Archive for February, 2010|Monthly archive page
RE: Would you eat a fetus?
Comments (6)I posed this to a pro-choicer the other day and I got this response:
“No. But I wouldn’t eat my own arm if t were removed from my body either.”
My response was:
“Because you don’t eat human tissue?”
It’s almost too easy with these people.
“No, for the same reason I don’t eat my own shit.”
Seriously?
“If you take a dump and don’t flush it, is it going to grow up into a person?”
“Well George Bush had to come from somewhere!” H-yuck!
“I’m being serious.”
“No, but if I remove a fetus at 12 weeks it won’t either. It’s as alive as my turd.”
“Point taken, but there’s an if in your answer there. If. If you consciously choose to remove it from your body it will not be alive. You can choose not to poop until your colon explodes from the pressure – your shit is never going to vote or pay taxes. It will never be alive.”
“Yes, neither will my fetus unless I choose to let it.”
“Did I miss something or did you just admit that you are choosing whether or not to let something be alive? How is that different than if I were to put a gun to your head right now and then begin a moral debate about whether I have the right to choose whether or not I pull the trigger? It’s the same thing.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Why not? It’s one life making a choice about the aliveness or deadness of another life, right?”
“Because I am already alive, I exist independently. A fetus is potentially a life and that’s the difference.”
“So it’s okay to destroy potential life?”
“Let me answer you with another question: in theory, your wife ovulates every month and you let your sperm die in your balls without fertilizing an egg. The fact that the two of you could be creating life every month but don’t is the same thing as a woman who has a fetus inside her and chooses not to let it keep growing. In both cases it’s potential life that isn’t being allowed to live.”
“Except that a sperm and an egg are each only 23 chromosomes. They’re gametes. They might as well be fingernail clippings. Without each other they aren’t life.”
“Yes, and that’s my point about a fetus and a mother. A fetus must have a mother for life. You choose not to give your wife’s egg a sperm in the same way that I choose not to let my fetus have me. If you’re allowed to not knock up your wife then shouldn’t I be allowed to not let a baby grow inside me?”
“There’s a critical difference here. Let me illustrate it with an example. Suppose you are on the jury of a trial for two men who are accused of killing a woman. There can be no doubt to the facts of the case (e.g., for the same of argument, just assume that it really happened the way I’m going to describe it). One of the men held a woman’s head under the water until she drowned. The other man was simply passing by when he happened upon this scene and witnessed the first man drowning the woman. He didn’t do anything to stop the other man. He just stood by and let the woman drown. How do you, the jury, find for each of these men?”
“Well, I believe according to the law, only the man who did the drowning would be guilty. I don’t think you’re required by law to intervene.”
“Why do you think that is? Why is the law that way?”
“Because who knows, if you tried to stop the guy, maybe he’d drown you too.”
“And because there’s a difference between standing idly by and an overt act.”
“Yes.”
“So you see where I’m going with this? If I let my wife’s eggs go unfertilized month after month, I’m just passing idly by. If you abort your fetus, you’re committing an overt act. If you did nothing to intervene, your baby has a pretty good chance of coming out alive, whereas if I do nothing to intervene, my wife has no chance of getting pregnant. Right?”
“Okay. Then by that argument, I’m required to let the baby come out of me. Okay. Once it comes out, I do nothing. I don’t clean its lungs or anything, I just let it sit where it lands after plopping out of my vagina and walk away. The baby will die unless I intervene, but I’m not required to intervene. But haven’t girls gone to jail for doing exactly that?”
“Yes, I believe they have.”
“So it’s inconsistent then. If the whole overt-passerby-thing can be inconsistent after the baby is born then why can’t it be inconsistent before the baby is born?”
“Because doesn’t a giant part of the pro-choice argument hinge on the fact that you’re not alive until after you’re born?”
“That’s irrelevant. That’s a different conversation altogether.”
