Strawfeminist 0, Real Feminists 2
Published by Amanda Marcotte April 17th, 2006 in Gender IssuesNY Times: I think of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” as the first feminist-backlash song. It came out in the 80’s and goes against the preachy and high-minded tone of 70’s feminism.
Cyndi: That’s not true! It’s totally feminist. It’s a song about entitlement. Why can’t women have fun?
It’s funny–people are so used to dealing with the strawfeminist that they don’t even pause to think how completely stupid it sounds to say that a song about a girl who evades all these various people trying to control her for their own ends could be anything but a feminist song. Strawfeminists are so wicked, so evil that strawfeminists even oppose feminism. Fascinating.
Less fun is this profile of Caitlan Flanagan in the LA Weekly, because the author falls far too easily for Flanagan’s schtick of positioning herself as the appealing alternative to fictional hoardes of women who marry men they won’t fuck and have children they won’t care for. But once again Flanagan’s endless dividing the world up into men and the good women who support them vs. bad women who think they should be treated like humans instead of sexbots becomes so undeniably tedious that the author cracks and starts calling her out for it, identifying correctly that Flanagan is “male-identified”. She also has a paragraph that’s quite revealing about Flanagan.
Not surprisingly, Flanagan’s intellectual heroes are mostly men — she cites her late father, Thomas Flanagan, a UC Berkeley professor of Irish history and late-life author of historical novels; The New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic’s Los Angeles–based literary editor, whom she so impressed with her skills as a dinner-party raconteur that he rescued her from futile efforts to write a novel and gave her the domestic beat at the magazine; and former Atlantic writer William Langewiesche, who switched her on to the idea of “writing history as it happens,” at which she is very good.
And then there’s this:
A week after our meeting — during which she has very likely read the Elle profile, which brought out the pious parson in her, a side I didn’t see — she calls me back and tells me she has a quote for me that she hasn’t given anyone else. “I am pro-choice, anti-war, anti-Bush, I’m a Democrat, and only a conservative on family issues,” she says plaintively. “I’ve got nothing but derision from the left — you’ve got to check everything on the menu to please them. But the right has been good to me, even though they disagree with me about abortion. I can go on Tucker Carlson and he’s respectful. The head of the Southern Baptist Convention had me on the radio. But the feminists humiliate me. We, the Democrats, have a real small tent. The Republicans have a big tent.” She must have in mind those beacons of open-minded tolerance, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.
Flanagan’s schtick is absolutely transparent and why she continues to get jobs offered her by liberalish men of means is even more transparent. She is, deliberately or not, the embodiment of the fantasy wife that is supposed to be the birthright of said men. For a certain class of men, it’s not really enough to have a dumb bunny of a wife, because that sort of marriage has no class or sophistication to it. The ideal is to have a bright, witty, well-educated woman who directs all that talent and beauty towards her husband and his children. It does well to remember that women in college in the pre-Feminine Mystique era were told outright that they were being educated and trained to be very impressive and exciting wives for the people who really mattered in society. To be sort of bored with the actual day-to-day grind of women’s lives actually adds to the charm–think of Elizabeth Bennett. To be kind of useless at women’s work but brilliant at a career you can’t have due to your sex and a little bit crazy/delicate adds even more to the charm of this fantasy–think Zelda Fitzgerald. Truly sexy housewives don’t dirty their hands with servant work. The best wife is one whose only job is to linger around the house being hot and thinking only of you and how to fulfill you sexually and possibly make you smile at her charming antics and of course her strict identification with your every thought and feeling.
Flanagan grasps this fantasy very well and has added another layer of fantasy to it, with her endless thrashing of women who refuse to play at it, women who would take one look at Zelda Fitzgerald’s life and say a hearty Fuck That Noise to reenacting it. The second reason then that Flanagan has so much appeal to the sort of men who hire her is she has an endless appetite for scolding the women of their class for wanting to compete with them instead of dance around in a French maid’s outfit for them when they come home.
