Neoteny

Even by GirlWritesWhat's largely incomparable standards, her new transmission is a doozy, covering her thoughts on the ramifications of neotony - the evolutionary retention of certain childlike features into adulthood. As usual, the video takes a little while to get going, as she defines her terms & generally lays her wares out, but the last 10 minutes or so she really gets those engines turning. Sublime.

Charlie Chaplin vs. Feminism

To do my bit in promoting the marvellous resource & museum of lost wonders that is the Unknown History of Misandry I thought I would tackle a story there already close to my heart, that of the first & greatest genius of cinema, Charles Chaplin. One of my all time heroes, I'd read much about the many slings & arrows lesser minds hurled against him in his astonishing life, but here's a story I hadn't encountered before:

VIENNA, May 25.—Charlie Chaplin will deliver a lecture on the tyranny of women in America in Vienna this summer.

This announcement made by Herr Kornblueh at the recent congress of the Vienna league of men called “Justita” was greeted with tremendous applause.

“Charlie Chaplin is one of our most ardent supporters abroad” Herr Kornblueh declared, “and since his divorce, he has written to us assuring our organization of his sympathy and emphasizing the necessity of a world wide movement for the emancipation of the oppressed husbands.

“The tyranny of modern women, who demand all rights and refuse all duties, who are marrying men only to lead a careless, workless and childless life, or to obtain a divorce and a lifelong alimony, this shameful tyranny is the underlying cause of all evils.

“Look at the insane asylum Steinhof in Vienna. Fifty percent of the unfortunate inmates were brought to this place because of their marriage.’’

The congress passed a resolution demanding the abolishment of alimonies find other unequal pacts between the two sexes, and protesting against the favoritism of the authorities in favor of women, especially the siding of the police with the wives whenever a domestic quarrel develops.

The Justitia is the first organization in the world fighting for the “emancipation of men,” and makes its appeal to all those “in revolt against the oppression of the female sex.” Only the freedom of men can prevent the white race from decline and ruin, declares one of the organizations proclamations.

“The only trouble is,” confessed Kornblueh, “there are few courageous men. Husbands are too cowardly, while bachelors are perhaps too willing to join our organization.”

[“Chaplin, Siding With Fellows, Will Assail Tyranny of Women - American Comedian and Victim of ‘Oppression of Female Sex’ Joins Brothers of ‘Justitia’ in Fight For ‘Emancipation of Men’,” Charleston Gazette, May 27, 1928, p. 6]

I could find no record of whether Chaplin actually gave the speech announced, & perhaps his involvement went no further than a letter of support, but he certainly had good reason to feel strongly about these issues - he had been forced into his first marriage to Mildred Harris when she (falsely) claimed she was pregnant & the very ugly, very public divorces he went through with both her & his next wife, Lita Grey, cost him enormously in record-breaking settlements, heartache & public support. The stress of the media circus surrounding the second divorce brought on a nervous breakdown & turned his black hair white overnight.


In the court cases, his (male) sexuality was dwelt on & vilified by the press: his love & desire were depicted as perverted - he was a lustful ogre out to corrupt youth, & the women he married only virginal innocents. The claims of the women & their lawyers were believed without question. Later on he became one of the most prominent victims of false paternity claims when in 1945, a (mad) woman he'd had a brief affair with came forward claiming he was the father of her child. Blood tests proved conclusively that Chaplin was not the father but these were not deemed admissible in the state of California at that time & Chaplin was ordered to support a child that was not his own.

Arguably the most famous human being that has ever lived ("bigger than Jesus!", as John Lennon would later have put it) Chaplin was also at this time the world's most eligible bachelor & so a slow-moving target for every gold-digger in the Hollywood hills from the day he hit superstardom to the day he finally fled McCarthyist America for Switzerland, & the United States refused him re-entry, in 1952.

Exactly 20 years later, he returned to the U.S at last at the behest of the Motion Picture Academy. They wanted to honor him with an Oscar for lifetime achievement. No-one mentioned the witch-hunts & slanders of the past. All was forgotten, & he was greeted as the king among men he was.

Men Are Fucking AWESOME!!

