rant
earlier I saw some things on LJ that had me in quite the tizzy, so I ranted
The other day I looked through an online forum for Feminists on LiveJounal.
Wow
Now I have a pretty damn good handle on my temper, I really don’t get mad at much. But I tell you here and now, that I am right now, so mad at some of the shit I saw on that site that am having a pretty damn hard time keeping from using some of the more colourful language that is indicative of my gender.
Some of the topics and my reactions to them follow:
First one that comes to mind dealt with women portrayed in movies. This wasn’t the stereotypical complaint against females in your typical action/adventure movie, but rather a complaint against women as portrayed in romance movies. The author of this piece (and for the record this is one of the few that I saw that didn’t leave me in a sputtering rage) was talking about an unnamed movie (just from the time and description of the movie I’m gonna guess that it was Along Came Polly) and how the man in this piece was, at the beginning of the film, an uptight stuck-up bastard who meets a free-spirited wholesome girl that teaches him how to get loose and become a better person (with the requisite wedding bells at the end of course) her complaint was this, she was offended by the fact that in these movies the men are always the stuck-up pigs and the women are inevitably the free spirits that release the men from some dark self-imposed prison of mediocrity. She posed the question why is it that this role is never changed, can the women be the “bad” protagonist and the man be the “good” influence.
My answer: sure, only problem is that to my knowledge, admittedly not and expert of any shape or form, it has only been done a handful of times. The one that comes to mind first is Van Wilder, here you have Gwen Pearson, very stuck-up straight shooter with limitless potential before her (here is where the asshole in me snickers *every Feminist’s dream girl*) meets Van, hilarity ensues and by the end of the movie she has caused the humiliation and ruination of the career of her now ex-boyfriend, helped in the reunion of father and son with Van and his father, and showed up to a college end-term party panty-less. (again the asshole in me pops up *now THAT’S a real girl*) But examples like this are few and fare between, most often we have two types of romance, male based and female based. The authors of each reflect biases on gender. The male based are predominantly written by men (surprise, surprise) and visa versa, in the female based ones you tend to have strong women with a “perfect job” who are their own bosses (or work for other strong women) and have seemingly perfect lives, I say seemingly perfect because if it was perfect there wouldn’t be a movie as there would be no drama or conflict. The part of their lives that is missing is of course the fact that there is no man (not that these strong women need a man of course, nor are they conforming to a pre-determined social norm of marriage, no of course not, they simply find that their great achievements feel better if they have someone with whom to share them) they find man, problems arise, problems fixed, happily ever after, the end. In the male based movies we have the aforementioned stuck-up man meeting the free-spirited woman, and the occasional other format but this seems to be most common, now to answer another question posed by the feminist in question, why are women always portrayed as these glimmering towers of wonderness and beauty. Because, simply, there are men out there, more than some of you might think, that always have, and always will consider that you, indeed and in fact, are. How, you ask, can I make this claim? Because I am one of those self-same men. Some of us feel that you women are perfect, not piecemeal, not one individual woman at a time, but instead there is this pervasive idea of women as a whole being great and wonderful and everything that could ever be wished in the Garden of Eden. And in truth, some of you really fucking piss me off when you get all uppity about it.
Next: eunuchs for everybody! The one that had me frothing at the mouth!
Ok, now I realize that this one was probably done mostly tongue in cheek, be that as it may, this one still had me in a wild frothing rage. The author of this piece stated that in order to ensure that no more unwanted fetus’s were produced the easiest solution was to castrate all men upon birth, after they milked some sperm from them to ensure the continuation of humanity. Also all older men would be castrated as well. This would prevent many of society’s problems, such as abortion, rape, incest, to name a few. Valid points. So why am I against this, aside from the prospect of losing both my “boys” and any possible future sex life? Simple, it al comes down to freedom, in many different forms, one of the first ones that I thought of when I first read this was the fact that the women in this “utopian” society would be able to pleasure themselves at their leisure where as men would be forever condemned the fate of not being able to know the simple pleasure of the orgasm. But there is in fact more to my mind that sex, despite what some people might tell you. One thing that the author talked about was how this way it would be entirely the woman’s choice whether or not she would get pregnant, just go down to the local neighborhood lab and get a friendly artificial insemination and nine months down the road we have a brand new bouncing baby, and because we can probably track the donors of these sperm samples we can find out what good traits they have, then if we find that there is some boy out there that has no good traits we can eliminate his DNA from the gene pool by not dispensing his sperm thus making man(or is it now woman)kind as a whole stronger. One problem, in all that I saw no need for men besides the initial donation, men become largely useless. And there is a bigger problem, ask anyone what defines a person falls between two things, their legs, and in this brave new world, men suddenly lack definition. Without the emotions (good and bad) that flow so freely from my, and every other man’s, genitalia, we (men) would stagnate and humanity would soon follow. And for one simple reason; everything in this world is defined by opposites, when asked to define what something is, one immediately does one of two things, either recites some arbitrary definition that some one came up with from rote memory, or they begin stating what that thing is not. In a world that now only has one real gender, that one thing begins to lose perspective, and we are left with, what?