What’s brilliant about Flanagan’s schtick is that she’s amazingly good at deflecting criticism from her actual argument, which is that professional men are entitled to have wives that are groomed and educated just for their own use by engaging her critics in a “isn’t it a shame that some women don’t even have the opportunity to be trophy wives” discussion centered around class. It’s impossible to resist the temptation, because most of us lefty feminists are dying for any opportunity to talk about class issues, but for once I’m going to ignore it and go ahead and discuss how unfair Flanagan is being to women of her own class, because getting sucked into a discussion about the privilege women in her class enjoy is being used by her and others as a cover for how much privilege she’s demanding the men in her class should feel entitled to have.
Flanagan, for instance, posits here that women of the professional class are falling down on their number one duty to seek out new sexual pleasures to gift their men with.
If marriages are sexless, it’s because ball-breaker women, exhausted from long hours at the office and from nagging their husbands to fold the laundry properly, are not home putting home-cooked hot meals on the table, not greeting their husbands at the door in heels and slinky negligee and, worst of all, not putting out. “Under these conditions,” she writes, “pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.”
In other words, men of her class are entitled to have women that are inhuman sex machines that have no desires of their own but to make sure the man is serviced to perfection. If a man withdraws sexually from his marriage, that’s his right of course, though it’s not a woman’s right to withdraw. If a man withdraws from his wife, that’s her fault of course, because she was wicked and put demands on him to act like he should care about his spouse’s sexual needs as if he was a mere woman.
For all that Flanagan likes to hammer at upper class feminists for supposedly not caring about lower class women, she sure as hell doesn’t appear to have any sympathy for lower class men. After all, this entitlement that she describes above is one reserved strictly for upper class men who can afford to keep a woman up who has no other contributions to the household but to push out a couple of kids and be his uncomplaining sex toy. Working class men need wives that are a tad more useful than the fantasy that Flanagan is promoting. Flanagan’s advice on being a good wife would ruin many a working class marriage, because what appears to be erotically enticing uselessness in the upper class is nothing but plain old uselessness in the working class.
And that is what is really going on with a lot of the anti-feminist “mommy wars” crap the NY Times is pushing–it’s about putting the upper class man above everyone else. The “fun” that the interviewer at the top thinks that feminists hate is a pretty specific kind of fun, the fun of those kind of men get to have that no one else will ever have a shot at, including upper class women who aren’t entitled to ask for a little sexual pleasure of their own in midst of putting on a huge performance for their entitled husbands. And the rest of us certainly aren’t going to ever see the day when we get to have the fun that is having someone lay around our homes thinking of new and exciting ways to get us off.
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Sorry but…I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to have sex with a guy who viewed his wife’s contributions to their mutual existence that way. It’s too much work for a man to be bothered with seducing his wife, the person he married and committed his life to, but she should go out of her way to be sexually available to him, even try to seduce him? That couple needs therapy, with particular focus on his sense of entitlement and unrealistic standards, not a talented, bright woman to surrender her entire life over to her husband’s fantasies.
I work a really stressful desk jockey job and I actually bring in a good bit more than my husband. My husband works a job that requires him to drive all day, and then he heads halfway out of town to go to classes at night. We still share housework and cooking, although I do the bulk of it during the weekdays for obvious reasons. And the sex is fantastic. But all of this is because we married the right person for the right reasons. He respects me, and he’s willing to put the work in on days when I’m tired, he’s willing to work me up to it. I never had a guy really want to seduce me like that before. Hell, my last boyfriend thought foreplay was rolling over and poking me in the hip with his morning wood while I was sleeping. The thing is, marriage does take work, but it also takes energy. You have to commit your resources to each other, or it’s not going to function. We have a shared sense that we’re building something together out of our lives, and with each step a feeling of accomplishment. What we do, we do together. I can’t imagine the marriages that Flanagan describes being any fun, ever having that sense of fulfillment, for either partner. And then, wtf’s the point of being married at all? If all you’ve got is a nagging bitch that rejects your every advance, or a charming, dependent sexbot, why link up to that legally, finacially, and emotionally for the rest of your life?
Why is a wife’s financial independence a factor in the husband’s difficulty seducing her?
Oh yeah, because in Flanagan’s world, women don’t like sex and therefore would never do it unless forced into it by the need to have the man support them.
I’m afraid I have to call BS on claiming Flanagan is “male-identified” and criticising her for having all/mostly male heroes. We shake our heads at the stupidity of misogynists who accuse men feminists of being female-identified and deride them for having female heroes; how is this any different?
