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Tag: Feminism

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An Age Without a Woman

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International Women’s Day has come and gone, as a fly landing briefly on the face of the Venus de Milo. The substantively identical Day Without a Woman and the International Women’s Strike took place in solidarity on March 8, endorsed by the usual suspects and calling for women’s abstinence from paid and unpaid labor in favor of a nebulous “day of action”.

International Women’s Day has come and gone, as a fly landing briefly on the face of the Venus de Milo. The substantively identical Day Without a Woman and the International Women’s Strike took place in solidarity on March 8, endorsed by the usual suspects and calling for women’s abstinence from paid and unpaid labor in favor of a nebulous “day of action”. No normal responsibility was safe from this collective tantrum:

Originally, the organizers urged women to shun all kinds of labor — paid and unpaid. They also encouraged women to forgo “reproductive labor” — everything from sex to child care — and “emotional labor,” which could be construed as the application of Band-Aids and kisses.

But it’s unrealistic to think that women who have young children will go on strike, noted Lauren Duncan, the Smith College professor who teaches the psychology of political activism.

“There’s no way women would let their children fend for themselves to make a point,” she said. “That’s just not going to happen.”

Still, the call to action may open some women’s eyes to how much they are doing, both at work and at home, said Duncan.

“This is a thing that all women struggle with,” Duncan said. “Women are socialized as little girls to take care of other people, starting with dolls and little siblings. . . . All of that is reinforced in school.

“Something like this,’’ she said, “can make you just more aware of, ‘Wait, you don’t have to do everything.’ ”

In the profoundly disfigured world of the feminist, where marketplace productivity is the pivotal aspiration of life, even tending her child’s boo-boo is a commercial activity—a contemptible one.

Much more than a Day Without a Woman, we are living in the Age Without a Woman. It is not one self-righteous personal day that will lodge on the register of history, but the tremendous social pathology pursuant of the abdication of hearth and home by women en masse in the 20th and 21st centuries. The woman whose absence is most significant is the “angel in the house” so jealously vituperated by feminists, not the woman working in social media marketing or the dystopian “helping professions.”

The sensibility of the woman to serve as a conduit to the sublime for her intimate circles has been replaced by the clownish pathos of ersatz masculinity. Where once she concerned herself with her family’s daily experience of beauty and cultivation of virtue and craft, she now presides dormant over a glowing laptop screen. Her generativity has been replaced with productivity, her legacy lining the shelves at Walmart. Instead of the magical babble of an infant, she has the mechanical growl of the office Keurig machine. The useful idiots of the women’s “movement” behold the spiritual ugliness of their world and are hoodwinked into a scheme that perpetuates it. Wearing red to symbolize “revolutionary love and sacrifice” does not a sacrifice or a revolutionary make. The future is for the women who understand women’s future formation lies in their children, not the wasted fossil fuels and discarded placards of “women’s activism.”

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America Culture Reviews

Gilmore Girls: An American Tragedy

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“This whole thing is dead to me, anyway. It died with Richard.” – Emily Gilmore, Fall. Was the death of Richard Gilmore the death of White America? It’s not that…

“This whole thing is dead to me, anyway. It died with Richard.” – Emily Gilmore, Fall.

Was the death of Richard Gilmore the death of White America?

It’s not that the Gilmore Girls revival is less White than the original show; it’s that it’s more honest. The original Gilmore Girls was a White liberal utopia: a single mother raising her young daughter in an idyllic, wacky, all-White village in Connecticut (except for some Koreans and one disdainfully snobbish mulatto Frenchman—we’ll come back to him). Known for its snappy dialogue and charming absurdity, it was a difficult show not to like—anecdotally speaking, I know almost as many men as women who quietly enjoyed Gilmore Girls, usually introduced to it by their daughters or girlfriends.

But of course, the original Gilmore Girls was a lie. In the real world, a sixteen-year-old pregnant rich girl who ran away from home wouldn’t stumble upon a Brigadoon-esque village and grow up to become a successful businesswoman while her genius daughter/BFF goes to the equivalent of Choate and then Yale. In the real world, women who make as many bad decisions as Lorelai Gilmore does aren’t happy, nor are they seemingly rewarded for all of them. But the world of Gilmore Girls was a world set apart, a frozen episode that looked like early 2000’s America on the surface but really hearkened back to a more idyllic time.

I went into the revival expecting more of the same. In the final episode of the original series, we’re left with a Lorelai who has finally gotten back together with Luke the diner owner, and a Rory who has turned down a marriage proposal from her long-term boyfriend Logan Huntzberger, in order to pursue a career in journalism. This latter decision was one of the more signal-y moments in Gilmore Girls history: the girl-power ending where she proved she didn’t need no man! I predicted a revival that showed a plucky reporterette, fully satisfied with her career; a script that covered over the reality of culture that tells women they don’t need marriage, of the sick society in which we live where ‘empowered’ women slowly eat themselves to death after returning from their desk job every evening, alone except for a cat or two.

But I was wrong. The Gilmore Girls revival, wittingly or otherwise, reveals the rot of American society—especially in comparison with the original. The difference is so striking that I have to believe it was not entirely intentional on the part of the show creator; rather, it is indicative of a distinct change in social mood that has taken place between when the show ended, in 2007, and today.

The new Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life takes place over the course of a year, broken into four 90-minute episodes: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. (Obligatory disclaimer: I am going to spoil the ending.)

In the original show, there was very little political propaganda. This was one of the most appealing things about it. Lorelai made the occasional George Bush joke, sometimes mocked her wealthy WASP parents for being Republicans, and Rory had a Planned Parenthood poster in her dorm room, but that was basically it. (Of course, the original premise of the show was pro-life, so they had to balance it out somehow). In general, this was incredibly refreshing compared to the constant political signaling in network television shows at the time, and compared to what’s on television now it’s like a different world. But the reboot is a different story. Suddenly, the town of Stars Hollow is engaged in gender activism, with earnest plans to put on a gay pride parade that never materializes due to a lack of homosexual town residents. (Hard to believe given the sudden prominence given to homosexual townsfolk.)

But far more striking is the change in the character of Michel Gerard. Michel, an overbearing, impeccably-dressed Frenchman with a thick accent and a penchant for Celine Dion, is a White-presenting mulatto who works at Lorelai’s inn, The Dragonfly. The original character of Michel was infamously sexually ambiguous; he of course fit a certain gay stereotype, was a little too close to his mother, etc. Nevertheless, there were occasional references made in passing to dating women, and never any made to male liaisons. Within the first 20 minutes of the reboot, in the first scene involving his character, Michel is discoursing scornfully about his male partner Frederick’s desire to adopt children. Why the dramatic change?

The answer is pretty simple: the original Gilmore Girls was a break from reality, while the reboot is almost unbearable in its reality. The past 8 years have been dramatic in their psychological effect on American society, and it is reflected here. But it’s more than that, in the world of the show. The mirror has crack’d from side-to-side; Richard Gilmore is dead. And with the patriarchal Gilmore gone, the order of things begins to break down, especially for the three female Gilmores.

Emily

“You don’t move or change ever. There’s a picture of you in the attic that Dorian Grey is consulting lawyers about.” – Lorelai to Emily, “Spring.”

The change in Emily is the most dramatic over the course of these four episodes. Unlike the two younger Gilmore girls, Emily is marble-constant, an American matriarch to make Tocqueville proud. As she points out to her unwed daughter Lorelai, who has been “roommates” with Luke the diner owner for 8 years, she, Emily, was married to the same man for fifty years. Her loss at his death is incomprehensible to someone like Lorelai. Ever her husband’s champion, after Lorelai makes a characteristically embarrassing scene at her father’s funeral, Emily chides her thus: “Your father was a great man, a pillar of the community, a man amongst men. And you dishonored him today like this in his own house.” None of the other males in this world come close to Richard Gilmore. The implication runs throughout the show: we shall never see his like again.

Much like the unappreciated WASP patriarchs who held America together for so long, but who also oversaw its slow doom, Richard died having paid for his illegitimate granddaughter’s education at his alma mater, Yale, where she learned—what, exactly? Richard died without having to seriously confront the fantasy he built around Rory, Yale, and ultimately, America itself.

Over the course of the year, Emily is in a tailspin. “I don’t know how to do this,” she says to Lorelai at one point. “Do what?” “Live my life.” It is a jarring thing to watch: Emily Gilmore, the woman who knew every customary form, the woman of exquisite taste, who could never bear to let anyone see her falter: spiraling.

Even her beloved Daughters of the American Revolution chapter holds no joys for her now. (This is where I think the show breaks continuity with the original character, but for the sake of argument, we may chalk it up to grief.) The DAR, of course, represents another aspect of the collapse of the American regime; we may recall that it was one of the only national organizations that fought the 1965 Immigration Act tooth and nail, alongside the American Legion. And if there is one thing Emily devoted her life to, besides her family, it was the DAR. Finally, in an outburst at a DAR meeting, Emily says the most un-Emily line of them all: “I can’t spend any more time and energy on artifice and bullshit.” This betrays more about the script-writer than about Emily, for Emily Gilmore before this would never have really considered her work for the DAR to be artifice: the seemingly frivolous work of choosing curtains and tablecloths and china patterns was an expression of an attempt to hold a fraying society together. As Emily says before she walks out the DAR doors, “This whole thing is dead to me anyway. It died with Richard.” Without Richard Gilmore, there’s no point in trying to save America anymore.

Lorelai

“You never do anything unless it’s exactly what you want to do. You never have. You go through life like a natural disaster knocking down everything and everyone in your path.” – Emily to Lorelai, “Winter.”

Fact check: True.

Lorelai is as flighty and selfish as ever, so there isn’t much new ground to cover here. She and Luke have lived together since the end of the series, never married, and apparently never even discussed having children, so it suddenly becomes an issue now. With Lorelai nearing the age of fifty, she can’t have children, and so surrogacy becomes a plot device that goes nowhere (but allows for some great scenes with the inimitable Paris Gellar, who breathed life into the whole depressing mess). Between the surrogacy drama and going to therapy with her mother, Lorelai works herself up into a real midlife crisis, deciding to go and hike the Pacific Crest Trail a la the book and movie Wild. Granted, I know nothing about either, but while the whole adventure seemed out of character—until she doesn’t actually go through with it—there was a certain pathos to the conversations she had with other women seeking solace in the wilderness. As the lonely ladies sit around a fire drinking boxed wine, one of them says, “I’m so glad I’m doing this. I almost did ‘Eat Pray Love,’ but my miles were blacked out. So here I am.” She later adds: “God, I hope this hike works. I need a new life so badly.”

Lorelai realizes that she doesn’t actually need a new life, and goes home to Luke having discovered that all she wants is to get married to him, leading to one of my favorite lines of the show: “I’ve gotta tell ya, before this thing goes on, the only way out is in a body bag.”

As infuriating as Lorelai is, she finally grows up enough to marry the man she loves. That’s something.

Rory

“You’re glowing! You must be in love.” – Emily to Rory, “Winter.”

But Rory isn’t in love.

She’s not in love with her boyfriend Paul, whom she has dated for two years and whose existence she regularly forgets. (The callous treatment of forgettable Paul is supposed to be funny, but comes off as cruel.) She’s not in love with her work. She doesn’t even seem to be in love with her lover, Logan Huntzberger, who, it turns out, she has been having an extended sexual relationship with, we can assume for many years. Logan is engaged to a French heiress, but Rory stays with him whenever she’s in London, which seems to be quite often. In the series finale Rory turned down his offer of a diamond ring and a life together—apparently only to exchange it for the life of a mistress, a high-class call girl. This is why it is almost impossible to have any sympathy for the girl when Logan tells her that his fiancé is finally moving in, and that they’ll have to conduct their liasons in a hotel in the future. It suddenly dawns on Rory that she is, indeed, the other woman—and that rather than romantic, her life looks tawdry.

