Sometimes it’s useful to remember just what the early second wave feminists were reacting against. Here, from a comic circa 1970 (judging from the clothing) is a sort of double-whammy of misogyny: hide your smarts, girls, or you’ll end up a wizened old maid at the ripe old age of … twenty?
The MRAs today who prattle on about how declining marriage rates mean that men are wising-up to the evils of feminism need to remind themselves that delaying marriage is a good thing for both men and women (the earlier the marriage, the greater the likelihood of divorce; the later the marriage, the more time for men and women to get decent education, start a career, mature a bit, etc etc). In the fifties, obviously, the pressure for women (and to a lesser degree, men) to marry very young was immense. This comic suggests that these pressures didn’t vanish with the coming of the sixties counterculture or even with the first stirrings of second wave feminism.
This baby knows more about contemporary women's fiction than all Spearhead contributors combined. (As does the kitten.)
There are really few things quite so entertaining as watching people as ignorant as a box of pig shit offering their opinions on literature. Especially when the people in question are W.F. Price and his gang of misfit boys at The Spearhead, who are back for yet another take on the whole Women’s Lit question.
At this point I’ve run out of jokes on this particular subject, so I’m just going to let Mr. Price dig his own hole here. Here he is, trying to argue that feminism has made terrible lady writers even terribler.*
[I]t appears that since feminism’s triumph, female achievement in the higher arts has deteriorated substantially. When women no longer have to excel to be read and recognized, but simply have to advertise the fact that they are women to be celebrated for dubious achievements, they won’t put as much effort into producing anything of quality. So the sorry state of women today is a direct result of feminist privilege, which absolves them of all responsibility and deflects any criticism. …
Yes, feminism has wrecked Western womanhood, reducing the young women of today to spoiled brats who can’t take a hint of criticism, and immediately turn to authorities to bolster their self-esteem. No woman can be too fat to be beautiful, too dense to be intelligent, or too dull to be creative. They are all equally super-duper goddesses, before whom men must genuflect and heap up mounds of praise.
Price of course gives no examples to back up any of his, er, “arguments,” and somehow I suspect he hasn’t actually read any fiction written by women beyond an odd title or two he might have been assigned in high school. I wonder if Price could even name a half-dozen living woman novelists without having to resort to Google — excluding JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and Jackie Collins (who hasn’t heard of them?) and Harper Lee (who wasn’t assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in high school?).
The fellows at The Spearhead are still talking about lady literature — by which I mean, why ladies totally can’t write for shit. This time, they’re taking on the lady poets.
Contrasting a poem by former US poet laureate Kay Ryan with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, The Spearhead’s W.F. Price proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that men are the best poets. And then Price takes it one step further, contrasting a video of Kay Ryan’s reading of another of her poems with Dylan Thomas’ passionate (if slightly overripe) reading of his “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.”
While I can’t take issue with Price’s methodology here – comparing a couple of random poems by a female poet most people have never heard of (but who apparently represents all female poets ever) with legendary poems by two of the world’s most famous poets – I wonder about his choice of male poets here.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Dylan Thomas? Sure, they wrote some awesome dude poems, for their time. But they’re long dead, Daddy-O, and we men of today demand poetry that speaks to our lives. Who better speaks to men today than the tag-team of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J from the Insane Clown Posse? And which of their poems speaks to men today better than their most famous work, “Miracles?”
Here are some selections from this fine piece of work — and because, by Price’s rules, any poem by a person of a particular gender obviously represents all poetry from people of that gender, this wonderful little poem represents all male poetry. (Not to mention all poetry written by insane clowns.)
We don’t have to be high to look in the sky
And know that’s a miracle opened wide
Look at the mountains, trees, the seven seas
And everything chilling underwater, please …
Pure magic is the birth of my kids
I’ve seen shit that’ll shock your eyelids
The sun and the moon, and even Mars
The Milky Way and fucking shooting stars
UFOs, a river flows
Plant a little seed and nature grows
Niagara falls and the pyramids
Everything you believed in as kids
Fucking rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to blow your brains
I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco bay
It tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away
And then, in this poem’s most famous lines, Shaggy 2 Dope (or perhaps Violent J, I can’t remember which is which), takes on the miracle of magnetism:
I see miracles all around me
Stop and look around, it’s all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
But as wonderfully as these lines read on the printed page, it is Insane Clown Posse’s performance of this poem (which they have set to music) that really brings home how motherfuckingly miraculous these two poets, and by extension all men who have ever written poetry, really are. So here is that performance:
As yet another great male poet, MC Hammer, once put it: “You can’t touch this!”
But, just to be fair, here’s some chick reading her dumb poem:
Picture of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Jason Towers, from here.
Man Boobz’ first FRIDAY NIGHT OPEN THREAD DANCE PARTY is now open for business. Most threads here are pretty open, but this one will be even more so. Talk about whatever you want, link to interesting shit, link to your own blogs, go wild!
