In addition to having this horrible thing happen to him, he's got half the world thinking it's good for a snicker.

Imagine; someone came into your house at 4am and chopped off your foot... then all over the intertubes people were going "BWAHAHAHAHAAAHAAAAA!!!!!!" about it.


However.

That said, I am a disciple of many credos; one is the Dalai Lama's wisdom of compassion for all beings.

Another is the maxim that if it's in the strike zone, one faces a certain, shall we say, duty to take a swing.

So I'm gonna go over to that thread and post two posts.

Or, as Walt Whitman once said,

"do I contradict myself? Well, then, I smell home cooking!
It's only the river! It's only the river."

As many are no doubt aware, Marissa Mayer is set to become CEO of Yahoo. This is exciting and good news for professional women, and women in business, because there has, absolutely, been a dearth of female CEOs in corporate America. It beehoves us to celebrate whenever barriers are broken, and we take steps towards a more genuine meritocracy in business and public life.

Yet Marissa Mayer is taking some heat from the professional complaining classes, the full-time 2nd wave blogosphere, among others; her "crime"? Well, she said out loud what a lot of people, a lot of women, a lot of professional women feel: That "Feminist", the label, connotes a whole ledger of negative implications.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/19/marissa_mayer_says_she_s_not_a_feminist_and_that_makes_sense.html

What's interesting here is the flexible umbrella of meanings which "Feminist" is held to cover. Not just by folks like Mayer, but by the esrtwhile outraged defenders of the word.

Let's head back to meanings and labels for a moment, shall we? For one, look at the oft-tossed-about "MRA" or "Men's Rights Activist" label. Do I believe men have rights? Men should have rights? Men should have equal rights? Absolutely. And am I an "activist", for equal rights for everyone? Again, absolutely. But do I self-apply the MRA label or anything resembling it? No, as I have repeatedly stated, I do not.

Why? Well, in addition to the other reasons I laid out in threads like this one, the folks calling themselves MRAs say a lot of despicable shit and argue a whole host of questionable, even noxious points.

I think something similar is happening with Marissa Mayer and the word "Feminist". Perhaps she reads stuff like this and doesn't want anything to do with it.

Now, let me also add that I do consider myself a Feminist, in the traditional sense of the word- I support equal rights for women, as well as everyone else. I wholeheartedly support reproductive freedom, etc. I will fight with every fiber of my being against the Religious Right, Republican War on Women. I promise.

And if "Feminist" was really thought, in the general public mind, to equal these things, I have no doubt that MM would not distance herself from the word. Marissa Mayer may not be aware of the schisms and divisions that have taken place in Feminist thought over the past few decades, and certainly may not realize that the 2nd wave authoritarians who, to many of our minds, were responsible for the tarnishing of the Feminist brand, have been rapidly losing influence and relevance.



But, doesn't it? Perhaps when distinctions of Feminism were muddied by the folks who teamed up with the likes of Ed Meese to advocate censorship, under the guise of "challenging sexism", that was when pro-freedom and anti-censorship yet pro-equality forces started to tune you out. Let's be clear: Marissa Mayer is going to be CEO of an internet company. The internet has, as one of its core linchpins, the free and open exchange of information. The 2nd Wave forces who have steadfastly tried to claim they "speak for all Feminists" for the past many years, holed up in isolated enclaves like the Smith College Womens Studies department--- who regularly denigrate dissenting women as being "funfems" or sellouts to the Patriarchal penis-plot or worse, they have made a central point of their agenda (really, at times, it seems the ONLY point) railing against the free exchange of information, decrying as "problematic" all the naked digital breasts flying around cyberspace, and generally dragging their heels as the rest of the world moves into the information age.

Because it is very hard, if not impossible, to stop people from watching other people fuck on film, in the information age. The same internet that allows folks with fringe beliefs on matters of sexuality and gender politics to communicate with each other between, say, the Australian Outback, the wilds of Arizona, and a fortress of Solitude in Canada, allows people to easily view things like pictures of consenting adults having sex.

So why would Marissa Mayer, newly minted CEO of an internet company, want to align herself with a label that has been claimed, repeatedly, as the sovereign and sole turf of pro-censorship authoritarians? She wouldn't.

What's funny is, the "Feminists" outraged about this, in this context, all of a sudden want to make "Feminism" about things like choice, which most of Silicon Valley, for instance, agrees with. But the other 23 hours of the day, they have no problem kicking out or otherwise denigrating Feminists who are dedicated to choice, when that "choice" comes with all sorts of ideas about "problematic consent" and behaviors they don't agree with.

Here's my advice: Make Feminism-the-word about things like choice, freedom and yes equality, and stop denigrating and ridiculing women who don't think heterosexual sex or pictures of naked people are inherently oppressive. That's the way to rehabilitate the label. Otherwise, again, it's the express train to irrelevance, as indicated by folks like Marissa Mayer.


