Women: Still not really people.
This crapulous sludge has been making the rounds. The writer, and I use that word loosely, asks, "What are women for?"
Has anyone with serious intellectual chops or even a pretense to same ever asked, "What are men for?" Men in the gendered and not the "all humanity" sense? Of course not, because, as Jill Filopovic writes,Men are… men. Their existence is a given, a necessity, the baseline off of which everything else is relative. It would be silly to even ask what their “purpose” is, because having a “purpose” implies service to some greater thing - “purpose” being the reason a thing is done. It’s silly to ask what men as a class are for, because men as a class simply are. They are full-fledged human beings - neutral human beings, without all the other signifiers that make them different and thereby “for” some purpose other than just existing. Women, being not-men, must be purposed for some thing relative to men. Hence babies. And then women start getting uppity, and then abortion, and then chaos - or at least that’s as close as I can get to what in holy Hell Mr. Poulos is even talking about.
The upside to Poulos' essay is that except for a few MRAs in the comments, everybody in there is laughing at him. So are various liberal bloggers (Thers, Roy Edroso, Scott Lemieux and SEK, TBogg, BooMan).
Poulos' follow-up piece was more or less, "LOL U MAD, therefore I'm right." But with more words. ( Michelle Goldberg: "No, you didn't hit a nerve. It's just that we all thought by now everyone agreed that women are human.")
Can we write off a loon who wrote seven years ago that "zany" fonts and deliberate misspellings like "kidz" on menus are harbingers of cultural Armageddon? Back in the '90s, I would have.
Today? When the GOP is pushing the Overton window harder to the right on birth control - not just abortion, people, but birth control - and Obama typically caves in "compromises" the long-term principle for short-term ground - rather than, you know, stand his ground AND protect women's access to birth control not just now but in the future? And we're told we should give a shit about coddling the superstition-based misogyny of the bishops and their non-Catholic allies?
When it can be said on the public airwaves of military women who are raped, "What did they expect?", with a casual sneer about women "who are now being raped too much," as if there were an acceptable level? (No, the fact that it's Fux Nooz doesn't make it okay to ignore.)
When George Will, writing about the necessity of fathers, picks as a subject a man whose grandfather was also his father, because Grandpa had raped his own daughter, "an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute"? (Oh, excuse me, "had a sexual relationship with" his own daughter, who was mentally ill? Because that "relationship" couldn't have been coerced on any level?) And barely mentions the woman other than to let you know she gave birth to the story's protagonist and she was a crazy slut who didn't have the decency to find herself a man to buy her off her daddy marry her?
When, concurrently with telling women to save it for their future owners husbands, the right wing invites a "pick-up artist" to their big convention so he can teach Republican male larva how to score pussy?
When a libertarian who used to call herself "Jane Galt" opines that the government should be in the business of shaming people? -Oh, wait, not people, just women. And only the dirty sluts who had sex and now want to abort their ickle pweshus gifts from gawd. Hey, according to one asshole from Virginia, this one a Democrat, such women had already agreed to be "vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant." (Susan of Texas, who initiated the exchange with libertwit Megan McArdle, writes, "Therefore any man who's ever had a rectal exam has agreed to be raped.")
Oh, and yeah, when this smug überprivileged turd who's backing up Frothymixture....
... says he gets "such a chuckle" from such unimportant matters as women's health being discussed in these tough times, and just suggests that "gals" hold an aspirin between their knees for "contraceptives," just like they did "back in my days"?
And that's not even getting into all the cultural shit that's not being debated in Washington, such as the Grammys welcoming Chris Brown with open arms and deciding that they, not Rihanna, were the real victims of his assault on her. Or the fact that in the U.S. - in "liberal Massachusetts," even - you can pull this shit (trigger warning) and be free on bail more than a year after your arrest.
I refer you back to Susan's blog to read her excellent rant about authoritarians and what we owe them, or rather what we don't owe them. Also see Vacuum Slayer's rant about morality and sexuality, and John Cole's burning question:When did the 1st Amendment change from basically saying that you can practice whatever religion you want and you won’t be burned at the stake as a heretic and we’re not going to form or recognize a national religion like the Church of England? When did it change to “everyone everywhere has to do what a bunch of old catholics in funny hats wants, because otherwise it hurts their feelings?” And why does it only apply to certain religions?