“No, it’s the conversation. The reason you’re not allowed to let your baby die by ignoring it after it’s born is because it’s a fact of mammallian and therefore human reproduction that babies cannot survive on their own without intervention, and we make the mother legally responsibe for the care of her own baby, because somebody has to care for it. Pro-choicers agree with this because it’s the only way they can respond to the easiest question in the world, which is if I can kill a 6 month old fetus, why can’t I kill a 1 month old baby? When does a baby gain the protection of the state? The answer is always birth.”
“Okay, then by that logic, shouldn’t it be illegal for someone to ignore another human being in desperate needs? Let’s change the scenario so there’s no crime involved, let’s just say that a woman has fallen into the river and can’t swim so she’s drowning. She cries out for help but you just ignore her and let her drown. Are you a criminal?”
“In my mind, yes. If I were on a jury hearing that case I would charge the person with negligent homicide if I could conclude that he had a reasonable chance of bringing aid to the drowning woman without incurring undo risk to himself. I believe the same is generally true with negligence cases in children. If a woman is judged to be incompetent to care for a baby then she isn’t legally responsible for letting it die, e.g., suppose a mentally retarded girl got pregnant, gave birth, and didn’t know what to do with the baby and so it died. Would we lock her up? Probably not.”
“But the law says that the guy is innocent, he doesn’t have to help the drowning woman.”
“Correct. He’d probably walk.”
“So that’s not murder but abortion is?”
“Yes – again, overt acts here. It’s the difference between preventing a drowning and actively causing one.”
“What if the baby were going to be born with some kind of hideous genetic disease?”
“Should we actively kill all the people who have genetic diseases?”
“No, but…”
“There’s no but. If you kill your fetus because it’s going to be born with a genetic disease and you follow the rest of my argument so far then you’d have to acknowledge that it’s also okay to kll adults with genetic diseases.”
“Well, fine, forget that for a minute, if your wife were pregnant with a kid who, say, had flipper arms and feet, would you want to abort the baby?”
“Yes, I probably would want to. Being the parent to a severely disabled child is probably one of the hardest things you can do in life. Do you always shy away from challenges?”
“It’s not about me, it’s about the kid…”
“That’s such nonsense. The flipper baby fetus doesn’t have a voice. It won’t have a voice until it’s a toddler, if it survives that long. When you abort flipper baby, you’re doing it for you. I guarantee that when your child is old enough to understand what you mean and you ask her if she wants you to kill her, she will say no.”
“Well not everybody is strong enough…”
“Yes. I agree with that statement. But not everybody is strong enough to resist the urge to kill other people or rape children or commit a variety of other crimes. Should they walk because they lack moral strength?”
“No, probably not.”
“If it’s amoral to kill and harm each other as adults it should be amoral to kill and harm our unborn children. I agree that there’s something to be said about allowing adults to decide whether they are up to the task of parenting at all let alone children with major health problems and subsequently allowing those adults to decide for themselves whether they are morally okay with having an abortion, but don’t you see how there’s something to be said about everything that we declare illegal? The starving child who steals, the jealous husband who kills his wife’s lover… all of these could be justified in some way, and as you can see in court, they often are. Sometimes the very same style of defense you’re using to defend abortion has worked in criminal trials where adults are accused of victimizing other adults.”
“I guess…”
“That’s why laws are laws. We come together to decide what we collectively call moral, and then we take that a step higher and come together to decide what we collectively call both amoral and illegal. This entire debate is all smoke and mirrors, because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether enough of the people of our civilization find abortion abhorrent enough to make it illegal.”
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Which is why I believe that Roe v. Wade was outrageous. We are a society of 300 million and we’re going to let 5 assholes in robes decide this for us?”
“Hmm… good point, but that’s how our country works.”
“I disagree. I find that to be an example of how our country doesn’t work. That’s called legilstating from the bench. 5 Supreme Court justices decided to overturn the law that was on the books that said abortion is illegal despite the fact that Constitution does not even begin to broach this subject at all. Let me ask you: why do you think pro-choicers favor Roe v. Wade?”
“Because it agrees with their position?”
