Activists for feminism are continually characterizing the world of women as one of terror, abuse, and uncertainty. For Leitch to take them at their word, applying a tough-on-criminals spin, is an authentic Trump touch. I do not wholly approve of the tactic, but, as much as I think some feminists are attention-hungry zanies, I recognize the kernel of truth in their image of the universe. I’ve never had a close female friend who could not tell of bizarre, creepy, threatening things happening to them — sights and encounters that, to a male with an ordinary upbringing, seem to have wriggled from the corner of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
[…]
The actual status of women is that they belong to the physically weaker sex. Biology has given male primates greater upper-body strength, stronger grip, and testosterone. Men commit the overwhelming majority of consequential violence everywhere in the world throughout all history. (Men’s rights advocates sometimes argue that women commit just as many violent acts as men, which misses the point by such a wide margin that it is the intellectual equivalent of throwing like a girl.)
Colby Cosh, “I’m with Leitch — give women pepper spray (but keep it from the men)”, National Post, 2016-12-05.
October 20, 2018
QotD: Women and violence
October 10, 2018
Bryan Caplan on “Sokal 2.0” or the “Grievance Studies Affair”
Much has been said and written about the successful academic hoax pulled off by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian to get multiple bogus papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the “grievance studies affair”. Bryan Caplan rounds up several comments and then explains why he is impressed by the work of the hoaxers:
My idea has inspired multiple actual tests. But frankly, none of them are in the same league as Sokal 2.0. Three scholars who held a vast academic genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles to earn tenure! Frankly, if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what would.
The main question in my mind: Does Sokal 2.0 primarily show that the authors are intellectually strong… or that “grievance studies” is intellectually weak? Both can be partly true, of course. But the harder the authors had to toil to achieve their goal, the less they impugn the honor of their target. So how hard did they toil? The authors’ self-account:
[W]e spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days… As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field. We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers.
In other words, they barely broke a sweat. While you could accuse the authors of self-deprecation, this is a rare human failing. When we succeed, most of us like to highlight our own awesomeness, not the ease of our goals. While most people would have been less successful than the hoaxers, what they did was far from superhuman. And that, in turn, amply supports their main theses: the fields they hoaxed have low intellectual standards and don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Does this mean that the subjects of race, gender, sexual orientation, body image, and so on don’t deserve to be taken seriously? Not at all. You shouldn’t blame subjects just because the fields that study them fall short. Identity is too important to be left to people who embrace their own identity. Still, until the researchers who study these subjects calm down, speak clearly, and treat dissent with civility, they will continue to produce little knowledge.
P.S. My main caveat about my positive evaluation of Sokal 2.0: I’ve seen too many hoax movies not to wonder if there’s a hoax within a hoax. Probably not, though.
October 8, 2018
The tyranny of testosterone, or why we shouldn’t lie to our kids
Sarah Hoyt, in the latest Libertarian Enterprise tries to talk to young women about the biological reality and how to avoid being fooled by Hollywood fantasy:
Myself and accomplice, neither of us fainting maidens, first went to the cabinet store, and found that cabinets we could barely move with much effort between the two of us were hefted around effortlessly by teenage employee who probably weighed all of 90 lbs and therefore less than either of us, and had arms like boiled spaghetti, but who had the blessings of testosterone making him much stronger than either of us.
I first ran into this with younger son, who at fourteen looked like a twig which I could have broken over my knee (he’d just grown two feet over the previous year, going from a foot shorter than I to a foot taller. This was also the year in which I was unreasonable and would turn around when he came in the room and say “shower, now” even though he’d already showered twice that day. I.e. to quote our old neighbor “that poor boy is being beaten with a stick made of testosterone. Mothers of boys will get it. At least mothers of boys who went through growth spurt from hell.) We went to the store to get cement to repair a crack in a garden path. The bags were 100 lbs. I tried to lift it and (partly because it was at foot-level and was an awkward floppy bulk) just couldn’t budge it.
Younger son gave the theatrical teenage sigh, reached past me, grabbed the bag and threw it into our shopping cart, leaving me open-mouthed in surprise.