Now, I’ll grant that Flanagan is an obnoxious hypocrite. But we should be calling her out for that, not which side of the sandbox she plays on.
Flanigan also talks a lot about “wifely duties” to have sex with your husband. Which I think sheds a whole lot of light on her views of sex. And on how pleasurable her sex life must be when doing it feels like work.
Don’t forget that the women is tired and cranky from her long-hours, high-pressure job that she insists on having just because of some stupid fetish about paying the mortgage, putting food on the table and saving for retirement. So obviously there’s no blame to be assign in any of this to a corporate system that makes people work long miserable hours even though the organizational and technological tools to make jobs shorter and easier have been around for decades and are in use in other countries.
Pretty funny, because this morning at the gym I was thinking about “The Identity of Strawfeminist,” and lo and behold, here’s this excellent piece by Amanda.
What I came up with, while hoisting weights above my 45-year-old, flabby, protesting body was:
- Strawfeminist (SFem) has no sense of humor. (How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: “That isn’t funny.”)
- SFem hates men, but more than that she hates children, and will go out of her way not to have any.
- SFem hates sex, but gets pregnant a lot, and every time she does, has an abortion “on demand,” because she…you know, hates children.
- SFem hates all mothers, and all women who are home with their kids.
- SFem abuses her nanny, which she somehow has a need for, even though she hates sex, and always has an abortion whenver she gets pregnant.
- SFem has never cleaned a toilet, washed a floor, cooked a meal, done the dishes, wallpapered a bathroom, sat up with a puking child, or run the vacuum. Her poor, beleagured husband does all this, in order to beg for sex later, because SFem never wants it.
- SFem, in spite of hating sex and never wanting it, is incredibly aggressive and selfish in bed. She always takes the lead and always has to be on top.
- SFem has never breastfed a baby, because she hates babies and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about breastfeeding, which she thinks is gross and lower class.
- SFem is an atheist, or a Wiccan.
- SFem has stolen a plum job from a man, via Affirmative Action. Her cowering corporation gives all the good jobs, best offices, golf memberships, and swankiest cars to the women, because they are deathly afraid of getting sued by the SFem police.
- SFem is single-minded in her work, putting in long hours and weekends to the detriment of her family, but she’s nowhere near as good at her job as the man she has stolen it from would have been.
- SFem doesn’t shave, or wear makeup, a bra, pantyhose, skirts, or high heels, and she has an ugly, short haircut that she gives herself with pinking shears.
Join the fun! What else about SFem?
Remembering back to my fun, single days, I’d like to add:
- SFem can’t dance, and doesn’t like to go out at night unless it’s to a feminist liberal socialist rally.
- SFem has no boyfriends, because she is prickly and caustic to men (like Elizabeth Perkins in “About Last Night” — and, come to think of it, “Big”)
- SFem has 10 cats that eat more than she does, and they piss and shit all over her house.
- SFem sleeps with/gives blowjobs to all the managers above her, which is the only way she ever gets promoted.
- SFem is a cock tease.
Tinfoil:
K. I’ll play.
SFem doesn’t have time for her poor suffering hubby and teary-eyed children because all of those NOW meetings take up all her time.
SFem doesn’t like sex with her husband because all feminists are secret lesbians.
SFem is angry not because of society because but because she’s power mad and isn’t yet ruling the entire universe.
SFem hates all men ’cause that “penis-envy” thing was true after all.
SFem bought ticket to The Nutcracker without knowing what it was about but rather because she liked the title.
SAY, THIS IS FUN!
Ohhhhh Nooooo MODORATOBOT!
Oh god those are awesome. I like yours even better than mine. What else ya got?
(Before I betray the entire feminist movement and clean my bathroom — because I am avoiding work because I secretly don’t like the work I’m about to do that I stole from a man)
Oh Amanda, how you deliver! This, and the second cup of coffee in my hand, is EXACTLY what I needed this Monday morning. THANK YOU!
For those of you, who like me, haven’t read the Elle review mentioned in the article, it can be found here.
If the interviewer was that clueless, it’s a good thing that they didn’t get into the DIY ethic of She-Bop.
Sorry I didn’t get exercised about the hypocrite idjit media darling of the week. She too shall pass.
Actually, Caitlin Flanagan made quite a big point in her articles that SHE hadn’t really done much in the way of changing diapers, scrubbing floors, changing sheets, and so forth. She was a stay-at-home mother with a nanny. Now, that’s nothing for me to object to necessarily; that’s her business — but it’s a bit disingenuous for her schtick on “working mothers aren’t raising their babies.” What, it’s any more “raising” if you’re having lunch with a girlfriend instead of a client?
“I am pro-choice, anti-war, anti-Bush, I’m a Democrat, and only a conservative on family issues,” she says plaintively.
But other than THAT, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
I’m still scratching my head about how we should pity the poor husband because his ball-breaker wife is ‘numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver’. Because…a proper housewife has short-term memory loss so she doesn’t remember what they did in bed last night? Help me out here.
much as I’d like to play “Strawfeminism is…” I have to start elsewhere.
philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood,
what the fuck? seriously. Who the hell actually wants sex with someone who’s only doing it to shut up your whining?
note I’m ignoring the implications of “consents to being raped” because she couldn’t mean that, or she would be far too stupid to actually form that sentence.
Thanks for this excellent post…and especially for calling out Deborah Solomon for her bs. That little nugget really made my blood boil. I and all my “piety-minded” 70’s feminist friends LOVED “Girls Just wanna have fun” when it hit the airwaves–there was no question but that is was a feminist anthem, joyous and full of energy and, well, fun.
Deborah Solomon for her bs
D. Solomon is one of the brighter stars of the NY galaxy of mouth breathers.
So as not to neglect the strawmalefeminist ( SMfem ):
SMfem is really gay and wants to disrupt traditional social structure for his own benifit.
SMfem is just pretending to support feminism to get laid.
Tinfoil:
Funny you mention that joke. A columnist at my school paper wrote an opinion piece entitled “Women Today Have It Better Than Men.” I wrote a letter back telling her that she was a damn moron, since her arguments basically boiled down to “I get free drinks and some guy gave me a shady job without asking me to fill out an application” My letter was published, and I was outed as a feminist to the guys in my physics department, who celebrated by complimenting me on my writing skills and telling me that joke with a different ending:
(How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: “That isn’t funny.”)
Alternate answer: Doesn’t matter how many there are, feminists can’t change anything.
I believe the original title of the song was Girls Just Wanna Have Abortion on Demand, but the record studio asked her to change it to Girls Just Wanna Get Knocked Up By the First Dipshit They Date And Spend the Rest of Their Life Casting Pious Judgement on Their Neighbors’ Daughters…
…so Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was a compromise. :p
Some boys take a beautiful girl,
And hide her away from the rest of the world.
I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.
Oh,girls,
They wanna have fu-un
I had to make sure that the quotes from this nutjob weren’t just someone else’s parody of her, they were that ridiculous.
Happy Feminist - that line about her being economically indepedent as having a bearing on how often she consents to sex jumped out at me too. In the 50s was having sex with your husband considered like putting in your hours so you he keeps paying for your food and shelter? How creepy. And she seems to both think it is bad to want to have sex only when you are in the mood, AND also bad to want to be seduced. From that I conclude she thinks women should have sex with zero arousal, which just sounds physically painful (though I don’t know, I have never tried it).
Damn! Now mythago has me wondering, too. Isn’t the “mind-numbing familiarity…” bit an intellectual defense of adultery? What else could relieve that “mind-numbing familiarity”?
(Personally, I prefer actually being friends with the person attached to the various sexual organs as a defense against this sort of thing, but I suppose opinions differ on the subject.)
As to the housekeeping, most of us without servants to do the washing up have long since learned to deal with unfolded dishtowels and sporadically-wiped counters. The woman in her appalling little scenario would probably have been happier if the husband had cooker her dinner as well, of course, instead of just the kids’. (Presumably leaving her to cook dinner for the two of them?)
And as to her not being liked by feminists and embraced by the right, even though she is liberal on all issues but one: does she realize that that one issue just happens to be the only issue she writes/talks about? Like would the head of the Southern Baptist be nice to her if she came on his show and just wanted to talk about why abortion rights are so important? Also, the right (and perhaps the left too), always enjoys an uncle tom, someone who will betray their own group. So an educated woman who comes out and says home great it is to make yourself subservient to a man, well of course the right is going to love that so that they can throw it back in the face of the feminists. You don’t have to be on the side of the right on every issue, just on the issue important to the group which you appear to represent - in this case, women and women’s issues. It’s okay if you are anti-war - they will find some dead soldier’s mother talking about how great this war is to fulfill that role of betraying people who have suffered from this war.
I don’t remember why, but about a month back I did a google search on Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and I all I came up with was a bunch of articles about how it was a feminist anthem of the 80s. I mean, the lyrics seem pretty explicitly about female empowerment and self-determination, even if it is pretty light-hearted. What a weird reading to see it as anti-feminist.
Karpad — do you not know that there are actually a lot of guys who are perfectly willing to have sex with someone who’s only doing it to shut up their whining? I used to know one of them — ahem — intimately. Poor me. I’m all better now, and I only have sex with guys who think I’m really hot. But really, there are a *lot* of them.
I wasn’t all that fond of Cyndi Lauper’s songs in the 80’s (just didn’t ring my bell), but reading this, I sure-as-sh*t am now!
Oh, and Caitlan, baby? I am sorry for you. That’s right, you woman of unearned-wealth-and-leisure, I pity you. I pity you because you put together all that education, all that talent for catchy phrases, and all that time, and *this* is the end result you got?!?
Oh, and:
SFem sucks dicks, but not because she likes it; only to make the rest of you feel bad.
Ah, Older. I sure envy you. My husband is one of those that whines until I just give up and have sex with him just to get him to shut-up. I just did it on Saturday morning in fact. Ugh. Years of that have made me completely uninterested in having sex with him.
The ultimate effect is that I am currently getting my financial affairs in order and am just waiting until the kids are old enough to decide who to live with. Then I am going to divorce his sorry ass and live a fine life with no one ever having any say in my life again.
Now, that’s not to say I won’t ever have sex with soneone, but it will be on my terms.
Kudos, Amanda, that was a smokin’ smackdown of the utterly deserving Flanagan.
I think you are also right to call Flanagan “male identified.” I would only add that you neglected to tag her with another label she deserves, based on her proclaimed heroes - she is a world-class brownnoser.
And of COURSE rightwingers are going to love her - they’re using her as “an actual liberal feminist” to beat up on feminists! What’s not to like from their perspective? Duh.
Basically it boils down to - time to call the whambulance - Flanagan’s bashing feminists and *gasp* they are bashing her BACK! The horror! Whaaaaaahhhhh!
Luckily she’s well paid for sucking Patriarchy’s dick, so that’s some consolation for her horrible trauma.
Extra points for pointing out Cyndi Lauper’s essential coolness. A friend of mine dated the sister of Robert Hazard (stage name of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”’s composer) and he says that Hazard DID mean something different by the song, and it was Lauper who put the feminist spin on it.
Lauper’s appearing in a revival of The Threepenny Opera - see it if you can:
http://www.3pennyonbroadway.com/
The Happy Feminist: Why is a wife’s financial independence a factor in the husband’s difficulty seducing her?
Because what she is lionizing is not the role of a wife, it is the role of a mistress.
J.B.: And as to her not being liked by feminists and embraced by the right, even though she is liberal on all issues but one: does she realize that that one issue just happens to be the only issue she writes/talks about?
Exactly. If you are a writer, you don’t get to whine about people judging you by what you write.
tinfoil hattie said:
“SFem has never breastfed a baby, because she hates babies and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about breastfeeding, which she thinks is gross and lower class.”
I have to add:
“SFem hates breastfeeding and moms who breastfeed, but somehow manages to annoy everyone by whipping out her breast in public to feed her bratty kid…”
“I’ve got nothing but derision from the left — you’ve got to check everything on the menu to please them. But the right has been good to me, even though they disagree with me about abortion. I can go on Tucker Carlson and he’s respectful. The head of the Southern Baptist Convention had me on the radio. But the feminists humiliate me. We, the Democrats, have a real small tent. The Republicans have a big tent.”
