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Monday, May 13, 2013

Dinosaurs

In response to my comment that the only way I can cope with the MRA/PUA crowd is to remind myself that they are merely dinosaurs bellowing piteously as they lurch into oblivion, a clever blogger who also comments on Manboobz posted link to the "Extinction" scene in Disney's "Fantasia." 

As I watched it, I realized that I'd seen this before, and that the visual image I was describing had been formed and implanted in my brain while watching "Fantasia" as a child  fifty years ago.  

I find myself muttering "Dinosaurs!" a lot these days, and usually in reference to people more or less my own age -- which is not so very old, mind you -- who can't or won't grasp that the greater social environment has changed, and however much they moan and roar, it's not ever going back to accommodate them.  I cannot remember the exact quote, but something like "shuffling backwards into the future" comes to mind.

And I ought to know.  Every day, I'm painfully aware of my increasing obsolescence.  It hasn't been a smooth, gradual decline either:  within the last decade, I went from being at the top of my game (whatever game you can think of) to playing bingo with a hearing aid in the back of a church basement (figuratively).

The bitch of it is, I know how tiresome I am being whenever I launch into a story about the ways things were -- I can see it in my students' and younger colleagues' eyes -- yet I cannot stop myself.  I want them to know.  I have something important to share here: the ways things are compared to the way things were.  I was there!  I know!

It doesn't matter what the topic is:  abortion, feminism, Islam, neighborhoods, technology.  Whatever, I must dive in and insert my historical perspective.  Because that is all I have to offer now.  And I cannot bear to be completely silenced, not yet. 





Sunday, May 12, 2013

Women Who Hate Women

Ann Coulter, watch out:  there's a new anti-feminist female provocateur emerging, and she's just as blonde, skinny, and outrageously mean-spirited as you are!  PLUS she's younger and -- dare I say it? -- even prettier.  Yes, Mirror, mirror on the wall:  it's JudgyBitch (catchy moniker!) AKA "Janet Bloomfield."  She's a self-described stay at home mom, reported to be from Canada, with an undergraduate degree in film theoryShe is affectionately referred to as "Drunky" on another anti-MRA blog because she is rumored to enjoy her booze.  Allegedly.  And God knows I'd be the last person in the world to condemn her for that!  However, if alcohol is behind this brand of vitriol, she might want to reconsider blogging-while-drinking, cuz this lady is one mean drunk.

I will admit that one of my guiltiest pleasures is indulging my morbid fascination with really evil women.  Male serial killers, architects of doom, and genocidal maniacs are a dime a dozen, but when a woman is truly horrible, she gets my attention.  Hence my addiction to Deadly Women, or any stories about the likes of Myra Hindley, Elisabeth Bathory, and, most recently, Jodi Arias.  Make of this predilection what you will -- I cannot defend it -- but clearly I'm not alone.  

Of course, women don't have to be practicing Black Widows to fascinate me.  They only have to think like sociopaths.  

I just spent an hour on one of Janet Bloomfield's blogs and I was impressed.  There aren't many women out there with the balls to claim prepubescent girls "ask" to be molested in exchange for candy, cigarettes, or limo rides.  In fact, Bloomfield has a lot to say about so-called rape and the women who invent it, but it boils down to her conviction that rape is a "fantasy" concocted by women too fat and unattractive to get real men to fuck them.  Nice, huh?  Bloomfield writes for A Voice For Men (presumably, in between mothering her three children, proudly crafting her husband sandwiches, and pouring herself just a little more chardonnay malbec). 

To get the full flavor of Janet "JudgyBitch" Bloomfield, you have to watch her Youtube channel; every narcissist has one these days.  The smug expression, the professionally cut and streaked blonde bob, the odd vocal affectations all scream a carefully crafted facade of upper middle class white privilege, and so enhance the appeal of her misogynistic rants immeasurably. 

OK, it's easy for me to understand why someone can "judge" members of a perceived inferior class -- morally reprehensible, but it follows a kind of self-serving logic -- but to turn on one's own class is a very curious phenomenon to me.  What does a woman gain by allying herself with her oppressor?  Does she believe, on some level, that by disavowing her own vulnerability as a female (and the mother of females)  and taking on the perpetrators' point of view, she wins special entitlements and protection?  Is this some variation of Stockholm Syndrome?  Armchair psychiatrists want to know!

And how does the adolescent daughter of such a woman react when the kids at school mention they watched her mom on the internet?  How do the other mothers feel about JudgyBitch as a mother and potential role model for their own daughters?   

