I guess Darleen isn't a feminist superstarlet

by Smitty

Amanda Marcotte at Double X:

But you don’t see many 16-year-olds hosting their own talk shows on major news networks. Having a baby is a lot of work, absolutely, but if it required the genius-level capabilities, the human race would have died out a long time ago.

Darleen Click:

And one doesn’t see many 16-year-olds successfully raising children on their own either. Mandy is not stupid enough to pretend giving birth is the same as parenting.

Is it possible that these levels of contempt for family and children exists beyond the Vagina Warrior class and contributes to the dismal portrayal of same in Western entertainment media, if not a birthrate that is way below replacement?

Marcotte continues:

And let's not forget how these arguments sound to people who can't have kids, because they're infertile or for some other reason. Telling women that having kids is the most important thing they can do makes the deliberately childless laugh at you, but for women who can't have kids, it's much like telling them they aren't even real women.

One wonders if the real discussion here is more about materialism than parenting. All I can tell women is that the older business norm of driving the house is every bit as valuable in the long run as the secular career. With the additional value that motherhood, by childbirth or adoption, as the case may be, can love you in your old age. Ask that of your pen or watch you get from your company. Or your pension plan that got cleaned out by white-collar thieves.

The denigration of the traditional family arrangement by feminists is as false and hollow as the denigration of capitalism by socialists. Yet feminists and socialists will preach their hellish anti-gospel while they've breath.

Pundette has the Official Anthem of National Offend a Feminist Week

Thank you, Pundette!

Bloggers: Join the Celebration!

The links are piling up!

Cornell Law professor Sherry Colb compares fetus to a rapist

Thanks to the Creative Minority for pointing out this professor's atrocity-by-analogy:

Particularly at the later stages of pregnancy, the right to abortion does not protect an interest in killing a fetus as such. What it protects instead is the woman's interest in not being physically, internally occupied by another creature against her will, the same interest that explains the right to use deadly force, if necessary, to stop a rapist. Though the fetus is innocent of any intentional wrongdoing and the rapist is not, the woman's interest in repelling an unwanted physical intrusion is quite similar.

Right. Merely by not wanting the baby, a woman empowers herself to use deadly force. Her will alone is sovereign, and all other considerations must yield. Professor Colb, how do you sleep?

UPDATE: Linked at Sundries Shack.

UPDATE II: Linked by Pundette (a mother of 7).

UPDATE III: Linked by Daily Gator.

Where do feminists learn to write so badly?

Clicking through from Ann Althouse, I wasn't sure what to think of this Judith Warner column in the New York Times. I wasn't sure what to think because Warner is so damnably foggy as to what it is she wants to say except maybe, "I am a woman. And a mother. And life is sometimes inconvenient. Hear me roar."

I take it that Warner is some kind of feminist, and perhaps the sister-in-law, niece or college roommate of someone very important at The New York Times Co., because I can't imagine why anyone would want to read such useless drivel as this:

. . . I saw this very clearly the other day, in a chance email exchange with my friend D.
She had written me to share some anxieties about the recession. They were very real and very pressing, and in the past, I would have responded with very pertinent examples of how things were much worse for me.
This time, however, tapping into great human reserves of calm and centeredness, I tried instead to lead her into staying with her feelings.
"Hang in there. Things will be O.K.," I wrote. . . .

She gets paid to write that crap. A "chance email exhange"? As opposed to what? A carefully orchestrated email exchange?

Then you notice her thumbnail bio, which tells you that Warner was the author of a 2005 New York Times bestseller. And yet "things are much worse for" her?

At which point, you struggle to resist the hope that she invested her money -- all of it -- with Bernie Madoff. You struggle, but you don't struggle too hard.

UPDATE: A woman whose blog title I greatly admire has some thoughts.

Silence of the Vagina Warriors

Darline Click noticed that the fembloggers -- who "have no problem with nasty mockery of Michelle Duggar" -- were suspiciously silent about the bizarre case of the woman who got in-vitro fertilization in order to give birth to octuplets, bringing her total to 14.

Then, one of them piped up with some weirdness about "the issue is childbearing by low-income women of color" -- telling me something I didn't know, and offering to take me places I'm not sure I want to go. Ace of Spades on Saturday:

Incidentally, I notice that Feministing hasn't commented on this at all, and I went back through five dreary pages of posts. Their usual joke -- "It's a vagina, not a clown car" -- is MIA. They tend to do this: There is no male villain in the story they can yell at about this, so it's not a story as far as they're concerned. If she'd had a husband, they would have posted about this twenty five times by now.

