die kategorienkritische auseinandersetzung mit der viele kategorien "crossdessenden" künstler_in hat mich sehr beeindruckt und ich freue mich schon darauf die diplomarbeit zu lesen. :-)

einen dank an katja für die vorstellung von claude cahuns fotografischen arbeiten. ich habe viel neues (kennen) gelernt und werde zum beispiel den 08.05. nicht mehr mit gängigen bildern verbinden, sondern mit einer überzeugenden arbeit von claude cahun.

einen umfassenden überblick zu den arbeiten der künstler_in findet ihr in der in der datenbank des jersey museums: heritage datenbank oder einen etwas kleineren einblick in die fotografischen arbeiten bietet das folgende video:

in folgendem kurzfilm gedenkt anna lena meisenberg der künstler_in:

danke auch an luka und juliette für die organisation des vortrages :-) .

Everything I do I do with my body. Even my soul is made up of raw meat, flesh. Truth is in a face, as much as it is anywhere.  We women know that faces are full of meaning, I think. Men have the gift of pretending that's not true. And this is where their power comes from.

Carlene Kipps from Zadie Smith's On Beauty p. 96

That quote above seems pretty insightful to me up to the point about power.  That is, I have found that women communicate more with their faces and bodies than men do.  They are more conscious of both what they put out and what other people are putting out through body language.  This becomes more and more clear to me as I get older and more women tell me about the subtle jockeying for position between women via how they look at each other, how they stand, every physical movement, especially upon first meeting.  I'm also notified more frequently when my measured words are betrayed by my face.

So yes, I agree witht the first part.  But the note on power is omitting a crucial fact.  Maybe men get whatever limited power they have from their ability to ignore this, but I think more likely to be the case is that women get much more power from taking note of it.  In general, they have a much better understanding of subtext than men.  When taken advantage of, it can be the source of great power. Carlene fails to note this.  Maybe it's implicit or maybe I'll understand why as I learn more about her character.  It's already clear that her audience in the scene, Kiki Belsey, disagrees.

More later about On Beauty and Wine Spectator's love affair with 2005 Bordeaux.

If you are a woman reading this, admit it, the sentence upsets you or at least unnerves you. It just sounds wrong. Maybe you are getting mental images of men beating their wives. Maybe you just feel that the formulation of the sentence itself is sexist and immoral. Admit it, the sentence just sounds wrong.

A man should do things to make his wife happy.

No problems here. Not sexist, not immoral, not wrong. No mental images of abuse. It's just common sense. If you love someone - your wife, your child, your dog - you want to do things to make them happy.

You don't let them abuse you, but if you know your wife likes a certain restaurant, you take her there even if it sometimes means you have to take on a few overtime hours just to be able to afford it. You love her and you do that for her.

Now God help you if you suggest that a woman should cook what her husband wants to eat.

In daily life, this happens as a matter of course. Women who love their husbands want to make them happy, they want to cook the food that their men like, and they don't even give it a second thought.

But the propaganda pushed on women is such that they can't actually admit to it, and should someone point it out, they feel guilty.

If a woman says, "I cooked this because my husband wanted me to", she's looked upon as a victim of abuse. She might as well admit that he knocked her teeth out and she's ok with it.

The way that young girls are taught today is that doing anything for your husband or boyfriend makes you a victim.

If you explain that people who love each other should do try to please one another, they agree. But when you are married or dating, you cannot constantly say things like, "I took you on vacation, now you owe me a meal." Talking this way will provoke a fight and make it look like you are bartering rather than building a family.

So when a man does something for a woman, it's just taken for granted that he should try to make someone he loves happy.

But when it comes time for a woman to do something, she's made to feel guilty as a traitor to her gender and is ridiculed as a willing victim.

And what did she really do? She loved her husband. And the hairy lesbian feminists and the leftist media just can't tolerate that.

Anyway, in the show Charlie Sheen does something that his gf doesn't like. She storms out and he now wants to know what to do.

The brother informs him to go "groveling" and that he must go to her house and "get humiliated" in person because women don't like to humiliate you just over the phone, it's more successful live. That's really what's being said and nobody says a word about it.

The brother also instructs Charlie Sheen that he must give her something as if she's a prostitute who must get paid to be in a relationship with him.

But, he says, don't bring anything that can harm you because she will throw it at your head.

Again, this is presented as normal and proper behavior for women.

Not only that, but it is seen as normal and proper for a man to go to a place where he will get physically assaulted in a way that may leave him more harmed than a woman would be if she were slapped.

Imagine if a show taught women to go to a man who will almost definitely slap them. There would be national outrage.

But when boys are taught that what they should expect from a woman is assault with a weapon - which will probably be more dangerous than a slap in the face - nobody says a word.

In one commercial, the man sees that the cereal box says that it's low in fat and asks his wife if she's trying to watch her diet. As every woman on TV, she gets into an aggressive pose like a wolf that is about to attack it's prey.

She attacks him and demands that he answer, "does it look like I need to lose weight?" Clearly she's just starting a fight for no reason other than to assert her dominance over him. He did nothing and said nothing wrong.

She just needed to attack him only to show who's the boss. If she doesn't abuse him on regular basis, he might suspect they are equals and he might ask for something or want something or deny her ridiculous whims. So she must always attack him just to show that she's his slave-owner and his job in life is to please her and otherwise he's useless as a human being.

As every man on TV, he backs down and at the end of the commercial she asks, "so what else does the box say?"

His response is, "it says 'shut up Steve'"

Yup, he has no right to ever open his mouth. If he ever says something, no matter what it is, it will be reinterpreted in a wrong way and used to abuse him.

But he can't shut up. As in the case of every abuse victim, there's nothing that the victim can do. The victim is not provoking anything. The victim gets abused just so that the predator can continue to display her dominance.

So no matter what he does, she will always abuse him.

And that's the kind of relationships that the Leftist Media promotes.

_________________

The other commercial has a woman showing her superiority and acting like a complete bitch. She bets that she can drop a few cholesterol points in a few weeks and that he won't fix something or other he's fixing. As is every man on TV, the guy is incompetent and she stands on top of him with a look of superiority basically saying I told you so.

This is the other side of relationships that the Leftist Media promotes. In the first commercial says that a man can never say anything to a woman, no matter how innocent. The second commercial shows that a woman should be allowed to abuse her husband and make him feel as bad as possible.

Notice that this is a standard line on TV. Men can never open their mouth, while women are outright bitches.

If I ever wound up with a woman like 99% of the women on TV, and I could not for some reason divorce her, I'd kill myself.

Life is not worth living if you have a woman like that next to you. Death would be a reasonable solution to 99% of marriages that I see on TV.

Rock Paper Scissors.  It will make you or rape you.  Me and my fiance tend to resolve a lot of our split decisions with a simple game of Roshambo.  "Who's car should we take?"  "What restaurant should we eat at?"  "Should we stay for another drink or go home and go to bed?"  Simple conflict resolution.  Take my advise people: Don't wager on a game of Roshambo and, if you do, be prepared to face the consequences.