“Yes, and because they’re absolutely terrified that if it were put to a public vote they would find that the pro-life vote is stronger than the pro-choice vote. When the curtain is closed and you’re in the booth you’re free to express your morals without being labeled a religious zealot or invoke the ire of militant feminists who have somehow made a woman’s right to do whatever the hell she wants all the time more important than virtually everything else up to and including the sanctity of life that can’t defend itself against the whims of its mother.”
“I’m not sure that the majority is pro-life.”
“Would you at least agree with me that we, the people, are owed the right to find out, and that the two of us will both agree that we will respect whichever decision is reached by the moral total of our society?”
“Yes.”
The Ups and Downs of Leadership
I am a natural leader. I can’t help it, I just am.
The problem is that I don’t like to be a leader. It has taken me years to understand this dichotomy but after the same pattern has repeated itself again and again I finally have come to an understanding of what leadership really means and why I don’t like it.
Whenever I join any organization which has come together to accomplish some kind of goal, whether it’s a business or a construction project or a game of intramural badminton, I do so with the intention of just being one of the guys on the team. Invariably, as time goes on, for some reasom people band around me and I find myself unwittingly in charge of something. Sometimes in charge of everything. Even when I make conscious efforts to dissuade people from following me they do.
One trait that I have that I find entirely lacking in the majority of the population is sheer assertiveness. When we face a challenge I am not afraid to state how I think we should overcome it, and most people are. This is interpreted as strength and people are drawn to strength.
The downside – and what I now understand is the source of the prevailing fear – is that once you lead, you become responsible – and responsibility is something that I find most people don’t want. This, I believe, is why so many people are drawn to systems that trade personal freedom for freedom from responsibility. Most people can’t handle it.
It’s a stressful thing to transition from a contributor on a team to its leader. Now the group that were once your peers are now relying on you and your decisions to bring them success.
There are two types of leader in this world, and they are defined by how they respond to this responsibility. A member of the first group treats his position as a kind of reward and views his underlings as means to an end. He doesn’t care if the group succeeds or fails as long as he personally gains from the experience. A member of the second group treats his position as a kind of burden and views his underlings as dependents. He cares deeply if the group succeeds or fails, and treats the shortcomings of even a single one of his underlings as a shortcoming of him.
I believe the vast majority of big business leaders fall into the first category. I believe this because I fall into the second category, and I know that the stress that I experience from taking personal responsibility for even small groups is overwhelming, so taking the helm of an organization that feeds the families of thousands of people would be a level of stress that most people would find overwhelming. One of the biggest ways I’ve grown in the last few months is to learn how to overcome all the stress and fear and anxiety and all of the other seriously difficult challenges that type 2 leaders face.
I don’t have any military training but from what I understand they teach their officers to think like 2 type leaders. There’s a common expression in the navy that goes like this: there are no bad crews, only bad captains. Their entire command structure is based around this: if the mission fails, it’s the commanding officer’s fault. The flipside, of course, is that when the mission succeeds, the commanding officer gets the glory.
The reason that I do not like to be a leader, I have concluded, is that for me, I feel very bad when my team fails yet I do not feel very good when we succeed. I very readily assume blame but very rarely take credit. This creates an emotional imbalance that leaves me down most of the time.
I believe that George W. Bush is a type 2 leader. I think he genuinely took the condition of the country as his own personal responsibility. Even though a great majority of the factors that affected the state of the nation were completely and utterly out of his control, he still felt as though he should have done something better than what he did. By the time he gave that TARP speech in late 2008, you could see that this burden was beginning to crush him. He had no confidence left, no strength.
Barack Obama is a type 1 leader. I believe he pursued the presidency so that he could be president; that’s it, and that’s all. The best interests of the nation – what the people actually want – are secondary to what he wants. Barack Obama is still pushing health legislation that this country does not want, yet he continues because it’s important to Barack Obama that Barack Obama’s legacy is that he accomplished something – anything – as a president. The man wants to be remembered for something. It’s about prestige for him. It’s about him.