Lacking sympathy for Rory is the popular thing to do in reviews of the reboot, but for the wrong reasons. Sure, it’s true that Rory comes across as a spoiled child who has never been called to account for her poor choices. And yeah, her career isn’t going well. But it seems to me that that’s not because she’s arrogant or entitled: it’s because her heart just isn’t in it anymore. Even when she steels herself to get something done and goes out into Manhattan to interview people for a ridiculous story, instead of successfully completing her task we are treated to the cringiest scene of the entire show, when she returns to tell her mother that she’s had her first one-night stand with a man in a Wookie costume. (Yes, at this point she’s still supposedly dating Paul and sleeping with Logan.) She expresses no horror at her own disloyalty, but only at her choice of partner.

So who, or what, does Rory love?

She expresses a sincere nostalgic love for her ex-boyfriend Dean when she runs into him in the grocery store. And she drops everything to save the Stars Hollow Gazette from extinction, even taking over as editor—a truly thankless task.

It’s clear that Rory is in love with her childhood. Stars Hollow, her first boyfriend, and her mother are all emblems of this. Other reviewers see this as a failing; I do not. There’s nothing wrong with loving a place and trying to make it better, even sacrificing more prestigious dreams in order to do so. In some ways, Rory makes peace with this over the course of the episodes. She finally makes a clean break with Logan; she begins writing a book about the story of her relationship with her mother; and of course, in the shocking final scene, she tells her mother, “I’m pregnant.” While the show creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, has suggested that Rory might have an abortion, the reviewer at Vox was horrified that Rory might actually think of keeping the child:

“Is this really what Rory wanted for herself? Or is she too deeply wedded to the mythos of Stars Hollow to know what her own desires are at this point?

The narrative’s cheerful, almost totally uncritical sublimation of millennial women’s individual agency to the cause of more babies is utterly enraging. To accept this plot as a natural conclusion to the show means either rewriting Rory herself into a passive noncommittal bore, or twisting Stars Hollow itself into something unrecognizable: a distorted version of American life where individual dreams and goals are repressed and subsumed into the larger collective. Stars Hollow, in this view, becomes a pro-life argument for the need to continue the legacy of Stars Hollow at any cost — even if it means dismantling the dreams of one of Stars Hollow’s finest.

It’s an abysmal, bittersweet way to part with a beloved fictional town. Rory will have the illusion of happiness, surrounded by community and family. But if 2016 has taught us anything, it’s that false comfort won’t make America great again, and it definitely won’t make Rory Gilmore great again.”

You see, the real tragedy would be having a community and a family, and thinking of yourself as happy. The horror!

Conclusion

The transformation of the town and its characters shows us that nothing is free of politics after the era of Obama, not even Stars Hollow.

Emily Gilmore is never really going to recover, because her world is gone.

Lorelai is getting married but isn’t going to have a child, while Rory may have a child, but isn’t getting married. It’s unclear whether or not she’ll have her baby, but either way, it won’t be raised with a father, just as Rory wasn’t raised with one. It’s a fatherless world. No fathers, no kings, no Richard Gilmores.

And yet the show isn’t really capable of pretending that everything is fine. The darkness shines through the charming humor, which isn’t as charming as it used to be. The gods left the earth a long time ago, but this seems to be a world entirely bereft of men. The result isn’t a feminist fantasy: it’s just sad.

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Culture Identity Sex

The Fascism in The Fappening

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The “woman warrior” who is “badass” and easily defeats men in physical combat is now so ingrained in popular culture it has become a cliché, even as attempts to apply it in the real world lead to unintentional comedy. 

Nature is the ultimate fascist. The Borg like Left, having conquered politics, religion, and sexual morality, now turns its attention to its greatest enemy.

After all, we now are all supposed to believe that race is just a social construct–so why not “gender?” And if gender is just a social construct, why can’t women do everything that a man can do–only better?

Coming on the heels of Marvel transforming a Nordic warrior archetype into a symbol of grrl power, websites gleefully reported a few days ago that “half the Viking warriors were female.” Tor, a Sci-Fi site which also does its best to PC police the culture and promote affirmative action pseudo-authors, desperately proclaimed:

Shieldmaidens are not a myth! A recent archaeological discovery has shattered the stereotype of exclusively male Viking warriors sailing out to war while their long-suffering wives wait at home with baby Vikings. (We knew it! We always knew it.)…

It’s been so difficult for people to envision women’s historical contributions as solely getting married and dying in childbirth, but you can’t argue with numbers—and fifty/fifty is pretty damn good.

Where to begin. Yes, shieldmaidens were in fact a thing (though rare), and the Norse and Germanic peoples generally were always known for the high status they gave to women, going back to Tacitus.

But to pretend that Viking warbands consisted of fifty percent women in an age where brute physical strength determined survival strains credulity. And however desperately Tor and other sites wanted to believe this was true, the archaeological discovery itself (which is actually from several years ago, not really recent) doesn’t really support the idea of Nordic Amazons striking terror in the British Isles.

The study looked at only fourteen graves, hardly a representative sample size. Of those fourteen graves, one included a woman buried with a sword and a shield.  Perhaps this means she was a shield-maiden, perhaps it simply reflects something unique about this unknown woman, or perhaps these weapons were buried as ritual items. In any event, one grave is hardly an earth-shattering finding.

But where does the 50% come from? Well, gender may be a social construct, but apparently you can still find out the identity of centuries old skeletons easily enough. The findings show that six of the 14 remains were women, seven were men, and one was indeterminate.

And… that’s it. That’s enough for the likes of Adriana Barton at the Globe and Mail to sternly intone that “any vestigial misogynists out there better run for cover.”

Back in the woman-hating, hierarchical, patriarchal world of math and literacy, what this rather limited study suggests is not that she-Thors were channeling Buffy a few centuries early but that the Norse settled the British Isles in co-ed groups. Assuming this pattern held up across the isles, Viking settlement followed the same kind of pattern as the English conquest of North America rather that the male led domination that created Latin America. This is an interesting finding–yet hysterical journalists immediately ignored it to start screaming about female Vikings, so desperately did they need to believe in a Narrative of absolute equality.

The “woman warrior” who is “badass” and easily defeats men in physical combat is now so ingrained in popular culture it has become a cliché, even as attempts to apply it in the real world lead to unintentional comedy. Perhaps the most prominent woman warrior of the zeitgeist is Katniss Everdeen, the “strong” heroine of the Hunger Games. Katniss proves that young girls can kill men with a ranged weapon too, or something. The character is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who has survived the faux paus of beginning her career with the Bill Engvall Show, a family friendly sitcom built around one of the Redneck Kings of Comedy. (Engvall’s fellow royals were Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, and Larry the Cable Guy, who was accused of racism by predictable shill and Alvin and the Chipmunks star David Cross.) Lawrence smoothly transitioned from the Engvall fanbase to her new Cross/SWPL fan base, becoming a hero because she curses, makes silly faces, and keeps (purposefully?) falling down at awards shows.

Miss Lawrence is the most prominent victim of the latest celebrity hack, which has been greeted with far more fury and frenzy than the beheading of journalist Steven Sotloff. She along with Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst (redundant post Melancholia), and various other celebrities who are famous for unknown reasons have their assets prominently displayed all over Twitter like Kim Kardashian on magazine covers at the grocery store. Be it a Whiskey Tango single mom on EBT or one of the wealthiest women on the planet, we can safely say that according to the modern American woman, the height of seductive behavior is a “selfie” taken next to a hotel toilet. The behavior is more reminiscent of the decadent, self-absorbed, and effeminate Capital residents from the Hunger Games than the stern warrior character that gave Lawrence her fortune.

“The Fappening,” as it is being called (to the horror of the Great and Good), required an astonishing amount of technical skill, time investment, and considerable personal risk–all to obtain what these women all but expose in magazine and movies regularly anyway. As even Seth McFarlane sang at the Oscars (to much criticism), all you have to do is go to a movie and “We Saw Your Boobs.” In Traditional societies, actors were held to be the social equivalent of slaves and prostitutes–and there was a reason.

Clearly, the hack is not purely about sexual gratification, but a kind of political act (as well as a bid for Bitcoins). It’s a takedown of those held up as the ideal to be pursued and envied, that nexus of fame, money, and sex that we call celebrity. And the mainstream media has certainly interpreted it as a politically charged act, charging that the theft of the photos is a sex crime, and that even those viewing the photos are essentially guilty of rape. Lena Dunham is outraged (“It’s not okay”)–presumably because even though she keeps inflicting it on the Girls viewing public, no one wants to see her naked.

As we know whenever the shibboleth of “rape culture” is invoked, power is at stake, and the issue here is the Narrative of female empowerment. Behind all the propaganda, indoctrination, and legislation, female empowerment translates into the sexual anarchy of Tinder, Twerking, and nude selfies substituting for “repressive” courtship, style, and modesty. When a woman is, quite literally, shaking her ass at you like a mating display from a chimpanzee documentary, you’ll take her home if you’re three drinks deep—but you’re not calling her your girlfriend anytime soon. In fact, you’re not calling her at all (at least not sober.)

Such couplings aren’t really sex–it’s just using someone else’s body to get yourself off. This has also cheapened celebrity–one can imagine being weak in the knees and unable to speak if you met the late Lauren Bacall in her prime, but you get the impression you could bring home Rihanna with a few lines of game, a few lines of coke, and a bottle of cheap rum.

Of course, protesting the “objectification” of women is precisely what feminism is supposed to be about. But the blunt biological reality that a woman’s sexual desirability is more dependent on appearance than status brings the whole house of cards crashing down. Thus, we have plastic surgery freaks of nature like Nicki Minaj held up as role models, Beyoncé wearing a leotard and white woman hair in front of the word FEMINIST (while her lawyers police pictures on the Internet), and Katy Perry singing songs about being true to yourself while paving the road to (the first of many I’m sure) divorces because her celebrity husband displayed a picture of her without her customary twenty pounds of makeup. In the latest scandal, we have some of the most famous, powerful, and wealthy women in the world using the tactics of a thirsty sorority girl trying to keep the fraternity president from booty calling her roommate again. It’s the lie of modern female empowerment exposed.

To their credit, some feminists recognize this, and have turned their attention to the concept of beauty itself. As they take egalitarianism to its logical conclusion, we end up with feminists correctly claiming beauty standards are fascist. Well, they are–and the attempt to defy the Aristocratic Principle of Nature leads to an evolutionary dead end.

For that reason, aside from the occasional charity case of a heavily made up celebrity hypocritically telling deformed or sick girls “you are beautiful the way you are,” few act on the egalitarian imperatives of feminism. The few that do tend not to attract sexual partners, fewer reproduce, and fewer still can successfully transmit their revolt against nature to their children. It seems more likely that Western women will actively choose subordination, converting to Islam, and withdrawing altogether from the choice between being an “empowered slut” or a socially despised “prude,” or, worse, a Christian. Absent that, the only option left is the surface egalitarianism but fanatical status seeking of liberal modernity, which values sexuality above all.

With the release of a few pictures, Jennifer Lawrence has been transformed from warrior to victim–and the implicit demand by the feminists and their media is for men with guns to ride to the rescue. Indeed, the FBI, fresh from trying to finish off Ferguson, Missouri, is now frantically searching for the hacker, as we can’t secure the border or go to space but we can damn sure protect the public image of celebrities. In time, there will be a tearful interview, references to her “courage,” and maybe some new legislation against “revenge porn” or whatever else needs to be done to make sure women don’t pay for a sexual indiscretion–even as online regulations are tightened against political ones.

But The Fappening in its way is a milestone–the dead end of Western sexual politics. Even the American equivalent of aristocracy is as disposable as last Saturday’s hookup. And throughout the entire society, no one is looking good–from men haplessly sending unsolicited dick pics and spending their days fapping to women who can’t go ten minutes without text messages from five different guys telling them they really are special little snowflakes. No matter how many FBI investigations, Women’s Studies harridans, or tear jerking testimonials from “victims,” there’s no exit from this dead end under this system and under this culture.

