Category: Sexual Politics

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Death by Discretion

I read an account of a bear attack a while ago that I found somewhat a disturbing.  A young woman camping in a wilderness area of a park in Colorado had been pulled out of her sleeping bag in the middle of the night by a large grizzly and dragged away screaming while a friend of hers nearby, who was also attacked, fled for help.

Help was found and a group of people set out to find the girl, if they could, and scare away the bear, if they could.  The bear did wander off leaving the badly injured girl lying on the ground.  The bear had ripped all of her clothing off and inflicted several life-threatening wounds.

I read the accounts given by some of the rescuers and could not find any reference to any attempt to stop the bleeding, staunch the wounds, apply a tourniquet, or any other first aid.  When recounting the story later, what they all agreed on was that someone  immediately covered her up with a coat.  Others returned to a nearby lodge to find equipment with which to carry her up to the lodge.  After considerable time, she was brought to the lodge and a doctor there treated her wounds but it was too late and she died.

It appeared to me that the rescuers were more concerned with the propriety of looking at a young woman’s naked body than they were with saving her life.  Nobody involved describes even examining her carefully to determine where the wounds were, let alone attempting to stop the bleeding.  It is by no means certain but it seems possible that her life could have been saved if someone had made a serious attempt to staunch the most critical wounds.

It is quite possible that she would have died anyway.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Here’s an account of a man in Japan who admirably attempted to save the life of a woman by applying a defibrillator (an AED or Automated External Defibrillator) only to be labelled a pervert by a bystander.   Now, I personally have wondered for years about how an AED is used– does the skin have to be bare?  A surprising number of people don’t know.  According to the information I found, it must be applied to bare skin, on the chest.

So if, I came across a woman suffering from a serious heart ailment and attempted to apply an AED, would someone watching would be outraged and demand that we all let her die rather than see her naked breasts?

I learned that the AED kit comes with a scissors, and yes, you absolutely should remove any clothing over the chest area, especially the bra (which may have an underwire in it).  

And good luck with that.  I know exactly what you will encounter.  You will encounter some asshole who thinks he’s a god-almighty guardian of public safety and good order and he will forcefully demand that you wait for a nice respectable ambulance to come along and handle the emergency.

I am quite confident that people have died because of people’s delicate sense of decency and that you will never hear about it.

 

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The Double Standard

The double-standard peaks out from behind it’s feminist camouflage.

I was thinking of Al Franken here, mostly.  There is no doubt at all that if a man had performed the same rude gesture as Ellen Degeneres did, he would have been roundly condemned.  If he had been a Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris would have led the charge to drive him from office.

Well, let’s hear it Senators Gillibrand and Harris!  Let’s hear your full-throated outrage once again: this kind of sexual ogling and intimidation will not be tolerated!  You will never, ever appear on her show.  Ever.

What was Franken accused of?  Posing for a picture with his hands in the air over a woman’s chest.  And the other accusations, as far as I can determine, include “trying to kiss me”.  Oh the horror!  A man tried to kiss me!  Off with his head!!  Yet some feminist jihadists insisted on lumping Franken in with Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey as poster-ogres of the passing patriarchy.

Imagine a male guest on Ellen asking the hostess what she thinks of his penis?   What do you think?  Just a trivial thing that should be swept aside and ignored.  Let’s just get on to something real, here?  Or a horribly inappropriate and offensive gesture that should be sanctioned immediately with suitable consequences?

Well, here we have Gal Gadot asking Jimmy Kimmel what he thinks of her breasts.  My point is not that Gal should be fired from her job because she asked Jimmy Kimmel to comment on her breasts (which she pointed to with her hands) but that neither of these incidents, nor the ones Al Franken was accused of, nor the ones that Louis C.K. was accused of, rises to the level of hysteria with which Franken’s alleged offenses were greeted by the “outraged” harpies who demanded his resignation.

I am most disgusted with Kirsten Gillibrand.  It was widely discussed at the time that Gillibrand was looking for Franken’s scalp as an entree into the world of 2020 presidential candidates.

And so it was.  Guess whose running for president in 2020?

I didn’t hear as much speculation then about Kamala Harris’ motives.  But guess who else is running for president in 2020?

A pox on both their houses.

When asked what type of man she likes, Rihanna said: “I like men who are more aggressive, but mysterious. I like them to be sure of themselves and know that you’re the man, I’m the lady, and the only way for us to make this work is if we play our roles.