Understanding the nature of leadership is important in selecting a leader. Both have pros and cons. Type 1 leaders may be personally motivated but no captain wants to sink his own ship. Type 2 leaders may be much better to follow but they run the risk of melting under the pressure. And with all things, these types are just extremes on the ends of a sliding scale. Nobody is purely one or the other. The very best leaders are the ones who can balance their level of personal stake as the leader of an enterprise with the demands of the position.
Yes, take personal responsibility for your team – but not too much responsibility. I am learning how to do this, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice. There’s no substitute for experience.
Up is the Most Depressing Movie I’ve Ever Seen
Seriously. I wonder who decided to call it Up. What a cruel, ironic title.
The opening montage of that movie is the most depressing sequence I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. It was worse than the Butterfly Effect. A miscarriage? Really? Was that really necessary?
I couldn’t enjoy a single shred of the film because the entire premise is that this old guy waited until after the girl he loved his entire life was dead to finally get around to doing what he promised they’d to together when they were children.
The reason it’s so depressing is that everybody has things they wish they could do – even outlandish things like move a house to the top of a waterfall on a different continent – that they know in the back of their minds they’ll never do because the demands of real life outweigh childish dreams. Obviously the point of the movie is that you can do them no matter how outlandish, but unfortunately it’s not inspiring because it was their dream, not his dream, and he waited too long.
The little bit at the end where they attempt to change it around by insinuating that this couple’s “boring” suburban life was in fact just as good of an adventure as visiting South America was way too little way too late.
That movie would have been a thousand times better if they hadn’t killed off his wife and they had taken the trip together.
Crumble
Have you ever noticed how completely and rapidly someone will crumble when you challenge their ideas?
Lately, with the advent of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), a large swath of the population likes to blog in miniature: a link to some news article with a 2 line commentary. Common examples are links to small victories or setbacks in some stupid social movement like gay marriage or save the seals or vote for Obama or whichever nonsense is hot right now.
As you can probably tell I derive a great deal of pleasure from challenging people with rather simple questions. For example, if someone on my feeds posts a link to a pro-gay-marriage, I will often challenge them with my personal favorite: why gays but not polygamists?
I find that most of the time, these people have no actual thought process behind the kind of things they claim to believe and are totally incapable of engaging in even the most elementary debates on the subject. They’ve latched on to some position for whatever reason, but can’t or won’t attempt to justify it. They just crumble. Blown down with barely a breath.
At least half the time, if they respond at all, it’s generally some thinly veiled or blatant ad hominem or something entirely irrelevant and unrelated. Nobody on the soap box likes to be challenged.
Well, almost nobody. I welcome it. I love it when people challenge my ideas. It gives me an opportunity to prove just how right I am. And since I like to believe that my ideas and my evidence for them are very strong, I don’t get easily phased when someone disagrees with me. Does it seem likely that the weaker your position is, the more afraid you would be to debate it? It does to me.
Debunking Global Warming
Watch this documentary. Based on what I knew about prehistoric climate, etc. etc. I was skeptical about man-made global warming the minute I heard about it, but this documentary proves it to be a hoax in my mind. It touched upon 100% of my suspicions (e.g., faulty science, greed-driven motives, etc.)
Regardless of whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, everybody needs to watch this video about climate change. It’s a multi-part series; here’s a link to part 1.
Secret Life of the American Teenager
This is the worst show on TV.
Last night while my wife was cooking me a delicious dinner I was channel surfing and I landed on this piece of crap. I had heard a little bit about this by the inundation of ads that ran for it for months on end, kind of like that stupid show Leverage which beat me over the head with the fact that the Tim Allen-look-a-like dufus main character won an Emmy like twenty years ago or something.
For those of you blessedly ignorant of this piece of crap, the brief recount is: let’s make a stupid TV series to ride on the coattails of that stupid Ellen Page movie, Juno.
I watched about 30 minutes on and off, out of sequence. I wanted to barf.