Now I don't know if Janet Bloomfield is a pseudonym as she claims it is, but when a person posts videos on YouTube, doing everything  she can to garner a sliver of attention from the boys, she is bound to be recognized by someone, sooner than laterAnd although she claims no fear of reprisals (from her husband's employer, from the college where maybe she will get a Ph.D. some day), I can predict with grim certainty that the wildly irresponsible claims and downright evil ideas she has posted about rape and pedophilia will not be easy to sweep away.

Oh, that's right:  JudgyBitch doesn't give a shit what other people think of her (unless it's Paul Elam, perhaps).  She's like the Courtney Love of the manosphere!   Now where'd I put that corkscrew?

Doing Nothing

Last night around midnight I was getting ready to turn in when I heard some of my neighbors yelling.  At first I figured they were just having a loud party, but it soon became apparent at least one woman was angry.  When I heard her say, "It isn't even loaded, you chicken shit," I knew someone had a gun over there, and I grew concerned.

My neighbors are South Pacific Islanders, and very friendly folks.  My only real beef with them is that they don't get waste service.  Instead, they pile their garbage into the bed of an open pickup until it's full, then haul it to the dump.  Winds prevailing as they are, a lot of candy wrappers and snack packaging get blown onto my lawn.  Although it's mildly annoying, I have never said anything: I just pick it up and mutter to myself.  Their eldest daughter is a stocky, athletic kid who spends hours every day shooting into the neighbor's basketball hoop or cycling in endless circles around the cul de sac.  She's a sweet kid who seems lonely.  It was the knowledge that she was in the house with these raging idiots that made me wonder if I should call the cops.

On the other hand, I didn't want to overreact, or get people in trouble unnecessarily.  Although several adults were yelling at this point, no one seemed to be in pain or extreme fear.  While I dithered thusly in my darkened living room, the cops arrived anyway, and with considerable drama ("Come out with your hands up!"), they arrested both a woman and a man. 

This Mother's Day morning all looked serene across the way, and I ventured out for a pack of smokes.  I have a favorite convenience store I always buy cigarettes from that is run by a Korean couple.  They are rather surly, but the front counter is plastered with pictures of their beagle in various adorable poses.  I've been popping into their store twice a week for ten years, yet they never seem to recognize me.  They never remember the brand I smoke either.  It's a little weird:  Do they really not recognize me?  Do all of us white people look alike?  Or are they just respecting my space?  Either way, I don't mind.  I'm a native of a city that is renowned for both its rain and its social chill, and I kind of like it that way. 

As I was leaving the store, I noticed a rack of t-shirts on display near the door.  One on top caught my eye.  It showed a cartoon man brandishing an unfurled belt above a small terrified face with the caption, "This hurts me worse than it hurts you."   It was so crudely drawn that I wasn't sure if the victim was meant to be a child or a woman.  I had never seen a t-shirt like that before, and I could hardly believe that someone would think of making it, much less selling it.  Was it meant to celebrate or condemn domestic violenceI almost wanted to buy it so that people would believe it was real.  I thought about taking a picture, or asking the owner what it meant to him, but his forbidding expression and lack of English daunted me.  

As I drove away, I thought, "It's time to find a new place to buy cigarettes."
  

Friday, May 10, 2013

Yellow Fever

This week I showed one of my classes "Seeking Asian Female," a documentary from Independent Lens (PBS) that tells the story of an "Asiaphile," a sixty year old parking lot attendant named Steven, and his efforts to win the affections of his younger Chinese wife, Sandy.   The film is available to watch online through the month, and I recommend it.

My class is composed almost exclusively of Asian international students, about half of whom are Chinese.  I was a little apprehensive about their reactions:  Would they be offended?  Would they be embarrassed?  In fact, they seem to have found it pretty hilarious, especially the scenes in which Sandy upbraids a befuddled Steven in Mandarin. 

In the short class discussion that followed, one of the students, a comely young Chinese girl, asked me, "What's wrong with being attractive to white guys?"  As I delicately waded into language of "fetish" and "objectification," I realized they were already familiar with these concepts via mass exposure to advertising and internet porn.

The students were asked to write a contrastive paragraph about the expectations that Sandy and Steven had before they married, and how these expectations were challenged by reality.  It dovetailed neatly with a unit we had finished on discrimination, racism, and cultural stereotypes.  (I've yet to read their efforts, but will do so this afternoon.)

