The Suffragettes

When I was a child, my image of the early 20th century Suffragettes was based on watching Glynis Johns as Mrs. Banks in the 1965 movie "Mary Poppins."

In other words, they were silly, blowsy middle aged ladies in corsets and ridiculous hats, strutting around, smashing windows, chaining themselves to iron gates, and blithely neglecting their domestic responsibilities.  (Never fear, by the end of "Mary Poppins", Mrs. Banks has seen the error of her ways.)

However, the resurgence of the New Misogynists -- many of whom would frankly like to return to a pre-suffrage America -- has made me more curious about, and appreciative of, the ladies of the Suffrage Movement. 

You can watch Hilary Swank and Frances O'Connor in an HBO movie, Iron Jawed Angels", playing the respective roles of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.

By the end of the film, both women have endured relentless mockery, betrayal by the competing "old guard" women's party, the corruption of law enforcement and congress, incarceration as political prisoners, beatings and torture. The scenes depicting forced feedings are particularly horrifying.  Ultimately, of course, Paul and the single plank National Woman's Party triumphed:  The 19th Amendment granted American women the right to vote in 1920.  

"Iron Jawed Angels" is not a great film.  I must admit I'm not a huge fan of Swank's onscreen persona; she always reminds me of a camp counselor with her toothy grin and endless, intense enthusiasm.  I'm also getting a bit tired of seeing Anjelica Huston cast as "the villainess."  And I found the use of contemporary songs in the sound track a distracting anachronism.  There is an entirely unnecessary "love interest" of course -- I guess so the audience won't assume Burns and Paul, quel horreur, were lesbian lovers?  However, the movie is fairly unique in its telling of an important and seldom-taught piece of history, and it reminds those of us who have been following the New Misogynists what a return to "the good old days" would look like.

Spete Tells It Like It Is

Over on deadspin.com, a guy who goes by "spete" (that is, I assume it's a guy) posted the following comment, immediately garnering many "likes" and positive comments from a handful of female readers:

Men's Rights Activism is one of those things that sounds reasonable in theory and is a complete fucking disaster in practice, kind of like Communism. In theory sure, someone should probably keep an eye out for every group, including this one particular group that has been in charge of pretty much everything for the entirety of human civilization. Just because their group has had the vast majority of political and social power throughout history doesn't mean that individual men might not be getting screwed over from time to time, it sounds perfectly reasonable to have someone looking out for their interests too.

Unfortunately in practice it's just a collection of the craziest, bitterest, stupidest, most batshit groin-grabbingly bonkers hateful misogynist assholes that can be found on the internet who spend 100% of their time alternating between poor pitiful me sobbing and screaming about what horrible bitches all women everywhere are. These guys are a hemorrhoid on the puckered anus of the internet. Even furries are a less embarrassing community than those mutants.

Another male commenter, GiovanniBattistaFidanza, professes bewilderment at the MRA phenom:

What are these guys whining about? Like 99% of all my interactions with women have been fine. They're pretty accommodating, they seem mostly friendly, even when I'm off my face. The only time I've had any stink-eye thrown my way was when I was being horrible a.k.a. hilarious. Women pose absolutely zero threat to me, and it's not the worst thing in the world having a few around every so often.

Reading these comments gives me hope...

Iggy Pop: A Man I Love

Yeah, something tells me Iggy has never felt insecure about his masculinity, either.

Sunshine Mary Turns Me Off

There aren't too many people that I want to imagine having sex, but of all the people in the world that I want to imagine having sex the least, I would choose Sunshine Mary.

It isn't just because she looks like Dana Carvey as "The Church Lady".  Or that her hair and glasses remind me of my own worst fashion choices in the eighties.  Or that she writes posts such as "In Defense of Duty Sex" (Close your eyes and think of England?).  No, it's not just because she is personally fashion-challenged and garbs every hateful thing she says in a cloak of piety.  Although that's all part of it.

It's because she is incredibly mean-spirited.