About a month ago, my fiance and I were on a nice walk on the Burke-Gilman Trail by a canal in the Fremont district of Seattle.  We were discussing the fact that I seem to be subjected to these cheesy Sandra Bullock / Jennifer Aniston, wedding and love story "chick flicks" more and more but that I can't get her to watch any ass-kicking/horror "man movies".  I'd had enough.  I swear to god men, if you don't  balance your masculine and feminine entertainment, you will start to menstruate every month.  You might be telling yourself, "Whatever man!  I'm no bitch!"  but, when you find yourself snuggled up on the couch with a bottle of wine and a chocolate bar watching Project Runway, you're beginning the transformation.  Go to the corner store, buy a couple of 40oz high gravity malt liquors, get loaded, and beat the shit out of something fast!

So, we decide to make a fair wager.  If I win, she has to see a horror movie and, if she wins, I have to go with her to see Sex and the City.  Well my friend, I wouldn't be writing this article if I had won, so I'm in the position of settling up a with a Sex and the City evening of magic and wonder.

The evening begins in the upper middle class neighborhood of Wallingford.  I take her to the Wallingford Pizza House on 45th which, by the way, is an amazing place to eat if you ever get the chance.  It's not too expensive and the food and drink selection is wonderful.  Anyway, I make it a point to order a caraf of burgundy wine in hopes of easing the increasing tension in my neck.  We enjoy our sensational upside down pizza bowls and I engage in conversation as long as I possibly can so that I don't have to stand in line too long at the theater.

When we the left the resaurant, I had a buzz that motivated me down the street to the Guild Theater where the film was playing.  As we walked up I noticed the groups of woman (NO MEN!) crowding around the ticket booth.  In hesitation, I continued walking and went right past the theater and on to a sports bar a couple of blocks down the street.  I needed a cigarette and they had a little smoking section out front of the establishment.  I usually need a smoke after a caraf of wine or when I'm avoiding something anyway.  I smoke fast, walk back to the theater and, by that point, my mindset is, "Alright fuck it, let's rock this bitch!"  My fiancee is rubbing my shoulders, very aware of the awkwardness that I'm experiencing.  She says, "Ok, I'll see one of your movies next time".

When we finally approach the ticket booth, it is occupied by two men, of course.  I buck up and say in a half whisper, "Two for Sex and the City".  They look me up and down and give me a cheesy smile.  I return their look with my own, "I will cut you" look and we preceed into the theater.  I purchase my usual Swedish Fish and a small Sprite and we go find our seats.

I admit that I have not actually even seen one complete episode from the TV series, so I cannot really offer an accurate review of any sort.  I can say, however, that there were way too many dick jokes for me to deal with.  I guess I would say that it's about high maintenance alcoholic women who date gay men with no opinions, get disappointed when their expectations are never met, and then complain to eachother while they're smashed on cosmopolitans.  That would pretty much cover it.  I've never sat through a movie before where I continually hoped that I'd have to go to the bathroom.  It was like going to Nordstroms and shopping with your mom for panties.  To be honest, I've only been sent to the store to pick up tampons once and, even then, I ended up shoplifting them. I smuggled them out of the store in my pants, as if getting caught wouldn't have been more embarrassing.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with being in touch with your feminine side.  We all have one and I think that it's an essential part in truly knowing yourself.  Believe it or not, these situations are not even strictly exclusive to heterosexuals because I know gay and lesbian couples who have the same issues with this shit.  Only one gay man loves Sex and the City or one lesbian partner loves the show Charmed while the other one can't fucking stand it.  Honestly, I would go to a million of these movies for my woman because I love her but, if your women expect you to go see this type of shit all of the time, but never recognize the sacrifice that you're making, then you are a bitch and you need to pull your balls out of your ass.  I actually recommend that you do, at least occasionally, go to these type of events with your lady and do so by your own free will.  She will, most likely, recognize that you're making an effort for her and, when you get home, will return the favor by making you feel like a man again.  She may, however, think that you will forget about the promise to see a film of your choosing, as she has.  Bless her soul, because I'm cashing in on this one, but I'm waiting for something as equally detestable and nefarious, except on the other end of the spectrum (see also: Dead End, Hostel, Old Boy, The Hills Have Eyes, etc).    

-O.G

FUN FACT:
The term "Roshambo" has also been adopted to describe a game in which participants take turns kicking eachother in the testicles until one of them (the "loser") can no longer stand.  

Check out a Bull here  and a cow over here.

I may be missing something here but I just can't figure this one out.  What is the message they are trying to give us or is this some kind of visual lost in translation type of thing?  I'm quite open to the variations that may occur in humans where gender really turns into many shades of gray with the two predominant poles making up the majorities on either side.  Does this movie perhaps try to prepare children for dealing with this reality later on in life?

If this is the case then maybe it should have been done in a way that makes it clearer to understand the "lesson".  But, my suspicion is that it is not the case.  That the creators of the movie didn't go that deep and that they simply created this bovine type creature based off of cows which somehow display male and female traits through behaviour only.

Either way I still looks weird to see a bull with rubbery looking udders and no other gender specific organs other than a prominent chin.

Stop a boy in HS or college and ask him how to treat a woman. He'll tell you that you can either mistreat her or let her mistreat you. Maybe not in those exact words, but that will be the meaning of what he says.

In college, my roommate had a girlfriend who would come over to our dorm room. Once she threw water in his face as a joke out of nowhere and he just got up and wiped it off without saying a word. On one occasion she was sitting next to him and began kicking his leg. He moved his leg quietly. She demanded that he allow her to continue kicking him and he put his leg right back.

One day he asked me why she treats him like that. I explained that it's because she wanted to turn him into a man. She's hoping to provoke him into standing up for himself and the more he allow her to do this, the more she'll abuse him in hopes that he'll grow some balls. [Most women would've long dumped him, but she was morbidly obese at over 350 pounds so she was holding on to whatever she could get.]

His response to me was, "but I can't be an asshole, I don't want to abuse her."

Years later I became friends with a married couple. The husband was afraid to say anything to his wife. She would desperately plead with him not to be afraid of her, but without any success. At one point, she asked me to please speak to him to explain that she doesn't mind it if he makes known his preference of a restaurant or where to go on vacation. His response to me was the same, "I don't want to be an asshole".

These are extreme cases only in that these men haven't learned from dating in high school. But almost every boy who hit puberty in the 1970s or later, when the media went on a Crusade against men as being evil and only deserving to open their mouth to say they are sorry, has the same story:

Boy likes girl. Boy tries to please her and always says he's sorry. Girl gets bored and tired. Girl dumps him for someone else or doesn't go out with him in the first place. Boy gets bitter.

After that, he'll either stay a doormat or he'll become the "asshole" out of anger. Assholes are not what women want, but they are preferable to doormats. So the end of high school, all the girls are scrambling to get a date with the "assholes" who got hurt in their freshman/sophomore year (and actually learned the lesson not to be a doormat anymore).