I’m not sure that a man who heeded the call here would not be worried that after being “aggressive” he would be accused of not obtaining enthusiastic consent.  Is it possible to have both?

 

“It’s no problem at all for a man to wear a dark blue suit a hundred days in a row,” she said, “but if I wear the same blazer four times within two weeks, the letters start pouring in.”  Angela Merkel

I have no doubt that most, if not all, of those letters (do they really still send letters in Germany?) come from women.  We have seen similar reactions to women newscasters who change their hairstyle.  So why do some feminists keep blaming men for the double-standard applied to women in politics?  Why are you outraged at us?  Why aren’t you working on your own constituency, who publicly ogle breasts, yearn for “aggressive” men, and complain about the way you dress and look?

When I was in college, years and years ago, I was asked by a couple of girls– good friends to each other–  to take their portrait together.  They tried various poses, and dressing in similar t-shirts, and sweaters, and tank-tops.  Then I half-jokingly suggested they pose nude, back to back.  I remembered a similar picture of the two women in the band Heart.  I thought it looked strikingly beautiful.  The two girls looked at me thoughtfully and considered it and I was quite sure they were ready to go when I quipped, “and without makeup”.  They immediately, decisively rejected that option.  They were horrified at the very thought.

I’ve thought about that lot, for years.  I– the male– was the one who thought they would look more beautiful with their flaws, with a more natural image of their faces, with their real pores and real eyes and real lips.

Would a good feminist argue that they only think that way because they have been brainwashed by men to think that?  I don’t believe it.

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The Grievance Aesthetic: The Fannys

First of all, I had never before heard of Fanny.   Fanny was an all-female band that formed in 1970, consisting of June Millington (electric guitar), Jean Millington (bass), Alice De Buhr, and Nickey Barclay.  The women were remarkably talented– no doubt about it: they could play.

I have been following music closely since I started listening to Bob Dylan when I was ten years old.  I have followed it closely throughout the last 55 years.  I never heard of Fanny that I can remember.  After listening to their songs, I feel apologetic.  I feel dispossessed.

Come on– they are absolutely fabulous.

Let me be clear: hard rock is not my preferred style.  I find it abrasive, noisy, sometimes propulsive, sometimes dull.  I crave good lyrics, the use of musical space, nuance, and subtlety.  I don’t have a single hard rock song on my personal list of the top 25 songs of all time, though I suppose Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” or “Backstreets” or “Adam Raised a Cain” might qualify at least as “hard edged” rock.

I recently watched a documentary on PBS, “Fanny: The Right to Rock”.   To my utter disbelief, this variation of the film is clumsily censored, words beeped out, images of breasts blurred out.  Fuck you, whoever did that.  I found a good copy elsewhere.

If I had been in charge of this project there is one thing I would have asserted right from the start as absolutely essential to the objective of this film: at no point should the esteem or lack thereof of their music be attributed to sexist, patriarchal oppression, sexism, and discrimination.  The fact that Janis Joplin did succeed where Fanny did not tells you that there was more to it than sexism.  And to be fair, the members of the band on the record in the documentary don’t belabor the point.

[Incidentally: it’s a product of BBC IV and if you can find the original BBC version, you can avoid the contemptible censorship savaged on the PBS version, notably including scenes of the girls frolicking half-naked in Hedy Lamar’s former house in Los Angeles.]

But why?  Isn’t that the essential story of the band?  Well, if it is, the band is not worthy of this tribute.  If the band should be known to you because they broke barriers and because they were really better than anyone thinks they were because their singular lack of popular and critical success is due not to any deficiency of talent but to the obstacles placed in their path by sexist (and racist — they were Philippine) attitudes, then you have to prove it by providing me with the songs and musical achievements that deserved more recognition than they got.

What you should want more than anything– what you should positively crave– is for viewers to be convinced that Fanny produced some extraordinary music that stands on its own merits without qualification.  That, this documentary failed to do.   To declare that their work was important or significant because they were women is defeatist.  It is to admit that their work really wasn’t good enough to earn distinction on its own.

They should instead insist on their music being heard on its own terms: very, very good hard rock.  Four very good musicians creating respectable, admirable songs.  In particular, Jean Millington’s vocals are probably as good or better than Janis Joplins’– and she could play bass — really play– to boot.