In response to a post on Dalrock about sad, remorseful divorcees (or, in his words, "post marital spinsters"), in which he quotes a pathetic woman who wrote on Cafe Mom that "When I pleasure myself (which unfortunately has been necessary since the split), I always end up in tears because it reinforces how lonely I am," Miss Mary gloats: "Welp, I don’t need to “pleasure myself” since, unlike Ms. Fabulous Frivorcee, I have a husband to do that for me, but I will cop to experiencing a rather delicious thrill of schadenfreude upon reading that sentence."

She hastily amends that she is just "kidding," that "actually, her letter is heart-breakingly sad. I’m glad she wrote it if it will save others from her awful fate. If more women are honest about the reality of divorce, as opposed to the fantasy, perhaps it will serve as a warning to the herd."

Her attempt to paint herself as caring and concerned makes her initial remark all the uglier.  Plus now I am left with the unfortunate image of Sunshine Mary's husband "pleasuring" her coupled with the proximity of the phrase "a rather delicious thrill."  Blecchh.

It's the Stupid, Stupid

I have been reprimanded more than once over at manboobz for using "ablist" language by referring to some of the manosphere writers as "lunatics" or wishing that they would climb out of their basements and get "real jobs."  And today I note, with some chagrin, that someone on the bluepill reddit was offended that I dismissed the redpill boys as "morons" instead of more kindly conceding that they are "misled."  Well, in fact, I think they are both.  Morons are, after all, easily misled.

When I am in another forum, such as manboobz, I try to conform to the rules of that culture.  As a visitor, I show respect to the community over there by parsing my thoughts in ways that do not offend other members.  In my blog, I write exactly as I please, and I try to express myself as truthfully as I can.  Similarly, when I was in the middle east, I wore "hijab" out of respect to the mores of the culture that was hosting me, and did not consider myself a hypocrite in doing so.  In my own home, I am not obligated to avoid offense; I am obligated to live and speak my truth.  And I wear whatever I damn well please.  (Which today means a t-shirt covered in bird poop and riddled with cigarette burns, so there!)

Granted, my "truth" is based on my own life experience, on what I have been exposed to through reading, observing, reflecting, and just plain hanging out (as a white, bisexual middle-class woman) on this planet for nearly sixty years.  

And truthfully, I do believe that many of the New Misogynists suffer from personality disorders.  And I truthfully believe -- based on reading many, many, many comments -- that their followers are not only poorly educated, but suffer from real intellectual deficits.  

And, yes, I am somewhat contemptuous of people who do not try to better themselves.  Ignorance is not a sin, but willful ignorance is the greatest sin in my book.  If someone tells me I am wrong, and explains why, I try to exercise enough humility to consider that he/she might be right, even if that means I must (gasp!) be wrong.  Because experience tells me that when I am feeling most defensive is when I am most likely to be encountering an important learning opportunity. 

People who cling to ideas that are not only wrong, but also harmful to others, in the face of all evidence to the contrary (whether this is creationism, misogyny, denial of privilege, denial of climate change, or transphobia) are ignorant.  And that ignorance is either stemming from (1) some willfulness on their part, (2) pathological delusion, or else (3) plain old garden-variety stupidity.  

People who are not stupid, but who take advantage of others' stupidity in an attempt to gain power or prestige, are, on the other hand, bad. (Think Karl Rove / Dick Cheney and Bush Jr.)  One of the things I find most despicable about "Roosh" is that he appears to have started out in life with the requisite number of brain cells and support to have done something useful (he has a B.S. in microbiology), but he squandered his gifts because his need to be perceived as a "leader of men" (an alpha among betas) trumped his willingness to achieve success through hard work and self-discipline.  He's a very bad person who chooses to treat women badly and who encourages stupid men to follow their worst (most base) impulses.