The solution is identity–and the revolution it implies and necessitates. Being a real warrior isn’t about being “badass” as defined by Tumblr, and it’s certainly not about defying your own people to inflate your own sense of importance. As real Christians understood, the body is fleeting, and family, not sexuality, should be the source of honor and pride for a woman and the object of reverence and sacrifice for a man. And as those Nordic pagans–male and female—who conquered and settled in Britain understood, great enterprises are done as a community, a united tribe that is defended by real warriors who value something beyond their own lives.

What defines a warrior is not just his deeds, but what he defends. “The fame of a dead man’s deeds” only endures as long as the folk does. But those deeds speak for themselves, and the value of a European man or woman can be found in the legacy he or she leaves behind, not in the fleeting memory of youth or the temporary sexual availability. And no man or woman worth remembering ever thought, “Lemme take a selfie.”

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America Culture

Frozen

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The balance demanded by modernity is between adopting enough symbols of traditional culture to appeal to a mass audience, but enough egalitarianism to be promoted by the media. And the most successful example of this delicate balance is the top grossing animated feature of all time–Disney’s Frozen.

Every little girl wants to be a princess. No little girl wants to be a feminist graduate student. The Eternal Enemy of Hierarchy can never be eliminated, only subverted. The balance demanded by modernity is between adopting enough symbols of traditional culture to appeal to a mass audience, but enough egalitarianism to be promoted by the media. And the most successful example of this delicate balance is the top grossing animated feature of all time–Disney’s Frozen.

Disney has always been Ground Zero for the Culture of Critique. Even though the company is easily one of the most destructive institutions in the country, it ultimately trades on its past as the symbol of “Main Street USA” Americana and even Western traditional culture. Grown men speak of the “magic” of the company’s theme parks; people spend their entire lives dreaming of wearing rubber costumes in stifling heat for low pay, just to be a part of the company. Despite it all–Disney endures. And for that reason, it’s a battleground.

The heart of this battle is over the “Disney Princesses,” the protagonists of the classic tales that revolve around royalty, heroism, and true love with a handsome prince. Needless to say, even the term inspires rage among feminists, but where there is demand, there will be supply. As a kind of quasi-public brand in its own right, Disney responded to the zeitgeist by trying to “diversify” the mostly European Princesses, notably with the black heroine of The Princess and the Frog. Though it was a mild success, “Princess” Tiana never quite captured the imagination of little girls like Cinderella or Snow White. Another non-white Princess, the soldierly Mulan, can only be called a “princess” with an asterisk.  

Frozen tries a different tact–and succeeds with a brilliant head fake. Instead of another affirmative action Princess, Frozen goes full Hyperborean. The story is loosely based on the Danish tale of the “Snow Queen” and takes place in the fictional land of Arendelle, inspired by Norway. Both heathens and traditionalist Christians can rejoice–the royalty of this Aryan land are invested by bishops in a Cathedral conducting ceremonies in Old Norse, the king and queen consult arcane books written in the Younger Futhark in times of trouble, and the only nonwhites to be seen are friendly trolls–who, amazingly, bow to the royal humans.

The palace is filled with Western art, the martial uniforms will warm the coldest heart of the Dark Enlightenment, and there’s even a shout out to Joan of Arc.  Furthermore, neoreactionaries should celebrate, as Arendelle seems so committed to the monarchial principle that all political power is transferred not just from one royal family member to another as circumstances demand, but even to royals from other nations without even the discussion of a domestic legislature. It’s good to be the Snow Queen.

Now that Frozen has been thoroughly celebrated by the feminist friendly media, it’s odd to recall the sputtering rage it initially inspired. When the blond Queen Elsa was revealed, angry feminists took to Tumblr to create amateurish and repulsive “ethnic” princesses with the hashtag #ThisCouldHaveBeenFrozen. If it had been, I daresay Frozen would have had fewer viewers than recent seasons of The Simpsons.  

The flabby feminist failures and their cheese doodle covered keyboard crusading were still duly enabled by the media. Margot Magowan aka “Reel Girl” pitched a hissy fit republished by Jezebel before the movie even came out, protesting the inclusion of a “mountain man” character (Kristoff, who is hardly an overweening male presence) among other grievances. And a Disney animator’s casual remark that animating females was harder than males because of the need to keep them “pretty” unleashed the kind of feminist wailing only seen when the Duggars have another baby.

Therefore, the film’s success in a PC culture is a stunning marketing accomplishment, the media equivalent of BET suddenly endorsing Mitt Romney. Frozen accomplishes this with one weird trick–it pulls a fast one on the audience to transform the “handsome prince” into the villain of the movie.

Let’s look at the plot for those who are unfamiliar. Elsa has the power to control ice and snow. She is close with her sister growing up until she accidentally injures her with her powers. Anna is healed by magic trolls, who warn Elsa of the “great danger” of her magic. Her fearful parents tell her to “conceal, don’t feel” the power and lock up the castle, but they die in a shipwreck, leaving the girls essentially alone. Years later, during her coronation, Queen Elsa loses control of her powers, reveals herself to the people as a sorcerous “monster,” and unknowingly plunges her kingdom into eternal winter. Anna’s mission is to bring Elsa back and free the kingdom from its frozen fate.

Anna also is driven by her desire to be open to the world and find true love. With her memory of Elsa’s powers (and Anna’s near death at her hands) magically removed, Anna never understood why she was always cut off from her kingdom and ordinary human contact. Thus, when the gates are finally opened, she falls for the handsome foreign prince Hans, becoming engaged to him the very night they meet. During the kingdom’s crisis, Hans takes charge in Anna’s absence (because apparently that’s how the constitution works here), distributing cloaks to the people, rebutting foreign leaders who want to steal the country’s resources, and leading dangerous rescue efforts. Eventually, Elsa is captured, but not before accidentally “freezing” Anna’s heart, putting her in danger of death unless she can be saved by an act of “true love.”

Anna turns to her handsome prince and explains a kiss from her true love will save her life–only to be told brutally “if only there was someone who loved you.” Surprise, suckers!

Hans has been playing her from the beginning–as the 13th son of another kingdom, he’s planning to usurp the throne of Arendelle to finally taste power on his own. With Elsa in chains and his “wife” Anna dying, Hans will control the kingdom. The abrupt volte-face would be called clumsy in a soap opera, but cloaked in politically correct messaging, it is hailed as subversive and brilliant. “Finally, a Disney Prince Who’s a Disingenuous Dickweed” shriek the clickbait commissars at Jezebel, preening that “this is the direction we should be headed, rather than risk over-romanticizing the very flawed past.”

Other glorious triumphs?

  • Queen Elsa is alone at the end of the movie, instead of marrying a prince. Elsa can be a cat lady with magic powers–just like every feminist’s dream.
  • When Elsa escapes the powers and fully embraces her powers in the soaring “Let It Go,” The Daily Beast’s Melissa Leon squees, “she lets her hair down, shimmies her hips, and puffs out her chest. Here she is powerful, independent of the male gaze.” Well, not entirely.
  • Anna eventually does end up with a man–the hapless Kristoff, who far from being a “mountain man” is a hapless beta, meekly asks permission to kiss her, and is even mocked as a “fixer upper” with “unmanly blondness” by the trolls who serve as his family.

At the climax, Anna is dying unless she can get her act of “true love.” We see Kristoff coming to save her and the audience follows his death defying race against time. But Kristoff never gets close enough to save Anna–the dying Anna actually sacrifices herself to save Elsa from the evil Hans. This was interpreted as Anna “choosing” her sister over a man.

Is this explanation what the movie is going for? Yes–it is a deliberate fake-out, as the audience follows Kristoff only for him to be rendered irrelevant and stand around uselessly. But what’s actually happening is not Anna choosing Elsa over Kristoff, but Anna choosing Elsa over herself. She sacrifices her own life to save Elsa, and, through this sacrifice, warms her own frozen heart and ironically saves her own life. This isn’t some new bold feminist creativity–it’s the end of the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine. In pure plot terms, the feminist reading isn’t as present as the traditional Western motif of self-sacrifice.

The triumphant song “Let It Go” is being hailed from everything as an anthem of gay liberation to girl power, but the plot undermines this interpretation as well. Elsa may be unleashing her power–but it’s a complete disaster for everyone involved, including her. She has unknowingly doomed her kingdom and her subjects, she manages to endanger her sister’s life (again), and she’s simply hiding from her problems instead of overcoming them. Of course, she can’t really be blamed for this–she is only just emerging from years of grief and isolation. “Let It Go,” is, after all, in the middle of the movie, before the main plot mover of Anna’s quest to find her “true love” even really begins. But is the “liberated” Elsa who sics a murderous snow golem on her own little sister some great hero to celebrate?

In the end, the way Elsa learns to control her power is through “love.” Suddenly, in a kind of PC version of the deus ex machina, Elsa instantly becomes a beloved ruler who effortlessly fires off snow magic whenever she wants to the delight of her adoring subjects, none of whom seem especially upset she nearly killed them all. Anna gets with Kristoff and gives him a new sled–so we know who is wearing the pants in this relationship. Oh yeah, there’s also a funny sidekick snowman named Olaf who is sentient somehow, because, you know magic or something. (Merchandising, cough, cough.)

Call it Disney meets Alinsky. The author of Rules for Radicals advised his acolytes to associate their ideas with traditional symbols like the American flag, knowing that the average person would always confuse the form for the substance. Frozen has Nordic princesses, extreme royal absolutism (of a form never really seen in Northern Europe), adoring subjects fawning over the “beauty” of their leaders, and nobles with magic powers. It sucks in audiences with the appeal of Tradition, and then undermines it.

But it’s not quite that simple. As feminist Dani Coleman notes in a sophisticated review, the “subversion” of the “Traditional” Disney narrative has been done before – many, many times. “No Disney heroine except Anna—even Ariel—has begun her story with love as her goal since 1959.” And plenty of other Disney Princesses actually showed real courage and the willingness to sacrifice, taking charge of their own destinies.

The feminist “subversion” is overstated, as Anna and Elsa careen wildly from disaster to disaster because of their own “vapid, brainless, impulsive and flighty characters whose agency is stolen from them for the sake of comedy and wafer-thin plot contrivances.” To put it another way, to say Frozen is a big deal for “strong women characters” is like pretending it’s a big deal when a black man is elected mayor of a city, or that two men walked down a street in San Francisco holding hands. It’s been done before. And the women don’t really act to save the day–they create problems of their own making, problems instantly cured at the end through pabulum given some kind of magical power.

Yet there is still something subverted here, unrecognized by most critics because it’s long since vanished from our culture. That something is real family. The “true love” between the sisters Elsa and Anna is worthy enough, but it is only achieved after a vast amount of unnecessary suffering due to their own emotional chaos and impulsive decisions. Elsa (aged 21) and Anna (aged 18) act like girls, not women, let alone strong ones. The feminist high fiving that they don’t need men misses the point that it is precisely the lack of a man that has caused all the chaos in their lives–not a husband or lover, but a father.

Early in the film, we are given a cursory introduction to Elsa and Anna’s father and mother, the King and Queen. All things being considered, they react with steady nerves and compassion when Elsa almost kills her baby sister. While it is true they tell Elsa to control and conceal her power, it is worth noting that they don’t tell her to deny it. They simply recognize there is danger, as well as beauty. They aren’t ashamed of Elsa, they want to protect her, and her father expresses his confidence that his daughter can learn to control her growing power.  

God knows it’s not unusual for parents to die in a Disney movie. However, the struggle of the protagonist usually revolves about learning about his or her place in the world, accepting the responsibilities of adulthood, and symbolically replacing the parent as a leader in his or her own right, like Simba avenging his murdered father, taking his place as king, and becoming a father himself.

