I was a bit slow getting to this post. I was chopping logs, making the fire, loading the dishwasher and cleaning the kitchen. My wife's still in bed. Just saying.
"That many men’s lives involved endless repetitive labor did not give her pause." Janice points out the double standard used by feminists to invent their subjection. Most workers, including most men, engage in repetitive labor without prospect of an achievement that lasts, other than filling the needs of the clients that they service. Few men, like few women, have the privilege of work with the hope of long term achievement. Academics exceptionally do, yet is an impressive cv really longer lasting than the needs served by others? The exception, of course, is having children, who are one's permanent contribution to humanity, and to which females make the signal contribution.
Thanks Janice. As always with your writings and talks, you reveal so much more substance than almost all other commentators on gender-related issues. Our supporters were delighted when I revealed to them that you'd accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker at the International Conference on Men's Issues to be held in Budapest in August 2024.
Janice you are a clear thinker and are able to clarify the complex. This section is so well said and explains so much of what’s happened, “Personal experience is appropriated and transformed into assumed powerlessness and resentment while gratitude, empathy, stoicism, and responsibility fall away. Boys and men are no longer perceived as fellow human beings with their own life struggles but as antagonists who demean, objectify, and assault.”
Simone de Beauvoir will always be celebrated for having recognized victimhood as the currency on which the feminist empire could be erected. It's interesting that her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, in a book-length essay excoriated the French poet Charles Baudelaire for disingenuously asserting his "otherness" as a lens for discerning and rendering through poetry a more authentic dimension of lived reality. How bitingly ironic that what for Sartre represented Baudelaire's "cowardice" would be rebranded in Beauvoir's typology as an emblem of feminist heroism where it is only through bitterness and self-pity that the value of woman's experience can be truly appreciated.
The worst mistake I ever made was to encourage my happy, healthy, wife who was then a happy healthy mother of 3 to take a university course on feminist literature 42 years ago. By the second week in she was coming home in tears.
It absolutely affected the course of our marriage!
I suppose books like these and exclusive female only naval gazing sit-ins account for the palpable misandry I have felt from a certain type of woman for about 30 years. Misery all around. Well done Beauvoir.
Well done! Your deep dive into feminist history has been great. It seems that this essay is one culmination of that work. Has it been stewing for some time? I feel you have found feminism's central nervous system - and cut it - in a short piece of writing. Imagine all those endless 'academic' papers, periodical essays, books, lectures, etc. all being undermined by something that could, in effect, be printed on a small pamphlet. Best one yet.
Not central to this work - but you point out that feminists don't really care for the lives of men: "(That many men’s lives involved endless repetitive labor did not give her pause.)"
But at the same time these women, who are disintrested in understanding men, have never been men, and have never heard men speak of such things, somehow know exactly what men are thinking at all times:
"Beauvoir riffs on the outrage a woman rightly feels when her lover asks her whether she has had an orgasm, a question allegedly designed to demean her and exert his power, for he “likes the woman to feel humiliated, possessed in spite of herself"
I don't believe in telepathy, mind-reading, ESP, tarot cards or seances. Yet Beauvoir, Millet, Dworkin clearly do. How else did they come to know what they claim to know? How does anyone take this sh*t seriously? And in universities!
"One is struck by Dworkin’s remarkable assertion of an allegedly society-wide oppression that one is unaware of until one has been argued into seeing it." Not only "society-wide," but for all of history and pre-history as well. Feminists never answer the question why women for thousands of years never noticed this ubiquitous oppression. Were they stupid? Blind? History is littered with the oppressed rebelling against their oppression, but for some reason it took women until about 1850 to figure their situation out. Not that very many of them did then either, but I suppose feminism started somewhere. Throughout history, there have been countless educated, highly intelligent and powerful women, but, for all intents and purposes, not one of them ever said a word about women's oppression.
thank you Janice for speaking out! The pathological misandry must have been like a demon that haunted her. Sadly, we allow women's studies in academia to poison our young people with this material. I'm saddened at the cowardice and hard heartedness of our leaders, especially men, to allow this to happen. When will we wake up!
Great work, Janice. You know there is a certain kind of person who is just determined to be unhappy, and to spread their misery to others. Living in a world of material abundance, where pretty much everyone has been liberated from hard physical labor and continuous toil, I am almost starting to think that 'affluenza' is a society-wide problem, and feminism's penchant for whining and creating non-problems, was the start of it. How can so many people be so free, and rich, living in a world of plenty and yet be so miserable?
We are supposed to think it is bad to be on the bottom of any hierarchy, but as Janice shows here, feminists eagerly claim that spot because that means, in comedy terms, not boxing terms, that they always get to punch up, always attacking those who are more powerful. Men will always be the oppressors, and it is bad form to punch down, so men's silence is mandatory. Very convenient. When has a movement so willfully sought to diminish its success while exploiting its success to the max? Clinging to a rhetorical advantage is, admittedly, easier than taking responsibility for what feminism has done to men, for starters, in education.
Oh Geez, why do I keep working these 60 hour weeks. As soon as I make the money, my wife and kids use it up!
Great stuff Janice!
This sort of feminism is the distilled essence of borderline personality disorder.
