About ten years ago, I dropped acid with a very close friend, and we went out to our local Goth club for the evening. An evening I still remember as being, possibly, the most amusing acid trip I've ever experienced.
It wasn't particularly visual: I never really got much in the way of exciting visual hallucinations. It was more that every single person there that we talked to seemed to be parodying their own personalities, so exquisitely themselves they seemed. Everything Natasha said was
so Natasha, every gesture of Lou's was quintessential Lou, the way that Pat left halfway through a conversation was, well, you know how Pat is.
I imagine that the people we observed that night wouldn't see it that way. And that, in defending themselves - no, you can't see straight through me, I'm more complex than that, stop reducing me to a caricature - we would have merely felt our point was proved. The more they defended themselves against the charge of being themselves, the more perfectly they played their parts.
Like this.Ace, for those of you who haven't had the dubious pleasure of encountering him, is this guy who…
Well, let's go through the article. I can't think of a simpler way to describe him.
He links to
a woman who, at first glance, seems to be trying the classic trick of playing the anti-feminist card - presumably she labours under the belief that by proving her own hatred of women, men will like her despite her being, you know, a woman. Which works for Ace, at least to the extent that he can point to her as a Real Woman and contrast her with the Straw Feminist, who is wearing the mask of his current obsession,
Amanda Marcotte.
Unlike Ms. Marcotte, this woman has actual, empirical, real-world experience in the bedroom. She speaks about more than airy, untested theory.
Ace knows this, of course, because since he himself wouldn't bed* the terrifying Ms Marcotte, it must follow that neither would any other man, and that therefore she must be unbedded. Ms Forksplit, by comparison, a charming name if ever I read one, seems to be saying what Ace wants to hear, and therefore she must be, like, getting laid all the time.
She does allow that she likes to know a man has some feminist training, though, so she knows that when he's calling her a dirty filthy whore who needs to be punished he's really doing a dirty-talk fantasy thing, not really, you know, expressing his genuine belief that she's a dirty filth whore who needs to be punished.
But apart from Mysterious Drifters usually played by Don Johnson or Mickey Rourke who come into a small town during the swelter of the summer in order to rob banks, shake up the quiet rhythms of small-town life, and (ambiguously) rape women, how many real dudes actually think of women this way?
Well, none, obviously. I mean, the very idea of it. Men, thinking that women need to be punished via ("ambiguous") rape? Heavens forfend!
Except the AutoAdmit boys, who consider that
rape threats (including posting identifying information including home addresses) against high ranking female law students are protected speech, and/or just a joke. Except the assholes who sent Kathy Sierra into hiding by posting rape threats. And the assholes who caused
Melissa McEwan to quit her job with John Edwards by coming to her house at night and threatening her. And the men who
stoned a teenage girl ** to death in front of a crowd betraying sexual excitement. And the men who think it's okay to threaten rape against politically unpopular right-wing women in order to punish them for their policies.
All of those cases, all of them, are examples of women stepping outside the boundaries set for them by men. And how do men choose to punish them?
And don't think it's escaped my attention that the men he chooses as examples of this oh-so-evil attitude are the 'Mysterious Drifters' idolised by teenage boys everywhere. The hell?
Masterfully ignoring what Ms Forksplit is actually saying, which is that dirty talk is hotter from a guy who is half reluctant to do it, from whose tongue the words are transgressive rather than a statement of his real beliefs, who gets the same illicit thrill from whispering filth as his partner, Ace goes on to miss the point some more.
Can any guys (or lesbians) conjure anything more depressing that having sex with a wholesale subscriber to strong-form feminist theory like Amanda Marcotte? Is anyone else's idea of dirty-talk Baby, I am going to empower you all night long... ?
I could half forgive Ace for his puerile misogyny if he was actually funny. But come on. For a start, this paragraph smells more like sour grapes then a pub at chucking out time. Secondly, he missed a classic chance to make a 'hot, sticky, white Holy Spirit' joke.
And thirdly, Ace himself has provided the answer.
What's more miserable than sleeping with a feminist man? Sleeping with a guy who considers female genitalia to be the equivalent of bacon and playdoh.
And then there's his closing line. His punchline, the joke to which the entire post has been building up:
Really, politics has no place in light conversation and/or light bondage and discipline.
Dude, if that's the best your tongue and your hands can come up with, no wonder you don't get laid. Seriously.
*Although I strongly suspect that his bedroom walls are covered in photos of her, such is the breath and depth of his little obsession.
**The link is to a post at which the YouTube video is linked. I'm not linking to the video itself, because it makes me cry.