Or you can talk about this: Earlier today I was listening to the song Dusseldorf, by La Dusseldorf, one of my favorite Krautrock bands, and I started thinking about bands that write songs referencing their band name in the lyrics and/or the titles of the songs. (In the song “Dusseldorf,” the word “Dusseldorf” is repeated probably a hundred times.) Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of other bands that have done this:
Women who might just decide that they don’t really want to have sex with some dude who keeps going on about how men are the most oppressed group in the world.
Responding, apparently, to a comment in an earlier thread suggesting “that being publicly vocal about the way men’s rights are trampled on and ignored is a great way to lose the opportunity of getting laid,” manifesto writer Kuppers argues that it just ain’t so — but when it is, just bite your tongue for as long as it takes to get into her pants.
He starts off with a strange variant on the notion that there are plenty of fish in the sea. If you feel that women won’t want to have sex with your Men’s-Rights-espousing self, Kuppers suggests, it’s
because your brain was conditioned in a small communal/tribal setting. A group of angry women was a serious threat to your prospects of reproduction. As you know, women often act like herd animals, and view acceptance and appreciation from their peers of their choice of man to be important. This is completely moot today. There are millions of fish in the sea.
Aside from that final truism I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about. I don’t recall growing up in anything that might possibly be considered – literally or figuratively – a “tribal setting” ruled over by a group – sorry, a herd – of “angry women” hell-bent on keeping me from reproducing. Is this a common experience? Also, I have precisely zero interest in “reproduction.” Indeed, I sort of make it a policy to only have sex with women who are at least as interested in preventing reproduction as I am.
On to point two in this curious document, which is that ladies love dudes with strong opinions:
Women, while they do not always explicitly say so and sometimes contradict so, sincerely do appreciate a man who has strong internal beliefs and principles, and does not compromise that for the sake of assuaging someone else’s sensitivities, including theirs. A man who is willing to pretend he is something he is not, isn’t attractive on a deep masculine level to women.
True, up to a point, but you might want to keep all that shit about women being angry reproduction-threatening herd animals to yourself. That might not go over so well on your first Starbucks coffee date. Or ever. Protip: Misogyny aside, very few people want to get with people who refer to sex as “reproduction.”
But if your desire for sex outweighs your manly desire to be truthful about your obnoxious beliefs, well, that’s all good too – if by “all good” you mean “you can still have angry sex with women you despise if you just keep your pie hole shut for a few hours.” Or, as Kuppers puts it in his third and final point, which he apparently doesn’t realize completely contradicts point number two:
The kind of woman who a) wants you to be subordinate to her crazy foaming feminist nonsense, and b) has no tolerance or patience for your concerns, is not worth anything more than a cheap, well-protected fuck anyway. Fine, keep your mouth shut for the couple of hours it takes to get her into bed, but you’d be mad to pursue anything more serious with a woman like that.
Dude, do you have a moment to take a quick survey?
So AskMen.com just put up the first segment of its annual 3-part Great Male Survey. Filled with strange assumptions and sometimes creepy questions, it’s a survey that reveals at least as much about the survey makers as it does the survey takers, and what it reveals ain’t good: it seems to have been written by a jaded ex-romantic ( or a committee of such) only a few short steps away from full-blown MGTOW-hood.
The survey starts off with a fairly innocuous question about basic compatibility, but quickly veers off course with question #2:
How important is it to you that your wife/future wife signs a prenup?
Hold on a second, daddy-o! We haven’t even determined if the little missy has “wife potential” yet — as question #3 puts it.
After one more question about marriage, the quiz moves on to cheating and then (perhaps inevitably) to the issue of divorce:
Do men get screwed by the courts in divorce?
Then it’s onward to kvetching about what a naggy shrew your partner is (assuming you haven’t already finalized the divorce):
Followed by the classic “Would you dump a girlfriend if she became fat?” (Just in case you’re wondering, ladies, nearly half the American guys in last year’s survey said “yes.”)
Next we get to what we might call the “creepy controlling asshole” portion of the survey. After asking whether we’ve ever snooped through our partner’s email or Facebook messages, they pose this doozy:
That quiet clattering you hear is the sound of a thousand creepy dudes Googling to see if this is possible – and, if so, the best place to put the chip.
After several more questions about Facebook and the internet, a few badly conceptualized questions about romance, and a bunch about sex, the quiz moves on to some good old-fashioned slut shaming, asking men to quantify the number of sex partners a woman is allowed to have before they consider her “promiscuous.” Ladies: you’ll be glad to know that 41% of American dudes who took the survey last year consider any women with more than 9 lifetime partners to be dirty sluts – sorry, “promiscuous.”
Then of course it’s on to an attempt to quantify exactly when women start getting all old and ugly:
Yes, one of the possible answers is “18.” You may be slightly reassured by the fact that zero percent of last year’s survey takers gave that answer. Six percent said “20,” though, and 24% said “30.”
Then we have this curiously worded question on workplace sex:
So the idea that your partner might be a big higher up on the old org chart isn’t even a possibility? What is this, 1962? Did they borrow this question from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl? Or find it scribbled on a napkin on Don Draper’s desk just before he impulsively proposed to his new secretary?