The girls will obviously wind up getting hurt in such relationships and go complaining that all the men are assholes. But if they don't find themselves an asshole, they will go around asking, "where have all the real (non-doormat) men gone?"

So here we come to the crux of the problem: what should men be, doormats or assholes?

And the answer is neither.

Since the beginning of civilization, men were taught to be gentlemen. Not doormats, not assholes. Treat her well and ask that she treats you well. Consider her opinion, but let your opinion be known. Don't argue unnecessarily, but don't just say you are sorry every time.

Today, on the other hand, the only images of men we have in the media are the abusers and the abused, never normal men.

The idea that men should "just say you are sorry" is not something pushed by women. Women are disgusted by such men. They'd rather get punched in the face or get cheated on than date a little wussy. If you don't believe me, look around. Women forgive their husbands for domestic violence and cheating. But if you "just say you are sorry" every time, she'll dump you faster than you can say the word "sorry" again, even as she'll feel guilty dumping someone who's "so nice".

Think about how often you've heard women say that some guy is "so nice" and he's physically attractive, but he's just not their type. Men are confused and claim that women don't make sense. But they are only confused because of the media propaganda that they can only be assholes or doormats. In this case, the women are the only ones making any sense.

The problem isn't being nice. The problem is that these men were taught since the age of 8 to have no personality, no guts, no leadership qualities - just fear. They aren't nice, they are scared.

No normal, adult woman wants a doormat. Some young girls think they do because that's what they see on TV also, but they will be just as disgusted by their doormat boyfriends and will dump them just the same. It's better to fight with a real man than to run over a colorless, useless doormat who will never be able to stand up to you ... or for you.

Women are social beings. Women think of life as a team sport. Even going to a public bathroom is something they do with friends.

Imagine you were playing doubles tennis and were looking for a partner. During practice sessions, would you watch someone who lost to you every time? Probably not. Not unless you wanted to lose all your real games because of your partner's incompetence. By losing to you in practice, they aren't making you happy, they are making you scared that you'll cause them to lose real, competitive games.

Does a tennis player ranked #7 in the world choose a partner who's ranked #356? No. You want a partner who's at least as good as you are. A player ranked #7 would want someone ranked in the top 10, and preferably higher than #7 so that this player can do better than before with the help of the partner.

Same with dating and marriage. Women don't want men who are going to drag them down. They don't want men whom they will have to defend and support. They want someone at least as capable as them.

When you are trying to get a date and you lose to her every time, she thinks of you as a loser and rejects you.

Now, if you are ranked #7 as a tennis player, you don't want a partner ranked #3 if they will make you feel bad about it and not treat you as an equal. So that's where being an asshole is bad.

When a woman wants a capable man, she doesn't mean that she wants you to abuse her like every guy on Lifetime TV.

A leader is not a person who abuses others into following him, but who inspires a following. A person is smart not by making other people feel dumb, but by proving with his actions that he's capable. Making others feel bad has nothing to do with it.

Most men I know are confused when I tell them this. They are so used to the asshole-doormat dichotomy, it's impossible to comprehend anything else.

But that's because ever since the age of 8 or 9, they have been bombarded with propaganda that they should "just say you are sorry or you are a bad person". After all those years of propaganda, it's hard to be able to understand that another option is even possible. If someone said to a young girl what they say to young boys, you would see journalists, social workers and professors show up at their door with pitch forks.

So here's Guy White's Official Guide To Picking Up Woman in one sentence: Don't be an asshole, but don't be a doormat. Doing this one thing will put you ahead of 90% of the men who might be wealthier, taller, better looking, have more hair and weigh less than you do. Ask any woman and she'll tell you: it's better to date a bald or an overweight man than a little wussy.

And all the women who are stuck going out with assholes and doormats, go complain to your local NOW office. They did it. They ruined your marriage or your dating life. Where are all the real men? They were killed by Gloria Steinem.

I've been meaning to write something on women v. feminism. I like Fred Reed, but he does take it too far at times.

Most of the women I know are NOT feminist. Feminism has done nothing for women. There are fewer female Nobel Prize winners now than before feminism.

The problem of divorce law is really that male politicians sold out, just as the problem of anti-male commercials is something caused by male ad execs. Women politicians are such a small minority that they couldn't pass the salt in the lunch room, much less a bill on the parliament floor.

Angry feminists - I referred to them as "hairy lesbians" specifically to differentiate them from normal women - have pushed for crazy laws. After all, who better to tell us how to marry and divorce than women who never had a man?!

And then regular, good women suffer.

As a man, how am I to know if you will prevent me from seeing my kids should we marry and then divorce? How am I to know if you will put me in jail for no reason other than trying to get my money during the divorce? So naturally men have a fear of commitment and their girlfriends, who are often not to blame for anything, suffer in the process, as does the white race due to the low birthrate this causes.

One bitch screwing her ex-husband with the help of feminist-endorsed laws is enough to give cold feet to 50 men who see what happened, and destroy the lives of 50 decent women who just want to have a normal family.

As for intellectual differences between men and women, just about every woman I know admits that genders differ in their interests and abilities. Men do some things better, women other.

Only politicians, journalists, professors and "hairy lesbians" deny this reality.

A few months ago, I was in New York and saw a government-sponsored ad for women to become plumbers. This job may be attractive to butch lesbians, but how many "normal" girls growing up dream of some day standing on their knees with their face on top of the toilet and their hand inside it?

The "shortage" of female plumbers has nothing to do with sexism and persecution. Women just don't want to do it.

The one problem that I have directly with women is that many tend to be very emotional and do not want to "move on" at the end of a relationship. This is not universally true, but it's more often true for men than for women.

Giving them power to destroy their ex-husbands leads to horrific results.

Men sometimes stalk women too. But as a woman, you can get an order of protection and throw your ex in jail for merely calling you.

What recourse does a man has if his ex puts him in jail just because she's mad that he dumped her? None. He'll spend a couple of days in jail. He'll pay his lawyer to dismiss the case. And then he'll be afraid that this will happen again. The women who did that to him will receive no punishment.

Would YOU want to marry a man who would be able to put you in jail any time he wants and suffer no consequences for making false claims to the police?

Just as men who stalk their ex-wives are punished, women who make false claims to the police need to pay the price.

If someone claims that her ex-husband raped their child and the child is obviously a virgin and perfectly healthy without any injuries, then we have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the charges are false and the woman should go to jail, and not just for making false claims, but also for extortion in divorce proceedings.

Now do most women pull those kinds of stunts? Of course not. But having some women do this puts tremendous fear in the heart of every man.

When they talk about an "honest dialogue on race", it means that blacks can be particularly brutal and insult whites with complete disregard for any social norms. Whites must just stand there and take the verbal (and sometimes physical) assaults.

So I started this blog to respond to the one-sided "dialogue".

Then I added some anti-feminist posts. What do you think about them?

I would especially want to read the thoughts of realist women, including The Vanishing American, Latte Island and Kathy Shaidle.

