Imagine, if you will, an article appearing in some sort of high circulation national or international publication. The article is about race relations in America. Specifically, it’s about the decline of white society and the rise of what the author refers to as “hip-hop culture” without ever really bothering to define the terms. Imagine, too, that the article can be summed up thusly:
You know what the biggest problem white people have facing them is? Successful black people. If it hadn’t been for that Martin Luther King, Jr. everyone would be so much happier because white people would still know they were the powerful, awesome innovators who drive culture and the black people would have their own seats on the back of the bus and special schools where they could create their own hip-hop culture and enjoy it to their hearts’ content as long as they didn’t take it in to the white peoples’ houses and neighborhoods and such.
So what black people should do to make sure white, middle-class Americans aren’t afraid of them is to go back to the world before Martin Luther King, Jr. Then we’d all be happy.
Now here’s the kicker of this perversely racist article: the writer is black. It’s just that he’s one of those reflexively self-hating writers who the white establishment keeps around because he keeps writing the sort of absolute bullshit that makes them feel good about being racist douchebags. Whenever somebody points out that they’re racist they point at that guy and say, “But if we’re racist why does he agree with us?” At cocktail parties he also gets to be everyone’s token black friend.
Life works out pretty well for the writer, too. He’s got a regular gig writing absolute bullshit and doesn’t care that he’s selling out the Civil Rights Movement every other day because he gets five cents a word, republication rights, and invited to all the nice parties. And all those black people he’s blaming for their own faults can’t touch him because he usually publishes his schlock in publications the very people he’s excoriating don’t often read. Or, if they do, it’s only a small number and any outrage they offer fizzles.
Until he made it to that major publication. All of the sudden everyone on the planet has read his self-hating bullshit. All of the sudden 90% of the planet is pissed at him and sending him letters filled with righteous indignation. So he decides to fire back. He writes a new article and calls it, “Why Are White Men So Angry?”
In it he acknowledges that his article ignited a firestorm of controversy. But, desperate to keep his position as the darling of white asshole newspaper owners happy, he decides to fire back. The gist of his new article is this:
You know who totally agreed with my article? The Ku Klux Klan. And those guys have been around for, like, a hundred years or so. They even have a website. So they must have their shit together, amirite? Amirite?
Well, guess what? This has just happened. No. I’m not talking about Juan Williams.
I’m talking about Kay Hymowitz. You may remember that I mentioned her pile of shit WSJ article[1] last week. Well, when I saw that Echidne of the Snakes had a new post today entitled “A New Hymowitz Piece. It’s Women’s Fault that Men Hate Them” I just had to go see how deep she’d dug that fucking hole.[2]
The entire article is an exercise in the First Rule of Holes.[3] First, she decided to pick and choose her defenders from comments on random news websites. I shouldn’t have to tell you just how fuck stupid that idea is.
There is one reason and one reason only to read the comments on a random news site. If, for some reason, you are having a high level of hope for humanity and decide you just want to squash that right away so it doesn’t fester, go find yourself a nice Web 2.0 outlet and read away to your heart’s content. You’ll soon find out that about 75-90% of the people who have the time and inclination to both read news articles and comment on them are sad, pathetic, angry loners who have no other way of getting out their serious message that everything that’s wrong with the world is that way because of uppity black people or uppity women or because the writer of the article is a moron who shouldn’t have a job. Most of the rest are adbots trying to get you to click on their website that pairs horny Russian teenagers up with rich men.[4]
So, basically, everyone is a fucking troll. Why? Because newspapers don’t understand the one thing that every single blogger figures out as soon as they get more than two regular readers: moderation is key. They seem to think that slapping up a comments thread is a quick way to drive circulation. But, in reality, it’s just a quick way to find out that most of humanity possesses at least one absolutely abhorrent opinion about something. And the joy of the internet is that they can congregate.
So when Hymowitz says this:
But a lot of the responses unwittingly proved my point—and another one: Men are really, really angry. Consider: “We’re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren’t any desirable American women. They’ve been bred to abuse men.”
My response is, “Yeah. Good fucking job. You found a self-absorbed, misogynistic asshole on the internet. Want a cookie?” But she’s not done yet, nosiree.
This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: “Sorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you."
Okay let me lay this out: I own a PS3. I own an Xbox 360. I own a PS2. I own a N64. I own a Super Nintendo. I own an original Nintendo. I have DirecTV hooked up to three goddamn televisions. I have high-speed internet.
I haven’t turned on any of my video game consoles in at least six months.[5] I follow sports but rarely enjoy watching ESPN. I don’t watch porn.[6] I’m actually offended to be lumped in with the jackass who wrote that comment. And you know what else? Most of the men I know would feel the same way.
See, Mr. Seattle Post Intelligencer Commenter is a whiny, entitled jackass who is trying to make his whiny, entitled jackassery the fault of someone else. This is what whiny, entitled jackasses do. You can’t be a whiny, entitled jackass if you’re willing to engage in honest self-assessment and say, “You know, maybe the reason no one likes me is because I’m a whiny, entitled jackass.”
The problem is that if you’re the sort of hack idiot who does Phyllis Schlafly proud whilst selling out your own gender and the fruits of the women’s liberation movement, the only option you have to find men who agree with you is to find whiny, entitled jackasses. You should also not be surprised to wake up and find the weeping ghost of Betty Friedan sitting at the foot of your bed.[7] And just be glad you’re not getting the ghost of Susan B. Anthony. I hear she will fuck your shit right up.[8]
Anyway, because the morass that is drive-by misogyny in the comments section of the Seattle Post Intelligencer just isn’t enough, Hymowitz decided to just drive the point home that she has no fucking clue what most men think. And she did it with the boneheaded glee of child of sub-average intelligence running around in a poisoned candy shop. To wit:
Check out the websites like names like MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), Nomarriage.com, or EternalBachelor.com (“Give Modern Women the Husband They Deserve. None.”). Or read popular bloggers like the pseudonymous Roissy, a ferociously caustic dissector of female “sluttiness” and “shit tests” (attempts to manipulate men). There are dozens upon dozens of gurus and counselors who publish posts like “42 Things Wrong With American Women” while chat forums ruminate over how “American Women Suck.”
As an experiment, I decided to see exactly how long it would take me to get offended by Hymowitzes list of e-supporters. If you’re the sort of person who gambles on blog post and takes the over…sorry. I clicked on the first (Not Safe For Anyone Ever) link. I got this:
Below is an article published by the Times of India that attempts to reinforce the delusion that females-tending-towards-a-more-mature-disposition continue to perpetuate: "Women are at their attractive bets [sic] when they are 31— that’s the precise age when, according to a survey, they are considered most beautiful.”
For those keeping track at home, this is the very first paragraph in the very first post on the very first link Hymowitz slapped up. It doesn’t get any better. Really. The article then asks the question, “Older women are attractive to who, for what?”
Because, really, what self-respecting man would want to bang one of those 31-year-old biddys, anyway? Everyone knows that those dumb bitches are really past their prime once their old enough to graduate from college. Really, 21-22 is the ideal age. Their old enough to get drunk so you can tell the police that, yes, she consented. She was just too fucking drunk to remember.[9]
Protip, Kay Hymowitz: the whiny, entitled jackasses you went to in order to find men who would defend your excrement hate you. How do I know that? Well, number one, you’re a woman and they fucking hate women. Number two, you appear to be above the age of 23. And they hate old women more than they hate women, with “old” being any number above the number of Natty Ices in case they just bought so they can party all weekend with their PS3s and internet porn and whatnot.[10]
See, the problem with men isn’t that women suddenly have a place in the world. The problem with men isn’t that they’re a bunch of boneheaded frat boys. The problem with men is that some of them are whiny, entitled jackasses and you’re pretending that all of us are, therefore, like that.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is as simple as it is depressing. As much as Kay Hymowitz hates and disrespects women, she hates and disrespects men more. She just likes that the checks they write for her Aunt Kay routine pay the bills. That being the case, she’s more than willing to pretend that the most odious of men are actually the ones who get it all right.
Now if only we could get the ghost of Virginia Woolf to pop in and tell Hymowitz to STFU. She’s really fucking it up for everyone else…
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[1]Book excerpt. Whatever.
[2]Since I was kinda busy at the time, though, I outsourced the initial outrage to Personal Failure. She’s good at that sort of thing.
[3]When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
[4]Yahoo News comment threads: the most traumatic place on Web 2.0. I think I’d rather watch 2 Girls 1 Cup.
[5]In the interests of full disclosure, I have been playing Mass Effect and Empire: Total War on my laptop a bunch lately. But the point still stands, dammit!
[6]I spent all my time when I was a Christian assuming that if I ever watched porn I’d get addicted. Then I actually saw some and I realized that it’s actually a waste of time. I compare it to horror movies. When I was little I assumed I shouldn’t watch them because they’d be terrifying. Then I saw some of the ones that had scared me in commercial form and realized they were pretty damn stupid.
That said, a good psychological horror film can still be terrifying. Event Horizon messed me up good. Cube…oh, man, don’t even get me started on Cube.
[7]My desire to make a pun on “the feminine mistake” is overpowering right now. I’ve decided to isolate it to the footnotes, where it can do the least amount of harm.
[8]For some reason I always have to look Susan B. Anthony up to make sure that I’m thinking of the suffragist and not the woman who, according to legend if not fact, made the first American flag. Why I get Susan B. Anthony and Betsy Ross confused is completely beyond me.
[9]If you need me, I’ll be in the tub attempting to wash my soul.
[10]For the record, if you want to see some actual good articles about dating on the internet, you could do much worse than the oktrends blog sponsored by OKCupid. They actually base their arguments off of statistics and hard evidence gathered on their website. Particularly apropos to this discussion is an article entitled “The Case for an Older Woman.” And, yes, that is an article written by a man. Why do you ask?
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