Another thing that gets to me about this is that now the women are in full control of the possibility of children, in other words women are in full control of the future, this is not all that different from the way things have been done from thousands upon thousands of years. The big difference now is that the women are in charge of the whole process, from inception to production, the women have all the say, what about the men? I know that I’m being a little biased here, but after all we are talking about my gender a little bit so I think I have a bit of reason. Don’t the men get a say in whether their DNA gets passed along, or better yet, don’t they get a chance to say whether or not they want to be a father. Apparently not.
Next: shaved legs vs. Sasquach, should women shave their legs.
No, there is really no real reason that women really have to shave their legs, or their armpits, or their crotch, these are simply things that they do for us, the men. Should any of you feminists feel that this is wrong, feel free to take it up with my mother, my best friend’s girlfriend, sister, and mother, and a few others. Don’t worry, I can make sure that their all there at the same time, it’ll sure as hell be funnier than anything cause, you are gonna get your ass reamed from so many angles that you won’t be able to see straight. See this one I’m going to use to segue my way into the difference between Feminism as the majority of the population see it as, and proud strong women who also like men and like being see and loved by us. Oh yes, before I get started, no I am not a woman, I have never been a woman and with any luck I never will be, I like being a man far too much to lose myself. Feminists as the world sees it seems to have gone from the point of wanting equality for women (a noble goal to be sure) to now wanting to have an Orwellian equality (we are all made equal, only I’m more equal than you are) whereas other women (see my mother for an example) are happy, the see that there are problems yes, but they also see that to fix some of those problems they will lose some of the things they treasure most. I have it on good authority (as in I have heard it from the source) that some women actually like looking good, for men. It’s not a matter of social repression or societal based roles being forced on them, but rather that they enjoy standing on a street corner and causing pile-ups and traffic jams, (and honestly I know what this feels like as I get the same joy when I’m in Raleigh, NC walking from a hotel to a bar in my Kilt, it’s really fun sometimes) but some others feel that this is not right and that women shouldn’t have to conform to these societal norms, and that’s all well and good, just please, for the love of god, if you are one such, do not feel the need to tell me everything about it and force me to your viewpoint, it won’t happen. If you want to discuss it, fine, if you want to show me how I’m wrong and my whole gender is nothing but lecherous pigs who were never as good at anything as any woman, we’re gonna have problems.
Next: a history lesson in language
My next piece will be on language, for I go to read someone talking about how they were taking Latin, and discovering that it was a gender based language. By that I mean that in Latin, a chair is female, a desk is male, etc. etc. now I would not have a problem with this if it wasn’t for the fact that they were talking about this, AS A BAD THING, now a little history lesson, feminism as we know it an love it today is about 90 years old, give or take a few years, Latin on the other hand is running the gamut at about 3000 years and change. Hence, the ancient Romans were not really concerned with whether or not they were offending people with their language (an even if they were, it was really kinda one of those things where if they did, they’d just conquer them anyway) so someone in this day and age complaining doesn’t exactly have Julius Caesar rolling in his grave. Further more, this is a language, really now can you get a bit more pathetic than to be getting mad at a language for being what you call sexist? It’s not as if complaining is going to make this “go away” or some such, really the best you can do is to stop taking the class and forget the language, that way at least you could pretend it doesn’t exist.