Here, the parents die so abruptly we never really get a sense of their relationship with their children. Moreover, there’s no transitional mentor for the children to learn from and bridge the gap from little girl to woman (let alone child to sovereign). This seems especially strange when Elsa is isolated from her kingdom for years and then is suddenly made absolute ruler. Who the hell was running the country while she was cooped up?

In one scene, a nervous Elsa prepares for her coronation and looks up nervously at a portrait of her kingly father, who, as some have noted, looks like a young Walt Disney. Just like all Disney products are ultimately in the shadow of w
hat the dead founder created, Elsa is trapped by the requirements of her royal role, even though the source is dead and buried. Not through his own fault, her father failed her by his absence, unable to return home, and manage her transition into adulthood. Perhaps he would have seen the folly of assuming she would automatically control her powers, or returned to the trolls for guidance. Instead, Elsa is left alone, and she instantly transitions from being sheltered and protected to flaunting her power in destructive ways out of a combination of fear, pride, and ignorance.

If we accept the metaphor of sexuality, the role of a daughter’s father is to protect her from the physical or emotional predations of other men (the Hans’s of the world) until the daughter can be “given away” to a man worthy of her. This concept survives in the traditional wedding ceremony. Knowing that your “little girl” is a woman can be painful to protective fathers but it doesn’t sever the bond between father and daughter, it merely changes its form. As Coleman observes (though not in this context), Ariel’s last line in The Little Mermaid is “I love you, Daddy.”

Mothers also have an important role to play. They have to educate their daughter as to what it means to be woman and to understand the power–and danger–of female sexuality. If left on their own, girls can either be terrified of sexuality or impulsively act out, leading to disaster. This is precisely what happens to Elsa, and, to a lesser extent, to Anna. And in a far, far more extreme way, it is what happened to the broken women of the modern West.

Screenwriter and director Jennifer Lee (product of divorce, divorced herself, naturally) may or may not have intended this message, but a Traditionalist viewing of Frozen isn’t about feminism or patriarchy. It’s about the gap left by the absence of family, a gap we see throughout the West. With so many marriages ending in divorce, mothers and fathers refusing to let go of youthful illusions, and, most critically, the patriarchal and matriarchal roles largely abandoned to media, schools, and pop culture, Western youth are left adrift. Instead of extended family or churches plugging the gaps in cases of death or misfortune, the larger culture actually encourages extended adolescence, with the resulting collateral damage all around us. In lieu of real family, we get a “Modern Family” of egalitarian cheerleading and faux loyalty dependent on abstractions and mutual comfort rather than a primal sense of duty to blood and kin.

In Frozen, we get a happy ending because the movie magically whisks away (quite literally) all problems. In our culture, we get an embarrassing wreck of a society. The forms of a real culture may remain – we still call things “marriage,” “families,” or “nations,” but the essence has departed. And what’s left behind are not extraordinary people commanding the forces of nature, but superfluous, deracinated individuals whose only power is to eradicate what remnants remain. But as the success of Frozen shows, even the most degraded has to look up–at least so they know what to tear down.

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America Culture Sex

Satire as News

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PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (U.S.A.) VOTES THAT JESUS CHRIST “MAY HAVE BEEN GAY AND TRANSGENDERED”

Editor’s Note: This was originally published by the race realist satire blog Diversity Chronicle. The site has managed to troll major media in the past and is an interesting venture in seeing how ridiculous our society has become that these stories are now believable news stories.

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (U.S.A.) VOTES THAT JESUS CHRIST “MAY HAVE BEEN GAY AND TRANSGENDERED”

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in a decision that has enraged fundamentalists and those on the radical and extreme right, has voted to recognize that Jesus Christ “may have been gay and transgendered.” This decision has provoked some extremists to accuse the Presbyterian Church of blasphemy and even apostasy. The Presbyterian Church reports receiving hundreds of angry letters of homophobic hate-mail since the decision, expressing hateful, bigoted, retrograde and ignorant views against the LGBT community. Previously, the church voted to ordain openly gay clergy and to allow ministers to officiate at gay weddings, rightly earning praise from progressives.

In another decision that is only controversial among hateful and intolerant bigots, the Presbyterians have decided to begin teaching children of all ages about homosexuality and the transgendered. Experts agree that it is important to reach children at the earliest ages in order to inculcate a spirit of tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Children need to understand that all sexual orientations and lifestyles, as well as all sexual acts, are equal and morally equivalent under all circumstances. No orientation or type of sexual act is better than any other – all are equal!

Statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups, showing that homosexuals are more likely to contract AIDS or other STDs, can have no basis in fact. They are quite obviously the result of a shockingly pervasive institutional homophobia. There can be no other rational explanation. In another decision, praised by progressives, condoms will be distributed at every Sunday school class. The church has decided to give out new glow-in-the-dark condoms in an effort to get children and teens more interested in practicing safe sex.

Children will be taught reinterpreted Bible stories, which include positive LGBT role-models. Based on a literal reading of some biblical verses, like 2 Samuel 1:26, it is now widely accepted that King David, the ancient Israelite hero, was a proud homosexual. The verse reads “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Another verse even includes a kiss between David and Jonathan! “And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.” (1 Samuel 20:41)

We even read that Jonathan stripped himself of his clothes before David! 1 Samuel 18:3-4 says “Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.” Although most scholars agree that the Torah does prohibit homosexuality rather explicitly (Leviticus 20:13) the Old Testament teaches that, where love is concerned, even God must bow to human feelings and abrogate His law! This might sound like God has changed His mind, which might disturb some fundamentalists, but the Bible cites other examples of this. God regretted that He had made man at one point (Genesis 6:6-7), and He regretted flooding the earth and vowed never to do it again. (Genesis 9:10-11)

LGBT and Liberation Theology Pastor Douglas Calvert observed that “There is actually a great deal of evidence that Jesus Christ was not heterosexual. According to tradition he had very long hair. He was very effeminate and soft spoken. He never married. He had no children, and he never expressed a romantic interest in the opposite sex. He did hang out with twelve guys though, and travelled with them all the time. When they were alone with nothing else to do, did they experiment with each other? Did they sleep together, or engage in orgies? We may never know for certain, but the answer is most definitely that they probably did.”

Paul Oestreicher, an Anglican chaplain at the university of Sussex, agrees. His article “Was Jesus gay? Probably” can be read here. More and more mainline protestant denominations are becoming open to the idea that Jesus Christ, whom they regard as the Son of God, and the third person of the Trinity, may have been gay. Instead of finding this as a source of shame or disconcertion, Christians should be proud and loudly proclaim the fact that Jesus Christ was gay! They should march through the streets advertising it with banners and shouting it through megaphones, loudly proclaiming “We are proud God is gay!”

Although most other prominent religious figures were married, or were polygamous, Jesus Christ never married. Many male pagan deities had wives or several wives and concubines as well. Shiva, the Hindu deity, had at least eight wives and countless concubines according to tradition. Despite Jewish tradition upholding marriage, Christ never married, nor did he own any slave girls. Curiously, the chief founder of Christianity, who sought to propagate it after Christ’s death, the Apostle Paul, also never married. Perhaps Christianity was the first world religion accepting of homosexuality.

Moses, Muhammad, and even the Buddha married and had offspring. Is it possible instead that Christ was not homosexual but perhaps was impotent? Is it possible that he had no sexual drive? Was he a sexually repressed heterosexual, who merely avoided women? Perhaps he was socially awkward with women? While these things cannot be ruled out, they seem unlikely. Some critics point to verses seemingly extolling the virtues of a eunuch’s life. (Mathew 19:12) Those verses however only serve to further reinforce the fact that Christ despised and abhorred the very idea of heterosexual sex!

Feminist Professor Claudia Jackson noted that “Jesus Christ was an early feminist; he understood that any sexual activity between a man and a woman was always rape. It is rape even if a woman expressly asked a man to have sexual relations with her. Men have always enjoyed a position of superiority over women. Thus the relationships between the sexes have always been unequal. Therefore heterosexual sexual activity always represents an indecent assault upon women.”

The Gospel of John refers to the gay lover of Jesus Christ “and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved…” (John 20:2) Before his death by crucifixion the Bible tells us, in John 19:26-27 “When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.” Clearly Jesus was saying something like “Mom, I’ve married a man. We are gay lovers. So, he is your son-in-law. He should live with you now, and take care of you.” This could not be more clear.

Some fundamentalist opponents of homosexuality cite verses like Leviticus 20:13 “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” There are several possible answers to this, besides the one mentioned earlier. The New Testament clearly teaches that God’s law was nailed to the cross and abolished on the basis of Christ’s sacrificial death. Thus God’s laws in the Old Testament are no longer binding for Christians. (Colossians 2:14) If one is Jewish, one could perhaps argue God was once homophobic but is no longer. God has reformed Himself and become more tolerant. Another retort might be that this verse, incompatible as it is with God’s love, was never inspired by God to begin with and should be dismissed as not truly of divine origin.

The particular explanation that one adopts is not important as long as we understand that homophobia is an ugly crime that we must never accept. We cannot countenance it under any circumstances. We must never allow bigotry to cloak itself in the garments of religiosity or spirituality! A homophobic religion is not worthy of tolerance, but only of hatred and contempt! To persecute such a sick and dangerous cult would not be intolerant, but virtuous and vitally necessary! Intolerance warrants no tolerance and tolerating intolerance is arguably the greatest evil of our time.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 is also used by homophobes and haters to attack the LGBT community. The verses read “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

Although abusers of themselves with mankind does explicitly refer to homosexual activity, and that is even more apparent in many other translations, these verses too could be rejected as incompatible with God’s love. Progressive Jews and Christians see the Bible as an evolving document. It must change and our interpretations of it must change with the times so that it remains relevant in every generation. To do otherwise would be to make ourselves prisoners beholden to an ancient literary work. Books are written by people, not by the hand of God onto stone! Good and evil or right and wrong are social constructs, evolving and changing over time.

Let us not forget, the Bible also calls shellfish unclean. Shall we all change our diets because of something that primitive nomadic, unwashed, lice-infested, neck bearded and barely literate peoples wrote several thousand years ago? Remember, these are people who owned slaves, sold their own daughters into slavery and murdered their family members and neighbours. Why? For worshipping the wrong supernatural sky buddies or picking up sticks on the wrong day. Hell, even saying that Asherah was Yahweh’s girlfriend was enough to warrant death for an Israelite! They were all, clearly, very far from perfect.

As Progressive Christians understand it, the Bible is the inspired word of God. However, it must evolve and be interpreted in light of present circumstances and conditions. It must not be rigid, unchanging, or seen as somehow inerrant. Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela were inspired by God. The Bible must not be seen as an exclusive or even primary source of truth in life. To do so would be to worship a book, to fall into the sin of bibliolatry. God is love, and therefore love and its daughters, tolerance and pluralism, and not the Bible should ultimately guide us. The Bible is an important literary work, but it only has value to the extent that it affirms humanist virtues.

Although religious fundamentalist homophobes like to claim Jesus Christ was a right-wing Christian who hated gays, the truth is far from that. Jesus opposed public prayer, and prayer in school. Jesus wanted to keep prayer in the closet and out of the public sphere “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” (Matthew 6:6 KJV.) Jesus said to keep prayer, and not homosexuality, in the closet, contrary to what so many bigoted and intolerant fundies proclaim!

We know that Jesus was a trained carpenter by Joseph the husband of Mary. It seems likely that along with building homes and furniture, Jesus offered decorating tips and ideas to clients. In his business, he would have had ample opportunity to discuss and explore interior decorating. No less an authority than Elton John noted that Jesus would have backed gay marriage and was gay himself.

In “The Secret Gospel of Mark” Jesus teaches a youth – who was wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body – the “Mystery of the Kingdom of God.” Obviously, Jesus was initiating him into his first homosexual activity! There can clearly be no other reasonable explanation. The Christian Church rejected this gospel as apocryphal, because of homophobia and intolerance!

