She doesn't link but she's responding to my post yesterday, "Sady Doyle Cheers Penis Amputation in Sweden!" And I'm a little taken aback by her dim take. I posted a disclaimer at top so there'd be no misunderstanding (you can't be too careful these days). I haven't yet seen Sady Doyle cheer penile amputation, although the link there goes not to a reference on "fair use" but to libel law. Seems to me that a hot shot writer like Ms. Sady might have a better handle on stuff like that, especially considering the high-octane allegations she tosses off with some regularity. No doubt she's loaded up more on Gramscian postcolonial feminism than introduction to First Amendment case law. More important, though, is that she's ignored the underlying meme there on Lorena Bobbitt-style feminist resistance. Radical (and deeply embittered) feminists cheered the John Wayne Bobbitt mutilation as striking a blow against "the institution of marriage as a legal cover for the act of rape and the permanent humiliation of women." For the hardcore feminist emancipators, Lorena Bobbitt was "a symbol of innovative resistance against gender oppression everywhere." Sady Doyle obviously gets it. But she doesn't cop to it since that would be giving up the candle for the Dworkinite extremist that she is. Because let's face it: Every man is a potential assailant in the post-modern "dude friend" world of militant feminism. Read her Atlantic essay, for example, "The Boyfriend Myth." Young women who enter relationships (with boyfriends) are basically asking for it since --- stop the world! --- small percentages report having sex when they weren't in the mood and some were "verbally abused" during their relationships. Yeah, it's hard out there ...
Anyway, all of this is mostly academic. Sady Doyle is a bitter hag of a young woman. She's a totalitarian painting a brush of censorship and repression so broad that the Red Guards of China's Great Proletarian Revolution look like amateurs in comparison. Most hilarious is her aggressive campaign to avoid responding to me directly, for example by blocking me on Twitter and abjuring links to my blog. It's a sign of complete anti-intellecualism and insecurity, but that's of course typical for academic feminists that she socializes with at Harvard-sponsored post-virginity conferences featuring such high-brow panels like "Debunking the Virginity Ideal: The Feminist Response to Slut-Shaming & Sexual Scare Tactics."
That is a little harsh, Dave. But I've seen way worse from the neo-communists.
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about the intelligence scene in the UK, but when I still lived in the US, we always assumed feminists this extreme worked for the government. For some reason, it doesn't occur to people that the FBI infiltrated the feminist movement, just as the infiltrated the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and the student movement. In fact the US intelligence role played America's feminist poster girl Gloria Steinem is still largely invisible. In 1976 Steinem blocked Random House from publishing details about her CIA past (see http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg02217.html). Steinem went on to infiltrate the National Organization for Women (which co-founder Betty Friedan publicly confronted her for). She also used Ms Magazine (which was funded by CIA-front foundations) very effectively to create massive divisions between professional and working class feminists and between feminists and progressive men.
ReplyDeleteMore recently evidence has surfaced about an FBI operation she ran to plant so-called "black feminists" in grassroots African American groups to break them up (see http://rah.posterous.com/black-feminism-the-cia-and-gloria-steinem-fwd). I ran across some of these nasties in Seattle, while working to set up an African American Museum. I write about it in my recent memoir: THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE (www.stuartbramhall.com). I currently live in exile in New Zealand.