What I didn't share with them is my own family history with yellow fever.  My uncle married twice, first to a Japanese gal named Yoriko when I was about ten.  She was the wayward daughter of a Shinto priest, and turned out to be -- to my uncle's dismay -- quite a pistol.  When they visited, Yoriko used my underwear drawer to stash her snacks, and my panties reeked of dried squid for a full decade.  Sadly, this was the only reminder of her once vibrant presence, as she soon ran off with her golf instructor and was lost to our family forever.

My uncle's second marriage came much later, and was a marriage in name only.  His second wife was a Korean bar girl who had suffered a near-fatal aneurysm in my uncle's Seoul apartment while he was at work.  She was grievously brain damaged as a result, unable to speak (although she could be distressingly vocal) and had an unsteady, lumbering gait.  She required constant supervision and around the clock assistance, so her aging mom and dad were part of the package.  My uncle married her -- or so he claimed -- so that he could get her on his medical insurance plan.  He set her and her folks up in LA for several years, but they hated living in the US, never learned more than a few words in English, and soon were back in Korea, where he continued to support them (and still does, after his death).  I sometimes wonder if my uncle took Jae Nam on, not so much out of compassion, but because he knew she was the one woman who could never leave him.

My uncle was only attracted to women who were extremely young, extremely petite, and otherwise "extremely feminine" in the worst sense of the Asian female cultural stereotype.   His addiction to Asian girls took him on various sex tourism holidays.  One trip to a Thai brothel resulted in his developing both oral gonorrhea and genital herpes simultaneously, the inconvenient details of which he shared freely.  (I learned to carefully sequester my personal linens and towels whenever he dropped in.)   My uncle's "yellow fever" persisted throughout his life even though it was based on a fantasy that his own experiences repeatedly disproved.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Roosh Writes Fiction

For a guy with utter contempt for females, Roosh spends a lot of time fantasizing what it is like to be a girl.  This week on his blog he offers up a short story called "Patricia and Her Smartphone."   Except it's not so short, after all; it is 3500 words long, as he lays out in thudding detail how a young woman's day revolves around the demands of social media.  It is meant, I expect, to be a stinging indictment of how consumerism has destroyed the capacity of women to form relationships with others. 

Roosh often blames feminism for all the ills that plague male/female relationships today, but he seems to conflate feminism with consumerism.  This lack of understanding of what these terms actually mean confounds and annoys me more than just about anything else Roosh does.   

Roosh's literary effort seems to be derived from Bret Easton Ellis yuppie satire, American Psycho.  I heartily disliked both the book and subsequent movie. but in their day they got favorable reviews.  Of course, there are no smartphones in American Psycho, which was published in 1991, but otherwise it's much of a muchness, as my mother used to say..

As someone who spends several hours a day trying to capture the fleeting attention of  "emerging adults," I am all too familiar with how the new technology hinders face-to-face communication and shortens attention spans.  I don't find the addiction to texting and twittering a particularly gendered behavior, however: my male students are equally in thrall to their devices. It also strikes me as a bit hypocritical that Roosh takes young ladies to task for living online, when he and his followers are doing much the same.  Meh, this is hardly breaking news, and many artists and writers have been addressing it.

I did smile at the passage in which Patricia and her friend Madison photograph their lunches before consuming them:  "The food arrived, presented beautifully on large plates with squigglies of unknown sauce going outward like heat rays a child would leave on a drawing of the sun. Both phones were out now, taking pictures from different angles...  From the beginning of their lunch date until the end, a total of 52 photos were taken. Sixteen of those photos would be uploaded to various sites to garner a total of 48 likes, comments, and retweets, including a comment from the restaurant, apologizing for the menu typo."   I (once) shared a meal in Las Vegas with a colleague who actually did this: by the time she was ready to take an actual bite, I was ready for the dessert menu.

Patricia, as Roosh's fictional feminized self, is a very, very Mean Girl who dismisses the men who approach her throughout the day because they aren't handsome or hip enough to meet her standards.   She later meets a fellow for drinks who tries to impress her by "talking about his recent experience in the Peruvian mountains where he took ayahuasca and achieved spiritual enlightenment [and] accumulated a vocabulary of 1,000 words in Quechua to learn important Andean wisdom from wise elders... Now, if that bit of esoterica wouldn't impress a girl, what would?  (Me? I'd be thinking, What a pretentious twit!)