Jesus Christ was a strong advocate of economic levelling and redistribution. He once told a rich man “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) He predicted a world where the poor would one day rule and hold all property in common, while the rich one percent would come last, as punishment for their crimes. “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” (Matthew 20:16)

Jesus even drove the capitalists out of the Temple and forbade them from selling their wares there. (John 2:14-16) Jesus was also a renowned peace activist. (Matthew 5:9) Jesus said we are to be judged based on how we treat the least of his brethren. “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40) A rich man asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” (Matthew 19:21)

Clearly Jesus was a homosexual and a progressive who favoured economic levelling, banning public prayer, and who strongly denounced the rich. The guy was a radical Jewish liberal as the Bible shows, persecuted and hated by the conservatives of his time! Those conservative leaders ultimately instigated his murder, so great was their hatred of him! It is ironic that conservatives and right-wingers claim to follow his teachings. They do so by systematically ignoring or distorting most of them!

It’s time for progressives to take Jesus back. We should not allow the radical and extreme right to hold the memory of one of our own hostage! Let us reclaim Jesus, who no doubt, if he were alive today, would proudly march with us under a rainbow flag in an LGBT parade denouncing injustice, inequality and intolerance! At LGBT parades across the nation and around the world this year, the Christian LGBT community will march with banners proudly proclaiming “God is Gay!” in his memory!

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America Politics Sex

STIHIE: The Republican Woman of the Future

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Here’s a cheerful reminder that even young Republican women buy the new morality the system promotes.

Here’s a cheerful reminder that even young Republican women buy the new morality the system promotes–and have no problem calling it conservative feminism:

There’s a new woman in town. She’s not shy, she’s not timid, and she’s not afraid. She’s not naive, nor is she lost or floundering. She’s not meek. She’s not quiet. She’s not passive. She’s self-assured, self-aware, and, yes, maybe she’s even a little bit selfish. She is here, she is present, and she is not going anywhere…

Whereas her very aura once showed of a life of privilege and luxury, she now cannot be pegged. Her background, her history, her ancestors are, quite literally, now all over the map. Now, her skin color cannot be identified, cannot be categorized, cannot be placed. Her hair, it flows in all different textures and colors, in braids and scarves and beachy waves. She forgoes ash blonde for whatever God or Allah or Oprah gave her and traded in Talbot sweater sets for blue jeans. She got rid of her pantyhose completely. Her wardrobe is a strange combination of J.Crew, Target, and those adorable little boutiques that are sending her into the same very debt she watches Sean Hannity discuss every night on Fox News.

She grew up with the belief that she could be anything she wanted to be. She was the princess and the astronaut and the stay at home mom. Her father went to work in a tailored suit and her mother served dinner at 6:30pm every night on the dot. Her parents were happy. Maybe they still are. Still, she dreamed of a life where she didn’t have to choose, a life that allowed her to have it all. So, she set out to make it happen. She went to college and she worked hard and she played hard, too. She joined clubs and kissed boys danced on tables at frat parties. She skipped class and made bad choices and she really lived life. She didn’t sit on the sidelines. She didn’t watch from afar. She didn’t let it pass her by.

She wants babies some day, but doesn’t want to have to give up her coveted job in the coveted city at the coveted startup — where she makes seventy-seven cents to every dollar her male counterparts make. Something, by the way, that she never believed was true until she started working and saw the men get raises and the women get sexually harassed. The gender discrimination and inequality and downright misogyny was shown to her on her very first day of work….

She enjoys a good cocktail every once in a while — or maybe every day – and she might even have an unprescribed bottle of Xanax in her medicine cabinet. She is, after all, in full support of the legalization of marijuana. Perhaps she has a bowl on her dresser. Maybe she just smokes cigarettes. Or maybe, just maybe, she thinks that what she does in her free time is none of your damn business. She likely supported Ron Paul at one point or another and thinks that so long as the Tea Party has a voice, the true Republican Party never will.

She’s had enough one night stands to know that’s not what she really wants out of life…but put enough tequila in her and she’ll reconsider. She carries condoms in her purse because she learned at a young age that you are your own responsibility. No one will save you. Besides, she doesn’t need a knight in shining armor; she can save herself. She’s been on the pill since she was sixteen, she also probably received the HPV vaccine — against her mother’s will, of course. She doesn’t expect the government to pay for her birth control. She does, however, expect that her job provide her with health insurance that does, or pay her enough to find an outside policy.

She’s not afraid to talk social issues. Find this new woman and you’ll learn that she has quite a few gay, lesbian, and/or transgender friends. Maybe she is one, herself. She supports gay marriage out of principle and also because she thinks everyone deserves to be happy. Separation of church and state, right? Then let’s freaking separate church and state. She wants God left out of government and government left out of God. She’d like for people to stop being shamed for their beliefs. She’d also like for women to stop being shamed for their bodies. Having the freedom to do what they’d like in regard to their own medical decisions would be nice, too. She knows that the “A” word makes people uncomfortable. She also knows people who have had one. Maybe she’s even had one, herself.

She wants a person in office who represents her, someone who understands that young women are watching, young women are listening, and young women are voting. This young woman, she wants, no, rather, she needs someone — a national figure — who understands that times, they are a-changing. Backwoods, backwards ideals don’t cut it with us. This woman is proactive, she’s progressive, and she’s sick of feeling forgotten.

If this is any indicator, it looks like Republican women are as insufferably leftist as the Jezebel crowd.

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America Culture Identity

Death to Urban Elves!

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It’s time to call a spade a spade.

Or, in this case, it’s time to call an Elf an Elf.

Originally published at Jack-Donovan.com

Now is the time for plain speaking.

It’s time to call a spade a spade.

Or, in this case, it’s time to call an Elf an Elf.

Oh, we’ve danced around the issue and called them by many names.

In the 1960s, our people called them “hippies.”

People today sometimes call them hipsters, but hipster-ism is a pose affected by rude, youthful elves who mock us with Pabst Blue Ribbon and vintage cigarettes because they know that when you live for an average of 700 years, you don’t have to take anything very seriously.

“SWPL,” or “Stuff White People Like” was also a cute euphemism, but we all knew we weren’t talking about “stuff white people like” in general. Lots of white people like Coors Light and know how to fix cars and listen to mainstream country music unironically.

We weren’t talking about those white people, and everyone knew it.

We were talking about creatures with white skin who AREN’T REALLY PEOPLE.

I’ve mentioned them in passing, but it’s time to identify the enemy. We must NAME THE ELF.

Elves are often mistaken for humans, because they have similar features and white skin, but they tend to be slender and slightly more delicate than the race of men.

I live in Portland, and that’s where I first noticed the obvious differences between humans who live in the suburbs and in the country, and urban elves, who live downtown, shop at Whole Foods, pretend to read UTNE, and see themselves as “stewards of the Earth.” They’re always saying queer, condescending things to humans, like, “why don’t you just evolve?”

The show Portlandia is actually complicated tongue-in-cheek Elvish humor. It’s self-deprecating and neurotic but somehow also celebratory and awkwardly amusing, like Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Elves can breed with humans, but they are embarrassed of their attractions to brutish and short-lived humans so they prefer to murder the children before their Elders find out. This is why elves tend to be feminist and vote Democrat. Elves also tend to be outspoken feminists because the elvish race, which has much in common with the Dwarves (but we’re not going to get into the whole gold-mongering Dwarf thing here), is almost completely androgynous and elvish communities have been matriarchal since their Age of Vulvar began in 33 AD. Elves will often say that “gender is just a construct” because they like to tease “unevolved” humans, who they know full well have more fully differentiated sexes.

Hen-pecked Elvish males are secretly jealous of human men, though, so they work with the Dwarves to market birth control pills, human pornography, soy products, plastics and other products with dysgenic, emasculating effects. They don’t actually consume these products themselves, which is why they can often be spotted at “health food” stores. “Health food” and “organic” are both shortened versions of unpronounceable Elvish words that translate roughly to “not the poison slop we feed stupid humans.” Sadly, wealthy and high-born humans often collude with Elves to push these products on the lower human castes, to keep them weak, compliant and easy to control.

However, it was the courage of an Alabama congressman that inspired me to finally “come out of the closet” as an elf hater.

Congressman Mo Brooks came out and said what I’ve known for some time.

The thoroughly Elf and Dwarf-controlled Democratic Party has long been waging a “War on White People” by conducting a massive university-based re-education campaign to get white people to “reject their whiteness” which is code for rejecting their basic human nature, and act more like white Elves. Elves see white humans as a nuisance, and know that if white humans hate themselves and adopt Elvish breeding habits and matriarchal lifeways, they will die out in an Elvish decade or two because of their shorter life spans. Elvish Democrats have also moved to import non-white peoples, orcs and goblins into white human areas as part of their ethnic cleansing campaign. Their secret slogan, which sounds far more sinister in Elvish, is “no white people, no white people problems.” After the extinction of white people, the elves will quickly move to enslave the unsuspecting non-whites, orcs and goblins, and rule planet Earth in alliance with the clever gold-hoarding Dwarves.

Most white people laugh at ideas like a “War on White People,” because they have been glamoured by Elvish magic, so they cannot see the Elves’ pointy ears or creepy high cheekbones. Also, it seems like the people in prominent positions on both sides of this “war” are white. Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, for instance, are not Elvish, but Elvish yes-people who have been promised immortality by Elves in exchange for their treachery. The joke will be on them, because the Elves lost the secret of passing immortality to humans in 1323 BC, during the Tutankhamen debacle, and this was well known to human scholars until the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in 642 by the Goblin Caliph Omar.

I do not mean for this to sound partisan, because the Republican Party in America, for the most part, simply wolf-whistles about the “War on White People” to create confusion and advance the interests of moneyed white humans, who hope to bargain with Elves after the majority of their white human rubes have been exterminated. They are sneaky backroom dealers and cannot be trusted.

That’s why I’m reaching out to you, common white human.

Let the scales fall from your eyes, my brothers and sisters.

The Elves are not your friends.

Stop taking their “diversity” and “women’s studies” misinformation classes. Stop supporting their puppet “parties.” There is only one political party. THE ELVISH PARTY.

Stop listening to their Elvish “Hollywood” folklore.

These are not your people.

They aren’t even people!

They’re elves, and it’s “us” or “them”

DEATH TO URBAN ELVES!

RUN TO THEIR DOWNTOWN BOUTIQUE STORES AND RIP THEIR ANCIENT HEARTS OUT OF THEIR SKINNY, SUNKEN CHESTS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

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Culture Identity Sex

Beauties in Beast Mode

29 min read
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These women are becoming more like men–physically, emotionally and in many cases, chemically. In the process, these manly women are distorting our perception of what women are, and what men should want from them. They are female fighters, lifters, soldiers, Crossfitters, bodybuilders, competitive athletes, movie stars, and the countless women who flock to trainers trying to emulate them.

Why Are So Many Men Applauding Masculine Women?

The professional feminists who scold us from the headlines of Time, Salon, Slate and The Atlantic aren’t exactly breaking gender stereotypes. They specialize in nagging, moral hygiene, and high melodrama. Feminists claim there’s a WAR against them every time they don’t get something they want, and when they’re not playing victims for sympathy or dreaming up new ways to say they’ve been raped, they’re busy gossiping about celebrities and giggling about pretty boys like Ryan Gosling. They would naturally object, but most feminists are, truly, basic bitches.

Beyond the feminist world of words and micro-aggressions, there are women–who may or may not identify themselves as feminists–who are not just verbally, but physically and aggressively challenging gender roles and overcoming sex differences.

These women are becoming more like men–physically, emotionally and in many cases, chemically. In the process, these manly women are distorting our perception of what women are, and what men should want from them. They are female fighters, lifters, soldiers, Crossfitters, bodybuilders, competitive athletes, movie stars, and the countless women who flock to trainers trying to emulate them.

Feminists will claim and celebrate the successes of these manly women, but it is often men–masculine and hierarchically-oriented men–who are coaching and pushing these women to become more masculine.