As with everything liberals say, they just assert things and then call you names if you disagree with them, instead of trying to prove their assertions.

But let's look at history.

Let us begin in ancient times before farming. Men hunted, women stayed back and "gathered".

Now who here would prefer to chase a large wild animal with a stick and who would prefer to collect berries? Anyone? I didn't think anyone would.

Think about it for a second. For a band of men to be able to feed their families, they can't just catch a rabbit. That won't feed multiple families the whole day. And rabbit fur certainly won't be enough to keep anyone warm.

What was necessary was to chase a large animal, the kind of animal that would easily kill a human if it got the chance to kick him.

There were no guns, just sticks. You had to surround an animal that was much bigger than any man and then beat down this animal with a stick as it fought back by desperately trying to kill you. Does that sound like a job you'd want or would you prefer to collect some berries while playing with your kids?

Next came farming. That's what people did until the 19th century and in some countries until the early 20th century.

What did men do? They farmed.

What did their wives do? They also farmed.

What did 99% of the population do? They farmed.

And among the elites at this time there were more female generals and heads of state than at any point during the Era of Feminism. If so much progress was made for women's rights by feminists, how come women are now winning several times fewer Nobel Prizes and hardly ever become heads of feminist-dominated Western states? Why did women just go back in their achievement as compared to the farming period?

Then the Industrial Revolution begins. The average man had to work in a disgusting sweat shop where they got abused and received barely human wages.

Staying home to cook one or two meals a day and clean once a week was certainly preferable to working in a sweat shop. Once again women got the preferable position.

Women did go to work in factories - when wars broke out.

During wars, one gender had to die on battle fields and the other gender had to work in a factory. I think it's pretty clear which job is preferable and as usual women got that job.

After each war, women ran right back home from factories. Now that men are back from war, let them work in sweat shops, and women can go back to playing with their kids while spending no more than a couple hours a day cooking and cleaning.

Feminists claim that men forced women out of sweat shops. But they didn't. There were no protests from women demanding work on the assembly line. Women gladly left - ran from! - the sweat shops and assembly line jobs.

As industrialization developed further, women learned that men created institutions with desirable jobs. Men built schools that required teachers. Men built hospitals that needed doctors. Men built non-profits that needed social workers.

All these institutions were built almost exclusively by men. Name one major hospital, university or non-profit founded by a woman (except female-oriented ones that do not admit men). I bet you can't. I bet nobody reading this can.

So feminists began clamoring that it's unfair that institutions created by men would hire men and men acquiesced and began to hire women.

But that wasn't enough for feminists: Apparently it's not fair that the person who created a corporation should have the right to own it. Why are the boardrooms full of men, they ask. They never ask, how dare someone demand that the person who created a company from scratch be forced to give it up only because he has the wrong type of genitals.

Half the corporations should be run by women, according to feminists, who simply disregard who actually created the company and all the products it sells.

And how do they explain that men created all these corporations and invented all those products?

They claim that women were discriminated against when throughout history they did not have to chase wild animals, work in sweat shops and die in wars. Who knew that when men were doing that, they were persecuting women!

Logically, you'd think they were protecting their wives and this was anything but sexism. But logic means nothing to feminists.

Half the men who started a successful business must give it up. They owe this much because their grandfather had the amazing opportunity ... to work in a sweat shop!

--------------------

Everything that I wrote is known to everyone. Nobody doubts that men were the hunters chasing wild animals with sticks, the terrible conditions of factories 100 years ago or that men fought wars.

This is all very well known to each and every person in the world.

But because of the daily feminist brainwashing from academia and mainstream media, we just ignore and forget known facts.

They tell us every day, "women were persecuted, women were persecuted, women were persecuted" and like idiot zombies, we just repeat it.

But how were women persecuted? How is staying at home worse than chasing a wild animal or working in a sweat shop? How's that sexism or persecution?

Nobody asks this. We just repeat the lies told to us. Goebbels would've been so proud of Femi-Nazis.

Oddly enough, there were no public market-places where a man could bring his wife once he had sated his hideous appetites on her, and sell her for whatever price the next man would pay. There were, however, plenty of market places where he could sell all his other property publicly, from his house, to his animals, to the wares that were the product of his labour. And buy and sell these other properties he did, with public records that go back hundreds of years documenting the commerce men made of all manner of things, real as well as abstract. But there is no documentation of the commerce of wives between men.

Clearly women were a very singular kind of property.

At the same time, men were schooled to rise when a lady entered a room. A gentleman was also taught to never contradict a lady, to show her respect at all times, to open doors for her, relieve her of any heavy labour and to protect her reputation. These polite obligations passed from expectation to personal responsibility if a man should marry the lady in question.

These behaviours that a man exhibited for his wife-property bear no resemblance at all to the behaviour shown for his sheep/cattle/slave-property.

Rather, it's the very same way a subordinate defers to his superior in the military, the way defendants and plaintiffs defer to the judge in a courtroom, the way a servant behaved with respect to his employer in a Victorian household and the way slaves submitted before their masters in more antique times.

Gentlemen were also expected to sacrifice their lives to save that of the womenfolk in times of peril, such as the sinking of a cruise-liner. Even the lowest of women on the Titanic enjoyed a greater chance of survival than the very wealthiest of men on board.

Yet these women were mere 'property'.

How many men would have sacrificed their own lives to save that of their sheep, cows and pigs? I would hazard none, and yet there's no doubting that a man's livestock is also his property.

Of course, sinkings like the Titanic are not common, and not the sort of thing to make generalisations about. For common occurrences that one can generalise about, one points to battle-ground cemeteries. For the First World War alone, there are millions of dead men all buried together under the hills of France and Belgium, blown to pieces, shot, gassed, bayonetted and diseased in order to spare their women the horror of defending themselves against aggressors. The miles of little white crosses are of a scale that quite stretches the imagination. Picture everyone at Woodstock, all half million of them, laid out dead or wounded. Then double it. That's the same magnitude as the Battle of the Somme alone. One battle of many in only one war. All of these crosses mark the bones of men - the propertied class. Those unfortunate women, that mass of men's property that Feminists would have us grieve for, are nowhere buried in mass graves, having fallen in the defence of their owners.

How very odd.

http://onemanskingdom.blogspot.com/2008/01/when-women-were-property.html

Fra i tanti, la mia amica Rowena ha guardato le cose con occhi che potevano essere i miei. Copio e incollo dal suo blog:

«I miei complimenti più sentiti ai giornalisti di Repubblica Bologna, che all'indomani del Gay Pride sono riusciti solo a inserire nel titolo della prima pagina "Gravi insulti alla Chiesa".

Io c'ero, e di insulti alla chiesa non ne ho sentiti, né ho visto cartelli blasfemi. Forse ho bisogno di una visita dall'oculista e di un giro dall'otorino, ma giuro che ho tenuto orecchie e occhi aperti al mio primo Gay Pride, perché non volevo davvero perdermi nulla.

