House of Eratosthenes

It’s a labor union. Except you don’t have to have a job to belong to it; you DO have to have a verginer; and the labor union officials are so passionate about what they do, they don’t have to be paid. If you applied those three simple changes to any labor union, you’d have feminism.

Viewed in those terms, it all makes sense. You see it isn’t that feminists should be allowed to get away with violating the dress code. It’s that, when they violate it and you blow the whistle on ‘em, you are subjected to such an endless acid rain of crap that next time you’ll decide it just isn’t worth the hassle. Yeah, in the minds of some, this is what “representation” means: Someone cheerleading the notion, whether they ultimately succeed at it or not, that you and people like you shouldn’t be held to standards, but everyone else outside your clique should be.

The subject under discussion is that Jessica Valenti doesn’t think women should be held to the standards of a dress code, if they’re willing to join her union and call themselves feminists.

I’m kind of obsessed with the site Passive Aggressive Notes; I think it’s hilarious. This one I found particularly irritating/interesting:

Apparently this woman’s supervisor sent this charming note because someone had been complaining (!) about her showing a bit of cleavage. According to the sender, “as I’m currently 7 months pregnant, i could be wearing a turtleneck and still be showing ‘too much’ cleavage.”

Ugh.

I really don’t understand this comment about wearing a turtleneck and showing cleavage. But I’m a guy, I don’t have to face the rigors of dressing up on planet-woman every single day, other people do, so we’ll just let that one go. I’m a little bit more curious about this “sender,” Jessica herself, and other folks climbing on the sender’s bandwagon. The full quote is —

“the shirt in question was a run-of-the-mill top with an empire waist…but as i’m currently 7 months pregnant, i could be wearing a turtleneck and still be showing ‘too much’ cleavage.”

And NO, there is not a pic. Just a one-line description of this run-of-the-mill top, which Jessica didn’t even see fit to carry forward on the help-me-deplore-this jungle-telegram.

So maybe we have two camps. The “people in our group shouldn’t be held to standards at all” camp, and the “people in our group always tell the truth all the time” camp, somehow laboring under the delusion they’ve been allowed to independently evaluate this run-of-the-mill top, when they haven’t. This nameless-faceless nipple-exposing hussy could be claiming she saw Elvis at lunch that day, and goddamn it you better believe it, because it’s Gospel.

This brings me to the second front of what we now, today, call feminism — the character disorder.

Rather than spell out the next point about the above clip, which would be tedious, try to imagine just a few differences injected into it which, in a sane situation, would be meaningless differences.

A couple of dudes raising emergency funds for the financially troubled “Asshole Magazine” who’ve been working extra hard at making themselves unattractive. Not like Wayne and Garth. More like Jimmy and Adam — plus 150 pounds each, their sneakers and blue jeans not quite as clean looking, foregoing the blubber-hiding untucked-shirt look in favor of the “Why Can’t Men Wear Half Shirts?” look. Big ol’ spare tires spilling out over their filthy frayed grease-covered blue jeans, maybe one of ’em picking his nose every few seconds…”Dude! We gots ta get hold of fifty billion dollars cause our magazine is in trouble!”

Just those few minor changes would expose what’s going on here.

People…entirely inexperienced at (or not giving a ripe about) figuring out what others want…just got an idea in their heads about what their product should be. Not the timeless entrepreneur’s idea of “If I build X, the world will beat a path to my doorstep.” Just a child’s idea — after she’s spent too much time playing with dolls. “This guy wants X.”

In the psychological domain, this is what feminism is. That you are here, feminists can accept. Everything else about you, including the thoughts in your head, is either irrelevant, or pre-planned. And where the plans disagree with reality, the plans win. Wherever the feminist mind is confronted by some uncomfortable difference, the answer is revolution.

It is, in the psychological makeup of people, the simple character deficiency of being unable to perceive.

The labor-union part of it, is a cause-and-effect consequence of multiple people struggling with this same deficiency, and banding together to get what they want.

Multiple generations of people have now been born since those long-gone days when feminism was something much bigger than it now is. And so while it’s obvious to those who lived through it, it should be jotted down for the benefit of those who did not:

Mainstream society used to accommodate this. You may have been wondering why workplaces are so yielding to the feminist movement, when the feminist movement seems to be nothing more than a bunch of chubby goth chicks scribbling down acrid blog posts and sending money to each other. The answer is tradition. These deficiently-charactered harpies, thirty years ago, had the world by the balls. If word got out they wanted something, things stopped under the capitol dome, and in the corporate board rooms, until someone could figure out what they wanted and give it to ’em.

Back in those halcyon days, was feminism more than a labor union and a character defect? No, not really. Not among the true believers. Not among the work-for-free union officials (and vastly greater numbers of them did not work for free). The only difference between then, and now, is that they had more people fooled. They’ve had this line of propaganda that “it’s all about ensuring women make a fair wage,” et cetera…they’re still trotting it out to this very day…there are far fewer takers.

Why is nobody believing it anymore?

Because when Bill Clinton takes advantage of women, thus completing the very picture of an overly-powerful male staying in power while abusing women sexually, socially, legally…they support him.

And when Sarah Palin runs for the Vice-Presidency, thus completing the very picture of a woman who represents others, courageously, attempting to achieve a bigger voice in forming the policies that affect the lives of so many millions, while at the same time dedicating herself to her family…they snark away at her with the hatred that used to be reserved for abusive men.

It’s been exposed.

It’s a labor union, formed for the purpose of achieving political goals that really don’t have that much to do with opening up options for women — killing babies (half of whom are girls), gay marriage, hippie peacenik protests, the two-minute-hate of the target-of-the-hour. And it’s a labor movement made up of people who’ve made it through childhood without developing the ordinary, everyday attributes of their personalities that the rest of us have to have, that enable us to work together and live together. And those attributes have to do with recognizing what the other guy thinks is important that we don’t, and somehow learning to deal with it.

Simply put, most people…if they started a magazine exploring what dickheads they are and glorifying their nose hairs and butt cracks, and the magazine started to go out of business…would say to themselves “Huh. I guess most people don’t want to see my butt crack.” And move on.

Feminists who cover themselves with tatoos and call themselves bitches, need forty big ones.

So won’t you please donate today. C’mon, those soldiers who need prosthetics and those kids whose homes burned down, can wait; we need your help calling ourselves bitches.

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A Labor Movement and a Character DefectMonday, December 15th, 2008

A Labor Movement and a Character Defect
Monday, December 15th, 2008