affirmative action, calls for
reparations, identity politics, civil rights for infinite special
classes of citizens, and on and on.<br />
<br />
Because the social justice ideology, the movement, and its
enforcers operate outside the purview of normal people, they have their
own concepts and terms, some or all of which you might not have heard
before.<br />
<br />
According to Rectenwald, “social justice” as a
well-intentioned remedy to economic, societal problems traces back to
the 1840s, when Italian Catholic Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio
used the term to describe “the glaring lack of an adequate Catholic
response to industrialism and urbanization, with their associated social
and economic symptoms.” It was the “supplanting of guild-based cottage
industries by urban factories [and] the displacement of workers” during
the Industrial Revolution that moved d’Azeglio to state that a certain
social justice was required to remedy the impact it had had on the
laborers.<br />
<br />
During that period, factories and advancements in machinery
disrupted the working classes of Western Europe, just as automation has
done to the Midwest in America today. The technological shift created
economic opportunity for some at devastating expense to others. “The
original social justice,” writes Rectenwald, “amounted to the protection
and mobilization of small charitable and philanthropic organizations to
address (but not eliminate) the recalcitrant social facts of
individual, economic, and political inequality, which had been
exacerbated under the new industrial economy.” <br />
In short, there were private charities that worked to
ameliorate the effects of job displacement and poverty of the industrial
age. That was considered social justice. It stands in contrast to
today’s social justice movement, which is only tangentially concerned
with uplifting the impoverished. It instead trains its energy on
bringing down the “privileged” and reordering the social hierarchy
around identity and grievance. It wants the moral superiority of the
oppressed moved to the top and nothing less.<br />
<br />
Feminists of the 1980s did most of the work in bringing social justice from academia to the rest of America. In her 1986 book <i>The Science Question in Feminism</i>,
influential feminist Sandra Harding writes that “by starting from the
lived realities of women’s lives, we can identify the grounding for a
theory of knowledge that should be the successor to both Enlightenment
and Marxist epistemologies.” In other words, Harding is asserting that
women, simply by nature of their gender, possess a particular knowledge
that should function as the viewpoint by which the world operates. <br />
If standpoint knowledge functions as the brain of social
justice ideology, its heart is intersectionality, an ever-shifting
ranking system that determines who is more aggrieved than the next, who
deserves more deference than the other. It’s a hazy, nonconcrete way of
measuring overlapping identities and their corresponding hardships and
victimhood. The more cross sections of oppressed identities an
individual can claim, the higher his or her status on the
intersectionality scale.<br />
<br />
It gets messy even within the movement. Who can say whether
one person is more aggrieved than another? Is a black woman more or
less oppressed than a white gay man? Is a Latino man more or less
privileged than a Palestinian transgender woman? Is a Native American
man more or less aggrieved than a lesbian Asian woman? It’s all worked
out through a type of never-ending oppression Olympics, a competition
for the title of Most Aggrieved. The judges are the social justice
enforcers, the culture fascists in academia, in Hollywood, in the news
media, and in political Washington. <br />
Black feminist author Gloria Watkins, better known by her
pen name "bell hooks," helped usher in the intersectionality ranking
system in her 1984 book <i>Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center</i>, a
critique of the feminist movement of the 1960s. In that book, she
argues that the movement overlooked struggles against forms of
oppression that fall outside of gender, and outside of white women in
particular. She writes, “Within society, all forms of oppression are
supported by traditional Western thinking. ... Sexist oppression is of
primary importance … [because] it is the practice of domination most
people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms
of group oppression exist.” She continues, “Since all forms of
oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by
similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be
eradicated while the others remain intact.”<br />
<br />
Hooks maintains that the most discussed grievance of the
time, the lack of women’s sexual and economic independence, was only the
first step in addressing other forms of oppression not yet acknowledged
by society. That observation was a prescient prediction of the
situation in present-day America, with its bottomless well of grievance
and oppression.<br />
<br />
The most up-to-date idea of privilege, social justice
theory’s ultimate adversary, was pushed into the mainstream by Peggy
McIntosh, who is famous for her 1988 essay, <i>White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies</i>.
The essay builds on 1960s feminism but ventures into race by critiquing
the privilege of white people in everyday life. Without ever using the
phrase, McIntosh talks about the hierarchy of intersectionality. She
refers to it instead as “interlocking oppressions.” And without ever
using the phrase, she introduces social justice ideology’s most potent
weapon — the modern-day struggle session: the command to “check your
privilege” in front of the masses.<br />
<br />
“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package
of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about
which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” she writes. “White privilege
is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions,
assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes,
compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.” <br />
She goes on to give 46 examples of white privilege she
personally enjoys, an exercise that college students are now instructed
to replicate at universities all over the country. (I personally went
through it during a mandatory freshman-level course.)<br />
<br />
Among McIntosh’s examples of her white privilege are: “I
can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be
neutral or pleasant to me”; “I can go shopping alone most of the time,
fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store
detectives”; and, “Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can
count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am
financially reliable.”<br />
<br />
McIntosh’s “knapsack of special provisions” might have
simply served as an innocuous set of observations about unrecognized
prejudices if it weren’t for the second half of her essay. That part
takes a maniacal nosedive and suggests that those who possess privilege
feel a sense of shame and a sense of responsibility to atone for
something they had no say in.<br />
<br />
“A man’s sex provides advantage for him whether or not he
approves of the way in which dominance has been conferred on his group,”
McIntosh writes. “A ‘white’ skin in the United States opens many doors
for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been
conferred on us.” She says that “individual acts can palliate, but
cannot end” the cycle. “To redesign social systems,” she puts forth, “we
need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.”<br />
<br />
<i>To redesign social systems. </i>That’s the entire purpose of the social justice movement. It’s to remake society from top to bottom.<br />
<br />
McIntosh concludes her essay by denouncing the “myth of
meritocracy,” which she says is kept alive by “obliviousness about white
advantage [and] obliviousness about male advantage” and is “kept
strongly inculturated in the United States.”<br />
<br />
This is social justice. It’s an ideology that says the
America you understand today is fundamentally broken and that full
equality is unobtainable without a complete overhaul of its current
order and a total abandonment of what McIntosh called the “myth of
meritocracy.” Social justice maintains that there is no meritocracy,
only identity, oppression, and privilege. Those assumed to hold an
advantage due to their race, gender, or sexuality must submit to the
aggrieved in accordance with the new intersectionality hierarchy.<br />
<br />
“Politics,” says Rectenwald, “is reduced by social justice
warriors to a series of … Facebook statuses, tweets, kneel-downs during
the singing of the U.S. national anthem, and so forth.” This is called
“virtue signaling” — overt gestures that communicate adherence to the
movement and its ideology. <br />
Social justice is centered on who can claim the highest
form of oppression, grievance, and victimhood at any given moment. It’s
an endless competition in claiming to have been the most exploited, most
subordinated, and most abused.<br />
<br />
Social justice and its enforcers have created an
ever-evolving, never-satisfied new class of people: the victims of
privilege, who in turn become the privileged by victimization. They are
our privileged victims.<br />
<br />
--------<br />
<br />
<i>Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the </i>Washington Examiner <i> and the author of </i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Privileged-Victims-Americas-Fascists-Hijacked/dp/1642931454" target="_blank">Privileged Victims: How America's Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People</a> <i>, from which this essay is adapted.</i></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-55943404656811578832019-10-27T13:05:00.001+00:002019-10-27T13:05:26.339+00:00Sex & Sensibilities<img alt="image" class="" googl="true" src="https://66.media.tumblr.com/88df84f7b5a08391b269168c5af43e5b/663e9db274bcbf22-c2/s540x810/4c42c0ac2c56ba8b84aef8ad1dca57f2b765a0ee.png" /><br />
<br />
I’ve just about made it through Jane Austen’s <i>Pride & Prejudice</i>,
at long last, as it’s been on my bucket list for awhile. It has
arguably the greatest opening line of any novel, which has always made
me want to continue with it, but apart from the odd nice observation or
turn of phrase here and there, it’s been a bit of a slog.<br />
<br />
I’ve
been trying to withhold judgement or limit my expectations, since it’s a
relatively ‘early’ novel (1813), but as with another highly regarded
book from roughly the same period, <i>Wuthering Heights</i> (1847), I
found it to be extremely limited in accomplishment and amateurish in
execution: with both books I had the problem several times of not
knowing who was talking to who on the page, which would seem to me a
very elementary mistake to make when writing a novel. And then realizing
this was taking place going on a hundred years after <i>Gulliver’s Travels</i>, which suffers from none of these deficiencies.<br />
<br />
Most
of all it’s been making me think about the differences between male and
female art - Austen, after all, is perhaps the highest regarded female
author there is, and especially in Britain is always mandatorily listed
in the ‘top tens’ of great writers. <br />
<br />
But why? Her strengths
are few - mostly just an ear for, and wry observation of, middle-class
life and gossip. Whereas, in terms of invention, originality,
drama, plot, tension, sustained humour, concision, and most of all
scope, she is nothing at all to write home about. <br />
<br />
Nothing exists for her outside the comfortable drawing rooms and pleasantly-kept gardens of her world. The book was written - <i>and set</i>
- during a time of enormous upheaval and drama and death - the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars - and yet the only flicker of
acknowledgement of this is the occasional mentions of the young army
officers, newly stationed in town, who are of interest <i>only as potential marriage prospects.</i>
There is an absolute absence of curiosity about the wider ramifications
of the war, the political changes daily taking place, about the horror
those men are heading to or coming from - let alone the experiences of
the ordinary footsoldiers. Her vision is microscopic: all that matters
to her are the internal frettings of a woman in search of a marriage.<br />
<br />
Austen made light of this herself, even writing of one character. <i>“without thinking highly either of men </i>or <i>of matrimony, marriage had always been her object”</i>.