Così oggi posso dire che ho visto un sacco di gente colorata e con la voglia di esserci. Ho visto giovani e meno giovani che pacificamente marciavano e ballavano al suono di vecchie hit della Carrà (che lo so che ad alcuni può sembrare un crimine ma, vi assicuro, non lo è).

Ho visto un cartello che diceva "Veltroni, di' qualcosa di gay", e mi sono sentita di condividerlo.

Ho visto i gruppi di gay cattolici, e quelli che un po' ce l'avevano con la Carfagna. Ho visto le butch e le monelle e gli orsacchiotti e gli atei e gli agnostici razionalisti. Ho visto il gruppo di Amnesty international, qualche drag queen sfilare con grande nonchalance su stiletti tacco 12 e qualche altra drag queen sfilare con grande nonchalance a piedi nudi e col tacco 12 in mano, stremate dal caldo e dagli equilibrismi.

E poi ho visto un papà che dal carro dell'AGEDO ripeteva infaticabile "Lesbiche, trans o gay, son sempre figli miei" tra gli applausi della folla. Non lo nascondo, mi è venuto il magone in gola e ho pensato che valeva la pena essere lì.

Peccato però che non ci fosse nemmeno un giornalista serio in giro...
Rowena (gay for a day)»

<~>

While I was on my way home tonight from a trip to Target and Fresh Market for Bounty napkins and hummus, I heard a news story on WABE 90.1, my local NPR station, about female athletes and injury. It was the Fresh Air segment and featured an interview with writer Michael Sokolove regarding his new book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports.

What stood out the most to me about the piece were that women succumb to much injury during basic training for the military, but it takes a more serious injury to for a woman to be immobile and unable to continue training than for a man. Sokolove mentioned that studies don't conclusively indicate that women can tolerate more pain than men. Relating to sports, he pointed out the drawbacks of the increased presence of female athletes--more women playing more sports (competitively for school or as a profession) means more physiological harm. Moreover, there's greater expectation for females to take the pain like a male counterpart.

My impression was that Sokolove isn't advocating the diminishing of the female athlete force; instead, he is bringing to light the necessity for a reconsideration of the role and development of competitive sports (particularly as it pertains to youth culture).* Young children who demonstrate a high level of skill in classical or performing arts (painting, music, singing, non-competitive dance**, sculpting) are encouraged to hone that ability to greater heights of not just technique but also of talent. Apparently, it should not or need not be the same for young children who display an above-average degree of athletic prowess. Sokolove criticized the tendency for these kids to become "too specialized" in one particular sport.

There are so many variables and factors to remember, of course. Pushing your creativity and brain to its limit can occur over a much longer period of time--decades. But the body? Not quite. Again, Sokolove probably didn't intend to suggest that elementary and middle school-aged children should ignore that they might take to lacrosse or futbol more naturally than they do to tennis or swimming, but there's moderation and knowing how to treat the body with the right balance of respect and nurture. He emphasized that female athletes need a different kind of training and practice regimen than males. He also noted that perhaps females would benefit more from having female coaches--who ostensibly comprehend the physiological differences between men and women and would therefore be more effective as a trainer.

Click here to read an excerpt from Sokolove's book and to listen to the interview. It's captivating!

*I watched a documentary when I was in grad school where sociologist Michael Messner argued that society needs to move past this implicit requirement for women to play as hard as men in order to survive and prove their worth in competitive sports.

**I realize that even non-competitive dancing comes with potential dangers too: eating disorders, pulled muscles, twisted and sprained ankles, stress fractures.

Pix creds: NPR

Read a New York Times article Michael Sokolove wrote about female athlete injury here.

The struggle for women’s equality comes down to this: the men’s grill in the Phoenix Country Club has television and a bar, while the women’s grill has neither of those amenities—though it soon will, following renovation. The New York Times deems the separate and unequal Phoenix grill rooms so laden with national significance as to merit front-page treatment, which it provided on Saturday.

It’s been a hard year for the cause of female victimhood, as the Times’s close attention to one golf club’s eating facilities suggests. The crusade to show that Hillary Clinton’s abysmally managed presidential campaign failed because of sexism ran up against an inconvenient reality: some of her strongest support came from Archie Bunker states like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, while bastions of liberal enlightenment, such as Minnesota and Connecticut, went solidly for Barack Obama. (Of course, the willingness of blue-collar males to vote for Clinton didn’t stop her from claiming that, but for sexism, she would be the Democratic nominee: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it,” she said to her supporters at the end of the race.)

Clinton’s popularity with working-class male voters is hardly the only obstacle to the perpetuation of the patriarchy myth. Wherever you look, pesky facts suggest that far from being hindered by their sex, women reap benefits galore. Every elite institution in the country—from Wall Street law firms to Fortune 500 companies to major media outlets—tries constantly to put as many women in prominent positions as it can, whether as partners, board directors, editors, op-ed contributors, or talking heads. Whenever the absence of remotely suitable candidates hinders this mission, the same institutions wail a mea culpa and promise to make amends. Federal and state governments pour millions of taxpayer dollars into the production of more female scientists, even though the sex ratio in a microbiology lab will have absolutely no bearing on whether it discovers the cure for cancer or for Alzheimer’s disease. Since many elementary and high schools now function as cheering squads for Grrrl Power, the idea that even more resources are required to overcome some still-unlocated bias against, say, female physicists is ludicrous. Female undergraduates now outnumber their male counterparts, which hasn’t resulted in the closing of a single college women’s center dedicated to providing girls with a “safe space” on campus.

But the most compelling proof of the desperation of the women’s grievance movement is the Times’s decision to resuscitate its hoary “sexist golf club” genre. In 2002 and 2003, the paper crusaded fanatically against the Augusta National Golf Club for its men-only membership policy. It ran dozens upon dozens of stories, often on its front page, about the club’s membership rules; it even spiked two sports columns that disagreed with its effort to pressure the club to admit women as members. But wonder of wonders, the club failed to toe the Times’s line; CBS ignored the Times’s command to cease broadcasting the Masters Golf Tournament, played at Augusta; and the paper’s editors put aside their exquisite repugnance long enough to cover the Masters with the usual level of detail, thus keeping advertising revenue safe and sound.

The Times’s most recent front-page female-golf-victims story tiptoes around the paper’s failed Augusta campaign, which had made it a laughingstock among media cognoscenti. After noting that “charges of sexism against private golf clubs are not uncommon,” the story merely mentions in passing that “Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where the Masters is held each year, does not permit women to be members.” The earlier crusade having ended in defeat and—the editors hope—now lost in the mists of time, it’s on to the next female golfers’ “rights” struggle, as the Times preposterously puts it, even more astoundingly trivial than the last.

The Phoenix Country Club has male and female members and a common dining room. But like many clubs, it has separate men’s and women’s grill rooms—an innocuous arrangement to which members agree by joining the club. The Times points out darkly: “Women at the club are not permitted to have lunch in the men’s grill room with their husbands after a round of golf.” It could as justly have observed that after the same round of golf, men at the club aren’t allowed to lunch with their wives in the women’s grill room.

