"rape and PIV* are almost the same thing", Part II. Welcome to Bizarro World.

It's a label that is self-applied, so again, how can in be a slur or an insult or a misrepresentation?

http://radicalhub.com/





Oh, this one?

http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/radfem-2012-first-speakers-announced/

That's right, again, keynote speaker Gail Dines.

Who, it would seem, doesn't shy away from the "radfem" label.

But as I said elsewhere, the flipside of no means no is, yes means yes.

What's exceptionally nutty about these folks is, their entire philosophy (if you can call it that) is built upon edifices of bullshit like the assertion that the billions of women on the planet who claim they are actually having sex because they enjoy it, really don't, aren't, and even if they DO they shouldn't be allowed to do it anyway~ because the spooky space Patriarchy is using penetrative sex to oppress the very IDEA of women, and as such... well, Sheila Jeffreys summed it up pretty well with this quote:



Crazy shit, right? I mean, if anyone tried to pull that sort of judgmental crap around, say, consenting adult gay sex, there's no way they would be held up as some sort of hero on a Progressive Site like this one, right?

And, to paraphrase Yoda, As Well They Should Not.

In fact, they'd be banned in short order for homophobia.

As well they should.

But, you know, certain kinds of adult sex (albeit allegedly "consenting", heavy sigh heavy sigh eyeroll eyeroll) it's OKAY, apparently, to judge the people who practice it, it's even okay to try to "cure" them of their orientation.

...Apparently.

Oh, yeah, that's the same Sheila Jeffreys who shared a conference stage with Gail Dines a week or so ago, of course.

But every time Gail Dines puts on her "moderate" face for the BBC and MSNBC, we're supposed to remember that Gail Dines doesn't have anything against sex!

Honest!

I am reminded of the first episode of Battlestar Galactica back in the late 70's, where Starbuck is aboard the Gemonese freighter talking to Cassiopeia.

Starbuck: "What's your name?"

Cass: "Cassiopeia"

Starbuck: "That's very beautiful. It means 'fairy queen'."

Cass: "Yes."

Starbuck: "Designation?" (job)

Cass: "I'm designated asocialator" (paid escort)

Starbuck shows a bit of concern in his face. Cass sees this and retorts.

Cass: "It's an honorable profession! Practiced with the blessing of the Elders for generations."

S: "No... no... I was just wondering why that woman was yelling at you."

C: "She's among the Itori sect of the Gemonese. They don't believe in physical contact between the sexes except when sanctified by the High Priest during the solar storm... which occurs only once every seven years!"

S: "No wonder those buggers are such good card players."

So apparently, Gail Dines is a shill for the World Poker Tour. Less PIV sex. More time for heads-up poker action. And our solar maximums are what, every 11 years?






P.S. a note to any other sci-fi geeks. I quoted the above from memory. If some of them are wrong, well, I suggest you deal.

http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/in-their-own-words/

"I think this deliberate muddying of what should be clear concepts like consent is atrocious."

I posit that this deception and obfuscation is the philosophical linchpin of the movement. By keeping the concept of consent infinitely situational, amorphous, and open to interpretation, one can ALWAYS claim that consent was not given, and by corollary, one can NEVER claim that consent was given. One could argue that the reverse is also true, but I believe that one would be wrong in this case, since consent is a positive assertion, action only follows on basis of that assertion. In other words, the reply is always by default negative unless explicitly given in the positive.

Is it not an oft-spoken position amongst the more radical feminists that women cannot legitimately consent to sex in a "patriarchy"? If consent is essentially whatever it is at a moment in time and for whatever purposes it is being discussed, the concept of consent can always be narrowed or morphed to create a negative result since the burden of proof is on the claimant who asserts consent can be given. Such rhetorical tactics would be laid bare for their deceptive nature if a definition of consent existed in that philosophical realm to which such rhetoric could be compared.

If radical feminism were ever to admit to a specific definition of consent, one which lays down in specific terms what a positive affirmation of consent constitutes, all of its primary contentions would self-obliterate.