But though Austen recognizes how deeply cringey and unpleasant this is,
her avatar in the book, Elizabeth, is shown to be no different from the
rest of the womanfolk: when the protagonist of <i>Pride & Prejudice</i>
improbably ends up at the country home of her love interest Mr Darcy,
the long, loving descriptions of the grounds and the estate, the
decoration of the house, even the furniture, are all an integral part of
the changeover of her feelings, all plus points and incentives on the
growing list of advantages to bag him. Essentially saying ‘<i>soon, all this will be yours’</i>.<br />
<br />
This
is another profound difference between the sexes, for if a man - then
or now - was writing about a woman he had met, and began listing all her
wealth and shiny objects, about how she has a swimming pool that he
looks forward to swimming in every day once they are married and she’s
taking care of his every want and whim forever…. everybody, woman <i>or </i>man,
would simply think him a heartless cad or a ridiculous gigolo. The idea
that such material covetousness would be a fundamental part of his
‘love’ for her would be unthinkable in any sympathetic male character.
It would not, in fact, be recognized as ‘love’ at all. And yet this
fetishization of wealth and/or status is still the rule for
female-written women characters in practically every ‘Romance’ novel
there is, from Jane Austen right up to <i>50 Shades Of Grey</i>.<br />
<br />
To
return to my original point: Austen is widely held to be the greatest
female author, and yet her objective accomplishments are few. In this
she illustrates in microcosm a general disparity between the sexes in
ambition and achievement and, well… genius. <br />
<br />
For example, in
literature there is no female equivalent to Shakespeare, Joyce, Tolstoy,
Dickens, Milton….. There’s no female Tolkien - a woman spending decades
building a world for which she wrote dictionaries in an invented
language and long books of political history and mythology before even
publishing a word. The nearest female equivalent would probably be J.K.
Rowling, a mediocre and derivative hack who just happened to be in the
right place at the right time. The former is the product of an
all-consuming obsession, a drive to break new ground no-one has walked
before, to do what previously would have been thought to be impossible.
The latter is a nice, safe, part-time hobby that paid well.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, and to be fair, there’s no male equivalent I can think of to, say,
Anaïs Nin, but then she herself is perhaps the most extreme example of the solipsism I’m addressing: <i>the subject of almost all famous female writers is the internal feelings of a single woman.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
This lack of vision, the lack of ability or inclination to rise up above and <i>out </i>of
oneself, attempting to reach far beyond one’s grasp, is largely why
there are no great female composers - no female Bach, or Mozart, or
Debussy or Mahler or Beethoven or Wagner or Stravinsky or so many
others. Even though all you need to write a symphony is some paper, a
pen and a piano, the middle class women of the 19th century, who had
more free time and piano lessons than anybody else alive, came up with
precisely nothing, not one orchestral work of any note.<br />
<br />
I already
(unintentionally) made a lot of people angry by pointing out awhile back
the
incontrovertible
fact that there are no great all-female rock & roll bands - yes, a
few good little cult acts like The Slits or The Dixies Chicks or The
Go-Gos or whoever, but none that achieved anything like the universally
recognized (and recognizable) body of work of The Beatles, The Stones,
Black Sabbath, The Clash, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Sex Pistols, The
Smiths, R.E.M., U2, etcetera etcetera etcetera… <br />
<br />
Now, part of
that is simply because of how hard it is to keep an all-girl band
together, when at least half the band will want to quit and become a
mother instead within the first 5 years. But it’s also just because of
the lack of shared technical excellence and overwhelming drive to
eclipse everything by <i>everybody </i>(male or female) that has come
before them. There ARE very important female figures in the history of
rock & roll, like Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Carole
King, Nina Simone, Laurie Anderson and others: my point has always been
simply that either they worked alone, or almost 100% exclusively with
men. Any great female singer you can think of, the entire musical
architecture built around and supporting her singing was constructed
pretty much exclusively by fellas. Just as in every other medium.<br />
<br />
Even female magicians: right now I’m hooked on watching <i>Penn & Teller’s Fool Us,</i>
and every time a woman appears onstage, I instantly know what I’m going
to see: an old trick, performed at an amateur level, dressed up in an
appealing and well-thought out presentation.
The focus is always much more on the colours, the clothes, the
backdrops, the character she is playing, rather than actual technical
ability.
The female magician simply refuses to spend decades sitting in front of
a mirror practising with cards, or cups and balls, at the expense of
all else, or obsessively designing and building device after device
after device to reach towards some new standard of greatness. <br />
<br />
And that’s a<i> perfectly sensible position to have</i>
- to want a well-rounded, pleasant life instead of one of mania and
single-minded obsession. But that’s also why no woman got to the North
Pole, or the top of Everest, or up in an aeroplane, or down to the
bottom of the sea, until long after the first man bit the bullet and
made the trip.Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-69484988338793337572019-09-18T16:38:00.002+01:002019-09-18T16:39:21.001+01:00Julia Hartley-Brewer meets Douglas Murray<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<br />
The most refreshingly sane political conversation you will see all year.Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-37772600441706488512019-09-11T22:47:00.000+01:002019-09-11T23:02:16.887+01:00RIP Daniel Johnston<div class="fake">
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<br />
I’ve just now found out that the Vincent Van Gogh of underground rock & roll, the late great Daniel Johnston, has died, apparently of a heart attack.</div>
<br />
The man had been a grotesque physical and mental wreck for decades, and yet it somehow still seems very sudden and unexpected.<br />
<br />
He first came to public attention in the early 1990s, at the height of grunge,
and in the middle of all that whining, self-pitying and mumbling angst,
Johnston stood out as the real deal, a genuinely schizophrenic,
regularly institutionalized tortured poet struggling to cope with the
voices in his head whilst also writing the most beautiful, wide-eyed,
open-hearted, painfully honest songs perhaps ever penned, <i>and </i>drawing
endless pictures of an Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape, peopled with
superheroes and impossible creatures of his own invention. <br />
<br />
The musical well - along with his singing voice - dried up in his final couple of
decades, most likely because of all the very heavy medication and just
plain old physical deterioration, but the songs he recorded at home in
anonymity throughout the 80s are now rightfully treasured among those
who know as scratchy classics comparable to all the great, mysterious blues
recordings from the 1920s and 30s: unique historical recordings of an
authentic American artistic voice.<br />
<br />
There’s a lot to his story,
too much to try go into here, but his music has been a touchstone of
truth in my life, and it means a great deal to me that he existed and
made what he made. No-one ever sung truer. <br />
<br />
So rest in peace, Daniel, and thank you.<br />
<br />
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<br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-41400694179858112772019-04-22T11:44:00.002+01:002019-04-22T11:47:22.747+01:00Jordan Peterson explains the Post-Modernism/ Neo-Marxism connection to Slavoj Žižek <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
People always go after Peterson for his lumping these two, seemingly disparate movements together, but this is the best and simplest stating of his position I’ve seen.</div>
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Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-3623925224795949572019-03-26T07:55:00.002+00:002019-03-26T08:08:44.967+00:00RIP Scott Walker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
So I’ve just found out that Scott Walker, one of the greatest, most
influential, and uncompromising artists in all of pop music, has died at
the age of 76. I guess that’s a decent innings but it still feels a
blow, and too soon. It felt like he still had a lot more in him.<br />
<br />
The
newspaper obituaries all seem to be dwelling on his early mainstream
success back in the 1960s with the Walker Brothers, with hits like ‘Make
It Easy On Yourself’, ‘My Ship Is Coming In’, and especially the
utterly magnificent ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’:<br />
<br />
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<br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
And that's to be expected, but the truth is, his most important work came later, with a long
solo career that paid no attention at all to chart success or sales, or
his movie star good looks, but instead fiercely followed his own
obsessive, idiosyncratic avant-garde path into unknown realms, with
deeply serious work that has no real contemporaries or precedent in the
English speaking music world, and more easily discerned roots in French
and German theatre and cabaret, as well as Russian writers of the past.<br />
<br />
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<br />
To me, more
than anything, he resembles one of the great French film
directors, like Bresson, or Cocteau, or Renoir, if they had instead chosen to
work only in song. And like those great artists, the best of what he
made will never age or go out of fashion, but still be encountered with
new eyes and treasured a hundred years from now.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zIJzTWk6bSw/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zIJzTWk6bSw?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-78668961875955693992019-03-11T19:05:00.000+00:002019-03-11T19:06:08.349+00:00Count Dankula Live Stand-Up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
This is 2019 comedy gold.</div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZPrCkxGEKg8/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZPrCkxGEKg8?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-12730820300368323562019-01-23T08:50:00.002+00:002019-01-23T08:51:39.242+00:00That idiotic Gillette ad may have turned the tide on ‘toxic masculinity’<div class="article-wrapper left-column clearfix standard" id="article-wrapper">
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<div id="author-byline">
<div class="byline">
By <a class="karol-markowicz" href="https://nypost.com/2019/01/20/that-idiotic-gillette-ad-may-have-turned-the-tide-on-toxic-masculinity/" target="_blank">Karol Markowicz</a></div>
<div class="byline">
<br /></div>
Razor blade commercials aren’t supposed to make national headlines,
but these aren’t ordinary times. Last week’s Gillette commercial <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/01/15/gillettes-controversial-new-ad-targets-toxic-masculinity/">playing on the #MeToo movement</a> became the latest piece of corporate messaging to berate and belittle men.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
The commercial implored men to “be better,” while juxtaposing scenes
of boys wrestling at a cookout, bullies menacingly chasing a boy down
the street, men catcalling women and making lewd jokes and generally
acting like brutes.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Many Americans were angry, not least men, whom the commercial framed as universal aggressors and rapists.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Fans claimed that those who were upset by the Gillette ad should be
asking themselves why. The implication was that, if you didn’t like
being lectured by a company trying to sell you razors, it must mean that
you are likely the bully and sexual assaulter the ad makers had in mind
when they made the commercial.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Well, I’m a woman, and I hated the commercial, because I’m tired of
the boy-bashing that has become all too common on our screens and in our
world.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
“It’s just an ad!” doesn’t fly. Would women shrug off “just an ad”
that treated femininity as something inherently bad and in need of
modification? They wouldn’t. Women accept far less criticism from
advertisements than men do.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
In 2015, a company called Protein World released an ad for a diet
supplement featuring a fit model in a bikini and the words: “Are You
Beach Body Ready?” The backlash was swift. The ad was defaced again and
again in the NYC subways, and the city of London went so far as to ban
“body-shaming” ads on the Underground.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
If there was a moment in time when women collectively decided that
they would no longer stand for being body-shamed, that was it.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Similarly, the response to the Gillette ad feels like a dam breaking. This might be the moment when men have finally had enough.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Men are constantly barraged with criticism. “Men are the worst” has
gotten old. The word masculinity is only preceded by the word “toxic”
these days.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Meanwhile, men have been on a downward trajectory for some time now.