This Youtube clip is actually entitled 'People Are Awesome', but c'mon folks, show some dignity & say what you actually see:

Interview With GirlWritesWhat

Absolutely first class interview with the first female president of the United States [fingers crossed]. It's also just about the best overview of all the issues relating to feminism & misandry you could hope for, so I recommend directing curious newbies to it as a great all-round introduction:


http://www.gnosticmedia.com/karen-of-girlwriteswhat-interview-the-femanist-fallacy-146/

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You Want to Cut Off What???

Nice little piece on circumcision I came across by the writer Vincent Bach, whose other posts on the subject can be found here.

Think about it. What if when your mother was pregnant with you she was openly contemplating the "pros and cons" of cutting off part of your genitals? Doesn't the thought of that sound sort of weird, if not down right scary?

The only reason that you think you have a decision to make regarding whether to have someone cut off part of your son's penis is because you have been raised in a culture that does this. Bizarre, huh? Just why in the heck do we Americans send our newborn babies down to another room right after they are born, strap them down, lyse their prepuce from their glans, put a clamp on it and crush it before finally cutting it away? What possible reason would parents agree to allow some stranger in a white coat to take a scalpel to our perfectly healthy children?

The answer? Sexual oppression followed by years of cultural habit. Throw in a little selfish greed by the professionals profiting from this multi-million dollar cottage industry and you have the makings for a culture that feels they ought to cut off part of your precious newborn's penis. You see, no one in this Country was circumcised except for the Jews before the late 19th century. George Washington and Abe Lincoln were not circumcised and none of their non-Jewish peers were either. Why that changed is a pretty remarkable story actually. Some doctors just after the time of the Civil War actually convinced a Puritanical American population that if you cut most of the skin off a penis (i.e. circumcision), little boys will no longer be able to masturbate. Masturbation at the time was thought to be a dreadful sin and was even thought by many to cause a host of other illnesses. So if masturbation could be discouraged, the theory went, it MUST be. Of course, now we know that circumcision doesn't actually prevent masturbation, it only makes men have to work harder at it.

Unfortunately, by the time we figured out that masturbation wasn't all that harmful and even if it was it still isn't prevented by slicing the foreskin off a penis, circumcision had already become a cultural habit associated with class distinction. Now fathers wanted their sons to be circumcised because they were. Only the lower class heathens were left uncut. Eventually, not wanting to be left out, the lower socio-economic classes began demanding it for their sons as well. And so it continues...

Eventually by the 1960s, some ethicists began to question the practice and as a result EVERY professional medical organization in the world has finally come to publicly admit that circumcision of newborn boys is NOT MEDICALLY NECESSARY and many of the more ethical ones have come to publicly condemn the practice. Cultures don't change overnight. There are vested interests at stake and those vested interests are also working hard to fool you into thinking that circumcision has medical benefits. Rest assured, the only medical benefit of circumcision is to fatten the pockets of those medical professionals who gleefully encourage and participate in the practice.

Do your son a favor and think about his rights as a human being. You know, those inalienable ones that you and I take for granted. If he someday wants to tattoo his heiny, pierce his nipples or God forbid cut off part of his penis, that will be his right. But maybe he won't be concerned with the masturbation hysteria of the 19th century. Maybe if you could ask him he would say, "YOU WANT TO CUT OFF WHAT?!?!?!!?"

I know that's what I'd say.

Men In Black III

Just seen the new Men In Black film, a nice little popcorn adventure flick, exciting, funny & imaginative. I liked. What struck me about it coming away is the almost complete lack of any discernible misandry in it - no jokes about men being stupid, no railing against deadbeat dads, no 7-stone clotheshorses beating up men three times their size while proving women can do anything men can "but better"... None of that, just a really sweet, well-made movie about male friendship, heroism & fatherhood.

It's a little strange that's newsworthy, I'll grant you, but it's unusual enough in this day & age to make me want to pass on as a recommendation. It sure would be nice to see more films follow in this vein.

The History Of The Word 'Misandry'

 




















Well, I've been meaning to write this for awhile - every day I am reminded by spellcheck that 'misandry' is not a proper word I should be using & wouldn't I like to pick another? Or, as the feminists would have it, "There’s No Such Thing as Misandry; its a modern, made-up word that makes you look stupid. and its as misogynist as fuck, so stop using it." (That's an actual, genuine quote, by the way, from the feminist website Femonade, Aug. 30, 2009).