There is so much cognitive dissonance in the manosphere, it makes my head hurt.  Sometimes I wonder if these leaders (i.e., Paul Elam) really started out believing the crap they now spew, or if they simply, over time, have acquiesced to their own lies.  Of course, in the hot house environments of manosphere blogs, where no received wisdom is challenged or examined, everyone's mind becomes duller, even the most critical (hostile) reader's. 

Look, I'm no brainiac either.  The worst thing about aging is that every day, I feel myself slipping, cognitively.  I struggle to keep abreast of the information and skills I need just to do my job, for example, and joke (?) that as soon as I retire, I will refuse to adapt to one more technological change.  Every day I am aware that I have less control over my future, so no wonder I find myself looking backwards.  I need to exercise more, both physically and mentally, just to maintain basic function.

If there's one reason I will quit following the manosphere, it is because I cannot afford to expose my already-deteriorating faculties to so much Stupid.  Ditto watching television.  In the same vein, if there's one reason I hate teaching remedial English, it is because exposing myself to so much bad writing is eroding my own writing skills.  Sometimes I find myself embroiled in some internal argument with, say, Bill Price's wife, or recoiling from some new horror from Matt Forney or JudgyBitch, and I wonder what the hell I am doing.  I should be taking a physics class or learning to crochet instead.

That's just how this tired old lady sees it on a cold, cloudy Friday morning. 
 

Time For a New Wardrobe?

A former student flagged me down as I was crossing campus.  As is often the case, I apologized because I couldn't remember her name.  "That's OK," she said.  "It was fifteen years ago, after all."  "But still, you remembered me," I said.  "I recognized your dress," she said.

Modern Day Chastity Belts

So this has been making the rounds, both in manosphere and feminist places:  rape-repellant sportswear.

It's been amply pointed out that whoever engineered this getup is absolutely clueless about rape prevention, since he/she thinks that it is merely a matter of preventing a penis from entering a vagina.  In the case of stranger rape, what are the chances of this saving your life at the point of a gun?  

Still, it made me chuckle a bit as I recalled how I devised my own "anti-rape" outfit while I was traveling solo from Kabul to Istanbul when I was 22 years old.  I basically wore a lot of tight layers:  underpants, layered with a pair of stout tights, and on top of that a rubber girdle.  Over this I wore a slip, a blouse, a sweater, a jumper dress, and a coat.  

Boy, it was hot in there.  Also, going to the toilet (overflowing squat toilets, mind you, on moving trains) took me about twenty minutes and gave me quite a workout.

However, I did encounter one incident in which my home-made rape prevention outfit was called into action.  Going through eastern Turkey, the conductor fetched me out of a "family" compartment where I was happily hanging out with a troupe of friendly Kurdish folks, and forced me into the back of the train, where an empty car had just been added.  He then proceeded to (attempt to) rape me.

He didn't have much luck.  He was a relatively slight man (probably about 150 pounds) and I was a stout woman (probably about 175 pounds), and I immediately employed a kind of passive-resistance technique, curling up into a ball on the seat, like a very large hedgehog might.  He couldn't even cop a good feel;  with all my layers of snug, thick clothing, groping my breasts and buttocks was probably as exciting as patting down a well-upholstered couch.  Frustrated, he began smacking me on the shoulders (fortunately not in the head, which was the only exposed part of my body), and then finally stomped out of the car, whereupon I immediately made a beeline back to the safety of my Kurdish family.

When I complained to one of the male members of the family, he asked me wearily what I had expected, traveling alone?  At least he couldn't blame me for the immodesty of my attire.  

There were a few such scary moments to come, however careful I was to avoid being isolated or surrounded exclusively by males.  The aggressors and would-be rapists were almost always men in positions of slight authority, i.e., hotel keepers, ticket agents, museum guards.  Women, if they were in the vicinity, were usually quick to come to my defense.

I considered trying to pass as a man, but my body type (in those days, distinctly pear-shaped) and childishly round face made that difficult to achieve in western dress.  And, as a Turkish friend later pointed out, would hardly have made less of a target of rape in those parts of the world.