Fewer men go to college, more men commit suicide, more men live at home
with their parents well into adulthood.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Men take the most dangerous jobs, they fight and die in our wars, yet
they are told nonstop that they are terrible, and the future isn’t for
them. They are expected to shrug it off because, well, they are men.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
If men are traditionally stoic and impervious to criticism, and we
like them that way, then the idea that men can take the shots simply
because they are strong and manly flies in the face of the commercial —
which bashes male stoicism.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
Gillette implores men to be better because kids are watching. Yes,
kids are watching men portrayed as bumbling idiots in so many ads and as
violent misogynists in this one.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
The worst part of the commercial is the group of men standing in a
row over their grills robotically repeating “Boys will be boys.” The
message is that men are all the same. They don’t think for themselves,
and they excuse bad behavior in each other. They’re grilling just like
your husband, father, brother — doing this activity they enjoy while
simultaneously creating bad men out of their sons.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
“We expected debate,” Pankaj Bhalla, Gillette’s North America brand director, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/14/business/gillette-masculinity-ad/index.html">told CNN Business</a>. “Actually, a discussion is necessary. If we don’t discuss and don’t talk about it, I don’t think real change will happen.”<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
No, what we need is to stop insulting men. We can’t elevate women by
knocking men down. Some men will nod along with ads that insult them,
but, in general, these companies are offending men and doing damage to
their own stated cause. On the Gillette YouTube channel, the commercial
has garnered more than double the number of “dislikes” than “likes.”<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
This wasn’t a win for the company.<br />
<br />
<div class="byline">
</div>
“Isn’t it time we stopped excusing bad behavior?” Gillette asked in
the tweet introducing the commercial. Yes, it is. And that includes the
bad behavior of corporate salesmen treating half of the population as
monsters, all to sell a product targeted at precisely that segment of
Americans.<br />
<div class="byline">
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Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-63131552542563490582019-01-21T20:38:00.001+00:002019-01-21T20:38:55.809+00:00What is a man? A response to Gillette<div style="text-align: left;">
A company puts their money where their mouth is and creates a positive response ad to Gillette’s. Beautiful.</div>
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Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-63869879522714493072019-01-18T20:47:00.001+00:002019-01-18T21:15:28.812+00:00The Best A Man Can Expect<br />
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<br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-28571900768409665812019-01-06T12:28:00.001+00:002019-01-06T12:28:38.660+00:00At Last Someone Gets Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-68815111125692553712019-01-05T11:56:00.000+00:002019-01-05T11:56:00.343+00:00Louis CK vs the new pearl-clutchers<div class="post_body">
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<img alt="Louis CK vs the new pearl-clutchers" class="fullWidth bMar10 hidden-sm" googl="true" height="240" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600px, 800px" src="https://media.spiked-online.com/website/images/2019/01/02213112/louis-ck-800x480.jpg" srcset="https://media.spiked-online.com/website/images/2019/01/02213112/louis-ck-600x338.jpg 600w,
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<i>by Andrew Doyle</i><br />
<i></i><br />
There is very little point in attempting to explain a
joke. A sense of humour isn’t a universal quality, and in any case is
wholly dependent on subjective taste. Those who find themselves unamused
are unlikely to change their minds once a routine has been
systematically deconstructed. It’s all about the timing. <br />
<br />
A <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DR8Nc3x_TkF4&t=YjkxYjE2NWRlNDg3YTE5NzczMmQ2Y2UzMjkxZWM1ZWRlZmIyZjMyZSxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">recording of Louis CK’s work-in-progress show</a>
at the Governor’s Comedy Club in New York was leaked last week, and has
been subject to the sort of moralistic scrutiny that now passes for <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiked-online.com%2Ftag%2Fcomedy%2F&t=ZTdlMWU5ZThlNjJkM2NkNGJiMmMzN2E5NzliZDgxZWIyMDQyZjVjNCxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">comedy</a>
criticism. ‘Louis CK condemned after leaked audio shows him ranting
about gender pronouns and school shooting survivors’, ran a headline in
the <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Farts-entertainment%2Fcomedy%2Fnews%2Flouis-ck-parkland-shooting-audio-gender-pronouns-high-school-a8705016.html&t=YWI3N2MyYzdmODY5MDNiYWY2YWU1NThhZjg1Y2M5NWFiM2U4NDEyYSxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Independent</a>. ‘Louis CK’s rant shows abusers are still casting themselves as victims’, railed the <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2019%2Fjan%2F01%2Flouis-ck-abusers-victims-metoo&t=ZWQ0NDA2YzE5ODBjN2RhYWIzMDg1NWJlZDc5NjE2ODBiNTQxNTRjNSxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Guardian</a>, characterising him as a man ‘bubbling with wrath’. According to the <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-6544853%2FLouis-CK-said-Asians-women-really-big-c-his.html&t=YjY3MDFhZTAxMDc4NzY1MTliYTdkNmM3Mjc3NzYzMzE3NmM4NGZmMixRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Daily Mail</a>, he ‘attacked Asians’ with his ‘racist stand-up set’.<br />
<br />
Then there was the predictable pearl-clutching on social media. ‘You
know what’s the worst, most boring kind of comedy?’, wrote comedian <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FAndyRichter%2Fstatus%2F1079649964727328768&t=MjNjMzg5MzgyYjM4M2UyNWFiNjM4MzZjYzI2NDJhN2M5ZWFhNjRmNixRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Andy Richter</a>.
