Worms Turning
Kim du Toit
February 19, 2008
6:03 AM CDT
Oh, good grief. Any time I make some post about men and women, it seems that there’s an army of girlymen* just waiting to pounce on me, their carefully-manicured nails flailing away. Here’s one (Blogspot ID: Shakespeare’s Sister—oh, how appropriate) (sent to me by Reader Monty) which starts off with this howler:
Back in 2003, I was nowhere near the feminist ally I am today. Oh, I considered myself a feminist, and I was strongly pro-equality, but there was a lot about feminism I couldn’t articulate, and quite a bit I wasn’t quite ready to see.
*Girlymen: Men who, regardless of sexual orientation, act like girls and not men, and approve of men and their behavior only when it does not in any way resemble traditionally-male behavior. Sometimes, these men are called “metrosexuals” in the behavioral sense—ie. they spend as much time on their appearance as women do on theirs (eg. John Edwards and The Hair).
You know where this is going to go, don’t you? If a man calls himself a feminist, it’s only a question of time before:
I realized that Kim du Toit was the biggest douchebag on the planet.
Oh, owie.
Suffice to say that du Toit defended men who rape, praised George W. Bush for being all manly and stuff, got bitterly angry about a commercial for Cheerios, and basically acted like the douchiest douche on the planet.
Right. “Defended men who rape.” $1,000 reward for finding any such thing in any of my writings (as opposed to many suggestions that such animals should be scourged daily until they are hanged). And I never praised GWB for wearing an aviator’s uniform: I pointed out that many women, of all ages and philosophies, had found him sexy when he did.
But no girlyman criticism of me would be complete without seeking approval from a “higher authority”:
Not for nothing did L,G&M declare du Toit “America’s Wost[sic] Blogger.”
Actually, the precise title was “Worst Blogger on the Internet”, and, considering the source (a bunch of preening girlymen academics), I wear that mantle with pride. But Sister Jeff (sorry, but I am going to make fun of any man who describes himself as a feminist) continues:
Du Toit begins by linking approvingly back to Dr. Mrs. Wingnutty Perfesser, just in case you didn’t get the memo that she’s a deep misogynist.
Okay, there’s a $10,000 reward for finding evidence of Dr. Helen’s misogyny. Only in the Realm Of Feminism can distrust of feminism (what we would call “criticism") be painted as hatred of an entire species—but let’s not allow clarity to get in the way of a little character assassination. And anyone who thinks that the Instapundit, surely the straightest of straight arrows, is a “wing-nut"… well, let’s just say that I’m sure that Sister Jeff’s vote for Hillary Of That Ilk is in little doubt.
Here’s another good one:
Seriously—yes, men think about their relationships. But we don’t analyze them clinically. At least, most of us don’t. For most of us, marriage has an emotional component to it. We, you know, love our spouses. Love can’t be weighed or measured, and doesn’t fit neatly into a category. At least for most humans.
Actually, it can, and it is, judging from the sad comments which appeared under the post in question.
As an aside, I am continually astounded when I post something which I think is applicable only to myself, or at best rare among other men, only to find that whatever I was describing is not only to be found among my Readers, but quite a common thing among men in general. But I digress. Back to the program already in progress:
Isn’t he a romantic, ladies? Don’t you just wish you were married to someone who believes that if he adds up everything in tabular form and finds out that this week debits exceed credits, he’ll “quit the relationship—I mean, just bail out of the whole thing—and usually with a swiftness and finality which confounds women”? Doesn’t that sound like true love to you?
Talk about missing the point. What I was describing, and which Sister Jeff missed completely, is that it’s only when the negatives from a relationship far outweigh the positives do men suddenly realize that it isn’t worth it—in other words, I’m describing not love, but the death of love. I know that for some, love is all flowers and faeries (a Shakespearean term) and cuddles and kisses, but the grim and appalling divorce statistics paint another picture—and all I’m trying to do is understand why the latter is the case. But for the dreamy idealists who populate the Feminist Milieu, hard fact is quite obviously Too Unpleasant To Contemplate. To continue:
But du Toit implies that every man on the planet is going to be ready to leave his wife the second she starts demanding anything of him, at least anything he doesn’t want to give.
This is, in a word, bullshit.