Patricia won't have anything to do with poor Cody, either, because he doesn't believe that access to birth control is a woman's right.  (And rightly so; that attitude should be a complete deal breaker in any woman's playbook.)

The story goes on and on and on.  Roosh took the next day off from blogging, citing exhaustion, and no wonderIf it was as exhausting to write as it is to read, he must be knackered.

Roosh writes competently; I'd be thrilled if my students could string that many grammatical sentences together.  Functional literacy does not, alas, good writing make.  Unfortunately, like pretty much everyone in the manosphere, he is incapable of nuance, subtlety or levity.  Despite his efforts to be witty and satirical, the resulting prose is heavy, turgid and excruciating, and about as much fun as watching someone stack bricks. 
  
I don't think this is the sort of thing his fan base wants to read, either.


Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Monday, May 6, 2013

The End of Roosh

Roosh is exhausted.  Anyone who reads his blog between the lines can sense he nearing the the end.  He is trying to prepare his fan base for the inevitable End of Roosh:

"When I first got to Eastern Europe, my standards were lower than what the market provided. I bought all the product available, a binge that coincided with doctor visits and antibiotic treatments. But each new notch increased my standards by just a tiny amount, until one day, standing in a plentiful, fully-stocked market, I did not make a purchase. The reason is that my standards overshot the local markets I found myself in."

In other words, he found himself, in a veritable "poosy paradise," to be impotent.

"I tried to drug myself with alcohol to make the market more appealing. It used to work in the past, but no longer. Even after many drinks, my brain knows true beauty. Only when my boner supplants my brain, when I walk around the market with a priapismatic [sic] erection that is not stimulated by the external, can I proceed with a transaction."

Let's reword this, shall we?  "Especially after many drinks, I am unaroused despite the abundance of attractive young women in my view."

"Please tell me how to go back to when my standards were lower, when I was not a machine for detecting aesthetic flaws in women, of spotting misshapen thighs, an extra dollop of adipose tissue over the stomach, eyebrows that weren’t properly groomed or even a voice one half octave too deep."

Gosh, I wish I could help here.  Perhaps you need to entertain the notion that while sex without emotional connection can be fun, as a daily diet it is lacking essential nutrients.  You have dedicated your entire identity, your life's very purpose, to detecting and exposing the flaws in women.  This is the End of Your Game: no one real can now meet your standards, and the sexual act has become about as meaningful as gorging on a bag of potato chips.


When I look in the mirror, I see a physically flawed specimen, so why have I come to seek perfection? My brain demands it, and it is defeating my boner, putting me on the path of one day seeing sex as a biological nuisance instead of a pleasurable necessity.

Ah, my love!  You are beginning to see the light: Sex is BOTH "a biological nuisance' AND "a pleasurable necessity."  Is Little Roosh beginning to grow up?

Almost all women I’ve had sex with in the past I would have sex with today, but only on one condition: I wouldn’t have to put in a stroke of work. They would have come to me, touch me, disrobe, and then let me play with their bodies as I see fit. I would not put 10% of the original effort that allowed me to have sex with them in the first place. This must be the end of the player, when the development of his brain defeats the evolutionary demands of his penis, or is it the natural order of man, with the hyper-sexed player and his demands of never ending variety being the anomaly, the freak of nature?

Let's not get carried away here.  You write as though you have actually had sex with a huge number of women, but we all know, don't we, that this is not exactly the case.  You also write as though "the penis" makes "evolutionary demands" as part of the "natural order of man."  In other words, your entire life philosophy needs a major overhaul.  And I don't know whether that will sit very well with your readers.
 
The club is horrible and I want to leave. I pick the most beautiful girl in the venue, one who my brain liked, but she rejects me, not so softly. I can’t leave after having done just one approach—I can leave after two. I go through the motions on the girl next to me, cute but not extraordinary, just slightly above the mean of what I’ve had in the past. She likes me. She’s touching me, complimenting me. She is ready to do the work that I don’t want to do and so my brain allows me to proceed and I will have sex with her three days from now. Unless it’s easy or unless the girl in the top 0.01% of women I’ve seen in 25 countries and counting, I can’t seem to be bothered.

OK, OK -- you've convinced me!  Sex addiction is a Real Thing.

Roosh is trying to tell his readership that he has had enough.  Little Roosh Wants To Come Home.  Don't make him keep trying to fuck strange women in strange countries!  It's starting to tear at his very soul.


But what else can Roosh do?  Sans the porno, does anyone care what Roosh does or says or writes?  It looks like he will soon find out.