House of Eratosthenes

Nugget of Wisdom I left at Cassy’s blog. The subject under discussion is a feminist who hates, hates, hates people paying too much attention to her overly-large breasts.

Angry brittle feminist (language not suitable for a general audience):

Hello, good friend/acquaintance/classmate/stranger. I’m just writing to let you know that I am in fact aware that my breasts are big. Thanks.

I mean, I’ve only been living with them for years. But thank you, person/classmate-who-I-may-or-may-not-know-particularly-well-and-don’t-necessarily-feel-comfortable-with for informing me. Your comment about my chest really spurred meaningful and insightful conversation and didn’t embarrass or dehumanize me in the slightest. I feel incredibly respected.

No but seriously. Don’t tell me to, “put them away,” or notify me that you could probably swipe a credit card through my cleavage. I don’t want to hear it. If my bra is visible and you would like to enlighten me of that fact, that’s fine, but making a “hilarious” comment about my breasts because you somehow feel that it’s appropriate or because you “only want to give me a compliment” ISN’T charming. What it tells me is that you’re more interested in discussing cup size than anything I may have been able to add to our conversation.

And another thing, wearing a low-cut shirt doesn’t give you the right to comment either. I’m sorry if I’m showing cleavage, that must be really difficult for you, but I’m sure you can move your eyes about six inches to the north . It is NOT my fault that you think yourself incapable of doing the simple task of looking at my face. And NO, wearing a low-cut shirt does not mean I’m “asking for it,” no matter how many people may have told you so. Please desist.

This may seem harsh, but I have HAD IT with STRANGERS and even CLOSE FRIENDS of both genders thinking it’s entirely normal to say, “Wait, oh my God, but you have really big tits,” in the middle of a conversation. And I’m fucking sick of letting such inconsiderate assholery get to me.

With the most sincere “go fuck yourself” I can muster,
Phoebe

Cassy’s wisdom:

I know what it’s like to have these kinds of comments. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s creepy, and most of the time it’s inappropriate. But guess what? People do not always behave perfectly, and life is not going to fit into this perfect little model of what you want it to be. I have had all kinds of comments from men and women alike about my boobs, and I certainly do not carry around this baggage, thinking about how horrible it is and what a victim I am…My freshman year of high school, when I first started — ahem — developing there were two boys who rode the bus with me who used to say stupid shit like that all the time. It got them nowhere and did nothing to me beyond getting me to roll my eyes and call them some name, probably the equivalent of today’s “assclown”. And then I went on about my day. I never felt like these guys were acting like terrible men trying to keep me, a woman, down. I thought, “Gee, what immature assholes.” And then I’d forget about it. Stressing about it and dwelling over it so much that you have to write a blog post about it is pathetic.

Because you know, letting someone define you by their insults says more about you than it does about them.
:
The other part of her post that I found interesting was how she apparently didn’t like people staring or even mentioning her breasts, even when she says herself she’s wearing low-cut shirts. Honey, if you wear low-cut tops with your boobs hanging out, people are gonna look. They just are. Either learn to deal with it or cover up more, because there will never, ever be a complete absence of people ogling a woman with large breasts. There are simply some people who will just look, and it’s our responsibility to find a way to handle the situation. Oh, and if there are so many people pointing out your boobs, it may not be a compliment. They might be trying to tell you something — as in, “Um, Phoebe? Your boobs are like, huge, and maybe you should put them away,” meaning, “Um, Phoebe? I’m about half a [centimeter] away from seeing some nipple action and I really don’t want to, so why don’t you cover up before you start stripping in the middle of my calc class, OK? Great.” I guess when you’re completely self-centered and narcissistic (and modern-day feminists are by definitely self-centered and narcissistic), it may never cross your mind that when someone mentions your body, it’s not automatically because they’re looking at you as a sex object.

My contribution, from a man’s perspective:

It’s generally been my experience that feminists have engaged their thinking about the proper role in society for women, at the expense of any and all reasoned thinking about the proper role in society for men; just thirty seconds of that, were they to indulge in it, would do enormous benefit to them. But they won’t ponder it for even that long.

Suppose all men woke up one morning and resolved to do whatever feminists want them to do, just as soon as the feminists all agreed on what exactly that is. I guess that would have something to do with the new-boyfriend stock character on Lifetime TV, who makes tons and tons of money but doesn’t have any opinions about anything except for how incredibly devoted he is to whoever-the-starlet-is.

In a world like that, what do we think of boobs, anyway? It seems we’d be regarding them purely clinically. A woman’s entire body, I guess, would have no sensual value to us at all…but we’d fall “madly in love with” one and only one woman. Over the course of an entire lifetime. If she’d have us. So we won’t have any attraction toward physical attributes whatsoever, but that one woman — oh, how beautiful she is! So we would have some.

The whole thing is such a dizzying mess of glaring contradictions. But hey, we’ve been oppressing you for five thousand years, we deserve to get a little dizzy.

It’s interesting how many of these progressive movements, all of which have thus far achieved only a fraction of what they someday want to, are concerned with a piece of a plan about how societies should work. They bitch, and bitch, and bitch some more about Come A Long Way We’re Not There Yet. But the flaw is the lack of agreement they have, and therefore coherence, about the hated oppressors. Within the activist groups and constituents, everyone agrees on who these are…conservatives, whites, males, straights, whatever…but there’s no agreement on anything else about us, other than that we’re just plain bad.

They’re non-influential, or influential only to a limited magnitude, because they’re incoherent, or coherent only to a limited magnitude. They’re all run by folks plenty sharp enough to notice and comprehend the link. And yet the conundrum remains the same, and it remains unresolved, across the generations. Which tells me the people who follow the movements, place trust in things that they know, deep down, they should not — or they’re not bright enough to figure out who they shouldn’t be trusting.

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