What is the "win" for them (in your opinion), that comes from this behavior:


Presumably people don't do anything unless they perceive they are going to gain from it in some way. So I am curious why you think they might want to adopt and use that strategy?


PLEASE NOTE: I am asking this conversationally, with genuine curiosity, and I am neither affirming nor denying what "radical feminists" do. I don't pay that much attention to them, it seems the OP knows way more about "radical feminists" than I know (or ever care to know).

...but another thing they don't seem to be able of answering is the very question you ask of me, thereby inspiring speculation.

And that has always been the one pertinent question with me. Why the big secret? Why WON'T they tell us exactly what their ultimate goals are? Why do they NOT attempt to define these concepts like what constitutes consent in a material, REAL, working manner? Define precisely who or what the patriarchy is, beyond just the idea of an invisible cultural hand. If it is a real thing, then give it to us how precisely you DO see all of these things. Then subject your concepts FAIRLY to criticism. It is only in this manner where we can honestly say whether what you say and think is relevant in the greater philosophical sense. If they ARE relevant, and there is a reasonable underpinning to it all, then that truth will out.

My personal take on it is this. The win is a continued sense of relevance in intellectual circles. Controversial views are long for the public eye.

I think that people become invested in their beliefs, no matter whether they are right, wrong, or batshit insane. Our very political system today supplies ample evidence to suggests that so long as you really WANT to believe something is true, you will despite all the evidence to the contrary. I understand that people can feel hurt, or oppressed, or can be treated unfairly. This is life on Earth, and it happens to more people than who would openly say. But you can get invested in that, as well.

The longer you invest yourself in an idea, the stronger you will protect it. The more you indulge the hurt, the greater the pain becomes. The more you convince yourself that you are treated unfairly, the less likely you are to notice when you are not.

However, I don't think that radical feminists are stupid or incapable of reason, although some of the premises they cling to and the conclusions they draw from it might lead me to the latter conclusion. I think they are well aware of what a definition of consent would mean to the philosophy in general, that it would immediately drive holes in the idea that "women are incapable of consent in a patriarchal system," and that they'd have to question their investment in it, and answer criticisms in the larger intellectual sphere as to the validity of their belief structures.

I think that fuels a lot of academia.

The idea that consent is impossible doesn't work for me.

I am on a Droid, hard to type. Thanks for your reply.

one is that women are always the victims (even when they don't feel like victims or appear to be the perpetrators).

The other is that men are always the oppressors.

By making all sex essentially rape they can explain away how happily paired up couples enjoying consensual sex are in fact reinforcing the patriarchy.

I don't come to your house to sling shit, I only participate when something strikes my curiosity.

Internet fights are not how I have fun.

On a Droid so can't type more now. Keypad is all effed up.

Why, if they are really interested in reducing the numbers of abortions, are they pretty much universally opposed to birth control?

The answer: Because what they're really interested in is stopping people from having sex.

And so, why, if these self-described "radfems" are really interested in reducing the numbers of rapes, would they intentionally muddy the concept of "consent"?

The answer: Because what they're really interested in is stopping people from having sex.



...wait! Whoa! Same thing!

Gee, that's interesting, isn't it.

And, furthermore, it's taken as axiomatic in self-described, well referenced as authoritative "radfem" circles, that "sex" IS "rape".

And no, I wouldn't expect you to take my word for it:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2011/07/18/a-bit-of-lighthearted-fun/



(emphasis added)

It's a great tool, if you can convince people of it.

In the US, kids are unable to enter into contracts because they are presumed incapable of making informed decisions. The downside for them is they can't really benefit from intelligent choices.

"Keeping the concept of consent infinitely situational" is the best of both worlds. If your choices land you in the corner office, then obviously you were capable of making informed decisions. If they land you somewhere that we disapprove of, like court or a strip club, then apparently you weren't.

Arguably it'd be a huge victory for advocacy for women to make men accountable for every poor decision while retaining all the benefits of good ones.

If all hetero sex is inherently non-consensual, then logically the victim of that coercion reserves the right to realize it at some later date, such as when she finds out that he had sex with her best friend or when he forgets their anniversary.

with flat earthers, Velikovsky types, "militia" clowns or any other such nutters out there. Except for wiping out porn, none seen to have a real agenda other than just blabbering their oddball views. Counseling might be advised, but I doubt it would help. Better meds maybe.

Contrast them with anti-vaxers, teabaggers, right to lifers and other better organized nutters do have an agenda to at least be able to anchor on. Can't win a debate with them, either, but at least the fight hinges on actions rather than words, so each side can look for a "win".

The wildest fringes of this radfem movement, if it is a movement, are irrational to the point of being ridiculous. One would think that they do believe in Genesis and humans are not mammals at all or certainly have no relationship to the other ones on the planet. We must have been made from dust and sand in a special creation and ladyparts and dangly bits were added simply to confuse us. The God who would do such a thing is obviously male and therefore initialized the patriarchy. With men being the enemy and women occasionally feeling a bit horny, (or so I've heard) I'm not sure how they feel about lesbian sex. I'm not sure I want to know, either.

Personally, I have grave doubts about any movement that opens with fear and hatred of any sort. There are plenty of rotten things going on that we can fight against, but the first thing to do in any movement is to define what we are for, not what we are against. Radical feminists and the flipside MRA assholes are simply yet more reactionary hate movements that have no point other than to whine and complain about something.

Pathological misandry?

Penis envy?

PTSD?

This crosses the line into delusional paranoia and screams in the face of a reality where sexual reproduction is present in 100,000 living species (guestimate) and has been established for hundreds of millions of years. So either these patriarchs have hijacked evolution for eons, making it an eternal evil, this person doesn't care how stupid she sounds, or she's having delusions and none of the feminists around her notice.

And if we're to believe the logic in any of her crap, it seems the patriarchy saved humankind from extinction while the (self-designated) rad-fems want to push us into it.

How does this person propose reproduction be done without PiV? This passage makes me wonder if she even understands the process.

Also, it seems to me that most any woman who has experienced rape and has experienced consensual sex knows how different the two are.

I think the SCUM manifesto covered that. Kill/sterilize most men. Keep a small breeding stock for extracting semen (not by sex of course).

So basically the same way most commercial operations breed cattle these days.

It's funny; a man who views women half as negatively as these gals view men (even despising the thought of using them for sex and nothing more because it still involves some contact with that hated gender) would be seen as deranged and possibly dangerous.

biology, may well trump anything ever said by Michele Bachmann, Allen West, or even a "greatest hits of Freeperville" compilation.

That is the method of reproduction that mammalian species evolved. As such, nothing could be more normal or natural. I am tempted to e-mail Richard Dawkins and set him after these brutally imbecilic wastes of oxygen and skin.

So really you can't take any of it seriously as it's mostly just a false construct used to subjugate women.

/notice how in evolution it's always the females bearing children, never the males? Darwin was simply perpetuating the rape culture by not only attempting to pass PIV sex as normal but also in putting the entire burden of reproduction on women.

with a straight face by certain people, some of whom post on DU. They are as anti-science and anti-knowledge as the most cretinous, snake-handling fringe of the religulously insane. How pathetic is that? How in the blue hell did such fundamentalists, which is what they are, ever wind up on a progressive board.

I guess you just have to believe in your belief when nothing whatsoever in the observable and testable world supports your delusions. But as Friedrich Nietzche once said, a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows shows that faith does not prove anything.

it's cute and harmless when it's about angels or ghosts or the afterlife or karma, and so on.

But when they apply that thinking to real world situations it can get downright bizarre.

There is no fundamental difference between radical feminism and any other faith. Meaning that the more they talk the more likely they are to bust out completely wrong arguments based on belief rather than reality.

/the PIV sex being an unnatural construct of the patriarchy thing is something they've actually stated. Doesn't get more unhinged than that.

70+ million years or so of mammalian evolution would seem to be an iron-clad, open-and-shut case, but not for the crazies. Facts and science mean nothing to them. May as well try to teach my cat how to play my bass as argue logically with the lunatic radfems.

"Strict adherence to any religion forces you to believe silly things from time to time..."

Or politics, or philosophy, or economics, or art... or pretty much anything. However, I imagine many will rationalize a difference without a distinction to better validate their own endearing yet rather extreme affairs with conceptualizations. So many economists, so many politicians, so many artists "he more they talk the more likely they are to bust out completely wrong arguments based on belief rather than reality...."

However, I can see why one might want to limit all of those only to religion-- as it's far more convenient and simplistic.

Just sayin'

with "under patriarchy" (which basically means, "on planet Earth" but yes, they believe consensual heterosexual penetrative sex is impossible.

In fact, that's one of the core pillars of the philosophy.

At the end, basically, she asserts that any time a man and woman have sex, if the woman comes first, and the sex does not IMMEDIATELY then-and-there stop, if the woman decides she "wants"* to continue the sex until the man, also, orgasms- that is a man "using a woman as a toilet".

Of course, we are also told that men don't give a shit about womens' pleasure, we're programmed by the Patriarchy not to give a shit about womens' pleasure, which is why we always finish first and roll off our long-suffering partner and promptly fart and go to sleep.

...so, don't be finishing first, guys. (Which always seemed like basic doooodely courtesy, but what do I, in my mansplaining doodely dood male gaze phallopressive heteronormative paradigm, know?)

But don't be finishing second, either.

And, according to Sheila Jeffreys, even if you both manage to go off at the exact same time, which is a nice trick but pretty difficult to pull off every time, aint it? --- the woman is still collaborating with the patriarchy and 'eroticizing her own oppression'.


[font size=1]* she can't, really, as per IBTP[/font]

when one person objected to the notion that sex is "using a woman as a toilet"

It’s not a bleak view of female sexuality so much as a bleak (and realistic) view of how men view having sex. IE, “I put my dick in you, you lose.” And since women exist in the P for the express purpose of serving men in which ever way the men see fit, they have been raised to show love for their men by letting them do what they want – by serving them. Many women may want to have sex with men, but the way we get to do that, and what that sex means, socially, is generally out of our control.

We’ve all been raised with the idea that this is what sex just is, so men, consciously or no, practice their sexuality the way they’ve been taught. For all of us it’s not about sexual desire for the opposite sex per se, but rather doing sex the way the P has taught us. Or rather, just what Andrea Dworkin was quoted as saying earlier.

I've had sex before and as a male I can say I never thought of it as "haha I win you lose! I don't even like this, the patriarchy just taught me to do it to keep you in you place. Take *that* toilet!".

I've thought "I'm having sex I'm having sex I can't believe it I'm actually having sex hurray!"

But that's not quite the same thing. I doubt the people who make such claims have ever had a relationship with a man. And if so I find it next to impossible that it was a healthy one.

make the craziest fringe of the religulously insane look one or two clicks less loony. Quite an accomplishment, but not exactly one to be proud of.

I guess it`s ok to call them Dworkinites now since she apparently was a "brilliant, tormented women (sic)"??

"The things that pass for knowledge, I can`t understand..."

Dworkin had a deeply seeded hatred of men. There's no question about it. You start to see into the dark side of her warped mind. Some feminists here are quick to distance themselves from Dworkin, but what is much harder for them to distance themselves from is the ideology that Dworkin largely helped to create. You don't have to be a man hater to parrot out Dworkin's nonsense, but it's a great start.

deconstruct them in my third year paper in law school.

Dworkin was in all likelihood severely mentally ill. Her (atrocious in the technical sense) writing illuminated so many hallucinatory paranoid and borderline schizoid disorders that one soon lost track of the number of pathologies present.

MacKinnon is not crazy in the way Dworkin was. She's a self-righteous prig of the highest order who managed to do some good work on the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace in spite of her self. Her prose is every bit as bad as Dworkin's in terms of its literary worth. In other words, as bad as Ayn Rand. I met one of her brothers, who was an attorney and real-estate developer here in the Twin Cities, a couple of times. His comment was "Yeah, Kitty's nuts, and a hypocrite to boot."

I had to leave in early January or I would have been tombstoned. The gun trolls and the Sisters of Purity/Dolores Umbridge Totalitarian Word Police got to me big time. I had to spend a while at Equestria Daily, where there are some arguments over esoterica you wouldn't believe, but where no crusades on behalf of purges. After my cat passed I came back to the Lounge and have now decided to re-engage with DU. I cannot express my joy that Skinner terminated the cesspit of Meta. Celestia be praised.

And here's a happy pony:

Fair warning, though.. the Dolores Umbrage brigade has been running rampant in GD since Meta was vaporized.. on the plus side of that, though, by and large I don't think they've been getting the reception they may have hoped for.

and in the much-less inbred pond of GD I suspect their welcome will not be one filled with open arms.

What amazes me, on a certain level, is that Skinner didn't tombstone the Usual Suspects. They are a cancer on DU. And I am increasingly convinced that he knows that all too well.

Because most people just don't pay that much attention but at the same time will be uncomfortable with anything that appears to be silencing a sympathetic group.

One of my friends teaches at a university and they have a group that is always causing problems, particularly in the form of repeated false accusations directed at the nursing program. Their accusations have been investigated more times than the Kennedy assassinations. The events in question just didn't happen. Any other group that was persistently making libelous accusations against other students, faculty and administration would be harshly sanctioned. But the makeup of this group seems to make it invulnerable.

Why?

Useful idiots. The moment this group is sanctioned those who hadn't really been paying attention would swing to their defense and assume their accusations to be valid.

And, you're probably calmer than me!

?w=500&h=400

Grew up with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and Popeye and always hated Disney - too sappy. When I was a little boy I adored Rocky and Bullwinkle and got a lot of the adult-oriented jokes even then. Gads, I am old.

I didn't know a single thing about Pony until an old friend of mine, who is a brilliant cartoonist and goes by the handle Tim Kangaroo on the art boards, introduced me to it last summer. It's sweet, smart, snarky and both kid and adult friendly. The show creators are directly tied in to the fanbase and constantly put in shoutouts to the fans.

The world is an ugly place. The Pony/Brony community is based around the themes of tolerance, acceptance and civility, at least at its best. And, remarkably, it sticks to those ideals a surprising amount of the time. It is a welcome respite for the shrieking idiocy one has to deal with in the real world, including DU.

The Usual Suspects are apparently never going away, and I will never understand why. There are 5-6 people that I would have tombstoned with extreme and permanent prejudice more than a year ago. Somehow they all survived with only
their Dear Leader being terminated. It existentially amazes me that people who are at their core right-wing totalitarians who use Left rhetoric continue to be tolerated here.

Whatever. Keep calm and brony on. BTW I am a huge fan of the Workingman's Dead <-> Keith and Donna Grateful Dead. And King Crimson. And Can. Out There is Good.

I look forward to chatting with you frequently, and never be hesitant about sending a PM.

There were a couple of writers in the British music weeklies of the time who thought they were gods - they were - and I took their advice and have been there forever since. I own EVERY ONE of the original albums on vinyl.

You either get that kind of genius the first time you hear it or not at all. I interviewed Holger Czukay almost twenty years ago when he was in town with Doc Walker. The article was never published, but it was a treat to speak with Holger,who was a kind and benevolent man, sort of a German Albus Dumbledore both in looks and manner. Especially when he pre-read an article on Can I gave him and called me up in Minnesota to offer some additional background information for the piece. Sadly, that was also never published.

Was Mark Smith in The Fall? I remember a mind-roasting cover of "Incense and Peppermints" by Laura Elise "Brix" Smith and the Adult Net and IIRC Brix was Smith's GF at the time and most of The Adult Net were members of The Fall. It killed. Exhibit A:

. Gads, I was so in love with this (and Brix) when I was in college.

Kricfalusi was a fucking genius that had and has absolutely no discipline. Ren & Stimpy got me back into animation after a long absence. "YOU ATE THE FIVE BUCKS!!!!!!" John K's big problem was that he just would never cut out the tenth fart joke in an episode that already had nine of them. He could have changed the world like "Animaniacs" did, but he refused to compromise on the silly shit.

I'm sure she'd be horrified at the suggestion, but I'm talking more in their presentation of absolutely goofy ideas roundly rejected by right-thinking people in a way that makes them seem rational.

A lot of members of that gang have been more than happy to pal up with the religious right, repeatedly, over the years.

It's pretty blatant, and obvious.

was about as well grounded as the rest of her delusions.

Much like her literary bete noire, the Marquis de Sade, she plumbed the darkest depths of the human psyche, but ultimately (as I see it) reflected her own darkness as much as anyone else's. Granted, her views were profoundly impacted by her horrific early-adulthood experiences, as well as by the historical repression of women and femininity. But she took those ideas in a direction which, by and large, only serves to deepen the darkness, in a fatalistic sort of way.

had such a wonderful trope on the Sisters of Purity:

"Leaving sex to the feminists is like boarding your dog at the taxidermist."

Clearly she was potshotting the Sisters of Purity misandrists and not your run of the mill liberal, rights oriented feminists.

Now, that said, I do not condone using any of this as a strawman to beat anyone over the head with. I'm not saying you advocate such an approach yourself, just that that is one possible misuse (IMHO) of the OP.

Identifying some ideas under the category of fringe nuttyness wouldn't be my idea of building a strawman unless those ideas don't belong there. When one floats the notion that coitus is oppressive to women and can be compared directly to rape, it's hard to imagine how that one isn't in fringe nut territory if not well beyond.

But as always, I could be wrong...

I wouldn't go so far as to say that there aren't any that do. Much of it depends on how you ask the question. If you ask the question, "do you think coitus=rape?" I doubt you'd get a positive response even if someone did believe in that extreme. However, if you asked the question, "do you think coitus is oppressive to women?" I suspect there would be a few positive responses and some who believe in those ideas but won't admit it here.

This blogger's material has been promoted on DU repeatedly. Bloggers affiliated with the hub have been busted repeatedly disrupting and trolling DU. So this wasn't completely random or out of the blue.

But I agree, it's extreme and hardly representative of anything resembling anyone's mainstream thought, and certainly paralleled by a lot of internet MRA goofiness on the other side.

But mostly I just scoff at all this nuttiness. Certainly it has no tangible impact on my life, so why should I worry about it?

be giving the evil eye would you?
With the The One Eyed Trouser Snake?

but then they kicked me out of Sex Police Academy.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024759864

Also:

http://reason.com/archives/2005/04/19/womans-hating



http://reason.com/blog/2005/04/17/the-dworkin-whitewash



If you really want to defend Andrea Dworkin's words, knock yourself out. However, despite backpedaling in later years, she was certainly not what you would call a promoter of anything resembling rational ideas pertaining to human sexuality.

Just pointing out their yearly attempt to remind everyone how deluded they are.

I've already said pretty much everything I'm going to say on it, and it seems pretty apparent to me that anyone who pays enough attention can figure out that there was something profoundly wrong with Ms. Dworkin's worldview.

It's especially funny with some of the 'harumph harumph don't malign Andrea' people popping out of the woodwork in that thread, because I'm fairly certain many of them have never read a single damn word the woman wrote... They're just so certain there was nothing 'extreme' about her expressed views, right?

She's just being bad-mouthed by the nasty acronym people, you know...

I'd like to see an explanation of the inherent sensibility and rationality of some of those quotes, like the "limp penis" quote, but I won't hold my breath. (Also, if it was in one of her books, you can't really say she never said it, can you? )

so she may as well have never put the original thought to paper.

I think that's an accurate synopsis of those quotes.

A few years ago it was "OFFS, Dworkin is irrelevant". Yes, I remember one of the biggest cheerleaders saying that.

Now it's changed again. So it's hard to keep up.

that is scary stuff. These radfems actually want to do away with intercourse.