Any way I’m getting tired now and I’m not making much sense. I go to bed now. Night, night
The other day I looked through an online forum for Feminists on LiveJounal.
Wow
Now I have a pretty damn good handle on my temper, I really don’t get mad at much. But I tell you here and now, that I am right now, so mad at some of the shit I saw on that site that am having a pretty damn hard time keeping from using some of the more colourful language that is indicative of my gender.
Some of the topics and my reactions to them follow:
First one that comes to mind dealt with women portrayed in movies. This wasn’t the stereotypical complaint against females in your typical action/adventure movie, but rather a complaint against women as portrayed in romance movies. The author of this piece (and for the record this is one of the few that I saw that didn’t leave me in a sputtering rage) was talking about an unnamed movie (just from the time and description of the movie I’m gonna guess that it was Along Came Polly) and how the man in this piece was, at the beginning of the film, an uptight stuck-up bastard who meets a free-spirited wholesome girl that teaches him how to get loose and become a better person (with the requisite wedding bells at the end of course) her complaint was this, she was offended by the fact that in these movies the men are always the stuck-up pigs and the women are inevitably the free spirits that release the men from some dark self-imposed prison of mediocrity. She posed the question why is it that this role is never changed, can the women be the “bad” protagonist and the man be the “good” influence.
My answer: sure, only problem is that to my knowledge, admittedly not and expert of any shape or form, it has only been done a handful of times. The one that comes to mind first is Van Wilder, here you have Gwen Pearson, very stuck-up straight shooter with limitless potential before her (here is where the asshole in me snickers *every Feminist’s dream girl*) meets Van, hilarity ensues and by the end of the movie she has caused the humiliation and ruination of the career of her now ex-boyfriend, helped in the reunion of father and son with Van and his father, and showed up to a college end-term party panty-less. (again the asshole in me pops up *now THAT’S a real girl*) But examples like this are few and fare between, most often we have two types of romance, male based and female based. The authors of each reflect biases on gender. The male based are predominantly written by men (surprise, surprise) and visa versa, in the female based ones you tend to have strong women with a “perfect job” who are their own bosses (or work for other strong women) and have seemingly perfect lives, I say seemingly perfect because if it was perfect there wouldn’t be a movie as there would be no drama or conflict. The part of their lives that is missing is of course the fact that there is no man (not that these strong women need a man of course, nor are they conforming to a pre-determined social norm of marriage, no of course not, they simply find that their great achievements feel better if they have someone with whom to share them) they find man, problems arise, problems fixed, happily ever after, the end. In the male based movies we have the aforementioned stuck-up man meeting the free-spirited woman, and the occasional other format but this seems to be most common, now to answer another question posed by the feminist in question, why are women always portrayed as these glimmering towers of wonderness and beauty. Because, simply, there are men out there, more than some of you might think, that always have, and always will consider that you, indeed and in fact, are. How, you ask, can I make this claim? Because I am one of those self-same men. Some of us feel that you women are perfect, not piecemeal, not one individual woman at a time, but instead there is this pervasive idea of women as a whole being great and wonderful and everything that could ever be wished in the Garden of Eden. And in truth, some of you really fucking piss me off when you get all uppity about it.
Next: eunuchs for everybody! The one that had me frothing at the mouth!
Ok, now I realize that this one was probably done mostly tongue in cheek, be that as it may, this one still had me in a wild frothing rage. The author of this piece stated that in order to ensure that no more unwanted fetus’s were produced the easiest solution was to castrate all men upon birth, after they milked some sperm from them to ensure the continuation of humanity. Also all older men would be castrated as well. This would prevent many of society’s problems, such as abortion, rape, incest, to name a few. Valid points. So why am I against this, aside from the prospect of losing both my “boys” and any possible future sex life? Simple, it al comes down to freedom, in many different forms, one of the first ones that I thought of when I first read this was the fact that the women in this “utopian” society would be able to pleasure themselves at their leisure where as men would be forever condemned the fate of not being able to know the simple pleasure of the orgasm. But there is in fact more to my mind that sex, despite what some people might tell you. One thing that the author talked about was how this way it would be entirely the woman’s choice whether or not she would get pregnant, just go down to the local neighborhood lab and get a friendly artificial insemination and nine months down the road we have a brand new bouncing baby, and because we can probably track the donors of these sperm samples we can find out what good traits they have, then if we find that there is some boy out there that has no good traits we can eliminate his DNA from the gene pool by not dispensing his sperm thus making man(or is it now woman)kind as a whole stronger. One problem, in all that I saw no need for men besides the initial donation, men become largely useless. And there is a bigger problem, ask anyone what defines a person falls between two things, their legs, and in this brave new world, men suddenly lack definition. Without the emotions (good and bad) that flow so freely from my, and every other man’s, genitalia, we (men) would stagnate and humanity would soon follow. And for one simple reason; everything in this world is defined by opposites, when asked to define what something is, one immediately does one of two things, either recites some arbitrary definition that some one came up with from rote memory, or they begin stating what that thing is not. In a world that now only has one real gender, that one thing begins to lose perspective, and we are left with, what?