Check out the photos in this article about women and lifting from women’s blog XOVain. Notice who’s spotting her? Behind every strong woman, there’s some guy telling her she’s a strong woman.

From regular gym-bros and NRA members to prominent trainers, fitness writers, and successful athletes, the guys most likely to complain about the pussification of men consistently pole-vault over each other to promote, defend, and generally fawn over any woman willing to handle a barbell, a ball, or a rifle.

Why are so many guys who are disgusted by effeminate men so supportive of masculine women?

I’ve been thinking about it for a while–every time I see men I know share some “strong is sexy” pic of a broad shouldered woman with an 8-pack. I wonder about it every time I see them point to a woman who is obviously taking male hormones as an example of a “real woman.” And I have to peel my palm off my forehead every time some tough guy turns radfem and starts telling any man who questions this that he is just “threatened” by “strong women.”

Exactly how manly do women have to be for us to be sure men are “secure with their masculinity?”

I’ve talked about this with a bunch of guys, including some strongmen, martial artists, and powerlifters, and here are some of the reasons why I think so many masculine men are encouraging women to be more like them.

Men are Being Solipsistic

Men are judging women as if women were men.

Guys have been taught from an early age, thanks to the scolding of feminist educators, that there are no “male” virtues, only human virtues. Men are naturally drawn to the old masculine virtues of strength, courage and mastery. They place a high value on traits and behaviors that men have always valued in each other. So, instead of letting women be women and appreciating the differences between the sexes, men are imposing their own idea of what is good on the women in their lives.

Radical feminists would, somewhat ironically, call this sexist and oppressive, because it is men telling women how to behave based on their own preferences and biases.

Why is a woman only a good woman if she acts like a man? That’s the patriarchy talking!

Men who appreciate manly excellence are doubly impressed when a female shows interest or aptitude in a manly sport or pastime. It’s not uncommon to see some alpha male type overlook 100 guys working just as hard and performing better to fawn over a female marksman, lifter or fighter because, well…“isn’t she something?”

It’s also easier to give a woman special attention, because you don’t have to deal with man drama–that whole push/pull, dick-measuring thing men do as they perpetually work out their chimpanzee hierarchies.

Men Don’t Actually Like Women

A dirty secret about men is that a lot of them don’t really like women. They like looking at women naked and they like having sex with women and they may even fall in love with women, but for the most part, they don’t really like women.

I’ve had a lot of heterosexual men tell me that they almost wish they were homosexual, because they find most women irritating and they feel like they have almost nothing in common with them. This actually seems to be the case more frequently with extremely masculine men, and it makes sense that they would have less in common with women. A male psychotherapist who works primarily with men in the military called me recently to talk about men and masculinity, and he mentioned hearing this from a lot of his clients too.

Actually, as I was writing this, a buddy of mine was texting me about this girl he was trying to talk into having sex with him. He was pretending she was interesting, but the truth is he just thought she was hot. Men do this all the time. His last text read, “I think I already hate her.” He went on a date with her later that week.

Feminists would call this “misogyny,” but I’d call it “normal.” It’s normal to want to hang out with people who are more like you, who have the same kinds of aspirations and who have similar interests. So it seems like when a lot of these guys fantasize about a perfect woman, they fantasize about some kickass chick who likes sports and guns, who won’t ask them to watch chick flicks or talk about the last episode of The Bachelor or say that everything is “amazing.”

Men Today Want “Activity Pals,” Not Girlfriends or Wives

Men and women used to understand that they were different, and that they would spend time apart doing different things. Men learned to love their women as women, and enjoyed them for who they were on their own terms, but they didn’t need or expect to have the same kinds of relationships with their wives that they had with their best pals.

Feminists have preached for decades that men and women were supposed to be “equal partners” in everything, and that seeped in and contributed to the idea that husbands and wives were supposed to want to do everything together.

But this desire for women to like and do “guy things” is as much a product of modern life as anything else–especially in America. Americans work a lot of hours, often odd hours, and it takes a lot of time and energy to maintain any kind of relationship.

Most men used to work with other men all day long, and work time has been “guy time” since men were hunting aurochs. Male friendships were forged and maintained in the process of aggressing against animals or nature or other men. As Lionel Tiger theorized in the 60s, that’s how men “bonded.” Today, most men get few if any opportunities to do “guy things” at work. Most corporate jobs are actually pretty emasculating. Most men also work with women, so work time usually isn’t “guy time.”

Because any relationship requires an investment of time and energy, it is difficult for a lot of men to maintain strong male friendships as working adults. If they want a girlfriend or a wife they’re going to have to invest a lot of their free time in building and maintaining a relationship with her, and there are only so many hours left in a week. If a man enjoys sports or working out or shooting guns, getting a woman to enjoy those things too probably means he’ll get to do them more often, and as a couple, they will likely spend more money on those activities. A lot of guys come to the conclusion, consciously or not, that if they want to do guy stuff and have a girlfriend, it would be better to find a girl who either already likes doing guy stuff or who can be encouraged to like doing guy stuff.

It’s like the dad who wants a son but ends up with a daughter, so he makes the best of it and teaches the daughter to do all of the things he wanted to teach a son to do. Some tom-boys are born, but a lot of them are made by dads in the same way that mothers sometimes make their sons into girlfriends. We’re not supposed to blame parents for this–we’re supposed to call that a myth and say “that’s just who they wanted to be”–but humans are heavily influenced by peer affirmation, and if you spend an unusual amount of time with your father or mother or boyfriend, you’re probably going to end up a little more like them.

Men want guy friends and girlfriends but girlfriends demand a lot of time, so some men end up slowly turning their girlfriends into guy friends. Women who want boyfriends who actually seem to like them and give them a lot of positive affirmation and attention end up learning to like doing things their boyfriends like doing.

I’m not looking to blame anyone for this–for the most part it just seems like modern couples are making the best of their situation.

There is a point, though, where making your girl into your bro gets out of hand. When you’re telling other dudes to “check out your wife’s sick lats” or bragging about how she could out-lift them and probably kick their asses…maybe you need some guy time before you and your wife end up shaving each others’ chests.

Unless that’s what you’re into.

Men are Fantasizing about “Shieldmaidens” and Sci-Fi Supergirls

Even as progressive Hollywood writes a tough-talking, man-tossing supermodel superhero into almost every action movie, and Marvel makes Thor a woman, much of the far right is also fapping away to fantasies of bosomy blonde Valkyries and sexy shieldmaidens. It’s difficult to tell how prominent a role women warriors played in Germanic cultures, but some scattered information is being played up to flatter women and encourage an absurdly modern feminist inclusiveness among so-called radical traditionalists. There have always been tales of female warriors, but they have generally been exceptions to the rule, and the women who fought successfully alongside men probably looked more like Brienne of Tarth than a sword-wielding succubus from a Heavy Metal magazine cover.

If men really want a co-ed warrior caste of eugenically bred, chemically enhanced, man-jawed super-persons to transcend the human condition and prepare our race for interstellar war with the Klingons, then they need to be more honest about that, and work out some of the contradictions and inconsistencies in their worldviews.

I’ll admit I’ve toyed with the seemingly eugenic notion that it would be better for everyone to be terrifyingly strong, fast, smart, and aggressive.

Leave it to a man to think up something like that.

It has some merit and appeal, but like all utopian dreams, it seems likely to decay rapidly when exposed to human nature. As with today’s military, the newspapers would get their carefully curated success stories even as internal morale and brotherhood failed, and women would hide behind sterile double-standards as they used sex to manipulate their male peers. The idea that women would be better and better off if they were encouraged to become mentally and physically more like men–but with men with shapely breasts and tight round asses–is just more sci-fi male solipsism.

Something in men tells them that might is right, and something lower tells them that women are hot, so I guess it makes sense that a lot of young men would decide that hot ‘n mighty women are the pinnacle of human perfection. I’d like to blame this on a post-feminist world of sexual confusion, or even ronery Asian animators, but Robert E. Howard was writing sword-swinging chicks into Conan stories back in the 1930s. The sexy warrior woman is an ancient archetype that’s long held a place in the pornographic pantheon of male fantasy. We’re just at a patch in history where it’s easy to lose perspective and imagine the exotic anomaly as a new norm.

Men Can’t Get Enough of the CrossFit Butt

The CrossFit butt sold more average men on weightlifting for women than a decade’s worth of oily blondes pumping iron in muscle mags.

You’ve seen the photos. You know what I’m talking about.

It makes perfect evolutionary sense for men to fixate on the rear-mount impregnation point padding of healthy young females. Some black men have a thing for gigantic Hottentot hindquarters, and I know some white guys who go for the Rubenesque Jell-O butt thing, but it makes sense for the majority of men to want that perfectly rounded, unblemished rear end that signals youthful fertility.

Women today are marrying later than their predecessors, if at all, and by the time they decide to settle down and have kids, they’re probably been sitting on their asses in some office eating those muffins from Starbucks for a decade or so. The prevailing wisdom says the only way women can keep that perky posterior is to do squats. Lots and lots of squats. When women object that grunt and thrust power moves like squatting seem a little…butch…men who normally hate feminists find themselves talking about breaking down gender boundaries and “reimagining our idea of female strength.” Because, well, “dat ass.”

Men Know Where The Money Is

Guys get into the fitness industry because they like training. Some got turned on to training when they used working out to transform themselves or to work through a rough part of their lives, but many more trainers, gym owners, writers and fitness entrepreneurs are just jocks who decided to try to do what they love doing for a living.

The bug, or the feature, depending on your perspective, is that unless you’re selling supplements or you’re a big shot with a name and a book or a new program, the real money is in marketing to women. Especially if you’re a trainer or a gym owner.

There are two obvious reasons for this.

First, the men who are most willing to give up everything and train to be elite athletes also tend to be young guys with little if any disposable income. Kids who pin their hopes on something as chancy as becoming a professional fighter or an extreme athlete often come from broken homes on the wrong side of the tracks. People with a lot of disposable income to spend on expensive gym memberships and personal training tend to be older, and most men over 30 have either figured out how stay in shape on their own or have let themselves go to focus on making money. Men are sexually objectified now more than they used to be, but plenty of wives are happy with a doughy husband as long as he brings home the dough.

Second, the body is a machine, and if a man cares about his body, he will tinker with it until he figures it out. Most men will buy books and talk to other guys at the gym and read websites and watch thousands of videos and argue furiously for endless hours with other men on the Internet about which technique or program is the best before they will pay a personal trainer to hold their hand and walk them through a basic routine. A lot of them would probably really benefit from a few sessions with a trainer, but it’s kind of like…asking for directions. Men want to figure it out themselves. Women generally prefer to be shown.

So, most male trainers end up counting reps for middle-aged women. Unless you’re at an elite level coaching professional athletes or entertainers, that’s the job. Go to any Globogym and see who is training who.

Most male trainers, no matter how jacked they are, no matter how much they can squat, no matter how much Hatebreed or Metallica or they listen to, eventually realize that they are in the female empowerment business. And to keep doing it day in and out, a lot of them probably convince themselves that’s a good thing. Who doesn’t like empowerment? It’s their job to lure cardio bunnies off their ellipticals and out of their Zumba classes. They sit through countless consultations listening to housewives tell them they’re worried about “getting too big” and masculine looking.

Of course these trainers know that noticeable hypertrophy is something they had to train for specifically, even as men, and there is no chance that a woman in her 30s, 40s or 50s will “accidentally” get yoked. With a lot of work, they might get the backs of their arms to stop jiggling and maybe even get something approaching a CrossFit butt.

These women want to look like taut TV and pop stars whose aging bodies have the support of top trainers, plastic surgery, Botox, human growth hormone, Clenbuterol, Adderall, and possibly Oxandrolone or Stanozolol–the testosterone derivatives especially popular with female bodybuilders. It’s rumored that the last two are also frequently used by female CrossFitters, and may well be responsible for many of the inspirational photos trainers use to motivate their female clients.