It seems like the writers of Dawson’s Creek finally ran out of money and mercilessly injected themselves back into the business of writing dialogue that only college-educated adults would be capable of enunciating designed for characters who are supposedly teenagers to recite. Yes, it’s one of those stupid shows where 14, 15, 16 year-old boys and girls speak like coherent 30, 40, or 50 year-olds. As much as I loathe Laguna Beach, at least the lines themselves in that piece of shit are improvised which adds at least one dimension of believability to the ridiculous story arcs they put together on that show. If you want me to believe that I’m watching anything about the life of a teenager, you can start by making me believe that I’m listening to teenagers actually speaking like teenagers isntead of reciting a memorized script that is so far out of left field it would make your head spin.
I watched the titular character perform a monlogue that lasted at least 30 seconds long in which she waxes philosophical idiotic about the deep meaning of kissing some random asshole. They made a girl who is supposed to be a sophomore or a junior in high school use the words, “husband material”. By the way, she’s speaking to her bumbling beta-male father whose wife left him and at another point in the episode called his ex-wife to brag about witnessing some completely irrelevant and anticlimactic moment of faux-bonding between his two daughters who were talking about masturbating at the time. During this conversation he preemptively apologized to his ex-wife for possibly interrupting a date with her new boyfriend. Yeah.
Speaking of sisters, the girl who has a baby has a little sister who looks like vaguely like Selena Gomez. At first, I was put off by a very inappropriate casting decision: a caucasian girl does not have a latina younger sister. However, after witnessing the manner in which they portray these two girls’ bumbling beta cuckold father, I was able to suspend my disbelief and merely assume that they’re successfully implying that his whore wife banged the gardener. Like mother, like daughter.
The show was pitched as this incredible story about teen motherhood, but the baby appeared on camera for less than 1 minute in the 30 through which I suffered. The fact that this idiot girl had a baby at all seemed like nothing more than a conversation piece, which is fitting given what the show is really about: artifically inflated, unrelenting, over-the-top fake teen sex drama.
My wife and I invented a drinking game to be played while watching this stupid piece of shit series: every time a character under the age of 18 says the word “sex” or anything related (“condom”, “masturbation”) you take a shot. Any time an innuendo to that effect is made, you take a sip. You’d be absolutely hammered in about 10 minutes of watching this crap.
Every single scene of the episode that I watched featured some dopey teenage boy using every sappy, exaggereted, feminized, beta maneuver in the book to get into a girl’s pants. “I think I love you, we have a connection.” But the girls, being sassy, intelligent, totally rational creatures of the 21st century are all wise to their games. Like the saps they are, the boys are led around by their dicks into having stupid conversations about “us” and the girls create fake drama amongst themselves by trying to steal each other’s pandering lap-dog suitor.
One particularly loathesome scene is when the very ugly female principal of the school who tries to look and act like Rachel Maddow gives a lecture to a dippy blonde idiot girl who they made sure to inform us was a Christian. In a very lame attempt to portray all religious people as shallow hypocritical douchers, this character plasters banners all over school with the phrase “just say me” which is a campaign to promote female masturbation as an alternative to sexual intercourse with boys – and the Jewish principal is of course not cool with that and smugly makes her take them all down.
At a later point in the story, they use this “just say me” plot element to give the teen mother character an opportunity to make a smirky face and imply that she’s going to go up to her bedroom and masturbate. Wow, how edgey.
Later, another particularly loathsome scene involves Ms. Maddow hosting some kind of preposterous mother/daughter dance ball at the high school gym during which she lectures all the attendees about how her grandmother survived the concentration camps by escaping to her happy fantasy cave of memory in which she, her sister, and her mother were dancing together in the living room while her father played the violin. The visual there is enough to make you want to gag, and this scene was obviously injected for no other reason that to take an already preachy, sanctimonious stupid show and make it even more preachy, more sanctimonious, and more devastatingly stupid.