Inappropriately angry, chronically empty, self-harming, and a destroyer of relationships.
I was a bit slow getting to this post. I was chopping logs, making the fire, loading the dishwasher and cleaning the kitchen. My wife's still in bed. Just saying.
"That many men’s lives involved endless repetitive labor did not give her pause." Janice points out the double standard used by feminists to invent their subjection. Most workers, including most men, engage in repetitive labor without prospect of an achievement that lasts, other than filling the needs of the clients that they service. Few men, like few women, have the privilege of work with the hope of long term achievement. Academics exceptionally do, yet is an impressive cv really longer lasting than the needs served by others? The exception, of course, is having children, who are one's permanent contribution to humanity, and to which females make the signal contribution.
Thanks Janice. As always with your writings and talks, you reveal so much more substance than almost all other commentators on gender-related issues. Our supporters were delighted when I revealed to them that you'd accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker at the International Conference on Men's Issues to be held in Budapest in August 2024.
Mike Buchanan
Party leader
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS
Janice you are a clear thinker and are able to clarify the complex. This section is so well said and explains so much of what’s happened, “Personal experience is appropriated and transformed into assumed powerlessness and resentment while gratitude, empathy, stoicism, and responsibility fall away. Boys and men are no longer perceived as fellow human beings with their own life struggles but as antagonists who demean, objectify, and assault.”
Simone de Beauvoir will always be celebrated for having recognized victimhood as the currency on which the feminist empire could be erected. It's interesting that her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, in a book-length essay excoriated the French poet Charles Baudelaire for disingenuously asserting his "otherness" as a lens for discerning and rendering through poetry a more authentic dimension of lived reality. How bitingly ironic that what for Sartre represented Baudelaire's "cowardice" would be rebranded in Beauvoir's typology as an emblem of feminist heroism where it is only through bitterness and self-pity that the value of woman's experience can be truly appreciated.
The worst mistake I ever made was to encourage my happy, healthy, wife who was then a happy healthy mother of 3 to take a university course on feminist literature 42 years ago. By the second week in she was coming home in tears.
It absolutely affected the course of our marriage!
Women are great and you are one of those.
I suppose books like these and exclusive female only naval gazing sit-ins account for the palpable misandry I have felt from a certain type of woman for about 30 years. Misery all around. Well done Beauvoir.
This is the best thing you have written that I have read.
Well done! Your deep dive into feminist history has been great. It seems that this essay is one culmination of that work. Has it been stewing for some time? I feel you have found feminism's central nervous system - and cut it - in a short piece of writing. Imagine all those endless 'academic' papers, periodical essays, books, lectures, etc. all being undermined by something that could, in effect, be printed on a small pamphlet. Best one yet.
Not central to this work - but you point out that feminists don't really care for the lives of men: "(That many men’s lives involved endless repetitive labor did not give her pause.)"
But at the same time these women, who are disintrested in understanding men, have never been men, and have never heard men speak of such things, somehow know exactly what men are thinking at all times:
"Beauvoir riffs on the outrage a woman rightly feels when her lover asks her whether she has had an orgasm, a question allegedly designed to demean her and exert his power, for he “likes the woman to feel humiliated, possessed in spite of herself"
I don't believe in telepathy, mind-reading, ESP, tarot cards or seances. Yet Beauvoir, Millet, Dworkin clearly do. How else did they come to know what they claim to know? How does anyone take this sh*t seriously? And in universities!
"One is struck by Dworkin’s remarkable assertion of an allegedly society-wide oppression that one is unaware of until one has been argued into seeing it." Not only "society-wide," but for all of history and pre-history as well. Feminists never answer the question why women for thousands of years never noticed this ubiquitous oppression. Were they stupid? Blind? History is littered with the oppressed rebelling against their oppression, but for some reason it took women until about 1850 to figure their situation out. Not that very many of them did then either, but I suppose feminism started somewhere. Throughout history, there have been countless educated, highly intelligent and powerful women, but, for all intents and purposes, not one of them ever said a word about women's oppression.
thank you Janice for speaking out! The pathological misandry must have been like a demon that haunted her. Sadly, we allow women's studies in academia to poison our young people with this material. I'm saddened at the cowardice and hard heartedness of our leaders, especially men, to allow this to happen. When will we wake up!
Great work, Janice. You know there is a certain kind of person who is just determined to be unhappy, and to spread their misery to others. Living in a world of material abundance, where pretty much everyone has been liberated from hard physical labor and continuous toil, I am almost starting to think that 'affluenza' is a society-wide problem, and feminism's penchant for whining and creating non-problems, was the start of it. How can so many people be so free, and rich, living in a world of plenty and yet be so miserable?
We are supposed to think it is bad to be on the bottom of any hierarchy, but as Janice shows here, feminists eagerly claim that spot because that means, in comedy terms, not boxing terms, that they always get to punch up, always attacking those who are more powerful. Men will always be the oppressors, and it is bad form to punch down, so men's silence is mandatory. Very convenient. When has a movement so willfully sought to diminish its success while exploiting its success to the max? Clinging to a rhetorical advantage is, admittedly, easier than taking responsibility for what feminism has done to men, for starters, in education.