This leads to an important consideration. If men take female hormones to gain the characteristics of females, we call them transsexuals. If women are be told to admire women who take testosterone and testosterone derivatives to gain the characteristics of men, aren’t they being encouraged to look like borderline transsexuals? Is the fitness community’s “ideal woman” really a vascular tranny with the 6-pack, biceps, and modified rear end of an 18 year-old dude? What does that say about this brave, new post-feminist bonobo culture? Why the double standard?

As personal trainers work with their clients, they help feminine women overcome their natural resistance to increasingly heavy resistance training by pointing to these strong, empowered, masculinized women as examples of a reimagined femininity. They sweet-talk their clients and make them feel good about themselves, because that’s what keeps them coming back and paying for the pleasure.

“Don’t be afraid of your own strength.”

“You’re stronger than you realize.”

“Women can be strong, too.”

And, as they shape them into fitter versions of themselves, whispering words of encouragement in moments of vulnerability, guiding their movements with a firm, caressing hand, carefully watching the form of every hip thrust, a lot of these trainers are setting up their next job perk.

Most male trainers end up banging a choice selection of their most loyal female clients. I watched one CrossFit coach take home one after another for months. I delivered fitness equipment to private gyms for years and watched the dynamic between these guys and their attentive, blushing clients. It’s become a fairly well-known phenomenon since then. It’s like bagging cougars in a zoo.

I’d bet many of the memes and slogans about women, strength, and training that “strong women” repeat and reformat and post to their Pinterest accounts and Facebook pages are the echoes of trainer game. We see this “Strong is the new skinny,” “Lift Like a Girl,” and “The myth that women shouldn’t lift heavy weights is only perpetuated by women who fear work and men who fear women” stuff over and over again because some guy, somewhere, was trying to fuck another man’s wife.

Trainers are the worst offenders, but it’s not just trainers. Almost every testosterone-fueled, hardcore, shit-talking lifting or fighting blog or site that I’ve read and enjoyed has posted some go-girl female empowerment article about “strong women” in the past year or so. They use them to drive traffic, expand their audience, avoid butthurt from a handful nagging female readers and clients, bathe in female affirmation (“likes” and “shares”), and probably to get laid. Almost none of their hero-worshipping fanboys will object, because they know they’ll be called insecure cowards, fags, micropenised misogynists, and anyway, “Look! There’s a hot girl lifting weights!”

Redefinition, Sex Roles, and The Flip Side of Feminism

The problem with this is not that some female outlier will shatter our illusions by being stronger than some men.

The differences between the sexes are on curves–they’re not mutually exclusive. The fact that strength is and has always been one of the defining virtues of masculinity does not mean that all men are stronger than all women. It just means that most men are stronger than most women, and women don’t have to be strong to be considered womanly, whereas the same is not true for men. It doesn’t matter if some atypical woman who realizes she’s not like other women decides she’d rather play with the boys. That’s probably been happening for all of human history.

The problem isn’t at the extremes, it’s about using the extremes to redefine the middle.

The strong men who stand up for their “strong women” are usually also the first guys to complain about the way American society is promoting effeminate men. They’re the first ones to mock the pajama boys and the Justin Biebers and limp-wristed hipsters. They’ll happily scoff at flamboyant feather boa-ed fruitcakes, metrosexuals, goths, and emo-kids. They’ll call other men “pussies” and “vaginas” all day long.

These guys think that men should act like men and women should act like women…until it comes time to pander to their female audience, or they need a gimmick to make a little extra money, or someone calls them sexists or misogynists–which is like being called a racist, only slightly less terrifying. Then suddenly strong is the new skinny, and no one should tell a woman where she should be or what she can do. Girl power!

Most of these jocks and tough-guys would object to being called feminists, and dismiss them as fat, ugly, whiny bitches.

But if feminism is about anything, it’s about eliminating socially prescribed sex roles. Feminists would argue that people are just people, regardless of their plumbing, and no one should tell women how to be women or men how to be men. No woman–especially women, because in feminism women are more equal than men–should be told she shouldn’t be somewhere or do something based on the fact that she’s a woman. Feminists also say they believe that feminism helps everyone, because it means men shouldn’t be told how to behave or where they should go or what they should do.

Feminists are conveniently selective about how they apply this, but we’re not talking about them right now. We’re talking about big, tough dudes who don’t think they are feminists.

The guys who I’m talking about would be the first ones to make fun of the male feminists in the “I need feminism” photos.

If it’s not OK for men to act like bitches, why is it applause-worthy when bitches act like men? Applauding masculinity in women is just the flip side of the feminist project to encourage effeminacy in men. The net effect is the same: the progressive negation of sex roles.

This glaring hypocrisy is something men need to think about honestly.

It’s not a hypocrisy of progressive men, who already call themselves feminists, and are all for Mr. Milkers and women fighting wars.

It’s a hypocrisy among otherwise socially conservative men, men of the right and far-right, men who believe that men today are by-and-large an embarrassment to their forefathers. I see it among readers of mine, who agree that the way of men is the way of the gang, who agree that masculinity is about strength, courage, mastery and honor, who rant about feminism, who are concerned about fatherlessness and a lack of male mentors, who worry that male testosterone rates are dropping globally, who are angry that there are no initiations for modern men, or men’s only clubs, or places where men aren’t constantly policed by the interests of women.

I see these same guys, guys who I generally like and agree with about most issues, turn around and cheer for female UFC fighters, for women who enter strongman competitions, for female powerlifters, for any girl who handles a gun, for sexy stock car racers, for chicks with vascular arms, 8-packs, and man shoulders. I see them encouraging every woman who enters a previously male space and simultaneously complaining that there are no places where men can be men anymore.

What, gives fellas?

Decide what you really believe.

If you believe that everyone should be manly, and unmanliness should be discouraged in men and women alike, that’s a novel position. I’d like to see a man who actually believes that work it out on paper.

If you truly believe that no one should tell a man how to be a man or a woman how to be a woman, be honest about it and stop playing both sides to look cool. Call yourself a feminist, or at least a men’s rights activist, since MRA’s believe what feminists believe, but realize that feminists aren’t being completely fair or honest.

If you believe that men should act like men and women should act like women, except when it’s convenient or profitable for you, then at least be honest with yourself. Pick up a piece of poster board and write, “I need feminism when it gets me attention, money or poon.” Then face the mirror and understand what you are.

I believe that sex differences run deeper than some obvious reproductive plumbing. Males and females have had different roles for most of human evolutionary history, and our brains, hormones, and psychologies have adapted to work differently. Different things draw our interest, different things make us happy, and we need different things from each other. I believe that gender is a total life experience, “from cradle to grave,” and that while it is possible to masculinize women and emasculate men, no normal female can ever really know what it is to be male, and no normal male can ever really know what it is to be female. It’s as degrading to females to think of them merely as handicapped males as it is to think of men as females with “testosterone poisoning.” I believe that the most feminine thing a woman can do is nurse her own baby, and the most masculine thing a man can do is face death in battle. Modern life degrades both masculinity and femininity–turning motherhood into a part-time job that women are supposed to squeeze in when they aren’t doing the “important” work of making money in some corporate career and turning masculinity into a video game that men play alone.

I’ve come to the conclusion that masculinity is the product of both nature and nurture, and that most men need to be surrounded by other men who will challenge them and hold them accountable to reach their full masculine potential. Without that brotherhood, the majority of men will become increasingly weak, effeminate, insecure, withdrawn, and apathetic.

By most accounts, that’s exactly what is happening to men in America.

I am not a feminist. I believe that sex roles generally increase human happiness, social stability, and are necessary for a thriving culture. Men should tell men how to be men and women should tell women how to be women. I think it’s great when men “police gender” and call each other pussies and push each other to be stronger, braver, and more competent.

And I am absolutely certain that the regular presence of women in male spaces short-circuits this process. The introduction of females into a group of men will always change the culture of the group, weaken male friendships, chill male speech (because men talk differently to each other than they do to women), and turn men against each other.

Encouraging a woman to do something men do and inviting her into one of the few surviving male spaces is a feminist act that is ultimately, if not immediately, harmful to men and masculinity. Men should call out men who do it, instead of congratulating them for being so “open minded” or being afraid to be called “sexists.”

There’s nothing brave about being “gender inclusive” in America. It’s like being “anti-racist.” It’s the safest, most establishment position you could possibly take. The President of the United States would pat you on the back and call you a “good boy” for doing exactly what you’ve been told to do. Anti-discrimination is fashionable, commercially viable, legally enforceable, and an easy way to get approval from women.

If you want to do something brave, try discriminating.

Try saying “no.”

Instead of jumping at the opportunity to help some tough girl live her best life and be a strong, independent woman who will brag about being manlier than men, try giving her the cold shoulder.

Then grab a brother and help him rise up.

Because men are failing.

Masculinity is failing.

If you’re angry about it, do something about it and stop playing both sides.

American women have thousands of laws, organizations, books, magazines, movies, television channels, gyms, websites and celebrities working to “empower” them. You don’t need to be Captain Save-a-Ho because American women do not need your help.

I’m not saying that women shouldn’t take care of themselves or learn self-defense skills or exercise. The historical reality is that the majority of women always worked hard. They worked in fields, milked cows, scrubbed laundry, and cleaned when cleaning was harder than running a vacuum. Women knew how to work hard without trying to be men or do everything men did. Women didn’t think “women’s work” was degrading until a bunch of bored Jewish women told them making money was more important.

If women want to stay in shape, let them Zumba. Leave them to their group exercise classes and yoga and things they actually feel drawn to and enjoy doing. Let women be women. Stop trying to redefine femininity by putting lipstick on masculinity.

I’m sure some women will read this and disagree. I’m sure it will make some women angry. Some of them will probably say they want to kick my ass. But that would just prove my point about how masculinized many American women already are.

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Culture Politics Sex

‘Rape Culture Isn’t About Sex, It’s About Power’

10 min read
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Rape culture is a lot like racism. Maybe they should just call it “rapism.” It’s an abstract “evil” that a certain group, in this case women, reserves the right to identify and use to manipulate another group, in this case men, into increasingly defensive and impotent positions. As long as they can keep men apologizing, they can keep controlling them.

Our forefathers understood the truth about women.

The truth is that women actually like sex. Without the coercive discipline of patriarchs, women would have sex all the time–like the frisky matriarchs of the Bonobo world.

Men have always known that women like to feel good, too.

As Nietzsche observed, man is only a means for women and the end is always a child. However, this is an ultimate, often subconscious cause. More proximate causes include pleasure and affirmation.

If females had ever really run things, I’m not sure what their version of female “honor” would be, or if there would even be one. Always and everywhere, female honor has meant chastity–and female chastity was clearly a male invention.

Before modern contraception, the control of female sexuality was necessary to maintain order between men. If men are to be expected to care for children, they want to know which kids are theirs. A woman who cheats on a man undermines him and makes him look like a fool in front of other men. The virtue of female chastity–the ridiculous idea that a woman waits for and only wants intercourse with the man she’s been courted by or assigned to–was essentially constructed to protect the honor of men. The expectation of female chastity probably kept a lot of jealous men from killing other members of their own tribes. Men have always known that they wanted to have sex with many women, but they constructed social and legal institutions that forced them to control their own sexual urges, too. To maintain order and create stability in increasingly complex societies, men around the world dreamed up different versions of monogamous, or occasionally polygamous, marriage.

Women were trained to protect their honor–their chastity–above all things. They were scolded for lustful or adulterous thoughts that, it was rightly feared, might lead to misbehavior. In rigidly religious and socially complex bourgeois societies, they were discouraged from thinking of themselves as sexual creatures at all. Sex was something women were expected to simply “grin and bear” as a punishment for being born female.

Modern contraception, industrialization, globalism, and women’s suffrage changed the whole game. The lie of female chastity was exposed, and the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family collapsed. Male investment in civilization and order continues to decrease, and women–who are far better consumers and sedentary employees–have collectively reached a position which offers them the means to exert their own influence and tell their own lies about sex.