Well, finally, Little Ms. Presidential Push-Up Bra speaks:

On the whole, I want to caution people against assuming that this case has anything to do with the experiences of most women. . . . [H]er case is not especially good evidence that the law or doctors have a right to start pushing women around and making our reproductive decisions for us. The far more common cases are those when control is yanked away from the woman in question because her judgment is sound, but the control freak doctor or politician is on a sexist or racist high horse.

Ah, all those sexist/racist control-freak doctor/politicians with nothing to do all day but push women around! You see, this is just it: The news qua news is not of interest to Amanda. It's all about the Fierce Fury of Her Vagina, terrorizing those phallocentric oppressors, so as to elicit cheers from the sisterhood for her Intelligence and Courage, because taking on the powerful National Association of Racist/Sexist Doctor/Politicians is not a job for the faint of heart.

Ace is dead on target: In the absence of a husband who can be blamed for the octomom's oppression -- for a mother of 14 is certainly a victim in the eyes of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Abortion -- then the doctor must be blamed, or some unrelated rant about . . . something. There is exactly one narrative Amanda Marcotte is interested in, and because the octomom story doesn't confirm that narrative (indeed, it may be dispositive) then it is ignored as long as possible. When it cannot be ignored, throw some pretzel logic and fulminations about "choice" at it, then move on.

The odd thing is that there is any readership at all for such stuff.

UPDATE: From Aaron S. in our graphic department, behold . . . The Battling Beavers of Planned Parenthood:

UPDATE: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

2009 Prediction Number One

Feminists will continue to provide a target-rich environment in the coming year. This fearless prognostication for 2009 is prompted by blogger Sylvia M.'s demonstration of the magical feminist ability to detect evidence of patriarchal oppression everywhere.

The New York Times: "After a lifetime of being wooed by others, Caroline Kennedy is still learning how to sell herself."

Sylvia M. "They're calling her a whore!"

No reasonable person could find sexism in such a commonplace phrase -- "selling yourself," i.e., self-promotion -- but a feminist is, by definition, not a reasonable person. Rush Limbaugh gets a lot of grief for coining the term "feminazi," but that expression captures the fundamental similarity between theories of Aryan supremacy and the feminist worldview of gynocentric biological determinism. And just as the Nazis relentlessly inveighed against "Jewish art" and "Jewish science," so does the feminist use "sexism" as a synonym for "anything I don't like."

Like Nazism, feminism is about fostering a sense of grievance based on evil attributed to a scapegoat. Both ideologies are based on a classic paranoid delusion:

Your failures are not due to any negligence or shortcomings of your own. You are a such a superior person that you are blameless for any misfortune that befalls you. Therefore, your failures are caused by the treachery of your enemies, who so envy your superiority that they conspire to undermine you. You have been betrayed and sabotaged.

This madness is self-contradictory -- the scapegoated enemy is both inherently inferior and yet so clever as to thwart the supposedly superior paranoiac. So, just as Nazis believed that the feeble and decadent Jew was able to sabotage the mighty Aryan civilization, the feminist believes that reactionary male troglydytes are capable of oppressing advanced, enlightened womanhood.

Like Nazism, feminism offers to comfort the isolated and fearful individual with the warm security of collective identity. To reject this collectivism is to betray The Cause and give tacit aid to the scapegoated enemy. The German who rejected Nazism was accused of being something other than a True German, and a woman who rejects feminism is not a True Woman.

Of course, a German of the 1920s and '30s might have been a genuine patriot -- sharing the common grievance over the degradingly unfair terms of Versailles, and eager to see his nation restored to strength and health -- and yet rejected the Nazis. Similarly, a woman might sincerely believe in the importance of educational and career opportunities for women without embracing the rigid ideology of femisism. Like Nazism, feminism demands that its followers either toe the party line or else be demonized as betrayers.

Tammy Bruce was a feminist in good standing, president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, until she refused to go along with NOW's national leadership in insisting on solidarity with O.J. Simpson. Although she continues to cherish the same ideals of fairness and justice that motivated her as a NOW activist, Bruce is now despised as a turncoat by her former comrades.

The feminist movement -- as a movement -- is totalitarian. It is one thing to seek to remedy specific and well-defined wrongs against women. It is something very different to portray all men as scapegoats complicit in universal oppression, and to advocate social revolution "by any means necessary" as the only acceptable response.
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So it is that with supreme confidence I predict that, in 2009, feminists will continue to make idiots of themselves. Always remember: Equality Is For Ugly Losers.

'Why are only skinny white women with fake boobs naked?'