‘The kind where older white men are angry that older white men can’t do
or say whatever the fuck they want any more.’ According to filmmaker
and amateur psychologist <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FJuddApatow%2Fstatus%2F1079755419965374467&t=MjE1NWU5MDAzYTVlN2I1NDJjNDE2MTExN2ZkMGQ2ODg4ZDhjZjIwMyxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Judd Apatow</a>, ‘Louis CK is all fear and bitterness now. He can’t look inward.’ Nuance was jettisoned wholesale by actor <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FEllenBarkin%2Fstatus%2F1080272957153468417&t=MjE1NWJlNTllODZjYTY2YzY3ZTlhOTY5MzFmYzYyMWY2ZDg1YjU2YyxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Ellen Barkin</a>, who stated that ‘Louis CK is a sociopath and serial predator’ who she hopes ‘gets raped’ and ‘shot at’.<br />
<br />
It goes without saying that CK’s critics are entitled to their
opinions, however unhinged. He is likewise within his right to ignore or
ridicule the backlash. As <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Frickygervais%2Fstatus%2F1079784120945967104&t=ZGZmZjMxOTE2MjRmMTQ5NzdjNmIxNTcyNjg0ZmY3NzBkMTNmNThjMSxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Ricky Gervais</a>
has pointed out, the reactionary response of ‘You can’t joke about
anything anymore’ is simply untrue. The controversy over CK’s set is
evidence enough that some comedians still refuse to self-censor,
although there is little doubt that a less established performer would
risk career suicide for a similar routine.<br />
<br />
Those who have defended CK have, inevitably, been accused of being
‘outraged by the outrage’, but this strikes me as an unconvincing
assessment of the situation, one possibly adopted in an effort to
undermine an alternative point of view through the imputation of
hypocrisy. If anything, CK’s defenders seem genuinely weary at having to
reiterate what we all know already: he is a comedian who was telling
jokes. Such an excruciatingly obvious statement wouldn’t be necessary at
all were it not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of our news
outlets appear to have ignored this reality, wilfully or otherwise.<br />
<br />
To my mind, this is the most significant aspect of this story. I may
not be outraged by the outrage, but I am fascinated by the way in which
the mainstream press seems determined to promote a narrative that very
few will find convincing. Even those of us who didn’t consider the
routine funny are likely to understand why others might, because only
the irredeemably solipsistic believe that their own sense of humour is
the benchmark against which all comedy should be measured.<br />
<br />
The other curious aspect of the media coverage is the insistence that
comedy should be taken at face value. Few who listen to the recording
will believe that CK is tickled by the notion of mass murder, yet this
is how his set has been perceived by the vocal minority. ‘I would call
it a comedy set’, writes Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, ‘but
that would give it a credence it doesn’t deserve’. Note the assumption
of bad faith in this interpretation. Sturges presumes the worst of CK,
and so feels confident in denying that a comedy routine performed in a
comedy club to gales of laughter can even be classified as comedy at
all.<br />
<br />
It would seem that some no longer trust CK as a performer, following a number of women <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F11%2F09%2Farts%2Ftelevision%2Flouis-ck-sexual-misconduct.html&t=ZGNiMjZiYTNhM2VhODRjNzdiYzA1YWQzNjQwZTAwMmVmOGNkNmQxMyxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">accusing him of sexual misconduct</a> in 2017. Although the accounts suggest that the acts were consensual, CK’s status as a villain of the <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiked-online.com%2Ftag%2Fmetoo%2F&t=NDg5ZWY0YjQxZjU2NWUzZjE0MTY0M2I5MGJmZTEyMjMwN2VlOTI4OCxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">#MeToo</a>
era now means that his material is being reassessed through a process
of cod-psychological guesswork. ‘It is possible that this is a
calculated career move’, writes Sturges, ‘to restyle himself as a
right-wing hatemonger expostulating about snowflakes, virtue-signallers
and ethnic minorities… A more likely story is that this is just a howl
of self-pity.’ But anyone with the slightest familiarity with CK will
know that this new set is entirely consistent with his previous work.
Writer <a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fjessesingal%2Fstatus%2F1079840449932730368&t=YTM5ZDg3NmY5NWVjNzQyNTFjMzk3MjhiZGRiNzc0NTc4MGM1MjUxYyxRUmpuSmgzQg%3D%3D&b=t%3AXm81bQRJJpCMUbDj0oBvxQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminismisahatemovement.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F181735941018%2Flouis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers&m=1" target="_blank">Jesse Singal</a>
made the point by quoting one of CK’s lines from 2008: ‘I would happily
blow 20 guys in an alley with bleeding dicks so I could get AIDS and
then fuck a deer and kill it with my AIDS.’<br />
<br />
CK has always tested the limits of his audience’s tolerance, and from
listening to the leaked audio it is clear that even when his material
is still in the developmental stage, his timing, turn of phrase and
impeccable stagecraft provoke many of us to laughter in spite of our
sensibilities. This is also why when his jokes are reported in the
press, divorced from the context of performance, they can seem
needlessly cruel. His style hasn’t changed, it’s just that his critics
have decided to presuppose a malicious underlying motive. If Louis CK
does have a motive, it is surely the standard one that drives all
comedy. Simply put, he wants to make us laugh. <br />
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<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/01/03/louis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers/" target="_blank">https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/01/03/louis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers/</a>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-67548233820281216262018-12-09T22:36:00.002+00:002018-12-09T22:40:16.983+00:00Kirsten Gillibrand's worldview only makes sense if you understand how feminists think<div class="col-md-6 col-lg-7 col-xl-8 Xd-inline-block d-md-block float-md-left">
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<span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter"><i><a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/sen-kirsten-gillibrands-feminist-worldview-makes-no-sense" target="_blank">by Suzanne Venker</a></i></span><br />
<span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter"><br /></span>
<span class="ArticlePage-articleBody-firstLetter">T</span>ucker Carlson asked Heather Mac Donald a <a data-cms-ai="0" href="https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/06/tucker-gillibrand-female-intersectional/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=atdailycaller" target="_blank">perfectly reasonable question</a>
this week: "Why would a group, any group, want to poison the
relationship between women and men, which is the building block of
everything that's good in the world?"<br />
<br />
The segment was about this Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., tweet: <br />
<br />
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
<i>Our future is: <br /><br />Female<br />Intersectional <br />Powered by our belief in one another.<br /><br />And we’re just getting started.</i></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand)
<a data-cms-ai="0" href="https://twitter.com/SenGillibrand/status/1070106980298186753?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 5, 2018</a>
</blockquote>
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<div style="float: left; margin-right: 2em;">
</div>
<br />
To the average person who's busy living their life,
this worldview doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that feminism,
which bills itself as merely promoting sexual equality (a phrase that
sounds so utterly innocuous but isn't), could be so destructive that it
rips relationships, families, and society apart.<br />
<br />
But that's exactly what it does. In response to Carlson's
question about why any group would do this, Mac Donald said, "Because
[feminists] would rather hate."<br />
<br />
Bingo.<br />
<br />
Any serious study of feminism reveals startling truths and
commonalities among its leaders that have led them all to the same
place: a hatred of men and marriage. The vast majority had highly
dysfunctional upbringings, fraught with emotional abuse or neglect. Many
had mothers who resented their children or their husbands ( <a data-cms-ai="0" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.suzannevenker.com/metoo/women-wanted-to-stand-on-their-own-two-feet-and-now-those-feet-are-starting-to-hurt/&source=gmail&ust=1544283212239000&usg=AFQjCNEMAnbn9mCZ4bckg7crqWN5oQonIQ" href="https://www.suzannevenker.com/metoo/women-wanted-to-stand-on-their-own-two-feet-and-now-those-feet-are-starting-to-hurt/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">here's a post</a> I just wrote about that very thing) and feminists internalized this dysfunction as children.<br />
<br />
Here’s a direct quote from Gloria Steinem: “I didn’t
understand the degree to which my response has been magnetized by things
that had happened to me before, and I think that realization came out
of being depressed.”<br />
<br />
When women like Steinem grew up, they displaced their pain
onto society. They concluded that their mothers weren’t to blame for
their problems and decided that if society had functioned the way it's
supposed to (with men and women as "equal," or interchangeable) their
mothers would have been happy. Harboring this attitude allows feminists
to resent their mothers less and hate men and society more.<br />
<br />
In other words, once you put their lives into context, the
politics that drive feminists make sense. Feminists hate anything that
smacks of tradition, especially traditional gender roles, since that
family structure reminds them of their past, which they associate with
depression and dysfunction. Ergo, they're on a mission to destroy
traditional society and to convince everyone else that this country is
bad and must be changed.<br />
<br />
"Feminism is really at odds with the civilizational legacy we've inherited," adds Mac Donald. <br />
Mac Donald concedes this sounds hyperbolic; but those of us
who follow feminists very closely know it is not. Feminists' entire
worldview about men, sex, work, marriage, motherhood, and politics is
filtered through a hateful lens, and they begin this destructive message
in universities, when young women are still impressionable and forming
their own ideas.<br />
<br />
It is calculated, and it is evil. Indeed, feminists are a
hate group. The evidence is all around us, but you have to pay
attention. Just the other day <a data-cms-ai="0" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DOEPsqFLhHBc%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&source=gmail&ust=1544283212239000&usg=AFQjCNF_jbDSaNqHGJmXpGPHENV11gJYFA" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEPsqFLhHBc&feature=youtu.be" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank">Hannah Gadsby gave a pathetic speech</a> for "Women in Entertainment" where she jokingly claims that even good men aren't good.<br />
<br />
The dissident feminist <u><a data-cms-ai="0" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DE4PIhXqep38%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&source=gmail&ust=1544283212239000&usg=AFQjCNGs27S6naF5XdOKAyn9T9fOZZjw3g" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4PIhXqep38&feature=youtu.be" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Camille Paglia goes so far as to call feminists "literally insane</a></u>"
in a conversation with Jordan Peterson, who then says (which goes back
to my point about feminists' upbringing) that women whose relationship
with men "has been seriously pathologized can't distinguish between male
authority and competence and male tyrannical power." He adds, "They
fail to differentiate because all they see is the oppressive male."<br />
<br />