Well, yes it is, which is why I neither said nor implied any such thing. That’s called “projection”. Here’s what I actually said about that:
Now, because we’re guys, certain things have a disproportionate effect on both the good and bad things: on the good side, sex, food and shared interests being probably the best examples; on the bad, infidelity, constant nagging and invasion of privacy constitute the negative. The degree of each, good or bad, will vary among individual men, of course. Some men will put up with almost anything if the sex is of the “bed on fire” variety, for instance, while others will walk out of a relationship for something as trifling as compulsory weekly visits to Mom (hers).
I had the same kind of nonsense tossed at me when, during the Pussification post, I remarked that giving women the vote has had some consequences which have not been too salutory: nanny government and intrusive regulation, and so on. To the Sisters, I was clearly saying that women should be denied the vote—when in fact, of course, I said no such thing, nor even implied it.
(Here’s a similar example: pointing out that private ownership of guns means that occasionally there will be some bad outcomes [eg. a few people murdering their spouses in a fit of rage] does not mean that I believe that all people should be disarmed. I make reference to bad things about private gun ownership all the time, but no one has ever accused me of being a gun-confiscationist.)
But, to the Sisters, saying that women voting hasn’t always proven to be a Good Thing automatically means I want to take the vote from women—once again, that’s called “projection”.
Hysteria blinds people when they denounce me. In Pussification-Crit 101, I was reviled for apparently wanting men to revert to being cavemen, even though my precise words were:
You don’t have to become a fucking cartoon male, either: I’m not going back to stoning women for adultery like those Muslim assholes do, nor am I suggesting we support that perversion of being a Real Man, gangsta rap artists (those fucking pussies—they wouldn’t last thirty seconds against a couple of genuine tough guys that I know).
But let’s not allow fact to intrude on our fantasies, anyway. Here’s another fine example from Sister Jeff, when I was talking about flirting in the office:
So why are we suddenly starting with how it’s totally unfair that I can’t tell some chick I work with that she has nice tits, and that I can get her into a better job if she gets into my bed? What’s wrong with that?
Only in the murky corridors of Feminist Agitprop can the word “flirting” be conflated with such behavior.
And that’s the precise problem. “Wow, that’s a pretty dress!” is automatically grouped with “Nice tits, chickie!” in the modern PC construct. While I champion courtly behavior often, never, not once, have I ever condoned nasty behavior like the latter in my writings. Never. In fact, if I may quote myself again (in The Lost Art), I said this about the latter behavior:
No wonder there are college rules which forbid complimenting and “staring”, when “Nice rack!” is what passes for a compliment.
You boor, you dolt, you insensitive, childish brute. Who the hell gave you the right to act that way towards a woman—a man’s daughter, another man’s sister, and somone’s future wife?
But of course, taking a single instance of writing and projecting an entire opinion on it—even though demonstrably wrong—is a hallmark of twerps like this. It’s the same thing as someone pronouncing Shakespeare to be a “racist” because he wrote stuff about black rams tupping white ewes (Othello, paraphrased), and either wilfully ignoring or being ignorant of the fact that the same racist also wrote this about interracial love:
King: By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
Berowne:
Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give such an oath? where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,
If that she learn not of her eye to look:
No face is fair that is not full so black
King:
O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the stole of night;
And beauty’s crest becomes the heavens well.
Berowne:
Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light,
O, if in black my lady’s brows be deck’d,
It mourns that painting and usurping hair
Should ravish doters with a false aspect;
And therefore is she born to make black fair.
Her favour turns the fashion of the days,
For native blood is counted painting now;
And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise,
Paints itself black, to imitate her brow.
(Love’s Labor’s Lost; Act IV, Ch. III)
Some racist. But again, I digress.
The plain fact of the matter is that I’ve heaped scorn on women (especially feminists, and their surrogates like Sister Jeff), and upon men (for behaving like assholes) in almost equal measure. It’s just funny that the anti-feminist pieces have engendered more hysterical responses than the male-bashing ones, which generally get greeted with the literary equivalent of a shrug, or a mild protest of “hey, we’re not that bad”.
By the way, Sister Jeff isn’t satisfied with posting this on a group blog. He also posted what seems to be a longer diatribe here, on his own blog. The comments are especially interesting on the latter. You may recognize one of the commenters.
Fun stuff.