One of the teen mother character’s half-asian female friends approaches teen mother at said dance. Teen mother proceeds in the presense of her mother and her hermanita to pull a condom out of her purse and hand it to half-asian girl, who leaves the scene with a stupid smirky face with the implication that she was going to go get boned later that night. Her little sister, whose sole purpose on the show is to be a bratty little emo bitch and remind her bigger sister in disgust that she did, in fact, have a baby at the age of 15, pretends to be disgusted while her mother accusatorily insists to know if teen mother is … get this… having SEX! No way! Seriously?! What follows is some kind of rambling monologue in which the teen mother defends herself for having a condom… blah blah blah… you can just imagine the drivel.
This is seriously the worst show I have ever seen. It baffles me that the following chain of events could have actually happened, seeing as each one of these should have an independent likelihood of nearly zero: someone thought this premise was a good idea; someone actually wrote a script for a pilot of this series; a network actually bought this script and funded a pilot; a casting director was actually able to find people to star in this show; the actors were able to recite this script without becoming nauseous; the network, after watching the pilot, bought the show; the public, after watching this show, didn’t smash in their TV sets with a sledge and vow never to watch television again; advertisers actually bought air time during this time slot.
It just plain baffles me. This is the worst show on TV.
What is a college degree worth?
I would like to thank feminists and SWPL yuppie assholes all over the planet earth for creating a culture in which a college education for females is so highly valued that these bright, young women are willing to sell their virginity for tuition money.
Wait, wait. Let’s not sanitize the act. Let me rephrase.
Bright, young women are whoring themselves out to the highest bidder in exchange for a degree in liberal arts.
When is it time to take a step back and ask ourselves if the moral fabric of our society is more important than a generation of hyper-educated girls, many of whom will waste their education (and I use that tem loosely, because 90% of college degrees and college in general is worthless).
I went to college. My wife went to college. Neither of us would have been willing to sink to that level of depravity to fund what was, in essense, a 4 year extension of childhood, except better since we weren’t living with our parents.
Are you happy, feminists? Is this the future you envisioned for you brood of daughters who are equal to your sons?
Eve Ensler: Reality Check
CNN fell over itself to link to this drivel. Real news network? What the hell does Eve Ensler have to do with anything? Is she even relevant anymore?
Relevent enough for me to link this crap to you and comment on it, I suppose.
It’s not hard to understand why Eve Ensler gives a rise to her female audience. To her credit, she’s a powerful speaker and there were bits of her monologue that resonated even with me, the coldest, most heartless of men who she never references directly but is always looming in the background as the implied antagonist when she uses phrases like “violence against women.”
We don’t get to choose which pair of genitals or which brain in our skulls we’re born with, any more than we get to choose where on the earth we’re born, which language we speak, whether we’re rich or poor, and so on. Because of all of this, it’s easy to understand how the world has people who make a career out of making us feel good about the hand we were dealt.
In a sense, the “girl power” line that Ensler delivers is really just another incarnation of the emotion behind nationalism. Let’s feel good how lucky we were to be randomly born a certain way, because the inverse is to be miserable about it, and since it’s totally out of our hands and immutable once done, we might as well be proud of who we are instead of hate who we are.
Now I know where this idiot got her big ideas about “Feminism 4.0″ or whatever it is she calls it. Eve Ensler won’t shut up about empathy. If you believed Ensler, men are all heartless, senseless dolts who are incapable of detecting social and emotional cues and that women are soulfull heartful magical little fairies with extraordinary powers of perception that extend to literally “feeling” how global warming is hurting Mother Gaia. I’m not exaggerating.
This isn’t a play that hasn’t been run about a million times before or that won’t be played about a million times in the future: take what has been historically perceived as a giant, gaping weakness and instead attempt to spin it as if it’s a strength. Bravo, Eve.
I also disagree wholeheartedly with the assertion that men are not as or more empathetic than women. We usually translate the broad concept of “empathy” into the more practical and easily understood “social awareness.” You would think that Eve after all her many, many years afoot on planet Earth that she would have met both men and women who are socially inept and men and women who seem to have a sixth sense. Is it possible that she has, but by and large Ensler has observed that women tend to show better social understanding than men? Wouldn’t that be stereotyping, then, for her to assert that social capabilities – i.e., empathy – is a female trait? Oh, but I digress.