The Rosa Parks role in this break-down-the-barriers battle is played by the Van Sitterts, a couple who, two years ago, wanted to eat eggs together in the men’s grill room rather than in the club’s formal dining room. Having failed to persuade the board to change its policies—presumably because most members are happy with the single-sex socializing options—they did what any self-respecting aspirant to victimhood does today: they went whining to the government. Instead of resigning their membership and joining another club, they petitioned Arizona’s attorney general to intervene. The AG was only too happy to comply, brushing aside the legal nicety that private clubs are in theory not subject to antidiscrimination laws and ruling that the club was violating those laws, since (pending renovation) the women’s grill room has neither a television nor its own bar. Television and booze are available elsewhere in the club, and women can bring drinks into their grill. But in the spirit of angry young wives who tally every pair of socks that they and their husband fold, the absence of absolute tit-for-tat equality in one room’s appurtenances means that women occupy an unbearable position of inferiority.

According to the plaintiffs and their supporters, some club members have reacted boorishly to the Van Sitterts’ grill-room crusade, sending harassing email messages and hectoring the couple. The Times assumes that such behavior is the result of male privilege under siege: the men “saw their feeding ways in peril,” it sneers, and struck back. Here’s another possibility: some members don’t appreciate the couple’s roping in the Arizona attorney general. Especially since Mr. Van Sittert never once complained about the separate grill rooms during six years of board service—perhaps not surprisingly, since he oversaw the design of those grill rooms during the 1980s, as the Phoenix New Times reports.

We will leave the Phoenix Country Club to its epic struggles. But why did the New York Times deem it significant enough to send a reporter and a photographer to Phoenix and to put their product on its front page? Do the PCC’s single-sex grill rooms speak to the second-class status of women in Arizona? Hardly. As the Times itself acknowledges, Arizona’s governor, secretary of state, chief justice, and senate minority leader are women. There are plenty of unequal single-sex arrangements that have not disturbed the Times’s injustice sensor, such as colleges that bar male students from their athletic facilities during certain times of the day and Phoenix’s women-only gyms. On occasion, the Times’s coverage of Yale University suggests that the paper is merely an outpost of the Yale Daily News—yet in the early 2000s, the Gray Lady ignored the story of the Yale Women’s Center’s fierce hostility to a group of male students who wanted to help with its rape prevention programs. A Women’s Center board member even made physical threats against one of the boys. The leader of the male feminists still wonders at the rejection: “I still feel pretty crappy about it,” Eric Sandberg-Zakian said to the Yale Herald in 2007. “I think if you’re a guy, and you’re told your entire life by society that you’re not supposed to respect women or their sexuality, that women are sexual objects, and you really disagree and you make the effort and you spend your time trying to change that, you go out on a limb, and then you get attacked for doing that? That’s very, very jarring.” A story not without interest for a paper seemingly interested in women’s-rights struggles—yet apparently not worth covering.

Time was when liberals would have professed to care about the dishwashers in the Phoenix Country Club, not the members who send them their dirty dishes to be washed. But the narcissism of today’s elites knows no bounds. Undoubtedly, a certain percentage of the Times’s readers found their blood boiling at its front-page exposé of alleged second-class status among society’s most privileged members. With any luck, this most decadent stage of the privileged Western women’s movement is also its last.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0701hm.html

Even the most male-oriented business is attacking men.

The man opens the door to the backyard where his wife is reading the Lowe's catalog. The door makes the sound of "paint me". The narrator asks something along the lines of, "is the house telling you to paint it?"

Next thing you see is the husband and wife shopping at Lowe's.

From the image, it's clear that the woman obviously knows what to do and what to buy at Lowe's Home Improvement, while the husband just nods like an idiot "yes-man".

I have a Lowe's near my house. Every time I'm there, the only people who know anything are all men. Even the women who work in the store don't have a clue.

I mean come on! Can you imagine an ad for a shoe store where the man knows all about shoes and the woman just nods in agreement with a stupid look on her face? Such an ad would be a major scandal with every hairy lesbian demanding that the advertiser "donate" tens of millions for diversity training.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., June 26, 2008—The Chair of Colorado College's (CC's) Board of Trustees has affirmed the school's actions in finding that student Chris Robinson and another student wishing to remain anonymous violated CC's "violence" policy for posting a flyer that parodied a flyer of the Feminist and Gender Studies program. In a letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Board of Trustees Chair David van Diest Skilling wrote that "the College acted correctly in their handling of the students' behavior" and that "there is no need for further action." FIRE continues to call on CC to remove the guilty verdict from the students' files immediately and to stand by its own promises of freedom of expression.

"For its intransigent behavior in this case, FIRE placed Colorado College on our Red Alert list, which we reserve for the worst offenders of liberty among college and university campuses," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "Given an opportunity to right the wrong done by CC's administrators, the Board has decided to disregard the facts in this case and back the school's actions instead of urging the college to enforce its own contractual obligations to protect freedom of speech on its campus."

In early 2008, a pseudonymous group called "the Feminist and Gender Studies Interns" produced and distributed a flyer called "The Monthly Rag." The flyer included a reference to "male castration," an announcement about a lecture on "feminist porn" by a "world-famous prostitute and porn star," an explanation of "packing" (pretending to have a phallus), and a quotation from The Bitch Manifesto.

As a parody of "The Monthly Rag," Robinson and a second student distributed a flyer called "The Monthly Bag" under the pseudonym "The Coalition of Some Dudes." The flyer included references to "tough guy wisdom," "chainsaw etiquette," the shooting range of a sniper rifle, and a quotation about "female violence and abuse" of men from the website batteredmen.com.

Shortly thereafter, Colorado College President Richard F. Celeste sent out a campus-wide e-mail declaring that "The Monthly Bag" included "threatening and demeaning content" and asking the "Dudes" to come forward. When they did less than an hour later, they were subjected to a three-hour hearing and charged with "bias" and violating the college's values of respect and integrity. Only after public pressure did CC retreat to the idea that the entire matter was about the "violent" implications of mentioning a sniper rifle. Skilling's letter similarly invoked "the unprecedented wave of violence on college campuses" as justification for punishing the authors of the parody.

FIRE wrote to Celeste on March 21, 2008, pointing out that any punishment would contradict CC's commitments to free expression, including a policy that states, "On a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful that it may not be expressed." But on March 25, Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students Mike Edmonds wrote to the "Dudes" stating that they had been found guilty of "violating the student code of conduct policy on violence." Although Edmonds acknowledged that the publication was meant to satirize "The Monthly Rag," he wrote that "in the climate in which we find ourselves today, violence—or implied violence—of any kind cannot be tolerated on a college campus" and that "the juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality" in an anonymous parody made students feel threatened by chainsaws and rifles.