In other words, giving feminists power is the equivalent of
giving the enemy a hand grenade. This group will never be satisfied
until, as Gillibrand wrote, "the future is female."<br />
<br />
Wake up to what feminists are doing. Stop letting
yourselves be bullied. If you don't, they will get what they want. And
trust me, It won't be pretty.<br />
<br />
-------------------------------------<br />
<i>Suzanne Venker (<a data-cms-ai="0" href="https://twitter.com/suzannevenker" target="_blank">@SuzanneVenker</a>)
is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential
blog. She is an author, speaker and cultural critic known as “The
Feminist Fixer.” She has authored several books to help women win with
men in life and in love. Her most recent, The Alpha Female’s Guide to
Men & Marriage, was published in February 2017. Suzanne’s website is
<a data-cms-ai="0" href="https://www.suzannevenker.com/" target="_blank">www.suzannevenker.com.</a></i></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-75502447321103088522018-08-20T16:31:00.000+01:002018-08-20T16:31:38.083+01:00Why It’s Not OK to Hate Menby <a href="https://quillette.com/author/tim-lott/" title="All posts by Tim Lott">Tim Lott</a><br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
Is it okay to hate women? Obviously not. It’s not only stupid and
immoral but impractical given how many of them there are and the marked
differences between each and every one of them. Is it okay to hate men,
then? Again, obviously not, for the same reasons. Except – it’s not so
obvious. Because such sentiments are again entering the mainstream.<br />
<br />
I say ‘again’, since misandry – the unapologetic hatred of men as an
undifferentiated group – is nothing new. Radical feminists like Andrea
Dworkin and Valerie Solanis (founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men
and shooter of Andy Warhol) were the most famous man-haters in the
1970s, but were pretty much disavowed at the time by many more
mainstream feminists and later by third wave feminists. Misandry went
out of fashion during the 1980s and the idea that feminists were all
‘lesbians and man haters’ was rightly ridiculed.<br />
<br />
Now it’s back – and much closer to the mainstream than it was 50
years ago. Despite all the remarkable advances we have made in gender
equality, the idea that all men are the enemy of all women has been
given a new lease of life, helped by the disgrace of Harvey Weinstein,
the rise Donald Trump and the successes of the #metoo and #timesup
movements.<br />
<br />
Understandable though this hatred may be as an emotional reaction, it
is shocking – at least for a man – to see it in cold print. The highest
profile attack came from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.9d387cee77af">Susan Danuta Walters</a> in the <em>Washington Post</em>
earlier this year, who says, in a piece titled, ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men’
that, far from being irrational, it “seems logical to hate men.”<br />
<br />
<br />
If this were a lone voice, one could dismiss it as a fringe point of view. But it isn’t.<br />
“You can’t hate all men can you? Actually I can,” writes <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/09/suzanne-moore-why-i-was-wrong-about-men">Suzanne Moore</a>, a British feminist, in the <em>New Statesman</em>
in 2016. “As a class, I hate men.” Men are not a class but this doesn’t
deter Moore from continuing her peroration. “I think any intelligent
woman hates men,” she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in
the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on – #yesallmen.<br />
Meanwhile, in ‘The Cut’ section of the <em>New York</em> magazine, <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/ask-polly-i-hate-men.html">a member of the public</a>
writing in complains to the ‘agony aunt’ – the journalist Heather
Havrilesky – that she “hates men” and is in danger of becoming a “cranky
old bitch”. Heather suggests in reply that she simply embrace her inner
bitch. “Most men are terrible,” she says. “Most men are shit.”<br />
<br />
In addition, two articles on <em>Medium</em> – not quite as mainstream as <em>New York</em> magazine, the <em>Washington Post</em>, and the <em>New Statesman</em>,
but certainly not fringe – echo the theme. Turns out, it’s not only
(self-defined) man-hating women who have turned towards hate as a
response to gender inequality. So have some men – like <a href="https://medium.com/@anthoknees/women-have-a-right-to-hate-men-df41b4de3842">Anthony James Williams</a> who writes in <em>Medium</em> that, “Women don’t have to like us, and history shows us that they have a right to hate us.”<br />
<br />
In the charmingly titled ‘When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do? <a href="https://medium.com/@anthoknees/women-have-a-right-to-hate-men-df41b4de3842">Ijeoma Oluo</a> – the mother of two boys, God help them – writes,<br />
<blockquote>
This society is doing everything it can to create
rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists. This society is
broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist,
hetero-cisnormative) trash. This entire patriarchal society is
responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.</blockquote>
If reading such hatred is exhausting, actually generating it must be
even more so. I suspect hate is a young person’s game (although Danuta
Walkers and Moore are not exactly spring chickens). It is tempting to
shrug off this new misandry as just silly and something of a sideshow,
but it’s possible that it represents a real strand of rising
consciousness. If that is the case, it is not merely silly – it is
dangerous. I have occasionally indulged in group hatred – ISIS in their
racist, faithist, head-hacking, innocent-slaughtering prime, the
Conservative Party in the 1980s, anyone involved in Prog Rock – but it’s
not a very healthy principle to base your life around.<br />
<br />
What does it mean to hate an otherwise random and unrelated group of
people, as opposed to a specific individual? We can all enjoy hating,
say, Nazis, pedophiles, and ISIS executioners beheading an aid worker.
Hate can be reassuring, which is why it is so seductive. But when one is
hating Nazis, one is hating people who subscribe to an ideology, an
idea. Pedophiles and ISIS executioners are historically smaller groups,
but they are also defined by a particular idea – sexual attraction to
children and the cult of death. At some level, they’ve made a choice. No
one is born a Nazi or an Islamist murderer, and even if <a href="http://www.eurekaselect.com/126891/article">Pedophilia is genetically influenced</a>,
that doesn’t absolve its perpetrators of guilt. However, hating men is
not hating an idea or an abhorrent form of behaviour. It is hating half
the world’s population, rich and poor, kind and cruel, black and white,
gay and straight, just because they happen to have a Y chromosome.<br />
<br />
To hate such a disparate group seems – is – demented. However, there
is a prism through which it makes perfect sense, the prism constructed
by the odd and contradictory fusion of neo-Marxism and post-modernism.<br />
<br />
In this scheme of thought, now widely taught in the humanities and
social science departments of the West’s leading universities, there are
no intrinsically superior, universal values, like love or dignity or
general human goodwill – and no such thing as ‘objective’ truth in the
scientific sense. It’s all relative. There are just multiple and
sometimes overlapping groups that compete for power, and their values,
even their idea of what constitutes a ‘fact’, are determined by the
relative status of their group. The most powerful group in society – in
all societies – are men, and men, therefore, are collectively guilty for
the oppression of every less powerful group.<br />
<br />
Since anything men utter is tainted by their place in the power
hierarchy and their implicit desire to maintain that power – a homeless
man at Grand Central station may be surprised, even delighted, to learn
that he occupies a ‘privileged’ position in this hierarchy – nothing a
man says can be taken at face value because, consciously or
unconsciously, it is imbued with patriarchal values and language.
Whether they realise it or not, all men are engaged in a struggle to
consolidate and extend their power, particularly over women. This is
doubtless why, according to this theory, rape is considered a
manifestation of male dominance – of the patriarchy – rather than an
expression of sexual desire. Power is everything – which tells you
something, perhaps, about the status anxiety of this theory’s most
fanatical adherents.<br />
<br />
Thus it is okay to hate all men – they are all infected by the canker
of patriarchy which, unlike individual thoughts and motivations, is a
kind of all-powerful super-organism, a hive mind controlling its male
worker bees. Men as individuals are simply tokens of something deeper –
structural misogyny embedded in institutional power. If you’re a man who
thinks you are not a misogynist, who in fact thinks you like women
perfectly well, you are deluding yourself. For such men, their sexism is
simply unconscious, just as in classical Marxism the ‘good’ bourgeois
was unconscious of the fact that he could not avoid exploiting his
workers or employees, even though he might be providing them with a
decent wage, good working conditions, and health and pension benefits.<br />
<br />
This analysis, given a moment’s thought, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Even if you accept that all the ills of the world are down to
patriarchy and the dominance of men, you have to concede the corollary –
that all the triumphs of humankind are down to the patriarchy also,
from medicine and science to the highest reaches of art and culture.<br />
<br />
Women may point out that they have been excluded from these fields
until now, and that’s largely true, although biology – the lack of
control women have historically had over their own fertility and the
greater physical strength of men – might be a far more simple and
plausible explanation than the existence of a hypothetical, all-powerful
super-organism. However, the very act that men hold the balance of
power is proof of the existence of patriarchy, according to this belief
system.<br />
<br />
My own view is that we have not ended up in the place we are, for
good or ill, because men are evil and stupid, or kind and clever, or
because we’re all enslaved by the patriarchy. We are here largely
because of blind chance – biology, the haphazard advance of technology
and the peculiarities of human nature shaped by natural selection. Like
most ‘ordinary’ people, I am quite sure such a thing as human nature
exists and while some sex differences are biological, men and women are
psychologically similar – far more similar than they are different.<br />
<br />
As such, misandry is deeply irrational. Hating men is
counterproductive. Hating men is not going to advance the cause of
gender equality. On the contrary, if you tell someone that you hate
them, simply because they have a penis, they have two basic alternative
responses (other than ignoring you, which is probably the most sensible
response). They can cringe and apologise – as many liberals do in the
face of such onslaughts, hoping in vain for rehabilitation. The Maoists
and their show trials did a lot to reveal the intrinsic human propensity
to confess to imaginary sins. Alternatively, and more dangerously, you
can respond with, “If you are justified in hating me then I am justified
in hating you.”<br />
<br />
Therein lies the hazard. I’m not denying that hatred can sometimes
produce positive results, even a form of justice. Maybe some white
supremacists, learning that they arouse intense feelings of hatred in
others, have abandoned their beliefs. Perhaps those flirting with
ethno-nationalism have been deterred from embracing it in the knowledge
that it will make them a social pariah. But it’s harder to abandon your
gender.<br />
<br />
Hatred is also useful in providing people with motivation when
prosecuting a just war – the Second World War wouldn’t have been won
without hatred of the Nazis. But when unfocussed, inappropriate or
overgeneralised, hatred is liable to produce far less desirable results.
