House of Eratosthenes

I really hate it when I’m watching a movie, with an incredibly complicated storyline, and tons and tons of genetically perfect gorgeous hot people of both sexes — much younger than me — and suddenly, I don’t have a clue what is going on because the guys all look the same. The hero who will shoot the villain at the end (or heroically lay down his life for his hot gorgeous co-star), the villain himself, the jackass who picks on the nerd, the jock, the sidekick. Look at that, one of these guys is the star, one of them is just a supporting character with hardly any speaking lines at all. Why are they both white? Why are they both five-foot-ten? Or, one of them is married to a woman and being cuckolded, the other one is poking her when the husband’s away. How come the casting people didn’t make one of them blonde and the other one dark? Why didn’t the costuming people put earrings one just one of them? Sometimes, when the actors are all too physically-perfect, and all have the same build, the same facial features, the same hot new fashionable hairstyle…to a guy who is sexually attracted to women and not to men, these guys look enough alike to cause a lot of confusion as to what’s going on. Then I have to rewind to find out what’s going on. Usually, that ruins everything because the movie was never designed to be good enough for multiple viewings.

Now, I could do a lot of things about this. I can write a post in a blog about how much I hate it when that happens…and then let it keep on happening, just, making sure I don’t sink too much money into those movies.

That isn’t what feminism does about things that it finds similarly annoying in modern culture, like, say, girls in skimpy outfits.

I could form a support group of other straight men who look forward to the stupid movies with hot girls in them, but are similarly annoyed when the guys look enough alike that they lose track of what’s going on. We could get together and drink beer and munch on some buffalo wings, every week or so, and get it off our chests — so that the rest of the world could keep working the way it does, and irritate us a whole lot less than it otherwise would.

That isn’t what feminism is about, either.

Or I could start an entire bulletin board about this thing, take out a subscription to Teen Magazine or GQ, keep an eye out for changing mens’ hairstyles, and when something gets popular I could bellyache on my bulletin board to the effect of “I’ll bet in the next year I’m going to waste fifty bucks or more renting stupid movies with one or two hot young girls, and probably a dozen hunky guys I can’t tell apart wearing this same stupid new hairstyle.”

And the rest of the world would keep on spinning.

And that last part is my point. Being from earth, and having red blood, I figure when I don’t like something that’s just my little cross to bear. In other words, there is a threshhold of pain I have where, once it’s crossed, I’ll start bellyaching and make myself tedious; there’s a much higher threshhold where I must start marching through the streets, interfering with other peoples’ business, and generally making a real pain in the ass out of myself — refusing to take no for an answer, changing the world, et cetera.

They’re two different threshholds.

Yeah.

I know, it’s an old-fashioned concept. I can be mighty annoyed by something, and still let people be the way they are.

If somebody else likes something that I don’t like, even if I don’t like it because it costs me money in the form of renting movies I end up not understanding, that’s essentially…fine. Life would be boring if we were all the same. And things that are, are; whatever will be, will be. The fact is, we have a lot of lusty young women who like to spend booku bucks on stupid movies, with dozens of guys therein all wearing the same stupid hairstyle. Maybe since those girls find men sexually appealing and I don’t, maybe this gives them some superior ability to tell those guys apart so they can figure out what’s happening in the movie. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’ll try not to get fooled, so I end up renting the movies I like, and they get the movies they like.

I will not ostracize.

I will not coerce.

I will not try to purify society.

Well, what we call the “feminist movement” wants to purify society. Some men, myself included, happen to like looking at young ladies who wear skimpy outfits. Just as some young women like to rent movies chock full of guys with fashionable hairstyles — who don’t look like guys those young women would actually be willing to date in real life. I think that’s foolish. It irritates me a little, for the reasons explained above, but I’m not going to try to “fix” them. The way the feminists would like to “fix” me.