Jean Millington later said that Fanny had to have a strong live presence in order to overcome audience’s perceptions that women could not play rock music well.  Wiki

Well, we don’t really know.  Do audiences really sit there and think, oh, I think they sound pretty good but they’re female so they can’t be as good as they sound?  Or do audiences simply sit there and think, “they don’t sound that great” and it’s the band and the feminists who think it’s because of their gender?  I am at a loss.  Listen to them: how could an audience not be impressed?

They didn’t “break through” into real success.  To do that, you absolutely have to have at least one song that really amazes people, that demonstrates originality and style and inventiveness and a compelling melody or vocal or all of the above.  A “More Than as Feeling” or “We Don’t Need no Education” or “Eighteen” or “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” or, crossing genres, “Have You Never Been Mellow” or “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be” or “Anchorage” or “First We Take Manhattan” or, even better, “The Hammond Song” by the Roches, a female group (in folk) that really did stand out for the quality of their music– not because they were female.  Fanny had many very good songs, but I can’t identify one that could have crossed-over into a pop hit.  But then, there were so many crappy pop hits.  And, of course, the promotional efforts of the record industry plays a big role.  They did have notable TV appearances, so you can’t say they didn’t get anything.  Just not enough.

What were they aspiring to?  Pop success?  They say they just wanted to be known for their talent, not their looks, but it was clear that they were not really good enough to be successful for their brilliant artistic achievements like, say, The Band or Steely Dan.  The bands that cite them as an inspiration, the Go-Gos, the Bangles, and the Runaways, were also pop bands with more success at creating the catchy pop single.  None of them were as good, from a purely musical perspective, as the Roches.

David Bowie’s appreciation of the band is frequently quoted:  “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers”.  Yeah, well, David Bowie was dating Jean Millington in 1973.  He was being asked to judge his girl.  But, okay, he was actually right.

Like almost all musicians, they were cruelly ripped off by their own management and the record companies.  But that is at least partly due to their own ignorance.  They allowed their producer and the record company to fire Brie Brandt because they wanted them to resemble the Beatles.  Seriously?  Because they had four members?  The rest of the band was very sad about cutting Brie out of the band, but it did not seem to occur to them that there is a universe in which young musicians can decide personnel matters for themselves.  It was as if God told them to fire her and they did.  They talk about it as if there really was no choice, because they don’t want to admit that the choice was between Brie and the commercial backing of the label.

There are bands that refused to compromise on issues like that and still found success.  There are probably even more bands that made the same compromise and, like Fanny, went nowhere.

The inevitable reunion is covered.  Nickey Barclay is mysteriously absent.  There is a clip of them performing live which is conspicuously deceitful: it’s the studio recording playing over the video of the band.  Not all viewers are dumb enough to not ask themselves immediately why they don’t play the live audio.

The broadcast version I saw beeped out “offensive” language.  Seriously?  It’s 2023.  You’re doing a documentary on this courageous, ground-breaking, revolutionary, ballsy female band, and you have to careful not to offend the delicate sensibilities of your projected audience?  [As I mentioned earlier, check out the BBC original if you can.]

The Candidates:

Aint That Peculiar

Fairly upbeat love song (the more you hurt me the more I love you).  Slide electric, pretty good bass.  Not bad, but not particularly distinguished.

Blind Alley

Typical Fanny: extremely busy, dense, vocals typical of thrash metal bands–  like, have you ever heard of space?  Vocals are “stretching”, a habit developed by metal bands from trying to be heard above their own noise.

Last Night I had a Dream

All the lousy little poets coming round trying to sound like Janis Joplin…

Place in the Country

Nicky Barclay sounds more than a little derivative of Janis Joplin (did Joplin cop a few strokes from Barclay?  They are active around the same time), but without the variety of tone and pace.

 

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Bach’s 13 Mistakes

“Tar” is a bit long-winded but still the best movie I’ve seen this year. Blanchett will win the Oscar. I am absolutely fabulously overjoyed that they filmed and recorded the orchestral scenes with a real orchestra, live; Blanchett’s piano playing is also real, as is the cellist ingenue. Most films about musicians dub the performances and it usually shows, badly. Contains a provocative, timely discussion by the lead character of the relationship of art to the scandalous behaviors of the artists, instancing a LGBQ student who can’t get “into” Bach’s music because he had 13 children.