Resentment, for one thing. Anger, for another. More hatred in response.
A sense of injustice on the part of good men – and such men do exist in
numbers very similar, I suspect, to the number of good women. These
feelings may well curdle and lead to an attitude of “If you think I’m
hateful then I might as well be hateful.”<br />
<br />
Such a response is tempting because hate has an array of
psychological rewards. By hating me as a member of my group, you are
legitimizing my temptation to hate you as a member of your group. So now
I have a ready made justification for hating women, which didn’t
previously exist (although a Google search of “I hate women” reveals
zero results, unlike a search for “I hate men”).<br />
Hatred can be a way of virtue-signaling – a way of contrasting
yourself favorably with the hated party, i.e. as a ‘good person’ in
comparison. To hate Nazis means you’re publicly announcing yourself as
not being a Nazi. To hate pedophiles means you are not a pedophile.
However, for all its short-term payoffs, hate strangles all
understanding. This is as true when directed towards genuinely hateful
groups – like white supremacists – as it is for those less universally
deserving of condemnation, such as men. Once you hate someone, or a
group, you don’t have to bother understanding them. It simplifies the
world and saves a lot of mental spadework.<br />
<br />
I don’t think that many women would say, or even think, that they
hate men. But the increasingly widespread perception is that men are
generally a bad lot, As Uluo puts it in Medium: “This entire patriarchal
society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.” We
are, by default, morally in the wrong in most matters and furthermore
unfairly privileged and entitled even when we don’t obviously appear to
be (as in our homeless friend at Grand Central). This all-encompassing
generalisation has a lot of small-scale but significant effects.<br />
<br />
In personal relationships, for example, where any woman who thinks
men are generally rotten and hateful is liable to take a pretty
jaundiced view of any particular disagreement that unfolds between them
and their significant other. The man, according to this toxic ideology,
is going to be a priori in the wrong before the argument even starts.<br />
<br />
I’m not suggesting women should be naïve or unduly trusting of men –
yes, men commit nearly all the rapes, and most of the violence, there’s
no getting away from that, and it’s no small thing, not in the least. I
am forced to admit that in my experience, men are often, though by no
means always, capable of being arrogant, ego driven, entitled and
insensitive and I don’t necessarily exclude myself, certainly not my
younger self.<br />
<br />
Hate us if you will – your feelings are your own after all and
sometimes those feelings are justified. Just don’t expect it to achieve
anything positive, or make you feel better in the long run, or to
produce a generous response in the objects of your ire. It may provide
temporary relief from the phenomenon of the simple and relentless random
unfairness of the world, but there can be a terrible arrogance in hate –
the arrogance generated by what is in fact a deep self-doubt and buried
fear. Fear of what? Of chaos, of uncertainty, of the fact that its very
hard to work out what’s right and what’s wrong in even a single
particular circumstance and individual, let alone an entire system or
gender. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in
faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.”<br />
<br />
It is an old and perhaps sexist trope that women should beware of
ruthless and dishonest seducers who are out to lead them down the path
to destruction. Perhaps it might be useful to think of hate in exactly
that way – and send it packing, its ears ringing with curses, and vows
of passionate and perpetual rejection.<br />
<br />
-----------<br />
<br />
Article originally appears at <a href="http://quillette.com/">Quillette.com</a><br />
<u><span style="color: #000120;"></span></u><br />
<strong>Tim Lott is a writer and journalist. His best-known book is <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scent-Dried-Roses-Suburbia-Classics-ebook/dp/B002RI92KC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1534292924&sr=1-1&keywords=Tim+lott"><em>The Scent of Dried Roses</em></a> which won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography and is now a Penguin Modern Classic. Follow him on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/timlottwriter" rel="noopener">@timlottwriter</a>.</strong><br />
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<br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-85358715349509717552018-08-14T09:53:00.001+01:002019-09-11T23:04:01.343+01:00What Can The Left Learn From Jordan Peterson?<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The phenomenal success of Jordan Peterson has created hugely polarised reactions, most clearly on the left, or progressive side of the political divide.
Matthew Tarnas Segall is a lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a highly progressive and spiritually influenced college in San Francisco, and Jesse Estrin is a depth psychotherapist, a graduate of CIIS and has worked on causes for social justice for many years.
In this four-way discussion with Rebel Wisdom's David Fuller and Alexander Beiner, both are keen to examine the question of what the left can learn from Jordan Peterson, and to ask why much of 'their tribe' has such a strong reaction to his thought. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: small;">“There's this polarization happening,"says Segall. "Everyone on the right thinks everyone on the left is a Stalinist and everyone on the left thinks everyone on the right is a Nazi.</span></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">"People like Peterson are trying to carve out... not a <i>non</i>-political, but a kind of position that's lateral to politics that's more in the psychological domain, to ask people to look at themselves as individuals, to question the extent to which they're projecting their shadow onto The Other.</span></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">"Until we can resolve issues on that level it's going to be difficult to resolve these political disagreements. That's one of the main reasons I've found myself so interested in what Peterson is saying: he's shifting the level of the conversation. Or trying to, at least.”</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-25809550048552648162018-03-16T14:48:00.000+00:002018-03-16T14:48:16.493+00:00The Burden Of Being Male<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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Karen Straughan at Ryerson University, March 2, 2018Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-22006040325819592282018-03-06T10:16:00.001+00:002018-03-06T10:16:47.932+00:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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LOS ANGELES—Gushing that yesterday’s Oscars had changed the face of
Hollywood forever, hundreds of total fucking dumbasses whose very
existence insults the name of journalism reported Monday that “diversity
was the real winner last night.” “On a night traditionally filled with
glitz and glam, it was race and gender equality that finally had their
moment in the Oscars spotlight,” wrote countless slathering dipshits,
who, by publishing surface-level puff pieces claiming that “new voices
had triumphed on the biggest stage in Tinseltown,” upended the very
foundation on which journalism was based. “Inclusion stole the show last
night in a dazzling spectacle that proves once and for all that outside
voices are the real up-and-coming stars. In many ways, it wasn’t A-list
celebrities who deserved a standing ovation yesterday, but
representation itself.” At press time, the bumbling oafs continued to
degrade their profession by declaring that, in many ways, America was
the true Oscar darling.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<a href="https://entertainment.theonion.com/diversity-was-the-real-winner-last-night-report-hund-1823524487">https://entertainment.theonion.com/diversity-was-the-real-winner-last-night-report-hund-1823524487</a><br />
<br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-59287577033008537522018-01-19T09:10:00.002+00:002018-01-19T12:58:26.668+00:00Jordan Peterson debate on the gender “pay gap”, campus protests and postmodernism <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>WOMAN DROWNS IN QUICKSAND FOR 30 MINUTES, REFUSES HELP. PICTURES AT 11.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><b></b><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<br />Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-41064830033829642512017-12-27T11:00:00.000+00:002017-12-27T11:02:42.365+00:00MEETING THE ENEMY Cassie Jaye at TEDx<h1 class="watch-title-container" style="text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">"When you begin to humanize your enemy, you will be dehumanized by your community" - Cassie Jaye</span></i></span></div>
Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972595838138383249.post-90246040280506659562017-12-18T16:47:00.000+00:002017-12-18T16:50:09.292+00:00The Women Worried About #MeToo<i>Thirteen bold women on why we must reject victimhood:</i><br />
<br />
<b>Lionel Shriver says…</b><br />
<br />
I am concerned that we are throwing knee-touching into the same
basket as rape, which does a grievous disservice to mere knee-touchers
and rape victims both. I am concerned that we are increasingly wont to
confuse genuine abuse of power in the workplace with often distant
memories of men who have made failed – ‘unwanted’ – passes. In the
complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the way
one conventionally discovers if one’s attraction is returned is to brave
some gentle physical contact and perhaps accept rebuff. Were I still a
young woman looking for a partner, I would not wish to live in world
where a man had to secure a countersigned contract in triplicate before
he kissed me.<br />
<br />
I am concerned that we are casting women as irremediably scarred by