And for fuck's sake, leave her (and her so-called "sensible 3 inch heels", which frankly -and I know a lot of professional silicon valley women- no one wears) alone. She just got made CEO of a company which essentially has no business plan, no product, and no revenue generating mechanism. She's got enough to worry about without the professional complaint class sniping at her.

hasn't gotten off their butts to do, for the past few decades, namely develop a reliable rocket which can most likely be man-rated, along with an economical, multi-purpose capsule that for now can be used for cargo and most likely soon will be able to ferry crew to and from, again, LEO.

This is not a slam on NASA; there are lots of good reasons for them not to re-invent the wheel. Low Earth Orbit is increasingly becoming a place where we live and work and do business, so that's not where NASA should be focusing their energy. And the Ares-1/Orion Capsule arrangement wasn't due to come online and take people into orbit until 2017, or so.. and even under the best-case scenario, the design had serious potential problems that several engineers had pointed out. Elon Musk is basically ready to do it, right now.

To my mind (barring further budget cuts) NASA is at least spending the meager resources they're still given where they can best do some long-range good; most importantly developing a heavy lift rocket which can be used in the boundary-pushing manned exploration (asteroids, the moon, eventually Mars) that is, really, NASA's mandate. For putting people on top of that, they can use the substantial work already done on the Orion capsule.

But I actually think the current plan is a good one, given the political realities. Of course, I strongly believe NASA -and science and exploration in general- needs more funding. You will not find a stronger proponent of both unmanned and manned, publicly funded space exploration than myself. I just don't think that is mutually exclusive with private development of space and space-related resources.

and who isn't, then?

Here's my proposal and request: Make a list of all of the "multiple accounts" you've got, including this one- all the names, and put them in the PROFILE of EACH of your "multiple accounts". That way, the process is transparent and everyone who interacts with "you" knows who "you" are, and no one has to be bothered with, for instance, telling "you" the same thing twice.

Good idea?

As I've said before, it's damn clear that what is driving much of this puritannical, anti-sex authoritarianism is somehow religion-based, either sublimated religious guilt, stealth (and not so stealth) alliances with the religious right, flat-out fundamentalism or simply people who have redirected it and don't realize it.

It is fascinating, when the topic comes to BDSM, how many of the 2nd wave feminist figures who opine on it, either allude to or directly acknowledge their own submissive sexual orientation. Dworkin herself was known to favor sub sex with her male partners, at least in her previous life. So how do we reconcile this? Or, more importantly, how do they?

As is alluded to in the other thread, I think it's probably true that most 2nd Wave Feminists who have a D or S sexual orientation are probably Sub. Why do I say this? Because, statistically, most people have that orientation. Again, it's pointed out in the other thread that subs far outnumber dominants, across the spectrum- male, female, gay, straight. It is speculated that this has to do with more people wanting to have a passive audience role than a stage driver role, but I think there's more to it than that: I think that people, in general, as animals burdened with the (relatively unique, as far as we know) weight of cognizance and sentience and language and civilization and all the rest, humans in general are tasked with a tremendous amount of control. Responsibility. In Buddhist terms, attachment.

Sexuality, and probably for those so inclined submissive sexuality, undoubtedly has appeal because people like to let go. They like to "lose control", they like to be swept away and give themselves over to something outside themselves. It could be argued that this impulse is behind much of our religion, as well.

So, people, statistically, skew sub. Not just people like Sherlock Holmes, but even 2nd Wave feminists educated in Dworkin and MacKinnon and "The Patriarchy" and the rest of it. Which has gotta cause a FUCKLOAD of cognitive dissonance. Along with our old friend, sexual guilt. (And here comes religion!) But for the authoritarian 2nd wave radfem, a simple solution presents itself by ascribing the personal sexual feelings and desires to a nefarious, external programming- Of course! I don't really enjoy those fur-covered handcuffs! .... "I Blame The Patriarchy!"

The problem is, it seems our sexuality is fairly hard-wired. Nonsense about programming and erotoxins aside, people like what they like and they keep liking it, which is why the sick fucks who are wired to like kids are, to my mind, not rehabilitatable. So in the case of your M/D Radfem who happens to be a little (or a lot) S, they aren't going to embrace their sexuality and be, like, "great, I'll find consenting adults who are compatible and we'll be safe, sane, and all the rest" because that person is going to be CONVINCED that not only is their sexuality a negative force that was put there by a nefarious space penis conspiracy, but also that it must be stamped out at all costs.

But that doesn't work, generally.

So unable to fix this glaring so-called "problem" in the self, it is the World which must be modified and corrected.