So they tell us about “rape culture.”

The violent rape of a woman is a brutal and visceral image that fills every man who loves his mother or his sisters with vengeful rage. Men may joke darkly about rape in the abstract, just as they may joke about murder or dismemberment in the abstract, but the actuality of violent rape is infuriating and repulsive to the majority of them. Men want to conquer the hearts and minds of women, but raping a woman of your own tribe is the act of a spurned, desperate man. A rapist is something that no right-minded man wants to be.

When anti-rape activists tell men they simply want to “teach men not to rape,” that sounds reasonable enough. When they say that there is a “culture of rape” that perpetuates rape, men are hesitant to disagree because they don’t want to be regarded as forgiving of rape or accessories to rape. It is precisely because most men are already against rape that women are able to use rape as a kind of personal holocaust. Anti-“rape culture” advocates are exploiting male disgust for rape and using it as a tool to silence criticism of women and exert control over men’s sexual behavior and conceptions of their own masculinity.

The women who claim that there is a culture of rape in America, as if there are somehow more rapes and rape is somehow more acceptable today than in the past or elsewhere, are not solely interested in preventing rape.

They surely know that the most brutal rapes–the nasty, violent rapes everyone imagines when they think of rape–are for the most part perpetrated by psychopaths and serial rapists who are immune to the influence of their college campus shaming sessions. Feminists also aren’t going to prevent Steel Reserve and Hot Pocket fueled trailer park rapes or underpass Joose rapes, because they have no more influence in these derelict zones than the mores of Victorian church ladies had in the backalleys of London. Given that the well-behaved college boys who make up their captive audience and potential mate selection are already against brutal rape, the ability of educational and Twitter campaigns aimed at ending “rape culture” to actually prevent violent rape will always be relatively minimal. A few frat boys will wait to make sure they got a clear “yes,” and the smart ones will record it for their own protection. But, for the most part, they weren’t the ones giving nice girls black eyes or broken jaws to begin with.

It is when feminists are asked how to end “rape culture” that they truly tip their hand. In a widely cited article in The Nation, the number one and number two ways to “empower men and women to change the status quo” were more concerned with changing masculinity, male identity and male sexuality than they were with preventing rape.

At the top of the list, the first “real problem” identified was “violent masculinity,” which is also known as “masculinity.” Violence has been a defining part of the male sex role and masculine identity throughout human evolution and for all of recorded history. The idea that violent masculinity is somehow a novel product of American society or even Western Civilization is one of the biggest lies feminists tell. If there truly are or have been cultures–not merely priesthoods or religious sects, but whole cultures–where the majority of men were not considered more violent than women, and I have never seen convincing evidence of this, then they are or have been exceedingly rare and anomalous. Male violence is a human norm and a human universal. Male violence is a central feature of both histories and myths concerning men all around the world, and the forms of entertainment that men and even very young boys choose freely continue to feature violent fantasy or simulated tribal warfare–as with team sports.

Just as men have always known or suspected that women also experienced carnal lust, women have always known or suspected that, for men, sex and violence are linked. The rush of dominating another man, or a beast, or the forces of nature is not so far away in the mind from the rush of sexually dominating a woman. All of our language about sex hints at the connection between sex and violence. There is no escaping the reality that the physical act of intercourse itself, as it is most often performed, involves a man violently pushing himself inside a woman in a wild, heightened, animalistic state of mind he rarely achieves in civilized life.

It’s not too much to ask to require men to make sure they have permission to engage in this ancient, ecstatic power play, since both men and women are having far more casual sex with far more partners than they were 100 years ago. But you don’t have to redefine masculinity to do that, since, as we all know, rape is already taboo.

Women are not stupid. They see this primal violence in male sexuality. They perceive their role it in it and it both excites and terrifies them, because they know that the delicate spirit of “equality” is exorcised in the frenzy of fornication.

Feminists taught the slogan that “rape is not about sex, it’s about power,” but only a few of them were willing to admit that sex is almost always about power, too.

Women are uncomfortable admitting that they enjoy the violent, dominant nature of male sexuality, especially in a political context. That they enjoy being dominated by men–at least in the bedroom, if only in the bedroom–is so politically volatile that it’s become an unspeakably dirty little secret for the new church ladies.

While it is true that women enjoy sex, they are also pragmatic and especially interested in safety and security. If there has been a “war of the sexes” raging throughout human history, men have almost always been the victors, precisely because they are bigger and stronger, more willing to take risks, and more inclined to be violent. Women see the potential for violence in men and they recognize that it is the greatest threat to the new order of society–their order. A majority of women in the developed world now have more political and economic power now than they ever have in human history, and this increase in status is utterly dependent on the continued pacification of men.

So they lie. They lie about male sexuality the way men lied about female sexuality.

They’re willing to trade satisfying sex for quasi-coital man-milking if it means holding on to their newfound political and economic power. They’re willing to use the tragedy of rape as a tool to cow men morally–to make normal, decent men prostrate themselves to prove they are not rapists or enablers of rape. As with “privilege,” men will always be guilty until proven innocent, and no matter what they do, no matter how they dishonor themselves, they will never be innocent enough. To release men from guilt is to relinquish power over them, and this power has already corrupted the hearts of the women who revel in it and gain from it.

Rape culture is a lot like racism. Maybe they should just call it “rapism.” It’s an abstract “evil” that a certain group, in this case women, reserves the right to identify and use to manipulate another group, in this case men, into increasingly defensive and impotent positions. As long as they can keep men apologizing, they can keep controlling them.

The continued success of feminism requires the ongoing construction of guilt cultures designed to mould men into a safer and more passive population. Corporate and banking interests want this, because ornery, violent groups of men unsupervised by women are a threat to established interests, property and supply chains. Pacified men also make better employees and consumers.

Feminists may merely be useful idiots to these bigger interests, but they are getting what they want out of the bargain for the time being. They want, as they have wanted for decades, to eliminate proscribed female gender roles and the ability of men to limit female behavior. They want men to “reimagine” a masculinity without violence or dominance. Masculinity without themes of violence or dominance may have no precedent, no history, and it may be completely at odds with physiology and human evolution, but male pacification is the key to female political and economic power.

These women are willing to do whatever they have to do to retain and gain that power, even if it means exploiting victims of rape to do it.

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America Identity Politics

White Men Vote Republican Because They’re Suckers

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Working-class white men vote Republican because the Democrats have made it clear that they care about representing the interests of everyone but  working-class white men. 

 

Originally published at Jack-Donovan.com

Amanda Marcotte recently wrote that “White men, as a group, vote Republican because they vote their resentments.”

The New York Times article she cited didn’t say or even imply anything about resentment. It did say that straight, working-class white men vote Republican because the Democratic Party has devoted the majority of its resources to appealing to women, gays and the various groups of less-white men who are nostalgically referred to as “minorities.” The Democratic Party has been on the opposite side of issues that working-class white men have cared about for decades, and according to the Times piece, many strategists within the party think it’s a waste of time trying to win them over.

Working-class white men vote Republican because the Democrats have made it clear that they care about representing the interests of everyone but working-class white men.

These guys vote Republican because Republicans actually make an effort to tell them what they want to hear.

Basically, white men vote Republican because they’re suckers.

The likes of Marcotte say that working-class white men are motivated by fear and resentment, but the majority of people who vote Democrat are doing it for nobler reasons.

They’re not. Most of them are voting for their own short-term self-interest.
Sure, there is a small class of progressive white men who make a big show of putting everyone else’s interests first. They demonstrate their moral superiority by standing up — mostly online — for whatever “rights” they believe that women or blacks or illegal immigrants or transsexuals or chickens are somehow entitled to.

Everyone else is just voting for stuff they want.

Women vote Democrat because they understandably want the convenience of being able to kill their unwanted children. They vote Democrat because they want free birth control and they want free healthcare for the kids they decide to keep. Women also vote for Democrats because Democrats offer special programs to help women get education and jobs.

Women have always depended on men for protection, but they’d rather depend on many men than just one or a few, so they are happy to vote for measures to increase “security.” As a group, women don’t like or understand guns, so they vote Democrat because Democrats promise to take guns away from men — usually those working-class white men — and give them to the big group of men in the government.

Men have historically been suspicious of what big groups of men will do when they have all of the weapons.

Blacks vote Democrat because they are smart and racist. They were going to vote for Obama no matter what he did because he was black, and like sensible people they figure it is better to have one of your own in power. Democrats, as a group, are known for caring more about giving free stuff to black people. Blacks are smart, because they know that it is always better to get something for free than to pay for it.

Blacks also know that you don’t need a permit to buy a gun. You just go buy one from that guy down the street and, you know, take care of business. White men are afraid to buy guns without following the rules, so more rules means less white men with guns. This is good for black men, because they like the convenience of being able to wear a hoodie in the rain without getting shot by nervous white men with guns.

Latinos vote Democrat because their families came to America to take advantage of employment opportunities and all of the benefits and protections that America offers to its citizens. They figure more benefits and protections are better than less, and Democrats always offer more benefits and protections.

In places with a lot of Latinos, Democrats say that you shouldn’t have to go through the trouble of becoming a citizen to get those benefits and protections. This is convenient for Latinos who are not citizens, because using a dead person’s social security number can sometimes be inconvenient.

Gay people vote Democrat because Democrats offer gay people stuff they think they want. Aside from marriage and the sadistic thrill of being able to force Christians to make wedding cakes, this includes free healthcare. Free healthcare comes in handy when you’re a man who occasionally has sex with guys he met 30 minutes ago on Grindr, or a lesbian who occasionally gets drunk and has sex with men. (See the first point about women above.)

Transsexuals vote Democrat because they want the government to pay for the very expensive cosmetic surgeries and hormones that are necessary for them to become who they really are. Also, they are confused about which bathroom to use, so they want more special bathrooms for confused people.

(Chickens are not technically allowed to vote yet, but we hear they want to be free range, which sounds libertarian.)

As Gari Day, the white male bus driver featured in the Times article said, “Republicans make you work for your money, and try to let you keep it.”

He probably doesn’t understand how the government can afford to keep giving everyone free stuff forever. He probably does figure that some of that money for the stuff other people want is coming out of his earnings. But he’s not alone in that — I’ve yet to see a successful Democrat turn down a tax break. No one actually wants to pay more taxes.

Aside from voting to keep more of their own money and to keep the guns they bought, a lot of these straight, white, working-class men are not asking for anything. They’re too proud for that.

As old-fashioned voters, they see themselves as part of the government. They’re not just trying to get more stuff from the government and come up with reasons why they deserve it. They’re voting for a society that works the way they think things should work.

And that’s why they’re suckers.

Democratic and Republican politicians, like everyone else, see the government as a way to get what they want. Politicians want power and status. To get elected, they accept money from regular people, from rich men, from businesses, and probably from foreign countries. In return, they promise favors. That’s how the system works.

People who don’t want anything from the government are useless to politicians, because they are difficult to manipulate and impossible to please. The government, like every big bureaucracy, is in the growth business. Making the government smaller isn’t in the short-term interest of any ambitious bureaucrat. Contraction only makes political sense when you’re trying to reduce an opponent’s sphere of influence.

Democrats promise more government, and more free stuff. Republicans promise less free stuff for poor people, and promise to lower taxes in return, but they rarely manage to lower taxes for anyone but rich guys who — let’s be real — were usually born into money and didn’t work any harder than the guys driving buses. Many of the wealthy elite are white guys, true, but they care about as much about the working-class white guys as the Democratic Party leadership.

White men are suckers because they haven’t figured out that the America they believe in is already gone, and that they are the only ones who aren’t asking for whatever they can get while the gettin’s still good. They’ll vote reliably Republican as long as the Republicans keep talking about self-reliance and how things should work, and that will free up Republican politicians to do favors for people who actually want stuff.

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