Robinson appealed Edmonds's decision, but the final judge of the appeal was Edmonds himself. Robinson was notified in an April 11 letter that his appeal had failed and that the finding would remain in his student file until he graduates. Although Celeste had argued that the students were "not sanctioned or punished," the April letter clearly stated that the letter in the file was a "discipline letter," and the Student Code of Conduct makes clear that having a letter placed in a student's file is an official punishment.

FIRE wrote to Skilling on May 16, urging him to ask Celeste to remove the guilty finding from the students' files. Skilling replied on June 18 that the board found "no basis to make any changes to the College's actions." Skilling said that because "The Monthly Bag" was "published anonymously without warning or permission" and "referenced tools and weapons of violence," the administration's actions were legitimate.

Skilling also incorrectly asserted that the two "Dudes" freely posted a second issue of the "Monthly Bag" in April after identifying themselves, but in truth the authors of the second issue, "The Coalition of Some Other Dudes," were four unnamed students.

"Colorado College's Board of Trustees obviously has an incorrect version of the facts, and the Board should ask Celeste where these facts are coming from," Lukianoff said. "FIRE will continue to pursue justice in this case until Colorado College admits its wrongdoing and removes this guilty finding. Colorado College should stop offering up excuses for shutting down controversial speech on campus and should honor its written promises to uphold freedom on campus."

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation's colleges and universities. FIRE's efforts to preserve liberty at Colorado College and at campuses nationwide can be viewed at thefire.org.

CONTACT:

Adam Kissel, Director, Individual Rights Defense Program, FIRE: 215-717-3473; adam@thefire.org
Richard F. Celeste, President, Colorado College: 719-389-6700; president@coloradocollege.edu
David van Diest Skilling, Chair of the Board of Trustees, Colorado College: P.O. Box 1620, Saratoga, WY 82331

Used with the permission of TheFIRE.org

The man runs out of sausages during a bbq. His wife comes to give it to him, but instead of just acting the way a normal woman would act in real life, she says, "awww, looking for this", making it obvious she's mocking him.

As usual the man has the look of an idiot. Instead of thanking his wife, he offers to high-5 her. When was the last time you high-fived your wife? Anyone? Anyone at all?

So fine, he tries to high-5 her. What does she do? She "leaves him hanging" with a look that says, "idiot!"

Now, any man who would high-5 his wife for giving him a sausage almost definitely IS an idiot.

But that's the point.

Like in any commercial that feature a male-female interaction, the man is an utter idiot and the woman is there to save him. The man is presented as an idiot with whom his highly intelligent wife somehow got stuck.

Again, there's nothing wrong with one spouse helping the other, especially with something so minor as a sausage for a bbq. It happens millions of times every day around the world.

The problem is that the man always has the look of a moron and to make sure that the audience doesn't miss it, the woman playing his wife will always point it out to make it obvious.

A middle-aged white guy in a suit attacked and tried to rob two teenage blacks. Already believable. Every time you read about real-life crime, it's always white guys in suits attacking poor black teenagers.

But it gets better. The middle-aged white man has no problem taking down the black male youth. But here comes the Sista.

She just took 3 classes of self-defense. She knows what to do. A split second later, the white man is literally spinning in the air. This 115 pound girl then puts 3 fingers on top of the man to hold him down. Because that's how strong all women are! All they need is just a couple of self-defense lessons.

The rest of the show that I still caught, the black guy who was beat up by the middle aged white man feels inadequate, but this is presented as male chauvinism.

I'm sure by the end of the show he recognized that he was wrong and acknowledged that gender is just a social construct, as men always do in shows like this (there was a near-identical episode on "Fresh Prince of Bel Air"), but I switched the channel.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Selected Works of Virginia Woolf. London: Wordsworth, 2005. 531-634.

Though I haven't written much on Virginia Woolf of late [i], I have been continuing my plan to read her major works. I finished A Room of One's Own as I was recovering from my ear infexions last month, and am currently working my way through The Years. Reading is slow, what with Ben, articles (on Ben), Derrida essays, and my repeated efforts to create an argument that brings all these together in a cohesive whole [ii]. Woolf, though, proves consistently hilarious rest from Ben and theory.

Woolf's skill at irony -- satire and just plain sarcasm -- is adept: a problem I find intriguing considering one her repeated advice to or indictments of female novelists and writers is the problem of including anger in one's work. Comparing the writing of Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Woolf declares Austen the finer writer:

perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.

I opened it to Chapter Twelve and my eye was caught by the phrase, 'Anybody may blame me who likes.' What are they blaming Charlotte Brontë for? I wondered. And I read how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies and looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she longed -- and it was for this that they blamed her -- [...] 'for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired for practical experience than I possessed. [...] When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh...

That is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted? (605-606)

I have found this passage puzzling for awhile. Charlotte Brontë's writing might end up auto-biographical and more "deformed" than Austen's work, but if it is, it is justifiably so.

Woolf spends the first two books of A Room of One's Own contrasting the rooms, dining halls and the intellectual company at the male-dominated Oxbridge University and the women's Fernham College. While male scholars have access to university libraries, women are denied this access (unless accompanied by a male chaperone). Too, male scholars are consistently better fed and given better living conditions than women, and thus possess all the material conditions that foster free intellectual thought and interesting, innovative writing.

Similarly, in what may be the most frequently-discussed chapter of Woolf's essay, Judith Shakespeare (Chapter Three) commits suicide when the material and legal conditions of her society prevent her from following the same career as her illustrious brother (a fate that is prescient of Woolf's own suicide in 1941). Brontë/Jane Eyre's frustration, then, at being denied the intellectual freedom and experiences that men possess, seems a position with which Woolf herself would sympathise; to hide that anger under a "perfectly natural, shapely sentence" (611), as Woolf claims Austen does, seems an unethical and insincere approach to Austen's characters and her audience.

Admittedly, a female writing when she is angry (particularly in Woolf's society) might find herself facing charges of irrationality, or writing due to emotion [iii]; however, such anger might also act as revelatory gesture, exposing the oppressive social conditions for women. The reader must ask, then, what is to be lost by writing angrily. For Woolf, anger, by a male or female writer is simply rhetorically ineffective:

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. [...] His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. [...] Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psychoanalysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man [...] Soon my own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these books there was always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often present and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. To judge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open [...] I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women—I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women, had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he was angry. (582-584)

Though Woolf confesses to her anger during her reading experience, her transcription of the event is rational, and indeed, self-reflective: her commentary on men's treatment of women in literature and science is made through an interrogation of her own responses to the texts she reads. Her critique, though satirical, progresses logically through her line of thought, and involves textual examples (that is, "proof") to convince her readers. [iv]

Indeed, throughout A Room of One's Own, Woolf maintains control over her work, and despite her fear that the topic "women in fiction" will be too variable to cover adequetly in a series of lectures, manages to discuss "women and what they are like, [...] women and the fiction that they write; [...] women and the fiction that is written about them, [and] all three [...] inextricably mixed together," (565) and does so in a logically unfolding narrative. Her comparative meals at Oxbridge and Fernham lead Woolf to wonder "Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?" (579). In order to research these questions, Woolf visits the British Museum where she encounters the book by Professor X which causes her anger; to allay this emotion, Woolf muses that contemporary conditions for women have improved signifcantly since Brontë's time, a musing which leads her to consider a social history of women, the writing conditions and products of Shakespeare, Austen, and Brontë, to compare the evolving literary styles of women, as well as the genres open to women in her society. Having predicted that opportunities for women will only become increasingly available, Woolf then offers her suggestion of how literature ought to develop, a suggestion which, considering the topic of Orlando, and her praise of both Shakespeare and Austen for refusing to allow their circumstances and mind to enter their writing (a character she labels "integrity"), is unsurprising:

And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co–operating. (623-624)

Woolf's suggestion for the cultivation of the "androgynous mind" is one that attempts to relieve the oppression of one gender not by inverting the power relationship between men an women, but by eliminating this power relationship: that is, Woolf suggests eliminating the cause of anger between men and women altogether.