So every time 90 lb girl beats a 300 lb trained fighter on TV remember that. And for the love of heaven explain to your daughters that it’s play fantasy. The daughter of old friends of ours has fallen for this hook line and sinker and was telling older son she could beat him. Older son actually has muscles (he was the one who helped me renovate two Victorians from the ground up and build two balconies. He also does all the sawing by hand.) He’s six one but projects taller. He also happens to be built like a brick ****house, as the men on my side of the family are. (As a little girl I keep insisting my cousins were wardrobes. If you think of the old fashioned wardrobe, seven feet tall and six feet wide, that’s the impression they projected.) That poor girl is five five and skinny for her height. She couldn’t even push older son back if he decided to stand still. She MIGHT be able to fend him off long enough to run away, if she fought like a cornered cat and gouged eyes and bit (I’ve done something like that in similar circumstances, but there’s a reason I’m never without a weapon.) but that’s about it.
Watching her brag to my least excitable, very patient son who just sighed and didn’t even bother contradicting her, I thought how lucky she was in her choice of male to annoy. But if she keeps it up, sooner or later her luck will run out.
We shouldn’t lie to the young, and all our fiction and most of our movies lie about what women can and can’t do, all in the name of “there is no difference between men and women.” (“Except men are defective women” is implied.)
August 4, 2018
Violence against women
Joanna Williams on the problem that well-established, well-paid, financially secure women — at least the professional feminists fitting those criteria — are having to work very hard to maintain their air of victimhood:
Being a feminist must be hard work. Perhaps you’ve got a newspaper column to fill with your hot take on the latest sexist outrage. Or perhaps you have a university sexual-harassment policy to write. Or a government minister to consult about a proposed new law. Or a hefty budget to administer. You’ve got the salary, a platform for your views, and the capacity to influence what happens in almost every institution in the country. And yet the entire basis for you being in this fortunate position, for walking the corridors of power, is your powerlessness. The bind for today’s professional feminist is the more power and influence she gains, the harder she needs to work to show that women are still oppressed.
[…]
As feminists increasingly take positions of power, tackling violence against women drives their agenda. The World Health Organisation tells us that violence against women ‘is a major public-health problem’. The United Nations tells us it is ‘a grave violation of human rights’. The British government describes violence ‘against women and girls’ as a serious crime that has ‘a huge impact on our economy, health services, and the criminal-justice system’.
Of course, violence against women and girls deserves to be taken seriously and perpetrators should be severely punished. But the lives of women in poverty-stricken and wartorn countries are very different to those of women in England. Likewise, adult women have far more agency and control over their lives than girls. Conflating the experiences of women all around the world, and of adult women with children, allows professional feminists to claim suffering by proxy.
At the same time, the definition of violence seems to broaden by the day. The internationally agreed definition of violence against women and girls is: ‘Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women [or girls], including threats of such acts.’ In the UK and the US, violence encompasses sexual harassment – which includes winking, whistling and looking at someone for too long. Amnesty International describes women’s experiences of ‘violence and abuse on Twitter’. In 2017, the organisers of a women’s strike against President Trump described ‘the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women’.
This is not violence as a physical act, but violence as metaphor. No wonder it is experienced everywhere. The World Health Organisation describes violence against women as an ‘epidemic’. We are told that over a third of girls have been sexually harassed at school and that more than a third of women have experienced sexual harassment at work. But then we also learn that two women are killed each week by a current or former partner. And here, immediately, is the problem with violence as metaphor. Real violence becomes relativised. When winking and nasty tweets are described as acts of violence, the word is no longer enough to describe acts of physical brutality and murder. Violence has become nothing more than a badge permitting membership of an inclusive feminist club, and this does little to support women who really are in need of help.
July 19, 2018
QotD: Ladies first
You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.
“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view.
David Thompson, “Reheated (48)”, DavidThompson, 2016-09-27.
June 19, 2018
QotD: Homophobia and racism in the USA and in Europe
Outside the very privileged top of society, feminism doesn’t get the traction it gets in the US ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Not even in England. In fact every other country in the world is far more “ist” than the US, because being “ist” (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]) is the way things are done. I find it mildly amusing whenever gay friends think that the US is worse than Europe “because of all the religious stuff.” Uh. No. The US is more tolerant than Europe because we’re richer and more vast and we can ignore that which annoys us more easily. In Europe they live in each other’s pockets on what is for us tight resources. They have no “give” and cohesion and conformity is enforced, which means if you stick out, you get it. Not publicly and certainly not if you’re a tourist, but if you live there among the people you’ll find you don’t need to hunt for microaggressions.
And before people from Europe say it isn’t so — you don’t know. Anymore than Americans do who’ve never lived there as locals. You don’t know how much LESS of the racism and sexism and homophobia there is in the US than in your area. Hint, what you see in our movies and read in our papers is the greatest bullshit around. Those PRACTICALLY don’t exist in the US, for any functional purpose. I mean, sure, people might think women are inferior, or might hate gays, but unlike the internet sites colonized by the alt.right (and how many of those are Russian agent accounts no one knows) people expressing such feelings (actual hostility not imaginary micro-aggressions) are likely to be laughed at or mocked. Not so in Europe.
And then there’s the more tan areas of Europe, and what we’ll term the first world minus a quarter.
I’m not ragging on my birthplace. It has some admirable qualities. But if you think that it is more tolerant or laid back than the US you haven’t lived there. Sexism is internalized at such a level people don’t see it. They give lip service to women having jobs, etc, but those women still have to be “good housewives” no matter what their job is. Men still get the choice seats in cars (be fair, they are so tiny most men have to sit up front to fit, but it has become internalized, too), men still take pride of place without a thoughts. No, not everywhere, not in every family. BUT at a cultural level, it exists at a point that feminists here would have a heart attack. Again no time to look for micro aggressions, you’re too busy working through the macro ones.
But here is the thing that these people forget: They’re not AGGRESSIONS. They’re just culture. When a man as a matter of course takes the best seat, he’s not making a comment on YOU. Hell, he’s not making a comment at all. He’s just doing something so deeply ingrained that he didn’t think about it. If you think that’s enough to make it so that you can’t succeed or that you need to run around saying you live in a patriarchal or male-supremacist society, let me tell you, cupcake, you wouldn’t have succeeded anyway.
Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.
June 7, 2018
Faith Moore explains how to avoid sexually objectifying women
It’s apparently very simple and straightforward, once you double-check the feminist cheat sheet:
Apparently feminism has become so confusing that even feminists don’t know what’s feminist anymore. But Everyday feminists apparently do — and they’ve provided us with a handy cheat sheet so we don’t accidentally objectify someone who was trying to be empowered, or empower someone who was trying to be objectified.
The way to tell the difference, according to Everyday Feminism, is to figure out who has the power. “If the person being ‘looked at,’ or sexualized, has the power in the situation, then they are sexually empowered.” Here’s an example: “if someone puts on ‘sexy’ clothing and goes out in public or takes a selfie and shares it, they have the power because they chose themselves to put on those clothes.”
Oh, okay, I get it. So, if a woman chooses to put on “sexy” clothes and go out in public then all the catcalls and inappropriate comments and unwanted marriage proposals are empowering because she chose to put on those clothes. Oh, and also if she takes a “sexy” selfie and posts it on Instagram, all the comments about how she’s a “slut” and a “whore” and should “put her clothes on” are also empowering because she chose to share that photo. (I’m learning so much!)
But wait! Apparently beauty standards “compel” some people to wear sexy clothing “because they believe that they won’t be beautiful” otherwise. And there are even some people who feel they must not wear sexy clothing “because they are shamed if they do.”
So even if you think you put on those clothes of your own free will, it’s possible that society was actually hiding in your closet handing you things to put on (which is creepy) and that’s why you dressed all sexy (or not sexy). Which means that even though you thought you were empowered, it turns out you’re actually being objectified. And if you choose not to dress in the way you wanted to dress because society tells you that society was telling you it was wrong, then you’re empowered because you’re doing what someone else told you not to do about what someone else told you to do. (This makes total sense. I’m such a good feminist!)
But what about people who don’t dress “sexy”? Don’t worry, they can be objectified too. “Even a person who is ‘modestly’ dressed can objectified if the ‘looking’ person makes a non-sexual situation sexual without the ‘looked at’ person’s consent.” Oh good, for a minute there I thought “modestly dressed” people were being excluded from objectification and was worried because I know exclusion is wrong and we shouldn’t do it. Phew! Glad that even people who don’t want to be objectified still can be.
May 22, 2018
QotD: Capitalism is the most feminist economic system ever
We really do need to be pointing out that the Good Old Days are now. Both technological advance and productivity growth have been driven by that combination of capitalism and markets. Capitalism, in its lust for profits, leading to the invention. Markets and the ability to copy what works being what creates the general uplift in standards by the spreading and wide use of those inventions.
The net effect of this has been, well, it’s been to make women’s lives vastly better. Starting with the point that many women actually have lives as a result. Childbirth has moved from being the leading cause of female death* to a mild risk which kills very few – each one a tragedy which is why we’re so happy that we have reduced that risk. We’ve automated all the heavy lifting in society meaning that women can indeed, with their generally lighter musculature, compete in near all areas of work. We’ve done more automation of household drudgery than we have of anything else too, freeing the distaff side from that chain upon their ambitions.
We’ve even freed all from the child bearing consequences of bonking – much to the great pleasure of man and woman alike.
Women today are the most privileged, richest, group of women who have ever stumbled across the surface of this planet. And in comparison to the men in their society they’re the most equal too. All of which leads to an interesting question. Just why are they whining so much?
*Possibly an exaggeration but not much of one. Certainly not about the mid 19th century before Semmelweiss.
Tim Worstall, “Capitalism Is The Most Feminist Economic System Ever”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-04-30.
March 7, 2018
QotD: Feminism
A consistent theme of feminist discourse for more than 40 years is a completely negative portrayal of male sexuality. Feminists are united in the opinion that whatever men do in regard to sex is always 100% wrong. Male attraction to women is condemned in feminist rhetoric as “objectification.” If a man admires a woman’s beauty, he has thereby degraded her as a “sex object,” according to feminist theory. If a man verbalizes his interest in a woman, feminists denounce this as “harassment,” and if he expresses his interest in a woman by any physical action — a kiss or a hug — feminists consider this sexual assault. Of course, feminists consider heterosexual intercourse to be inherently oppressive, a violent act of male domination — “PIV is always rape, OK?”
Robert Stacy McCain, “Feminism’s Anti-Male Double Standard”, The Other McCain, 2016-07-02.
February 22, 2018
The worst episode of The Avengers? “How to Succeed … at Murder”
In a column ostensibly devoted to the British Labour party’s ongoing ructions over their “all women shortlist” problems, David Cole recaps what he calls the worst episode of the brilliant 1960s British TV show The Avengers:
(Image via Aveleyman.com)
When I think of The Avengers, what comes to mind is not the bloated comic-book franchise in which overpaid actors cavort in front of a greenscreen for the masturbatory pleasure of nerds. No, to me, there is and will always be only one Avengers, and that’s the 1960s British crime and espionage TV series. As a kid, it was my favorite show, and I have fond memories of rushing home from elementary school every day to catch Emma Peel (my favorite of John Steed’s female partners) in action.
Among Avengers superfans, there is one episode that is generally considered the worst. Indeed, the episode is outright despised, because in a series lauded (and properly so) for being a trailblazer when it came to presenting strong, intelligent, and independent action heroines, the episode “How to Succeed…at Murder” is seen as a giant chauvinistic step backward. It’s known as the “anti-feminist” episode, the one that took the show’s message of female empowerment and stood it on its head. “How to Succeed…at Murder” was first broadcast in March 1966. The setup is typical Avengers-style mystery. Prominent businessmen are being murdered by unknown assailants, and it’s up to Steed and Peel to get to the bottom of it. It turns out, a group of sexy female ballet students have created a secret society dedicated to the destruction of powerful men. They use their feminine charms to get hired as secretaries, only to quickly begin taking control of the business to the point that when they murder the boss, ownership falls to them. The society’s motto is “Ruination to all men.”
Mrs. Peel infiltrates the group and learns that the girls take their orders from a female marionette, which seems to speak and move on its own. In a voice somewhat resembling that of a drag queen, the marionette explains the group’s mission: “To take woman out of the secretary’s chair and put her behind the executive desk. To bring men to heel and put women at the pinnacle of power.”
The marionette’s “helper” is Henry, the clumsy, doughy owner of the ballet school where the secret society meets.
Emma is soon exposed as an infiltrator, and it’s up to Steed to confront the evil ballerinas on their home turf. “No man will dominate us again,” the girls crow as they hold Steed at gunpoint. However, the unflappable Steed quickly deduces that the marionette is actually being controlled remotely by…Henry. Yep, these women had a male boss all along! Revealed as the mastermind, Henry tearfully explains that following the loss of his late wife’s ballet company at the hands of greedy investors, he vowed vengeance against powerful businessmen (it’s also revealed that the marionette is crafted in his wife’s image, and Henry, his mind bent by grief, actually believes he’s his dead wife when he gives the puppet voice). To achieve his revenge against the business world, Henry took advantage of the anti-male sentiments of his students. “No man will ever dominate you?” Steed mockingly asks the girls. “You’ve been taking orders from a man all this time!” As the murderous dancers stand crestfallen, their mouths agape, their boastfulness sapped, Emma disarms the lead girl and beats the living crap out of each and every one of them.
You cannot read a review of this episode on any Avengers fansite without encountering the words “sexist,” “reactionary,” or “misogynistic.” The vitriol stems from the fact that the man-hating feminists turn out to be gullible morons. In their fanatical crusade against male domination, they inadvertently allowed a weak, delusional man-who-believes-he’s-a-woman to dominate and control them.
February 10, 2018
Protecting (some) women from their own decisions
Kirio Birks on the Formula One “grid girls”:
Objectification, we are told, is degrading. Why? Because any job that requires employees to be sexually attractive and gazed upon for that reason necessarily dehumanises them. It encourages others to treat them as pretty ‘things’ rather than as autonomous people with their own lives, passions, thoughts, and desires. Or so the thinking goes. ‘Grid Girls’ – models employed by Formula One for promotional purposes – have just discovered that their role is to be discontinued. As Formula One’s managing director of commercial operations explained: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”
But in their hurry to spare Grid Girls the indignity of the male gaze, nobody making this argument seems to have stopped to wonder whether Grid Girls might have an interest in defending what they do. Instead, a collective of ostensibly progressive voices leapt to their defence without bothering to ask the girls themselves if they needed defending at all. In response, Formula One abandoned its Grid Girls so that it can be seen to be moving with the times and hip to contemporary mores. In doing so, Formula One’s executives have implicitly conceded that they have spent too long objectifying women instead of empowering them. They would like it to known that they’d rather see women driving the cars, or as members of the engineering teams, or just about anywhere other than track-side holding a driver’s name-board and looking beautiful.
What baffles me is that a move supposed to empower women came at the expense of other women, and only because a minority of outsiders found Grid Girls inappropriate, problematic, and otherwise an offence against good taste. But even if Grid Girls are being objectified, then – contra the explanation offered above – it’s not at all clear that objectification is wrong in and of itself. It is acceptable to use people as a means to an end – that’s called employment. Grid Girls obviously know that they will be objectified and they make an autonomous, informed decision to take the job anyway. They are not harmed, they are paid for their time and their work, and many of them have come forward to say, with understandable indignation, that they enjoy what they do. Needless to say, this has not impressed those feminists who applauded their redundancies. But surely a woman has a right to be the object of somebody else’s desire if she wants and surely it doesn’t matter if she is being paid for it?
Get me on @thismorning so I can defend us #gridgirls
Because of these feminists, they’ve have cost us our jobs! I have been a grid girl for 8 years and I have Never felt uncomfortable! I love my job, if I didn’t I wouldn’t do it! Noone forces us to do this! This is our choice! pic.twitter.com/PUWcyB5BeG— Lauren-Jade (@laurenjadepope) January 31, 2018
Opponents may suggest that Grid Girls have internalised their own oppression in a society shaped by patriarchal values, but not without making two claims: (1) that Grid Girls are unable to adequately think for themselves because of the society they live in and (2) that thinking for yourself is only evidenced by acknowledging the existence of a patriarchal status quo and resisting it.