even minor, casual advances, and as incapable of competently and
sensitively handling the commonplace instances in which men are drawn to
them sexually and the feeling doesn’t happen to be mutual.<br />
<br />
I am concerned that sex itself seems increasingly to be seen as
dirty, and as a violation, a form of assault, so that we’re repackaging
an old prudery in progressive wrapping paper. I am concerned that we are
well on our way to demonising, if not criminalising, all male desire.<br />
<br />
Turbocharged by social media, #MeToo may have gone too far. Rather
than bringing the sexes together with improved mutual understanding, we
are in danger of driving the sexes apart. If I were a man right now, I’d
lock the door of my study with the intention of satisfying myself with
internet porn for the indefinite future. Real women would not seem worth
the risk of destroying my career. Is that what we want?<br />
<br />
<i><b>Lionel</b> is an author, most recently of </i>The Standing Chandelier<i>, and winner of the <a href="http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/opf/books.php4?bookid=178">Orange Prize for Fiction</a></i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Christina Hoff Sommers says…</b><br />
The #MeToo movement seems to be devolving into an anti-male
grievance-fest. Veteran journalist Lucinda Franks now claims ‘gender
degradation’ irreparably harmed her career, but it’s hard to see the
impact that sexual harassment had on a decorated reporter, who was the
youngest person ever to win a Pulitzer. A <i>Glamour</i> writer has described a ‘spectre of fear’ haunting all working women in ‘every interaction’.<br />
<br />
Reality check: American women – especially those in the
professional/managerial class – are among the freest and most
self-determining human beings on the planet. They may run into the
occasional troglodyte, but overall, they are not merely doing as well as
men – they are starting to surpass them. According to a recent survey
of hiring data, young women are starting to out-earn young men. Women
now earn most of the advanced degrees – including doctorates. The
women’s advocacy group Catalyst reports that as of 2015, ‘women held
51.5 per cent of all management, professional, and related occupations’.<br />
<br />
Gender scholars don’t dispute these findings. But they maintain that
the patriarchy, in a desperate effort to hold on to power, is acting out
in lurid ways. The evidence suggests otherwise. The General Social
Survey is one of the most trusted sources of data in the social
sciences. In 2014, a random sample of Americans was asked a
straightforward question: ‘In the last 12 months, were you sexually
harassed by anyone while you were on the job?’ Only 3.6 per cent of
women said yes. That is down from 6.1 per cent in 2002. The patriarchy
is well past its prime.<br />
<br />
Powerful men are falling left and right – but not because women are
second-class citizens. Just the opposite. Girl Power is real. Instead of
carrying on about how frightened and degraded we are, maybe it’s time
to acknowledge the truth: in 2017, we can destroy almost any man by a
single accusation.<br />
With power comes responsibilities. As Wesley Yang said, in the best
article yet on the #MeToo frenzy: ‘Feminists should remember something
they know well from their own experiences with men: nobody is so
dangerous, to themselves and others, as a person or collectivity that
wields power without acknowledging it.’<br />
<br />
<i><b>Christina</b> is an author, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and host of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lARl8OzHs-A">The Factual Feminist</a>.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Nathalie Rothschild says…</b><br />
Why is the #Metoo campaign worrying? It is hard to know where to begin.<br />
I could discuss how it is normalising the kind of mob behaviour that
is the most negative aspect of internet culture, and how it is eroding
the presumption of innocence.<br />
I could mention how the insistence that men are complicit in
perpetuating a ‘rape culture’ characterised by a ‘continuum of abuse’ –
running from lockerroom banter to gang rape – demonises half the world’s
population and relativises, and therefore trivialises, sexual violence.<br />
I could argue that it poisons relations between the sexes, turning everyday interactions into a social minefield.<br />
<br />
I could focus on the censorious impulse behind #MeToo. ‘Outed’
celebrities and their work are denounced as ‘degenerate’ and erased,
much like ‘unacceptable’ material was shoved down the memory hole in
George Orwell’s <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>.<br />
<br />
I could discuss how #MeToo marks a return to puritanism, and revives a
Victorian view of women as actual or potential victims of sexual
assault and therefore in need of shielding.<br />
But perhaps the most disturbing element of #MeToo is how it has
transmogrified into a kind of confession competition. The more gruesome a
woman’s testimonial is, the more sympathy she is likely to get from the
online sisterhood.<br />
<br />
The idea that the moments in our lives when we felt power was
exercised upon us should be those that mark us and define us forever
runs counter to the view of women as active, autonomous agents. And it
is that view which ought to define the experience of being a woman in
the 21st century.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Nathalie</b> is a print and broadcast journalist based in Stockholm, Sweden.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Wendy Kaminer says… </b><br />
#MeToo is the unthinking woman’s anti-harassment crusade. It commands
us to ‘believe the women’ unthinkingly, without considering the
seriousness or plausibility of their claims. It calls every accuser a
survivor, whether she alleges a sexual assault or a single, unsolicited
advance. It ignores essential differences between work-related
harassment that undermines women professionally and inconsequential
social annoyances, threatening to police interpersonal relations outside
the workplace. It celebrates conformity and demonises dissent, as you
might expect from a movement based on proclamations of ‘me too’.<br />
<br />
Thinking people make distinctions – between a hand on your knee and a
grope up your skirt, between a sexual attack by a supervisor and a pat
on the butt from a guy in a bar – just as they distinguish pickpockets
from home invaders. #MeTooism condemns such distinctions as reflections
of rape culture. At best, when we differentiate ‘sexual assault and
sexual harassment and unwanted groping, [we] are having the wrong
conversation’, Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand asserts, while
preparing to run for president as the self-appointed avenger of all
self-identified female victims.<br />
This dangerous nonsense denigrates women – we are not all traumatised
by every fool who cops a feel – and questions our claim to equality.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Wendy</b> is a lawyer, author and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Julia Hartley-Brewer says…</b><br />
<br />
The #MeToo campaign is very worrying and will achieve the opposite of
what it pretends to want. The hashtag claims to be about empowering
women to speak out when actually it is turning women into perpetual
victims.<br />
<br />
Women who put up with sexual harassment and keep quiet about it for
years, protecting the perpetrators, are hailed as heroines and strong,
powerful feminists. Yet, bizarrely, women who speak out and deal with
sexual harassment forcefully at the time, and then happily move on with
their lives as I and millions of other women have done over the years,
are derided as ‘victim-blamers’ or even ‘rape apologists’. It’s almost
as if a woman is only ‘the right kind of woman’ if she is willing to
play the victim.<br />
<br />
This is not what feminism was supposed to be about. It was supposed
to be about empowering women, not infantilising them. Any woman can now
point the finger at any man and make any claim she wants about something
that may – or may not – have happened to her 10 or 20 years ago. That
allegation, whether there is any evidence to back it up or not, is
enough to end a man’s reputation, his career or even his life. We are
seeing an end to the principles of natural justice, innocence until
proven guilty and fair trials.<br />
<br />
Make no mistake – this is a witch-hunt, and to hell with any innocent
men who accidentally get caught in the net of the #MeToo outrage.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Julia</b> is a journalist, broadcaster and host at talkRADIO.</i> <br />
<br />
<b>Emily Yoffe says…</b><br />
<br />
We should not tolerate sexual harassment. But I am worried that, with
the growing consensus that there should be ‘zero tolerance’ for sexual
harassment, we will make the same mistake regarding the workplace that
we’ve made with other social problems in recent decades. (The concept of
zero tolerance is itself problematic – to oppose it means being accused
of tolerating whatever wrongdoing is under discussion.)<br />
<br />
When we apply zero tolerance to a problem, we enlarge what the
problem is and take away the ability of those charged with passing
judgement and meting out fair punishments to weigh the entirety of the
circumstances and tailor a response that brings justice. Instead, too
often judges and school principals, for example, have become rubber
stamps who impose the harshest possible penalties. We should pause
before using this model for sexual harassment.<br />
<br />
This is a rare moment in which women and men of good will can work
together to fashion more equitable workplaces. That project is
endangered if we unreasonably expand what we mean by sexual harassment
and then make any accusation of it a trigger for potential career
banishment.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Emily</b> is a journalist and contributing editor at the </i>Atlantic.<br />
<br />
<b>Mary Kenny says…</b> <br />
<br />
No woman should be coerced into sexual relations – let alone raped –
and moral codes exist for a reason. Yet sexual relations are complex.