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False Statements and Superfluous Details

It is always fascinating to read about a very old mystery that is finally solved.

In 1984, a twelve-year-old girl, Jonelle Matthews, disappeared from her home in Greely, Colorado.  Police say they have been “haunted” by the case since then.  Last week, the mystery was “solved”.  A man named Steve Pankey was convicted of her kidnapping and murder.

Wow!  DNA evidence, right?  Fingerprints?  A witness?  A confession?

Well, we now know better than to trust confessions.

The evidence, as far as can be determined from the news article in the New York Times and Wiki, consists mostly of Pankey making “odd” comments about the case, showing an “unusual” interest in it, and …  well, read about it.   It’s get weirder and weirder.  Apparently, Pankey, who is divorced, and whose wife seems to have provided police with some of the evidence of Pankey’s “odd” interest in the case, admits to being a celibate homosexual, even while he served as an assistant pastor at his church.

His wife, apparently, does not remember that his alibi– that he was with her the night of the kidnapping– was a lie.  She was there with him, just a few nights before they left for a trip to California.  The car was already partly packed.  Would she not remember if he had been out that evening, if she remembers that he listened to radio accounts with suspiciously strong curiosity, or that he asked her to read newspaper accounts of the story aloud to him after they arrived home?

Jonelle’s body was found in 2019 by a construction crew working on a pipeline.  There is no DNA evidence, no finger-prints, no photos, no witnesses.  There is, in short, nothing but a rather bizarre interpretation of some odd but not really strange verbal expressions by the suspect.

This is not the first time some odd person has made curious statements about an unsolved murder.  We should know better by now: it’s a psychological condition, a personality quirk, a bizarre compulsion.  If a person behaves “oddly”, by all means, check it out.  But if there is no supporting evidence, you probably have something similar to this case.

Ask yourself this: would the police have ever excluded a possible suspect because he didn’t provide “superfluous details” when discussing the case with them?

But to bring a case like that to court, based sole on the “superfluous” detail or “excessive” interest is worse than inadequate.  It borders on criminal abuse.  Close enough!  Hang him!  Great police work!  Medals for everybody.

And Jonelle’s family is glad to have “closure”.  If I were in Jonelle’s family, I would tell the police, “are you fucking kidding me?”  Get back to work.

This is all absurd.  It’s idiotic.  And, as if we don’t already know from election-deniers,  it is further evidence that a lot of people are, frankly, stupid: a jury voted unanimously that, by golly, if the police think he’s guilty, he must be guilty.  They convicted him.

Pankey insists he is innocent.  He says he is being persecuted because of his homosexuality.  He might be right.

I love the “superfluous details”.  The police felt that the “superfluous details” implicated him.  Because there is some kind of magical police science that tells you that men who provide “superfluous details” likely committed a crime.  Just as, when I was little, my mother believed that giggling if someone stared at you and asked if you were lying meant that you were lying.

I know people who put on a grave, serious expression when talking about police who were killed or injured on duty, as if there is something solemn or sacred about them.   It is very hard, especially recently, especially after the numerous incidents in which police behaved very, very badly (even to the point of homicide) and not one of the officers who saw or heard of the incident reported it, to not believe that most police don’t deserve our respect.

Interesting side-note: Jonelle was born to a 13-year-old girl, and then adopted.

“A chokecherry tree was planted in front of Franklin Middle School in memory of Jonelle. The tree died after a few years and a plaque inscribed with Jonelle’s name disappeared.[18]”  (Wiki)  So much for that solemn commitment to commemorate and honor her memory.  I guess it was a superfluous detail.

 

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We Hum Along to Infidelity

There is a video of a group of children performing the song “Gentle on My Mind” in this cheerful, anodyne style that makes you sit back and think, oh, how wonderful that he (the songwriter) has such warm thoughts about his girl.  She must be so pleased that he’s thinking about her after he stayed a few nights and then ran off.

Have you ever hummed along to it?

Have you ever taken note of the lyrics:

And it’s knowing I’m not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that are dried upon some line

There are many strange paradoxes in popular culture: our contempt for men who “love ’em and leave ’em” for their cruelty and selfishness, and our worship of songs like “Baby the Rain Must Fall” and “Gentle on my Mind”.  Our cancel culture, about men who cheat.  Our public disapproval of philanderers.  But most people still hum along, as they do with a song about killing an unfaithful wife (“Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”).