With a typical right-wing sample size of 1 (one), she reaches this conclusion. It really isll about her, isn’t it? No matter how contrary to common sense and empirical evidence, because she perceives that the ‘left’ rejects her, the Democrats must be exclusive, totally unlike those inclusive republicans.
tinfoil:
Thanks ever so much.
Lemme see….
Sfems are all atheists or wiccans because God is clearly a man.
Sfems all hate barbie dolls ’cause they only had dump trucks to play with when they were little which is also, of course, whey they are alll lesbians.
Male Sfems blog on Pandagon because they think they can thereby get laid by the evil hairy feminists which is the only kind of women that will have them because they’re groveling weenies who can’t get a real red-blooded passive-aggresive woman.
D:
SMfem is just pretending to support feminism to get laid.
That one’s always puzzled me. Are the people who hurl this particular accusation not tacitly admitting Neanderthal/Nice Guy tactics don’t work? Wouldn’t the sort of woman who would be attracted to a man acting like a feminist hold no interest for the sort of man for whom that’s merely a role anyway?
Rocket Girl — Leave Now! As Dan Savage says, LTMFA! It’s never too soon or too late to lose a loser.
Oh, and, Rocket Girl? Staying for the kids? They already know; they’re wondering why the hell you don’t LTMFA. If you wanna talk about it, Amanda, please give her my e-mail address.
Flanagan may think that she’s honoring traditional moms, but with her over-the-top pronouncements (e.g. “When a mother works, something is lost.”) she succeeds at nothing other than turning the traditional mom into a parodic figure more effectively than most feminists could have ever dreamed of doing. Flanagan’s plangent tale about her own mother’s “abandonment” (see this wonderful for more on this) suggests that Flanagan doesn’t actually trust stay-at-home moms, given that they’re so vulnerable to feminist brain-washing as well as the seductive lure of life outside the home.
Flanagan fancies herself a domestic doyenne, when in reality she’s all about a kind of creepy homemaker fetishism that bears little resemblance to the domestic sphere as it’s actually lived and experienced by people. I often think that if she would refashion herself as a pure parodist, or just someone who has a kinky interest in the fetishistic potential of homemaking, Flanagan’s schtick would make a lot more sense than it does. She could even be a virtuoso.
Rocket Girl - take up Older on her offer to talk. Staying in a crap marriage for the sake of the kids hurts everyone in the long term. All in my opinion, your mileage may vary, and the rest of the disclaimers. Divorce is painful, says the voice of hard experience. In my case I realized that it was a matter of amputation or death by gangrene, but still let things drag on waaaay too long.
The flipside is that if you can convince your spouse to go into counselling you may be able to fix things up. I’d most certainly try that first, since it can lead in the long term to a very solid and mutually respectful relationship. It does require commitment from both partners, though, and it’s a long haul. Still worth a try.
Q: How many MRA’s does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Four, one to change the bulb and one to bitch about how sockets last longer than bulbs,
one to bitch about how society doesn’t value burned out bulbs, one to bemoan the fact that the
uppity bitch used to have to change the bulbs herself as a good homemaker should.
Not to mention the idea that any man would want to have sex with those kind of women, ie the hairy ones.
More along the same lines.
Sfems manhating lesbians who are ugly and hairy so no man would want them.
Sfems are all sluts who are always having abortions.
Sfems are all earthy hairy socialist hippies who are trying to destroy the capitalist economy.
Sfems are all white middle class rich women who only care about their careers and money.
Staying for the kids? They already know; they’re wondering why the hell you don’t LTMFA.
What she said.
Also, Kyso, in addition to Magis’s joke you might ask them the one about how many men it takes to wallpaper a living room (A: Two, but you gotta slice ‘em really thin.) Then when they express shock and horror, you can ask them why the fuck men have no sense of humor.
Wouldn’t the sort of woman who would be attracted to a man acting like a feminist hold no interest for the sort of man for whom that’s merely a role anyway?
They don’t care about that, because the only reason they, like all men, associate with women in the first place is so they get to fuck them. If they could get the hot non-feminist girls, they would act like normal guys, but since they can’t, they have to settle for pretending to like feminists, because any pussy is better than none.