February 6, 2018
February 4, 2018
QotD: Modern feminism
Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call “encouraged helplessness” (from psychologist Martin Seligman’s “learned helplessness”—the feeling that there’s nothing you can do to escape your fate).
In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism — instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them.
That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it — because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out.
If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me — count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become.
This doesn’t require you to be fearless. You just need to shove your fears aside and do what needs to be done — say, getting up on your hind legs and telling some co-worker, “Stop saying that thing to me” or “…treating me this way.”
Now, if they persist after you’ve told them to stop a few times, that’s harassment and you can seek support to get them to stop. But consider that it’s less likely to get to that point if you simply act like men’s equal—act as if you’re powerful — instead of acting like you’re a feminist.
Amy Alkon, “Are Women Really Victims? Four Women Weigh In”, Quillette, 2017-11-22.
November 28, 2017
QotD: Women and “providers”
…Women evolved to feel compelled to seek men who are “providers.”
This hasn’t changed, not even for powerful women making a lot of money. Research by evolutionary psychologist David Buss and others has shown that even when women are high-flying big earners, they seem to want men who are higher-flying bigger earners.
This is even true of women who consider themselves feminists. Another evolutionary psychologist, Bruce J. Ellis, wrote in The Adapted Mind of fifteen feminist leaders’ descriptions of their ideal man — descriptions that included the repeated use of terms connoting high status, like “very rich,” “brilliant,” and “genius.”
Amy Alkon, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck , 2014.
November 8, 2017
Nancy Friday, RIP
In the 1970s, one of the most controversial books was Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, drawn from interviews with a large number of women about their sexual fantasies:
My Secret Garden exploded on to bestseller lists around the globe in 1973. The work was shocking, deeply sexy in parts and proved that women had erotic imaginations just as men did, and that they, too, masturbated just as men did. It heralded the innocent dawning of what later became known as the sex-positive feminist movement. My Secret Garden came at the beginning of a wave of overtly sexual content written by women. Also in 1973, Betty Dodson penned what was to become the world’s bestseller on masturbation, Sex for One. My Secret Garden didn’t have the gravitas and respectability of say, Shulamith Firestone, but as author Susie Bright, the original “Sexpert” in the 1980s and 90s, says, “it sold millions and millions of copies and was a big wake-up for America’s puritanical, sheltered girls and young women”.
Of course, Friday was attacked by many. Like Dodson, her work was dismissed for being not scientific enough or for being too personal, or too much like soft porn. But an even bigger issue was that she wasn’t, Bright recalls with glee, “the tiniest bit politically correct”.
There is something quite secret about My Secret Garden. All Friday’s interviewees, who talk about fantasies ranging from being sex workers to being urinated on, talk anonymously. One interviewee explains how, when she has sex with her husband, her fantasy is imagining “the bed practically torn apart and us ending up on the floor wet and sticky and happy”. The reality though is that, “All he’s really doing is lying on top of me and thrusting away.
In 1996, Friday told Salon: “I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon.” In that same year, while discussing sexual harassment in the office on Bill Maher’s Comedy Central talk show Politically Incorrect, she claimed that men suffered from harassment as much as women.
H/T to Kathy Shaidle, who commented:
This was a very important book, although some will scoff at the idea. I was always struck by the fact that the only two male fantasy “objects” who were named (possibly for overly cautious “legal” reasons; one is clearly Leonard Cohen but not called that) were Mr. Spock and Sherlock Holmes…
The wide-spread (and I believe disingenuous) surprise that greeted the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey was no surprise at all to me. Friday was denounced as “no feminist” for revealing women’s rape fantasies, and she was decidedly non-p.c. in other respects. Whenever anyone dismisses this or that “evidence” as “simply anecdotal,” I think of this book in which anecdote is all, and more revealing and true than any “experiment” or “survey.”