“Gentle on my Mind” is pretty poetic about it:

I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin’
Cracklin’ caldron in some train yard
My beard a rustling, cold towel, and
A dirty hat pulled low across my face

This gets kind of weird.  Not only is he dumping her– like Gordon Lightfoot in “For Lovin’ Me”, but he’s wandering around like a hobo, not working, evidently, and surviving on soup with his fellow derelicts in “some train yard”.  Quite a picture for his beloved, while she’s warming to the idea of being “gentle on his mind”.

So the gentle part means she isn’t going to put up a fuss about him dropping in for sex now and then, leaving his sleeping bag behind her couch, and then taking off whenever he feels like it.

Elvis Presley recorded it.  So did Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.  But, Aretha Franklin?!  Yes, she did.  Well, that’s liberating!

John Hartford wrote the song, he says, after watching “Dr. Zhivago”.  And from personal experience.

Maybe I misunderstand the lyrics.  Maybe the poor guy had no choice but to move on and eat soup in the train yard.  But it doesn’t sound like it:

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman’s cryin’ to her mother
‘Cause she turned and I was gone

Who’s right?  Well, let’s expand it a little.  Let’s consider Hartford’s wife.

The story of the song narrates the reminiscences of a drifter of his lost love, while moving through backroads and hobo encampments.[2] Betty Hartford, who later divorced her husband, noted to him the similarity between herself and the song’s female character. She questioned John Hartford about the man’s negative feelings toward his marriage. Hartford said he likened her to Lara and attributed the man’s feelings about being trapped in a relationship to his “artistic license”.

There you go.

It was, at one time, one of the most played songs (in all versions) on radio in North America.

Men thinking kindly — or not– about the women they abandoned

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“Because of the Thoroughness With Which the Accuser Was Discredited”

Paul Takakjian, a criminal defense lawyer who is not involved in Bauer’s case but previously served as a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said he saw Thursday’s ruling as “a harbinger of maybe good news” for [Trevor] Bauer in his criminal investigation “because of the thoroughness with which the accuser was discredited in the judge’s eyes.”  NY Times [2022-04-30]

I post this link with no pleasure, but because we are all continually confronted with advocates for women insisting that women never lie about sexual assault.

It appears that the woman let slip that she hoped to extract a large sum of money from Bauer as a result of her allegations, and in spite of lavish evidence that she consented to his actions in the bedroom.  In fact, the woman initiated contact with Bauer and requested “rough sex” and, apparently, even specifically asked for actions by Bauer that she later alleged were abusive.

I am disappointed– but not surprised– that Major League Baseball suspended Bauer for 2 years regardless of the facts.  It is not logical.  Either the woman has been discredited or she has not.  If she was discredited– and she certainly was after a “thorough” investigation– then Bauer’s behavior may have been distasteful and offensive to the more mainstream (public) preferences of Commissioner Rob Manfred and his colleagues, but it should not be grounds for a suspension, and I would not be surprised if Bauer wins his appeal.

I repeat that– it was a thorough investigation.  No judge would be eager to dismiss charges in an explosive case like this but the judge,  Dianna Gould-Saltman — yes, a woman– had no choice.  The evidence was clear and convincing.

This reminds me of the Jian Ghomeshi case in which several women also lied about the incident– to the police and in court– and then coordinated their stories.  Ghomeshi’s lawyer provided the court with convincing proof that the women had lied and the case was dismissed.  Yet the feminist establishment continued to behave as if he had been found guilty.

They will behave the same way in the case of Trevor Bauer and that is why MLB suspended him in spite of the court case collapse.  If they had let him resume his career, they would have been relentlessly savaged in the media and nobody wants to have defend someone whose taste runs to rough sex, and nobody wants to even mention the fact that the woman requested it because feminist orthodoxy is that the woman never asks for it.

 

 

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The Myth of Sybil

The story of “Sybil”, the woman with 16 different “personalities”,  is a myth, pure and simple.

(NPR on one of the books that has debunked it.)

One website, defending Sybil, refers to “Michelle Remembers”–without comment–as a reference to the influence of “Sybil”.  That is astonishing.  “Michelle Remembers” is one of the most discredited books of the 1980’s.

First of all, you do need to know what in no other developed country is the concept of a “multiple-personality” widely accepted.    Only in America, and only in a certain part of America.