When a mother *doesn’t* work, something is lost. And that something is:
The confidence that both parents can have that if dad is killed, or injured, or just bugs out, the family won’t starve, and
The self-reliance that the kids learn, both by taking more care of themselves from the start, and by seeing that their mom is a Real Person who can go out there in the world and bring back the necessities of life, and they will, too, when they get big.
Because what she is lionizing is not the role of a wife, it is the role of a mistress.
Nail. Hammer. Bang.
I’m still scratching my head about how we should pity the poor husband because his ball-breaker wife is ‘numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver’.
Not only is he to be pitied because his ball-breaking wife insists on having an orgasm, but said orgasm is solely about the efficacy of his gyratory dick-swizzling maneouvres, the poor bastard (because real men don’t go down), and she deliberately moves that G-spot around so he keeps having to learn new gyrations if he wants to get the points on the board.
Y’know, my partner and I got the various permutations of digits, members, orifices and mucosal membrane friction that lead to [insert Hitchcockian visual double-entendre here] early on in our dating. What has varied in the 15+ years since is the intellectual foreplay that gets us started and the pacing of the procedure according to various moods. The physical manoeuvres don’t have to change much over the years to satisfy each other if the mindsex part of the relationship is working.
The way Flanagan writes about marriage I don’t think she’s ever ever gotten any of the mindsex part. I can pity her for that.
There is something seriously wrong with a woman who feels the need to announce to all of America that she des not actually enjoy sex with her husband. Talk about man-hating.
Look, sex is a thing of the physical world, and thus is icky.
The mind is a thing of the spritual world, and thus must be kept pure of black people dying in NOLA.
What always makes me laugh, like how you’ll get men going on about how only sex with a woman involved is manly compared to sex with nothing but men involved, which is icky and effeminizing, is that it’s basically the enjoyment of sex for reasons other than reproduction that is one of the things that marks us as sentient creatures, but for some reason there is nothing more degrading to right wingers than the idea that sex is a thing of body and spirit which is to be enjoyedand not sullied by self hatred and some warped belief in heteronormitive feminine duty.
Becasue that’s what is really creepy about this peice, if she’s forcing herself to have sex when she doesn’t want to have sex, then she’s, basically (and a only a teensy bit hyperbolically), raping herself.
I enjoy the fact that, after having been told by Lauper that he’s wrong, the interviewer just… stops. There’s no explanation of why “Girls…” is an anti-feminist backlash, of what the reviewer thinks of it, no attempt to get Lauper to talk in-depth about how it’s not a backlash song… One suspects this woman knew she was talking right out her ass from the get-go.
Look, sex is a thing of the physical world, and thus is icky.
did the strawfeminists go gnostic while I wasn’t paying attention? because ramblings about the patriarchial demiurge seems… profound.
Mildred, spot on.
“Q: How many MRA’s does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Four, one to change the bulb and one to bitch about how sockets last longer than bulbs,
one to bitch about how society doesn’t value burned out bulbs, one to bemoan the fact that the
uppity bitch used to have to change the bulbs herself as a good homemaker should.”
Nah, MRAs don’t change bulbs. They just sit in the dark and whine about how all the women figured out they needed new bulbs and went and got new bulbs, and nobody came over to where the MRAs were sitting in the dark and gave them new bulbs.
Ledasmom:
You aren’t saying MRA’s are in the dark are you? :)
And….
I can just visualize having sex with someone who’s just doing it out of duty.
Ick, ick, ick. *shudder*
Ledasmom:
Deeming a bulb burnt out and tossing it aside, leaving the discarded party to “bitch” ain’t exactly something limited to either gender.
Unfortunately, they just keep coming in the Duke case:
SFist thinks “all men are potential rapists” and is paranoid about rape.
And, SFist encourages women to be drunk sluts who are more likely to get raped. (see Wall street journal).
Nancy wrote:
What did Hazard mean instead? And how did Lauper “spin” it without changing the words?
And can someone read Amy Sullivan’s entrails and tell me why she thought the song was feminist-backlash? Because it’s more about “girls want to have orgasms” than “women want to have decent jobs”? Doesn’t she realize both are part of the Sekrit Femunist Agenda?