So asks a feminist at Feministing in regard to this Danish TV commercial, which is extremely NSFW:

Link:

The ad is for a Siemens washing machine that costs 4,999.00 DKK (or about $900), according to TechCrunch, which calls it "the best commercial ever made." Via Eratosthenes, who seems to share my joyous contempt for feminism. Anything that annoys feminists is a good thing, although in point of fact, I share the quoted feminista's dislike for fake boobs. To my taste, natural A-cups are better than fake C-cups.

Oh, also notice that the annoyed feminist commenter seems to find something vaguely wrong in the fact that this Danish commercial features only white women. Hello? It's Denmark -- 91 percent of the population are native Danes. Actually, however, a careful viewing of the video reveals that there is at least one Asian model (at the right of the screen at the :05 mark). The largest immigrant group in Denmark is Turks and the model at the right of the screen at the :15 mark could definitely be Turkish. Nor do all of the women have fake boobs. A careful viewing, I said . . .

UPDATE: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

UPDATE II: Matthew Archbold:

Walking by Abercrombie or Victoria's Secret is essentially a walking tour of porn for children. . . .
They see it. They internalize it. They think that window display represents the realm of adulthood. They intuit that adults desire 8-pack abs and 38 D breasts. And kids want to be adults.

Via Free Republic. Believe it or not, I'm actually a social conservative, it's just that I'm not a prude -- the two things are not synonymous -- and understand that kids don't need to log onto political blogs to find naked women on the Internet. As for adult readers, I think your morals are unlikely to be corrupted by that silly Danish commercial. I'm far more bothered by all these TV ads for Cialis, Viagra and contraceptives. You can't watch a football game with your kids nowadays without being subjected to warnings about four-hour erections.

UPDATE III: Ace says, "There is, of course, a political angle here of great import." Exactly. And not just because the Conservative Blogger of the Year said so, but because Jessica Valenti can never be mocked too much.

Her Sugar Daddy

Her rich boyfriend pays her rent, lavishes her with gifts, and takes her on luxury vacations. So why isn't everyone congratulating Melissa Beech on her good fortune?

In a society that long ago discarded the ideal of premarital chastity, youthful fornication has lost its shock power. If Miss Beech were merely sleeping with a college classmate, her behavior would be no different than that of millions of other young women in 21st-century America, and nowadays only the strictest of religious conservatives would condemn it. None of those passing judgment on her, however, speaks the language of sin. Her stone-throwing Pharisees are strictly secular.
Much of the opprobrium heaped on Miss Beech took her to task for failing to live up to the careerist ideals of feminism.

That's from a column I wrote for Taki's Magazine. Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: David Kirkpatrick shares my suspicion that "Melissa Beech" might be doing chick-lit fiction here.

'Stop oppressing my cleavage!'

The misogynistic patriarchy has reached a new low: Requiring women to keep their boobs inside their clothing at the office!

It's another one of those Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't situations that political correctness continually foists upon us. This supervisor sent an email to his female employee suggesting that she was revealing too much cleavage, and thus is condemned as an oppressor swine. On the other hand, if he had sent a note complimenting the woman on her wardrobe choices -- "Hey, love that low-cut top! Enjoying the show! You've got a great rack!" -- this, too, would have offended feminist sensibilities.

UPDATE: Welcome, AOSHQ Morons!

UPDATE II:

Q. How does a radical feminist screw in a lightbulb?

A. That's not funny!

UPDATE III: Coincidental news in New York. I'm trying to think up a joke about the Giants' offensive line and Peyton Manning getting sacked in Dallas, but nothing immediately springs to mind.

You know how those people are ...

Feminists, I mean:

In short, gang raping of women is commonplace in our culture both physically and metaphorically.
This past week, we witnessed just such a phenomenon involving men who are afraid of a powerful woman. Hillary Clinton, in her quest for her Presidential nomination, has in fact endured infantile taunting and wildly inappropriate commentary. Indeed we have witnessed almost comical attacks by John Edwards who in turn sided with Barak Obama as both snickered at Clinton's "breakdown," which consisted of a very short dewy-eyed moment. Now John Kerry, who should certainly know better after his own "swiftboating," has joined the playground gang.

Meanwhile a separate release accuses Ted Kennedy of "betrayal" of women for endorsing Obama. Hat tips to Hot Air and Ace of Spades, who observes:

In related news, Mary Jo Kopechne died of psychological vehicular manslaughter.

Lie down with crackpots, wake up with atrocious metaphors.

UPDATE: Marty at Jammie Wearing Fool writes:

It will be most curious to see the next card the increasingly desperate Clintons now play.

Given that Team Clinton just dispatched a surrogate to accuse a black man of perpetrating a "gang rape," I think the next card has already been played -- as usual, off the bottom of the deck.