As is well known, Sybil herself acknowledge the hoax in a letter to Schreiber:

She got the very, very strong impression when she went in and brought this letter of recantation to Dr. Wilbur that if she didn’t go with the program she was not going to have Dr. Wilbur anymore,” Nathan says. “Dr. Wilbur was giving her 14 to 18 hours of therapy a week. Dr. Wilbur was coming to her house and eating with her, giving her clothes, paying her rent … so, how could you give up Dr. Wilbur?

Sybil Exposed

Is this really difficult to see?  Look at the culture around MPD?  Look at who revels in it, thrives in the lurid stories attached to it?

Or look at hypnotism:

HS: Yes. She was very hypnotizable, what I call a “grade five.” On a zero to five scale we can classify most levels of hypnotizability. The top group—the hypnotic virtuosos—are about 5 percent of the population and they show extra phenomena that we don’t ordinarily see even in good hypnotic subjects. For example, they have the ability to regress in time and they will report past experiences in the present tense. It is as if they “ablate,” or remove from memory, the period of time from, say, their fourth birthday to the present time, and you have an expression of what was there up until the age of four. For most people, to get them to a fixed point in time, we use something that has an affect potential. You can’t just say, “I want you to go back to January 14, 1916″—that doesn’t mean anything. You will say to the subject: “You are getting younger and younger. You are now nineteen, eighteen, seventeen years old, twelve years old, seven years old,” and then: “This is your fourth birthday.”  NY Review of Books

If this impresses you, I have some bitcoin I want to sell.

Let’s put it this way: if you want to accept what Dr. Spiegel says about hypnotism at face value, it would be possible, for example, to go back in time to when you lost your keys and discover where you lost them.  In fairness, I believe Dr. Spiegel implies that this is not possible.

It is not possible, unfortunately, and neither is it possible to go back in memory to “a fixed point of time” (see Dr. Spiegel covering his tracks?).  You are always only going back to a memory you already have, or one that you have constructed, if you are suggestible, and I would suggest that the best patients for hypnosis– or any kind of psychiatry– are very suggestible.

That said, even Dr. Spiegel didn’t buy Sybil’s multiple personalities and he made clear why Dr. Wilbur and Schreiber did (and why they stopped speaking to him):

Schreiber then got in a huff. She was sitting right in that chair there, and she said, “But if we don’t call it a multiple personality, we don’t have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!”

Exactly.  The publishers knew what gets you on Phil Donahue and 20/20 and maybe even 60 Minutes, and they knew that that is what sells books and makes movies.

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Narcissist Jami Attenberg

What’s particularly calculating about Attenberg describing her assault is that it brilliantly inoculates her from criticism. “Oh, you don’t like my book? Well, clearly, you stand on the side of toxic masculinity!” Hardly. But I have to wonder — in light of Alice Sebold identifying the wrong man who assaulted her — how much of this story was invented or embellished or even fact-checked by the people at Ecco. It’s easy enough to suss out who “Brendan” is. (It took me three minutes to find him on Google.) And since the dude is now dead, we have no way to corroborate the story. We also get a casual detail about a suicide attempt, but no effort by Attenberg to examine what led her to this state. Victimhood has become the currency of “memoirs” of this type. Victimhood is also the very quality that a narcissist flails about to anyone who will listen.  From Here.

And the above is quoted.

And validation.  Yes, the New York Times treats her account of the assault as validation.

“I Came All This Way to Meet You” is at its most affecting when Attenberg follows the darker thread of her own experience, sharing the story of an assault she endured from a classmate in her writing program. It’s not the revelation that makes this story so powerful; it’s Attenberg’s vituperation over how the university handled the assault, and how she is — and is not — valued as a writer, and how these two things are bound up together.

From Here.

What the New York Times forgot to say– or maybe the repetition police stepped in– is just how fucking courageous that makes her.  So courageous.  So amazingly courageous.  Oh my god, that’s so courageous.  How brave!  Oh my.

It must be noted that the person Attenberg accuses of assaulting her is conveniently deceased and unable to counter her allegations.

We get more:

All of this rings painfully true; above all, Attenberg’s rage — the rage of the writer, especially the female writer, who’s suffered not just assaults but endless indignities and unfairnesses.