So Esquire magazine recently posted a list of “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read” on their website. Esquire being Esquire – that is to say, a men’s magazine that had its glory days in the era of Mad Men and that seems to be aimed mostly at old farts (and aspiring old farts) — only one book of the 75 was written by a woman. (That’s 98.67% male, for those of you with lady brains who can’t do the math.)
The internet being the internet, some people noticed that the list was a wee bit heavy on the dudes, even for a men’s magazine, and pointed this out. The bloggers at the Joyland Publishing blog suggested that while the books on Esquire’s list were “mostly fantastic,” it might behoove men to pick up a book or two written by a woman once in a while. And so, with the help of some of their readers, the two assembled a list of “250 Books By Women All Men Should Read.” (Why 250 and not, say, 75? Because they got a lot of suggestions.)
Here’s a little one-question quiz for you all: What title did W. F. Price at The Spearhead give his post on the controversy?
A) “Some Great Suggestions for Books by Women You Guys Might Want to Read.”
B) “Did You Know There Are Female Authors Besides The Chick That Wrote Harry Potter?”
C) “Feminist Publishers: Force Men to Read Women’s Lit”
Yep, the correct answer is C, of course. Apparently a couple of bloggers suggesting some books by women that men “should” read is some kind of Gestapo-like imposition upon men by “Feminist Publishers.” Price grouses:
[I]it strikes me as rather mean-spirited of females in the publishing industry to denounce even ineffectual efforts to introduce men to literature. By all accounts, publishing has come to be dominated by women, and men are reading far fewer books than women these days. Given this state of affairs, you’d think that the women in the industry might be a bit gracious and let the boys pick and choose which titles interest them.
But of course that won’t do, because feminists must find fault with any and everything men are involved in. …
The implication [of the Joyland Publishing blog post] is that men should be forced by political pressure to read female writers (sometimes these feminists come off as whiny, annoying girlfriends complaining that “he just won’t listen to me!”).
Or, you know, it might just be that the writers of the blog post, and those who wrote in with suggestions, really enjoyed the books in question and thought that dudes might just enjoy them too. Sort of like when a friend tells you that you should totally watch the movie Dogtooth, because it is so fascinating and creepy and awesome. Or when I tell you right now that you should go watch Jane Austen’s Fight Club on Funny or Die.
Naturally, the comments from Spearheaders were even more ignorant and obtuse than Price’s post. The basic theme: Bitches can’t write for shit (as far as I know).
In case you think I am offering an unfair characterization of the, er, debate, here’s one Spearheader’s contribution to the discussion:
when a man says “no, I won’t read your literature”, you have to respect that, bitch.
I basically do not read anything a wimminz has written, not even in my favourite genre of science fiction, because every single time I have tried they have been unmitigated fucking crap full of feminazi girl power bullshit and emotional baggage and basically very little hard SF…
I never read anything written by women unless it happens to be instructional and related to work. Pretty much all the fiction I’ve ever read is by and for males. If I read some non-fiction for fun it’s always got a male author. I realized a while back that my cd collection is about 98% male. When I was a kid I never thought about it, it just came naturally. Now that I’m older I intentionally avoid anything by women.
It’s always,er, instructive to see what some random guy who apparently reads mostly instructional manuals has to say about the literary controversies of the day.
There were, of course, more thoughtful analyses, like this earnest comment from the excitable, exclamation-point-happy David K. Meller:
Women write for an audience of their own level–to wit themselves! Most men are simply too intelligent to be interested in what passes for literature scribbled by women! …
Correct me if I am wrong, but is most woman’s “literature” one more kvetch klatsch of women–or girls–getting together to complain about, to defeat, or to evade the workings of us evil, letcherous, abusive, horrible M-E-N! There is no point in men reading such drivel …
There may be better days coming; when women are once again taught the arts of pleasing men, in their creating a comfortable environment for the chosen man in their lives, and when they again will use their ability to read to discover new and better ways to do this, and their ability to write to communicate these truths to others of their sex! Until that happens, literacy for women, much less dominance in authorship, editing, and publishing has been, and is, a BLOODY MESS for everyone, especially men!!
PEACE AND FREEDOM!! David K. Meller
Yes, women should really only be allowed to read and write if they are reading or writing instructional manuals on how to cook and give better blow jobs, possibly at the same time.
PEACE AND FREEDOM!! to you too, good sir.
Speaking of which — the blowjob bit, not the PEACE AND FREEDOM!! — the commenter calling himself dragnet suggested that young men such as himself were simply too busy to read much of anything. They have other priorities:
The vast majority of my reading is for work, research, and classes. …
Frankly, I’d rather be getting laid than reading a novel after a grueling work week. The three or four hours I sometimes have free on the weekend when I’m not working or working out or sleeping or eating, I’d rather be out with my friends or getting serviced by whatever girl I’m with at the time.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a penis, must be in want of some girl to service it.
PEACE AND FREEDOM!!1!!
Anyway, ladies and manginas, any good lady books you want to suggest for the dudes of the world?