Putting aside the curious logic displayed there - ALL words are made-up after all, they don't just come into being by themselves - the excellent research done by St Estephe over at The Unknown History Of Misandry shows that this is simply not the case: there are examples he provides in English as far back as the 1880s, & one in German from 1803. Here's one from a book review in 1871:

“We cannot, indeed, term her an absolute misandrist, as she fully admits the possibility, in most cases at least, of the reclamation of men from their naturally vicious and selfish state, though at the cost of so much trouble and vexation of spirit to women, that it is not quite clear whether she does not regard their existence as at best a mitigated evil.” [From review of novel “Blanche Seymour” (anonymous), The Spectator, London, Apr. 1, 1871, p. 359] 

It's a long, exhaustive but fascinating read, much like the site itself, & I recommend you go over there & give them both a deeper look. In the meantime I will just post a few of the clippings he has on display:

".... She was, however, a voracious reader and wealthy enough to satisfy her cravings in this direction. On her death her library was found to contain nearly 18,000 volumes — all written by women. This was said at the time to be the most extensive collection of this kind ever formed."  - [“Man Hater's Library.” The Oelwein Daily Register (Io.), May 8, 1912, p. 3]

"Feminists Against Violence Against Men"

So while debating some pond life on youtube the other day, I was instructed to google "feminists against violence against men" to see how many of the sisterhood are working tirelessly in pursuit of true equality & looking out for us men & boys with the concern they loudly devote to women.

While fully expecting a single blank page with the sound of crickets chirping & tumbleweeds scraping lazily by in the wind, I dutifully did as I was told, curious to see how many pairs of open arms & eyes of love were out there waiting for me in the womyn's space.

Try it yourself, see what happens. Here's what I got:

One website article, & a single puff piece by The Guardian. Everything else was either a men's rights site or feminist criticism of the idea of defending men at all, saying why violence against men was a non-issue.

Still, I went to the solitary site in question (desifeminists.wordpress.com), looking to see if this was some new ifeminist-type branch of the feminazi party but sure enough, all it said was while violence against men was not nice, & we should all say so, it is nowhere near as big a deal as violence against women, & probably the result of the patriarchy or something.

Elsewhere on the very same site, which I had flown to in hopes of the sweet balm of compassion, I found this:

SCUM is the Society for Cutting up Men.
Is it any surprise that of all the feminist thoughts and writings out there, SCUM is all that makes it into pop culture? This is once of the few topics I actually heard of while browsing TV channels, rather than in my Women’s Studies classes.
I had dismissed SCUM as some weird and obviously unsupported, obscure writing dreamt up by a crazy woman. But luckily, I got to have a new perspective as a fellow feminist on Feministing.com posted the link to the whole document. Now after actually reading it, I see it as a brilliant satire. It just reverses all the utter bullshit and hatred that patriarchy has spewed about women. If any readers find the claims made in the SCUM manifesto absurd, then consider how equally absurd the hateful claims about women are? Such claims are made by idiotic, sexist religious leaders, politicians, husbands, scientists, fathers, and any Joe Schmo alike (and even sexist women, I should add).
Recently I’d been thinking about the ridiculous makes-me-want-to-vomit kind of women-hating pseudo-spirituality that many ISKCON leaders spread. I was also think about stupid male chauvinistic scientists whose aim in life is to “prove” that women are less intelligent than men, because, you know, their interpretation of research data is “objective” while the rest of us get to “personal.” The SCUM Manifesto would be my response to all those douchebags. I hope you like the satire as much as I did

There was one comment there before me, left by someone whose tenuous grasp on the concepts of satire, reason, & indeed reality itself had led her to remark:


"It’s funny because anti-feminists actually take it seriously, not realizing that it’s satire."

So I added:


"I think the punchline where the psychotic woman who started a movement called ‘The Society For Cutting Up Men’ went out the very next year & shot two men, killing one & then attempting to kill a third, that was particularly funny. I can’t believe some people still don’t get it."

Never got through moderation.