Eve, being born a woman and having no clue what it is like to walk through life with a pair of balls, would probably be surprised to find that did she have balls she would likely be just as observant and in touch with the emotions of others as she is without them. I certainly have no trouble understanding the emotions of the people around me and detecting how people really feel as well or better than most women that I know.
But you might not guess that if you were to interact with me, or other men like me. The difference between a man and a woman is not the absence or presence of the traits that Eve Ensler harps upon as chief femine virtues exclusive to the fairer sex. No. The difference is the actions we take – or don’t take – as a result of those perceptions.
Let me illustrate this with some examples.
Suppose John and Jane observe that Spot is unhappy. Which is more likely to attempt to comfort Spot?
Suppose John and Jane get into a fight and are sore at each other. Which is more likely to attempt to reconcile the situation?
Suppose Spot dies. Who is more likely to cry?
In the narrow-minded world of Eve Ensler, when John ignores the fact that Spot is unhappy because Spot is a dog and John doesn’t give a damn, Eve interprets this as one of two things: John is so “emotionally disconnected” that he is oblivous to Spot’s condition or that he “lacks compassion” to comfort Spot.
So the entire premise that Eve has been selling lately is that we all need to find our “inner girl” – e.g., the part of us that reacts like, well, a girl, to every situation emotioanlly rather than rationally. She’d probably tell me that if I advocated otherwise that I’m exactly part of the problem she’s trying to address. She’d probably also try to convince me that this is part of my conditioning and that had I only been raised differently I would think differently.
Lady, if you want to claim that girls are magic empathetic creatures in spite of the cultural upbringing they experienced, you’ll need to accept the fact that I’m a rational pragmatic creature in spite of the cultural upbringing I experienced. The fact that our culture tends to reward rationalism at the expense of emotional responses – an observation of Eve’s that I concur is right on the money – is immaterial to the reality that it is in my nature to not behave like a girl, because I am a man, and testosterone is a helluva drug.
What do we mean by cultural upbringing anyway? Well, probably school. Of course school is going to put an emphasis ratoinality and practicality, because an education is preparing us to function as adults in a rational, pratical environment – namely, the natural world, and the civilization we’ve built adherent to its rules. Math is a cold, heartless bitch, and so are engineers. I can’t integrate a partial differential equation with the power of my girlish emotions. I can’t feel my way through bridge construction. I’m not going to convince a water molecule to split into two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen with a weep story about rape.
Look, men have a monopoly on basically every useful trait. We’re bigger, stronger, smarter, faster. If women want to pretend that they have some magic emotional third eye to add one more plus in their column (the only other being raising small children, which men generally could not care less about), then so be it. But don’t expect we men to actually take that seriously because we know better.
If a feminist could spend one day as a man, she would stop being a feminist. If a man could spend one day as a woman, he’d probably spend all day in front of a mirror fondling himself. I was going to make a comment about how if he had to spend a second day as a woman he’d probably put a bullet in his head, but then I realized that no; he’d probably spend it in front of a mirror fondling himself.
There’s just no way I can take feminism seriously. They’re just so misguided.
I think most of the men who would possibly defend and/or buy into this crap are young men who haven’t experienced living with women for protracted periods of time. The more you see of them, the less you can possibly believe about the crap that Eve Ensler and her ilk spout ad infinitum. That is, of course, if you actually view what they say with an air of skepticism. If you bindly believe everything you hear without testing it against your own unbiased observations then of course you’ll keep drinking the Koolaid… but my own eyes and my own experiences don’t lie. When reality does not mesh with the words of feminism, well, I can only conclude that the words of feminism are giant lies crafted to make girls feel better about themselves.
I’m all for girls feeling better about themselves – whatever makes them happy. I only have a problem with it when I’m expected to actually take it seriously. Give me a break.