Shakespeare wrote: ‘Sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair
speechless messages.’ If we are honest with ourselves, we know how many
layers of complexity there can be in jest, flirtation, a look, a sigh, a
word. Women have often warmed to a touch, a joke, a comment which
implies interest or pursuit. That is not harassment.<br />
<br />
Feminism should mean taking responsibility for ourselves and also
standing up for ourselves. Unwanted attention should be dealt with. As
Camille Paglia points out, men are often quite frightened of what women
will say to them – be bold and say it. What is dismaying about current
trends is the tendency to return women to delicate, Victorian damsels
who reach for the smelling salts if they hear a lewd joke. What next –
chaperones?<br />
<br />
The novelist Kingsley Amis used to say: ‘Women are trouble – keep
them out of all institutions.’ He was a misogynist, but such notions
will revive if women portray themselves as so fragile that they can’t
deal with the small change of everyday life with robust common sense.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Mary</b> is a journalist and the author of </i><a href="http://newisland.ie/product/am-i-a-feminist/">Am I a Feminist? Are You?</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Claire Berlinski says…</b><br />
<br />
The #MeToo movement has exposed allegations of very serious sexual
crimes and the degree to which women are simply fed up. This is healthy,
up to a point. But we are way past that point.<br />
It has now morphed into a mass hysteria. Men have been accused of
transgressions no reasonable person would define as a crime. And this
crime comes with a swift and terrifying penalty, but has no clear
definition and no statute of limitations. This is juridically and
morally absurd. <i>Nulla poena sine lege</i>.<br />
<br />
This crime, it seems, may be committed through word, deed, or even
facial expression. It rests entirely on discerning what a woman feels,
or will feel, even decades later. But discerning this is actually quite
difficult. ‘It’s payback time for men’ is not a reasonable definition.
We must now together reason this out. <i>Nullum crimen sine lege</i>.<br />
<br />
The names keep coming. The heads keep rolling. A charge of creepiness is a death sentence. (<i>De minimis non curat lex</i>.)
Once the charge is made, employers race to purge the creep lest they
too be stained by his dishonour. ‘We are deeply disappointed by the
reports that Mister Absolutely Unacceptable in this day and age failed
to live up to our company standards’, begins the ritual. And you know
damned well Mister Absolutely Unacceptable will never get his job, or
his life, back. <i>Audacter caluminiare, semper aliquid haeret</i>.<br />
<br />
This is not good for men. But neither is it good for women. Newton’s
third law is not just about physics. There will be a reaction. And women
as a professional class will find themselves figuratively screwed – not
an obvious improvement in the screwing scheme of things.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Claire</b> is a novelist and journalist. Donate towards her new book: </i><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/braveoldworld">Stitch by Stitch</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Cathy Young says…</b><br />
<br />
The post-Harvey Weinstein #MeToo momentum has ended the silence
surrounding sexual abuse committed by a number of wealthy and powerful
men, so it’s difficult not to see a positive side. But it is also
increasingly clear that this cultural moment has turned into an orgy of
female victimhood and the demonisation of men.<br />
<br />
Some alleged abusers are being punished with very little evidence;
the announced resignation of Al Franken, the Democratic senator from
Minnesota, has been a wake-up call for many. (One of the eight charges
against Franken was squeezing a woman’s waist while posing for a photo.)<br />
<br />
Women are being encouraged to scour their past for experiences that
make them ‘survivors’ – such as a smarmy compliment or a drunken pass
from a colleague. Men are being told to soul-search for past
mistreatment of women. Yet the reality is that there are also male
victims of sexual abuse and female abusers – and when it comes to
low-level hurtful or obnoxious behaviour in the arena of sex and
romance, the sexes are probably just about equal.<br />
<br />
Telling women that their lives are a chamber of sexual horrors, and
telling men that they are part of an evil oppressor class, is not the
path to equality.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Cathy</b> is a journalist and the author of </i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ceasefire-Women-Forces-Achieve-Equality/dp/0684834421">Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.</a> <br />
<br />
<b>Rita Panahi says…</b><br />
<br />
Due process and the presumption of innocence cannot be forgotten in
our eagerness to embolden women coming forward with allegations of
harassment and sexual assault. There must be a balance between believing
women and ensuring that the lives of innocent people are not destroyed.<br />
My greatest concern is that the #MeToo phenomenon creates a toxic
narrative that casts every male as a potential predator and every female
as a perpetual victim. This can be enormously damaging for women,
particularly young girls who, despite having every advantage and legal
protection in the West, grow up believing they face enormous, perhaps
insurmountable, barriers.<br />
<br />
In Australia, women have outnumbered men at university for the past
three decades. But instead of this fact being celebrated, many in the
media continue to portray empowered women as lifelong victims. As
institutionalised forms of discrimination are eliminated, the obsession
with supposed entrenched misogyny deepens – despite all evidence to the
contrary.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, modern feminism all but ignores the plight of the most
oppressed women around the world who are subjugated from the cradle to
the grave.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Rita</b> is a journalist and columnist for the </i>Herald Sun<i>, in Australia.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Joanna Williams says…</b><br />
<br />
‘Sorry, I nearly touched your elbow. I forgot we can’t do that any
more’, he said. ‘You have to ask my permission first’, I replied. We
both laughed.<br />
<br />
A social event at the university and, for once, I wasn’t counting the
minutes until I could leave. I was talking to a professor I’d not met
before and it turned out we shared the same views on academia, free
speech and mutual colleagues. I relaxed.<br />
<br />
And then the elbow non-incident happened, and an exchange among
equals became a conversation between a woman and an older, more senior,
male colleague. Even laughing about new rules of etiquette prompted
self-consciousness.<br />
<br />
One of the worst things about the #MeToo panic is the impact it has
on informal workplace relations. Yes, people still socialise in mixed
groups and colleagues still share confidences behind closed doors. But,
at the same time, a new wariness has taken hold. A voice in our heads
asks how our interactions might be interpreted by others. Is it best to
leave the office door open? Invite a third party along to the lunch
meeting? Under what circumstances can you hug a colleague? Or touch
their elbow?<br />
<br />
This self-consciousness robs workplaces of the spontaneous human
warmth that makes having a job bearable. Worse, as colleagues are made
suspicious of each other, we risk turning the clock back on hard-won
sexual equality.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Joanna</b> is <i>spiked</i>’s education editor and author of </i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Feminism-Need-Liberating-Gender/dp/1787144763">Women vs Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars.</a> <br />
<br />
<b>Claire Fox says…</b><br />
<br />
#MeToo has morphed into a campaign that brooks no dissent. Raise
qualms and watch the insults roll. Critics are told they are suffering
from internalised misogyny, are in denial, or are too old to understand
the horrors of leering bosses.<br />
<br />
One campaigning commentator, Rosamund Unwin, writes in the <i>Evening Standard</i>
that reactions to harassment post-Weinstein have ‘exposed a
generational divide’. Maybe she is right – I am one of those ‘older
female journalists’ who is concerned at the YouGov survey revealing that
two-thirds of women aged 18 to 24 view wolf-whistling as ‘always or
usually’ being a form of sexual harassment. Twenty-eight per cent see
winking in the same way. Yes, WINKING.<br />
<br />
Unwin concludes that my failure ‘to cheer that our sex finally feels
able to speak out’ is due to a ‘lack of empathy’ among the over-40s. She
speculates that such indifference is because ‘some women perhaps feel
they owe part of their success to being the female in the room who
wasn’t difficult, who laughed at the boys’ “jokes”’.<br />
<br />
These sorts of accusations are galling, especially for those of us
who have spent years metaphorically kicking sex pests in the balls and
fighting for women to be treated as equals in the workplace. I shouldn’t
have to resort to personal anecdotes. However, as #MeToo confers
credibility on those who declare themselves victims, I have felt
pressure to reveal my own slew of nasty sexual experiences, as evidence
that I’m not some traitor to the cause.<br />
<br />
How ironic that #MeToo is fuelling its own bullying climate: women
are told to conform, or else. This climate is a greater threat to real
freedom than any pathetic groper.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Claire</b> is author of </i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Find-That-Offensive-Provocations/dp/1849549818">I Find That Offensive</a><i> and director of the Institute of Ideas.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Ella Whelan says…</b><br />
<br />
#MeToo has been hailed as a revelatory moment. But the truth is,
there’s little new about this obsession with phantom sexual-harassment
epidemics. #MeToo might have been spurred on by news of a fat old perv
in Hollywood, but the feminist narrative of victimised women has been
around for a long time.<br />
<br />
And screw it – I won’t say that there’s anything good about #MeToo.
You don’t need to celebrate a hashtag to understand that sexual abuse
and rape are wrong. Neither do you need a social-media movement to have
the guts to stand up to any guy who crosses the line. I’m sick of women
feeling that they have to caveat every political criticism of this
victim culture with the line: ‘Of course I believe that rape and sexual
assault is bad, but…’<br />
<br />
#MeToo is a craven attack on women’s liberation, spurred on by
middle-class journos, fame-hungry politicians and virtue-signalling
celebrities. Normal, working-class women don’t get a look-in. We’re the
wrong kind of women, you see, because we refuse to be patronised by such
fainting-couch nonsense – and because most of us will know that being a
‘survivor’ takes more than having your knee touched.<br />
<br />
I want to live in a world where women feel empowered to take life by
the balls. So no, I won’t join in the #MeToo choir. This patronising,
illiberal assault on sexual freedom is #NotMe.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Ella</b> is assistant editor at <i>spiked</i> and author of </i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Women-Want-Freedom-Feminism/dp/1925501477">What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism</a>.<br />
<br />
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Originally published at <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/meet-the-women-worried-about-metoo/20639#.WjfhorenFhE" target="_blank">Spiked.</a>Byronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02091777148066841336noreply@blogger.com0