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1781337.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.
Has anyone with serious intellectual chops or even a pretense to same ever asked, "What are men for?" Men in the gendered and not the "all humanity" sense? Of course not, because, as Jill Filopovic writes,Men are… men. Their existence is a given, a necessity, the baseline off of which everything else is relative. It would be silly to even ask what their “purpose” is, because having a “purpose” implies service to some greater thing - “purpose” being the reason a thing is done. It’s silly to ask what men as a class are for, because men as a class simply are. They are full-fledged human beings - neutral human beings, without all the other signifiers that make them different and thereby “for” some purpose other than just existing. Women, being not-men, must be purposed for some thing relative to men. Hence babies. And then women start getting uppity, and then abortion, and then chaos - or at least that’s as close as I can get to what in holy Hell Mr. Poulos is even talking about.
The upside to Poulos' essay is that except for a few MRAs in the comments, everybody in there is laughing at him. So are various liberal bloggers (Thers, Roy Edroso, Scott Lemieux and SEK, TBogg, BooMan).
Poulos' follow-up piece was more or less, "LOL U MAD, therefore I'm right." But with more words. ( Michelle Goldberg: "No, you didn't hit a nerve. It's just that we all thought by now everyone agreed that women are human.")
Can we write off a loon who wrote seven years ago that "zany" fonts and deliberate misspellings like "kidz" on menus are harbingers of cultural Armageddon? Back in the '90s, I would have.
Today? When the GOP is pushing the Overton window harder to the right on birth control - not just abortion, people, but birth control - and Obama typically caves in "compromises" the long-term principle for short-term ground - rather than, you know, stand his ground AND protect women's access to birth control not just now but in the future? And we're told we should give a shit about coddling the superstition-based misogyny of the bishops and their non-Catholic allies?
When it can be said on the public airwaves of military women who are raped, "What did they expect?", with a casual sneer about women "who are now being raped too much," as if there were an acceptable level? (No, the fact that it's Fux Nooz doesn't make it okay to ignore.)
When George Will, writing about the necessity of fathers, picks as a subject a man whose grandfather was also his father, because Grandpa had raped his own daughter, "an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute"? (Oh, excuse me, "had a sexual relationship with" his own daughter, who was mentally ill? Because that "relationship" couldn't have been coerced on any level?) And barely mentions the woman other than to let you know she gave birth to the story's protagonist and she was a crazy slut who didn't have the decency to find herself a man to buy her off her daddy marry her?
When, concurrently with telling women to save it for their future owners husbands, the right wing invites a "pick-up artist" to their big convention so he can teach Republican male larva how to score pussy?
When a libertarian who used to call herself "Jane Galt" opines that the government should be in the business of shaming people? -Oh, wait, not people, just women. And only the dirty sluts who had sex and now want to abort their ickle pweshus gifts from gawd. Hey, according to one asshole from Virginia, this one a Democrat, such women had already agreed to be "vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant." (Susan of Texas, who initiated the exchange with libertwit Megan McArdle, writes, "Therefore any man who's ever had a rectal exam has agreed to be raped.")
Oh, and yeah, when this smug überprivileged turd who's backing up Frothymixture....
... says he gets "such a chuckle" from such unimportant matters as women's health being discussed in these tough times, and just suggests that "gals" hold an aspirin between their knees for "contraceptives," just like they did "back in my days"?
And that's not even getting into all the cultural shit that's not being debated in Washington, such as the Grammys welcoming Chris Brown with open arms and deciding that they, not Rihanna, were the real victims of his assault on her. Or the fact that in the U.S. - in "liberal Massachusetts," even - you can pull this shit (trigger warning) and be free on bail more than a year after your arrest.
I refer you back to Susan's blog to read her excellent rant about authoritarians and what we owe them, or rather what we don't owe them. Also see Vacuum Slayer's rant about morality and sexuality, and John Cole's burning question:When did the 1st Amendment change from basically saying that you can practice whatever religion you want and you won’t be burned at the stake as a heretic and we’re not going to form or recognize a national religion like the Church of England? When did it change to “everyone everywhere has to do what a bunch of old catholics in funny hats wants, because otherwise it hurts their feelings?” And why does it only apply to certain religions?
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1781337.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.