The problem always is, how do you know if the “assaults”, “indignities”, and “unfairnesses” were caused by sexism?  How do you know if this treatment might have been deserved?  Did you know that everybody occasionally suffers “indignities” and “unfairness”, even if they don’t all make themselves into martyrs.  Maybe Attenberg was a self-aggrandizing narcissistic bitch?  She was obviously– from her own testimony– a ruthlessly ambitious writer who might have been tempted to use people along the way.

 

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The Women Roar: I am Weak and Fragile

Here we go again.  Some women at Harvard, wishing to challenge the establishment within the institution to prove they are totally woke when it comes to feminist issues, have demanded a pound of flesh for the horrifying, terrible, rotten, monstrous acts of a certain professor John Comaroff.

In the interview, she recalled how Dr. Comaroff launched into a harangue about how she could be subjected to “corrective rape,” or even killed, if she were seen in a lesbian relationship in certain parts of Africa. But he said it with “a tone of enjoyment,” Ms. Kilburn said, adding, “This was not normal office hours advice.”

This was Dr. Comaroff advising a graduate student that traveling through Africa with a same-sex partner could be dangerous.

Did you catch it?  Do I have to call attention to the fact that this is something he said.  These are words.  And her judgement of his tone: it was not satisfactory, to her.  It was a “tone of enjoyment”.

So the grand inquisitors of the feminist movement sprung into action, recruited some fellow-travelers who don’t appear to have anything more substantial to add to the story, and attacked Professor Comaroff and sued Harvard University for not having burned him at the stake long ago.

A group of 38 colleagues at Harvard wrote a letter defending him.  Then they retracted it.  Apparently they discovered that Professor Comaroff, attacked by a female student, reacted the way most of us do when attacked unfairly: he defended himself.  He refused to favor this student with his approval and blessings.  He gave his opinion of this student’s attack on him to others.  (In fairness, read this for a relatively balanced view.  “Balanced” if you believe that the student did not have the option of telling him to get lost and going somewhere else.  But then, she claims, she would have been disadvantaged by not being able to expect favorable treatment from a professor she attacked for being abusive to her because he seemed to enjoy warning her about the social policy and attitudes of certain African nations.)

Of course his advice was stupid and unpleasant.  Of course he was also probably right.  And of course he probably enjoyed passing that information along to the lesbian student, Lilian Kilburn, who was convinced that he was hitting on her.  Maybe he was.  She’s not particularly attractive, but who knows.  Either way, as I glided past the salacious headlines and teasers about this story I kept waiting for the part that described the “harassment”.  Was it– yes it was: he kissed her on the lips.  Maybe.  He says he didn’t.  She says he did.  Suspend the fucker!  Cancel him!  He must pay for his outrageous iniquities.

I’m not going to go into any more detail on this one– that’s all there is.  There is no real groping or rape or sodomy or slapping or whatever it is that we used to call “sexual” abuse.  Just a number of female students who clearly don’t like Professor Comaroff, who resent the fact that he defended himself when attacked, and, yes, of course it isn’t about the money and of course they are after the money.  Yes indeed: these martyrs are suing Harvard University for not protecting them from Professor Comaroff’s lips and words.

Fuck this.  This is indefensible.  This does not evoke a sense of women’s empowerment and equality and intellectual stature.  It evokes a conviction that these women are weak, petty, vindictive, and insecure.  How do they prove that they really are better and smarter and more virtuous than those men at Harvard who actually run things?  Sue them.  It’s better than bringing down the governor.   It’s even better than accusing them of being complicit in a murder, like Joyce Carol Oates did.

I’m not even going to make sure you know all about my long-standing beliefs or views on women’s rights and equality as if I somehow have to prove that seeing bullshit for what it is has to be excused in some way.  This IS bullshit.  It is stupid.  It discredits feminism– and the sustained drumbeat of these cases is doing more damage to it than most women would believe.

And they don’t know about it because it’s something sensible, smart, educated, enlightened men talk about when there are no women in the room.

Now, be careful.  If you comment about the rather butch appearance of these women, you too could be cancelled.  I’m going to comment anyway because if the tone of voice of Professor Comaroff is fair game (yes, that is basis of part of their complaint) then I must insist that the physical appearance of these three women is also fair game.

It’s all subjective judgement that in one case become the axis of a million-dollar lawsuit and in another case my disrespectful opinion of what I think is really happening here.