A man who finds a gorgeous young woman in skimpy clothing appealing, you see, is an unfinished task. Feminists don’t want me to be attracted that way, or if I am, they don’t want to hear about it. That would be fine, but we see a lot of evidence of feminists going out of their way to “detect” the hunchbacked knuckle-draggers like me. They want to know we’re out here. It’s the first half of the “Search And Destroy” mission.

I’m not supposed to call them “feminazis” or tolerate anyone else calling them that. This Wikipedia entry for the word indicates a great deal of controversy over whether the moniker is “acceptable,” as if that were not a question to be decided privately by each individual choosing to use it. Why should they not be called this?

The people we call “feminists” don’t work through deliberation. They work through purification.

That isn’t just my opinion. It’s the opinion of self-proclaimed feminist Debra Bruno. And it’s an opinion she proclaims, right in the middle of questioning why anyone would be scared of feminism.

What’s so scary about feminism?
‘Consciousness raising’ just means honest discussion about our behavior and our choices.

The other day at work, some colleagues and I were discussing a chain restaurant known for its scantily clad waitresses. I was taken aback for a moment. “They have the best sports bar in my area,” one person said. “I hear they have great Buffalo wings,” said another.

It was a moment of disconnect. “But how can anyone go to places like that?” I asked. “What about the objectification of women’s bodies?”

The what of the who?

My colleagues, many of them young enough to be my offspring, gave me puzzled, bemused looks.

“This is one of those feminist things, isn’t it?” someone asked.

“Yes, I’m a feminist. Yes, I did consciousness raising,” I said.

“What’s consciousness raising?”

It was my turn to be startled. Hasn’t everyone at least heard about consciousness raising? A quick survey of the people in my office revealed that no one, male or female, under the age of 30 had even heard of what in my day was so common we called it “CR.”

As I said, I’m from earth. And I have red blood. So when I think about deliberating attributes of the public sensibility for the greater good, and “consciousness raising,” one of the very last things to run through my head is people running around making innocent comments and then their counterparts being bemused, puzzled, taken aback, and/or startled. I don’t think that’s a productive discourse. “OHMYGOD I can’t believe you just said that!” is not a statement for what I think of as consciousness-raising, and it follows that any argument based on the exclamation or the underlying sentiment, similarly fails to qualify.

I think what Bruno is finding out here, is that it is the feminazis who have been purified out of existence — except naturally. Nobody has started a movement to “backburn,” if you will, the feminist movement. What happened, was people thought independently. They observed the feminists trying to control what people see, what people hear, what people say, and what people see & hear that they like, or dislike. The young people have figured out that, okay, social movements can be started for the purpose of controlling these things. Once started, can such movements be successful? And are they good things?

And the young people watched, learned, and evaluated what they saw.

They saw high-profile figures like Robert Packwood, and their careers destroyed.

They saw other high-profile figures like Clarence Thomas, and their careers nearly destroyed. Over probably nothing; certainly, nothing provable. They saw, what was supposed to be “consciousness raising,” emerge as something actually more like political-agenda raising. Or friend-raising and enemy-crushing. Favoritism in its purest, rawest, most naked (oops! Sorry, Debra) form.

And then a most peculiar thing happened.

They saw a high-profile figure who happened to be the President of the United States, arguably just as guilty of denigrating women as sex objects as Sen. Packwood and Justice Thomas, even moreso — certainly, more provably so — given a free pass. So they saw it never had to do with consciousness, ever. Or sensibilities. Or decency, or respecting women. It never had anything to do with those things. It was really all about controlling the way people think in order to control the way people vote.

So feminism, having obviously become much more concerned with its political self-interests than with its stated goal of improving society, was abandoned.

And to try to reclaim some semblance of relevance, we see the movement, through advocates like Debra Bruno — exert more control. Now, they throw up red flags when they see normal, straight men traipse along to Hooters to get a plate of wings, a cold brew, and an eyeful. Beep Beep Beep! We’re here to sound the alarm. We’re still relevant.

Well, I hope not. You people scare me. Maybe now you know why…but I suspect most of you weren’t as mystified about it as you put on.

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