Realistically, however, Woolf also suggests that a leveling of gender will not occur for span of decades, as women must actively labour to overcome their present state in which they are "dreadfully ignorant" (632), and they must do so from within their material and social limitations. This is a process which, she predicts, will take another century, at least. While it's heartening to note that many of Woolf's predictions about burgeoning gender equality have been realised, it can also be dismaying to realise that Anglo-American feminist literary criticism has tended to ignore or reject Woolf, reconsigning her to the obscurity which left her frustrated and angry.

End Notes:

[i] of late. It seemed incongruous writing about her during Ben's birthday week, that old misogynist.

[ii] a cohesive whole. A process which follows the pattern: type, delete, type, delete, delete, expletives, head-on-desk-in-despair-utter-utter-despair, walk the dog, type type delete.

[iii] due to emotion. A declamation which is itself unfair, given that males, as Woolf notes at various points in her essay, are permitted to write angrily without being declared similarly irrational. Woolf cites the example of a male scholar naming Rebecca West an "arrant feminist" for writing that men are "snobs": in response to which Woolf offers the indignant observation that "The exclamation, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringe ment of his power to believe in himself" (585).

[iv] her readers. In this way, Woolf is comparable to Austen who, though she is often satirical and sarcastic, is never irrational.

25 June 2008 ~ Niagara Falls

A 'marriage strike' is the social phenomenon of men seeking to avoid marriage. The 'marriage strike' specifically refers to the action of men living within the Western world. Advocates of the marriage strike believe that after a considered cost-benefit analysis, the legal contract that is modern marriage no longer represents an attractive option for men living in the West's changed legal, economic, sociological, cultural and demographic environment.

Contents [hide] 1 Introduction 2 Legal Causations of Emerging Western Marriage Strike 2.1 Divorce Penalty 2.2 No-fault divorce 2.3 Divorce and Children 3 Male Alternatives to Marriage 3.1 Cohabitation Without Marriage 3.2 Pre-nuptial Agreement 3.3 Foreign Women 4 See also 5 Research 6 Further reading

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[edit] Introduction

Advocates of the marriage strike hold the combination of 1) laws permitting no-fault divorce, and 2) prevailing conditions in divorce courts that are substantially more likely to favor the wife over the husband in disputes over child custody, visitation rights, ownership of the family residence and other shared property, child support, and alimony, enable a woman to unilaterally divorce her husband, while simultaneously depriving him of the right to see his offspring and financially crippling him.

Advocates of no-marriage argue that since the divorce rate is high, and that women are more likely than men to seek no-fault divorce, then such scenarios a likely outcome of marriage, and therefore men should choose not to marry.

There have also been numerous studies showing that a approximately 76% percent of no-fault divorces in the United States were initiated by women-- usually against a man who works a blue-collar job, and for subjective grounds such as "emotional unfulfillment" rather than any actual wrongful conduct of the man himself.^{[citation needed]}

Likewise, according to [maritalstatus.com], a Web site geared toward divorce and remarriage, divorce is a $28 billion-a-year industry with an average cost of about $20,000. Furthermore, it is an unquestionable fact that those men most unable to afford adequate representation legally, are most likely to suffer the most financially in resulting judgments and settlements.

Such evidence gives rise to allegations that many women are unfairly reaping a financial windfall through divorce at their ex-husband's expense, and therefore men should simply avoid this risk through avoiding marriage altogether.

Such advocacy holds that marriage poses absolutely no benefit to a man whatsoever, in that that traditional positive benefits of consortium, security and custody have been entirely revamped and eclipsed by reforms to original marriage laws; meanwhile likewise, advocates hold that these and other societal, legal, and other reforms, now afford equal or greater such benefits to non-married persons, in addition to of the benefits of remaining unmarried.

Advocates hold, rather, that selective, one-sided reforms by feminists and other groups such as universal suffrage, abortion, women's liberation, equal pay, and other reforms, have created a one-sided situation that unfairly benefits women in both marriage and divorce, at the man's expense.

[edit] Legal Causations of Emerging Western Marriage Strike

[edit] Divorce Penalty

Marriage, while being publicly understood as a union between man and woman, is also a legal contract. On divorce, the court deems that a legal contract is considered broken, and legal consequences come into effect. There is a dissolution of the previously shared financial assets of the married couple. Assets are divided for distribution to both parties by a court ruling. Typically, a woman will receive 50% ownership of the couple's assets on initiation of divorce. These assets include property, housing, vehicles, savings, and investments^[1].

[edit] No-fault divorce

No-fault divorce is divorce in which the dissolution of a marriage does not require fault of either party to be shown, or, indeed, any evidentiary proceedings at all. It occurs on petition to the court, typically a family court by either party, without the requirement that the petitioner show fault on the part of the other party. Either party may request, and receive, the dissolution of the marriage, despite the objections of the other party.

[edit] Divorce and Children

In the Western world, family law is structurally more likely to award child custody to a child's mother in the case of divorce ^[2][3]. This legal situation results in fathers often having very limited access to their children after divorce. In an attempt to balance the rights and needs of the mother, father, and children, courts may award a couple joint custody of their children after divorce.

[edit] Male Alternatives to Marriage

[edit] Cohabitation Without Marriage

Proponents of the marriage strike advise that men should simply cohabit (live with a girlfriend), and not actually marry. Living with a girlfriend presents a legally safer alternative, with marriage's benefits to men, with a reduction in the penalties found within marriage.

De-facto Law:

However, it should be noted that family law can also be applied in some Western nations (eg, Australia) and other nations (eg Brazil) to de-facto relationships such as these. After a certain length of time, the breakup of a non-marriage, live-in relationship can legally result in a man losing his assets to his 'de-facto wife', as considered by the law.

[edit] Pre-nuptial Agreement

A prenuptial agreement, commonly abbreviated to 'prenup', is a contract entered into by two people prior to marriage. The content of a prenuptial agreement can vary widely, but commonly includes provisions for the division of property should the couple divorce and any rights to spousal support during or after the dissolution of marriage.

Prenuptial agreements are not always fully recognized by law in case of divorce. