Ah, but it’s so much easier to project that self-loathing outwards.
Speaking of woman-hating, I finally roused myself to read this article by Joel Stein that I saw referenced in an Echidne post. Hoo boy does Joel Stein hate women. He doesn’t seem to actually know women or how they behave of that they’re different people. This op-ed reads like a misogynist screed on a blog written by a man who is angry because actual women avoid him, and his entire conception of what they’re like stems from porn and old movies.
You know how ladies, when they don’t get what they want, can go a little crazy? Am I right, fellas? Right now, they’re pretty upset about losing their first chance at a female president. This would have empowered little girls, shattered sexist beliefs about female incompetence and forced men around the world to view a woman as an agent of power instead of a sex object — all of which, it turns out, are important to women even though they buy Star magazine. Ladies are complicated.
By the logic of this argument—that some women’s interest in gossip magazines should discredit all women’s claims to equality—Joel Stein’s deep interest in pornography, which is deeply silly, should result in the immediate dismissal of men from power everywhere. Because porn is even sillier than gossip magazines, because at least the latter record a fantasy that’s got some base in events that actually happened, albeit to people that are living in a non-reality type world. But porn is pure fantasy. Thus, men are sillier than women and shouldn’t probably be allowed to leave the house, much less run for office.
Because women do most of the voting, and the shopping and the TV watching and the book reading — porn really must take up a lot of men’s time — they need to be placated. Which shouldn’t be hard. You know how when your dog dies, your wife wants to get a puppy right away? That’s what America has to do. We need a replacement Hillary.
Assumptions you must hold for this joke to work:
*Only women love pets, and probably only women have feelings at all.
*Feelings are bad.
*”America” is a man, and even though women can vote. Women are not real citizens, and their belief that they are making decisions is an illusion created for them by all-powerful men in order to get more sex.
One thing this election is reaffirming is that no writer went broke telling male editors that women really, really suck. What’s with the high levels of resentment of women’s very existence? Maybe the world of publishing would be better if you had to show that you did get the girl in high school before you get a job as an editor. Or, maybe we should just ban men from running newspapers, on the theory that male silliness like sports and porn is vidence that they can’t do anything that should be taken seriously.
Because while women are sad that Hillary Clinton seems poised to lose the Democratic nomination, they’re even more dejected that there appear to be no women with enough political stature to run for president next time. That’s why Barack Obama and John McCain need to pick female running mates. Either that or we’re going to have to find some money in the federal budget for 150 million flower bouquets.
Women will give up claims to equality and power for baubles, you know. Or Stein needs to believe that, because the alternative to holding the false belief that he’s automatically superior to half the human race would be to face up to the fact that he’s a shallow, empty, mean-spirited human being with little discernible talent that makes his money regurgitating tired stereotypes as if they’re fresh, exciting and rebellious.* This is how privilege breaks people, you know. If you’re rewarded for having the correct race and gender, all too often you don’t bother developing a spirit, much less a personality. Exhibit #2: Our current White House resident.
He then gets into a wrong-headed non-analysis of the potential VP candidates that I won’t bother requoting. What I enjoyed was this ending that explains so much:
Will a female vice president really satisfy women? Of course not. But what does?
The mystery of why so much hate is solved! Joel, I understand that, when faced with the fact that you’ve never seen a woman satisfied, it’s more ego-soothing to believe it’s them and not you. But more ego-satisfying doesn’t equal more true.
*Having calmed down, I want to take it back about Stein being a complete hack. Once in awhile, he’s funny. More often, he uses the asshole schtick to be an asshole but not take responsibility for it, though.
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So. Women don’t consume porn, either?
Just when I thought couldn’t find a reminder what we’re up against, I found another screed on this topic on redstate:
http://redstate.com/blogs/achance/2008/mar/02/single_mommy_politics
Will a female vice president really satisfy women? Of course not. But what does?
All right, I’ll settle for a female VP if you throw in three -no, four- orgasms and an evening of dinner and ballet. Will that sudden burst of reasonableness satisfy Joel Stein? Of course not, but what does?
Reading “redstate.com”?? Oy, thank you for your sacrifice: I can barely stand to read the blogs that I agree with.
The hell? Most of the women I know are for Obama. Their main disappointment is that the first strong female candidate for President is Hillary Clinton. Even so, they are not deaf to the misogyny dealt to Clinton by the media and Republitards. I submit that plenty of men I know deplore this kind of shit, too.
Damn, I hate gender essentialist thinking.
God, I hate Joel Stien so damn much right now. Abuse of the rhetorical question is the sign of a hack. “Am I right, fellas?” “You know how…?” repeated who knows how many times. That’s words that do NOT fucking need to be there. It’s like his editor told him he wanted 300 words, and when he finished with what he had to say, he was only at 220, so he pads it like a freshman English major.
God, I want to beat him with a shovel.
Ooh! Ooh! I think I know! Mr Kotter!
Is it, not having to deal with sexist assholes?
“and forced men around the world to view a woman as an agent of power instead of a sex object”
He *is* aware that other countries have had female heads of state, right? Even (gasp!) elected ones! He can’t actually be ignorant of that fact, can he?
In addition, does he really think that people in other countries look to America to decide how to view women? Because my European friends certainly don’t…
God, this misogynist bullshit is getting so old. About half the time these days, I can’t even get properly angry about it. I just feel tired.
From the RedState post:
Behind the obvious hatred of women is fear. It is a deep fear that men will be obsolete. They are deeply afraid that if their women get a good job, day care, and a vibrator, and she won’t need them anymore.
Who *is* this moron?
You know how ladies, when they don’t get what they want, can go a little crazy? Am I right, fellas?
Because men never behave irrationally when they’re denied something they desire.
Didn’t this guy get booed off the stage at The Laff Factory 20 years ago?
Who *is* this moron?
I don’t know who he is, but I hope when he goes out in public, he wears a sandwich board that says I AM A MISOGYNIST ASS, or at least some kind of visible signifier thereof.
I must confess, I’m sorta not seeing the downside to the Red State rant quoted above, up to and including the “destruction of the traditional family” part. If my family is any indication, traditional families are way, way overrated.
^^ Hmm, just googled both terms and only found one result, which didn’t put the man and place together. Of course the internet didn’t really exist 20 years ago to log these things.
Other things worth noting about him, particularly his comments on the troops…how did he get not only a bachelor’s, but an advanced degree, from Stanford?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Stein
I don’t really feel like registering with the LA Times to read the full article, but the most fascinating thing about the excerpts here is how Joel Stein seems to be operating completely under the assumption that no women are in fact reading his article. It doesn’t even read like he’s referring to “women” as outsiders as a way of communicating something to women, it seems like he just hasn’t considered the possibility that women could put down Star long enough to read something Serious like the LA Times or whatever.
I’m not really seeing it either, the way he puts it, and I don’t understand why conservatives object to it — loathing women is really the only explanation I can understand. It’s not okay for women to get the government to help them and their children; it’s not okay to go after the fathers of children for support; it’s not even okay for a woman to aspire to anything better than a shit job. He seems to think women who don’t have a man volunteering to look after them and their children should just crawl into a hole in the ground and die.
So really it’s not a fear that women won’t need men any more; it’s a fear that women might have any power over men at all, that women might be able to leave men and survive, that men might not be able to abandon their families with utter impunity.
When a man can’t extract obedience from his wife and children by threatening them with destitution, what’s left of the family?
I know it’s been pointed out a million times on this blog. But this is such a screaming example. His misogynistic view of women includes a really grotesque and nasty view of men. I’d imagine most male pandagon readers would object to his view of them as well.
After reading a couple of his other columns I think this was a lame attempt at humor.
If you’ve seen Joel Stein on the telly, a psychological explanation for this stuff suggests itself. Joel is one of those pale, skinny, vaguely intellectual-looking (this dumb article is the disproof) kids that regularly used to get jammed into the locker every day by the meathead jocks at every respectable/traditional high school in these here United States. Occasionally you might have seen these guys try to avoid immolation by the jocks by sucking up to them, imitating them, flattering their egos, etc. I wonder if ol’ Joel, consciously or unconsciously, is trying to prove that he ain’t no sissy girly man by spouting the same misogynist shit that his former tormentors went in for. Probably unfair psychobabble speculation on my part, but he doesn’t deserve better.
If you’ve seen Joel Stein on the telly, a psychological explanation for this stuff suggests itself. Joel is one of those pale, skinny, vaguely intellectual-looking (this dumb article is the disproof) kids that regularly used to get jammed into the locker every day by the meathead jocks at every respectable/traditional high school in these here United States. Occasionally you might have seen these guys try to avoid immolation by the jocks by sucking up to them, imitating them, flattering their egos, etc. I wonder if ol’ Joel, consciously or unconsciously, is trying to prove that he ain’t no sissy girly man by spouting the same misogynist shit that his former tormentors went in for. Probably unfair psychobabble speculation on my part, but he doesn’t deserve better.
I’m confused. I thought Clinton’s “I only belated regret wasting hundreds of thousands of lives a a trillion dollars or so on pumping up america’s phallus, and I wouldn’t rule out doing it again” and he mandate for health insurance were about appealing to the guys who would otherwise be too insecure to vote for a woman.
I hope his tongue was planted firmly in his cheek when he decided to have this published, if not, it will be a mighty long time before anybody else’s tongue will be making a visit there.
It doesn’t even read like he’s referring to “women” as outsiders as a way of communicating something to women, it seems like he just hasn’t considered the possibility that women could put down Star long enough to read something Serious like the LA Times or whatever.
I think Joel knows perfectly well that the editorial page he shares with Jonah Goldberg isn’t even close to Serious. I think he’ll be surprised to find out that anyone read this essay at all, much less bothered to fisk it on the internet.
D’oh … hit “blaspheme” too soon …
Let me put it this way — we got the Sunday LA Times this morning as we do every week, but it will almost certainly be thrown away without the Opinion section even being unfolded. I don’t think I’ve read that section for at least a full year, if not two.
Behind the obvious hatred of women is fear. It is a deep fear that men will be obsolete. They are deeply afraid that if their women get a good job, day care, and a vibrator, and she won’t need them anymore.
Well, certainly men like Stein will become obsolete. The irony of this is by letting go of the fear and the sexism, then you will make yourself useful in a post-sexist world.
Oh, I’m aware that it’s supposed to be funny. But “funny” usually only works if the humor-creator and humor-audience believe that the humor conveys some sort of truth. The jokes don’t work unless you actually believe that women are irrational bitches that men have to jump around nervously lest they be permanently deprived of pussy.
Can we not just demand LATimes and WaPosh be shut down permanently?
.. they actually posts those shoddy opinions? It’s won’t even pass freshman keg party conversation. (incidentally, is it me, or those newspaper running work programs for conservative bobble heads and twits again? But then again maybe everybody that sounds and look like Tucker Carlson should be in media. Just to make sure they all go down in flame.)
Jebus, Joel Stein is usually mildly amusing. This shit not amusing. Not even a little bit.
I am wondering the same thing as Roxanne: Women don’t do porn either?
Cheer up, everybody. If Jack Nicholson can see the light, so may Stein one day.
I think the idea that nothing really satisifies a woman comes from the rhetorical bag of patriarchy, that makes a number of assumptions:
1. Patriarchal control of society is necessary for there to be anything called civilisation.
2. Women — not being men — writhe and recoil under the rule of men.
3. Women would only feel themselves happy if they were ruling themselves, but if they were ruling themselves it would be a chaotic rule of “the feminine” — which would make them ultimately very unhappy indeed, since it would destroy civilisation.
4. The rule of men is necessary for both men and women to thrive. Women need to accept patriarchy for their own good.
(Therefore, by their very natures, which are feminine yet desirous of power, women cannot be happy. They have to unhappily choose one aspect or the other: power OR femininity. But in choosing one, they must deny themselves the other, and hence condemn themselves to misery.)
This seems like a prime example of the old fake sarcasm where people say what they really believe (with some small bit of hyperbole) then deflect criticism by claiming it was in jest.
I have some good examples of this on my blog:
http://margalis.blogspot.com/2007/12/on-language-satire.html
Im sure everyone remembers “Rape Only Hurts if You Fight It.” This reads like another one of those.
I’m sure if Stein gets some flack he’ll claim that he was satirizing men’s attitudes or something nonsensical like that.
It reads like something by Elliott Kalan if Kalan wasn’t funny by was an asshole.
Have Pandagon readers yet adopted the phrase “feeling stabby” from Jezebel?
Yes, I’m feeling very stabby.
Conservatives have difficulty coping with our complex world, and need to make it appear simple and cartoonlike. From The Ideological Animal” in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of Psychology Today:
“All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats,” quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
“What’s with the high levels of resentment of women’s very existence?”
Dunno, but it’s got a long pedigree.
Euripides, “Hippolytus”
Great Zeus, why didst thou, to man’s sorrow, put woman, evil counterfeit, to dwell where shines the sun? If thou wert minded that the human race should multiply, it was not from women they should have drawn their stock, but in thy temples they should have paid gold or iron or ponderous bronze and bought a family, each man proportioned to his offering, and so in independence dwelt, from women free.
- A man who tries not to resent all y’all women.
Of course America is a man, there are more of us than there are women.
Oh wait, there aren’t?
Never mind.
Too tired for the political, so I’ll pluck out something that hits personally:
You know how when your dog dies, your wife wants to get a puppy right away?
I know no one who has done that. Everyone I can think of who has lost a pet, regardless of gender, never considered getting a new [young similar pet] right away to replace the old one, as though it were a malfunctioning television.
It’s like he doesn’t know any real people, and thus is forced to only be friends with people from desperately atrocious sitcoms.
Joel Stein, the Freud Flintstone of the RedState set. What do women want? Will nothing satisfy the women he has dated? I think he’s found the answer.
Oh, I don’t know. When I had to give up my dog (my own hospitalization prevented me from caring for him, and I couldn’t ask someone else to take a young beagle I was having trouble house-training for possibly six weeks, so he had to be placed with another family via the rescue I got him from) my younger cat mourned and acted out for months. She’s back to herself now, but assuming the 13-year-old cat goes first, I’m probably going to have to get the younger one her own kitten to play with or else I’ll go through another four months of neediness followed by biting me. And if the new kitten turns out to mourn in the same kind of way, we might have a vicious cycle here of always having a senior cat and a junior cat. But then again, I am in my thirties and unmarried, so I am doomed to a life ruled by cats. I hope the two I have now live very long, healthy lives.
I’m so out of touch with popular culture it’s pathetic. Actually, I’m out of touch with the rest of humanity in general. I am up on the cutting edge of biotechnology, surely that counts for something and I do also force myself to keep up with current news events because I know perfectly well I need to know if the world is coming to an end or not at least a few days in advance. (General Thank You to Pandagon for helping me out with the latter.) People usually make me nervous, bored or both simulaneously though, especially people (a) on TV or (b) who have any connection with Popular Culture.
Point is, clearly I’m supposed to know who this guy is (like I was supposed to know who Maureen Dowd was too, which I sort of did, I knew she wrote that book with the stupid title that I didn’t read on purpose). I don’t. But I did read his article. It was a collection of cliches that were dated in the 1950’s interspersed with references to the 2008 presidential nominee race, probably so you can tell he wrote it this decade. I guess if you like to watch Green Acres or The Honeymooners or other stuff of that black-and-white era you’d laugh, but honestly even then I’d think you’d notice that it wasn’t particularly a clever take on any of those old jokes.
Do people actually get paid to write stuff like that? Cause if so I’m totally putting the kids to work a couple hours a week cranking out stuff like that, they absolutely could manage that level of quality and originality and it wouldn’t take up much of their time and then they could buy their own Wii games!
Never heard of this fellow, but “Guys, y’ever notice how women …” is the oldest specimen of hackmanship extant. This man’s stupidity and lack of originality or any discernible talent eclipse his misogyny. The dude’s clueless.
Amanda:
Leaving aside the rest of the post, it should be noted that this isn’t a sensible comparison. As far as most readers are concerned, gossip magazines really are exactly as stupid as pornography: half of what you see in rubbish like People or USWeekly is staged photo-ops marketed to an audience incapable of separating the lives of idiot celebrities from the characters they play onscreen (on the radio, etc.). These magazines are the ‘women’s arm’ of an industry that markets to men and women, of course.
Porn is of course grounded in real experiences; for one, live-action porn at some point really does involve people Behaving Badly in front of a camera. And the fact that much porn trades on images that relate little if at all to the average person’s lived experience isn’t simply a strike against porn, any more than that fact is a strike against all fiction. Most porn belongs to one or another species of fiction, and everyone with half a brain knows that there’s more to aesthetic representation than a laundry list of what elements are being represented.
It’s incredibly lazy to dismiss the complex experience of looking at/being aroused by porn, which is both merely instrumental and imaginative/escapist, and you should know better. I know you get defensive when you talk about these topics, as is your right, but you shouldn’t be too hasty in your defenses of the staggeringly awful gossip magazines. The differences between Brangelina photos snapped through car windows, on the one hand, and ‘voyeur’ websites on the other, is one of degree, not of kind - and several degrees smaller than you’re probably willing to admit. Stein’s a nothing writer; you might measure yourself by his betters and save the time you’d spend on posts like this one.
It was second-rate James Thurber at best.
…how did he get not only a bachelor’s, but an advanced degree, from Stanford?
I’ve known Stanford graduates(including a guidance counselor at my high school) who were dumb as a brick in many ways.
Wax Banks,
Now that’s some great and creative parody. Arguing the aesthetic value of porn as being greater than other commercial photography - it’s kind of brilliant. Now, that kind of satire is far more rare and subtle than the hackneyed Joel Stein article. Particularly the argument of how arousal over porn is a complex experience.
one jewish dyke, I figure that’s less you being “We need a cat at all times, and grieving? So last week!” and more being considerate of your cat’s needs, though.
I think I heard somewhere that Stein is married. If true, I really don’t want to think about the implications of that relationship.
Yep, jewish dyke, you just might. I’ve got that cycle with dogs. Actually, I usually want a new dog soon for myself, not as a “replacement”, but because the neediness of a new pet stops you from just sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, gives you something to occupy yourself with. But the remaining dog has sometimes made me do it even quicker than I would otherwise — when I had a dog that passed away in early December a few years back, I planned to wait til after Christmas to get a new one. But after a solid week of my other dog just lying on the bed and whimpering incessantly I threw up my hands and said, “OK, OK, I’ll go to the pound TODAY!”
As for Joel Stein, he makes me feel so stabby I cannot even formulate a specific on-topic response.
Pretty much, yeah. We’ve ended up with two younger cats because it turned out that our older cats were much more attached to one another than we ever realized. Natasha died, so we got Boris a kitten to keep him company, but then Boris died about 18 months after Natasha and Keaton (the former kitten) got so bitey and clingy that we got him his own kitten.
(Now he’s turning into an empty-nester because “his” kitten is almost a year old and doesn’t need him as much anymore, but that’s a whole other story.)
ksms:
I don’t mind you missing my point, but please try to at least read the comment you’re responding to. I didn’t make the first claim you impute to me (about porn having greater aesthetic value than other commercial photography). Your implicit claim - that arousal is uncomplicated - kind of stuns me, and I admit that I didn’t think I’d have to argue that point with an adult. Suffice it to say that if you think of arousal as unimaginative or purely mechanistic, in men or women, then please pass on my sympathies to your lover(s).
My suspicion, ksms, is that your implied attitude toward porn (specifically toward men’s responses to it and desire to utilize it) is much more widely shared in this blog community than is readily admitted by community members. But I’d like to keep things pleasant this evening, so I’ll assume that you misconstrued my comment and that you’re reading my talk of ‘arousal’ narrowly for one or another reason that’s little to do with me - perhaps because you thought I was defending Stein’s risible column.
Well ha ha and here’s to us, then! Carry on apace.
Sorry, I left something out of my first comment and did want to clarify for the zero people still reading this comment: it’s clear that Amanda is aping Stein’s bad logic for the purposes of parody in the paragraph to which I responded above. But her assertions - separate from the logic-chain she’s spoofing - she apparently means in seriousness. And those assertions are to my eye either momentarily ungenerous (because they’re made in the heat of disagreement, tactically) or creepy (because they reflect a deep-seated misunderstanding of sexuality, not to mention the media ecology of the various gossip industries).
Actually, I like porn, Wax. Though like most people, I have my preferences. It just doesn’t seem that complex to me, though - watch a dvd of hot young naked guys fucking, my hand down my panties for five or ten minutes, bingo. (Hey, I’m old, and I’ve been doing this self-love thing for a while. I kind of have it down pat, so to speak.)
It just doesn’t seem all that complicated to me. Sorry. Certainly no more complicated than media-generated celebrities, and p.r.-created celebrity gossip, and planned photo-ops, and fashion spreads in magazines (ever talk to a stylist? They spend hours getting that shit “just right”).
I’ll pass on my sympathies to my lover, though. He’ll be confused, but I’m sure I owe him a random apology for something.
I’ll apologize to you, too, for somehow giving you the impression that I’m an evil sex-negative feminazi trying to take your porn away. But only if you apologize for calling me a lousy lay - that was just plain mean!
Wow. From your excerpts, his article isn’t even funny.
If you’re going to be a jerk, you may as well be funny…. yeesh. There have been many great and powerful nations democratically led by women, so no, this would not “have forced men around the world to view a woman as an agent of power instead of a sex object,” just certain men in this nation.
His closing argument essentially makes his entire article meaningless. But what would add meaning to his writing?
Sure it has. Ask around the EUC.
You’re right about the fear, though, wayward. It runs shrieking and screaming off the page.