Another thing that gets to me about this is that now the women are in full control of the possibility of children, in other words women are in full control of the future, this is not all that different from the way things have been done from thousands upon thousands of years. The big difference now is that the women are in charge of the whole process, from inception to production, the women have all the say, what about the men? I know that I’m being a little biased here, but after all we are talking about my gender a little bit so I think I have a bit of reason. Don’t the men get a say in whether their DNA gets passed along, or better yet, don’t they get a chance to say whether or not they want to be a father. Apparently not.
Next: shaved legs vs. Sasquach, should women shave their legs.
No, there is really no real reason that women really have to shave their legs, or their armpits, or their crotch, these are simply things that they do for us, the men. Should any of you feminists feel that this is wrong, feel free to take it up with my mother, my best friend’s girlfriend, sister, and mother, and a few others. Don’t worry, I can make sure that their all there at the same time, it’ll sure as hell be funnier than anything cause, you are gonna get your ass reamed from so many angles that you won’t be able to see straight. See this one I’m going to use to segue my way into the difference between Feminism as the majority of the population see it as, and proud strong women who also like men and like being see and loved by us. Oh yes, before I get started, no I am not a woman, I have never been a woman and with any luck I never will be, I like being a man far too much to lose myself. Feminists as the world sees it seems to have gone from the point of wanting equality for women (a noble goal to be sure) to now wanting to have an Orwellian equality (we are all made equal, only I’m more equal than you are) whereas other women (see my mother for an example) are happy, the see that there are problems yes, but they also see that to fix some of those problems they will lose some of the things they treasure most. I have it on good authority (as in I have heard it from the source) that some women actually like looking good, for men. It’s not a matter of social repression or societal based roles being forced on them, but rather that they enjoy standing on a street corner and causing pile-ups and traffic jams, (and honestly I know what this feels like as I get the same joy when I’m in Raleigh, NC walking from a hotel to a bar in my Kilt, it’s really fun sometimes) but some others feel that this is not right and that women shouldn’t have to conform to these societal norms, and that’s all well and good, just please, for the love of god, if you are one such, do not feel the need to tell me everything about it and force me to your viewpoint, it won’t happen. If you want to discuss it, fine, if you want to show me how I’m wrong and my whole gender is nothing but lecherous pigs who were never as good at anything as any woman, we’re gonna have problems.
Next: a history lesson in language
My next piece will be on language, for I go to read someone talking about how they were taking Latin, and discovering that it was a gender based language. By that I mean that in Latin, a chair is female, a desk is male, etc. etc. now I would not have a problem with this if it wasn’t for the fact that they were talking about this, AS A BAD THING, now a little history lesson, feminism as we know it an love it today is about 90 years old, give or take a few years, Latin on the other hand is running the gamut at about 3000 years and change. Hence, the ancient Romans were not really concerned with whether or not they were offending people with their language (an even if they were, it was really kinda one of those things where if they did, they’d just conquer them anyway) so someone in this day and age complaining doesn’t exactly have Julius Caesar rolling in his grave. Further more, this is a language, really now can you get a bit more pathetic than to be getting mad at a language for being what you call sexist? It’s not as if complaining is going to make this “go away” or some such, really the best you can do is to stop taking the class and forget the language, that way at least you could pretend it doesn’t exist.
Any way I’m getting tired now and I’m not making much sense. I go to bed now. Night, night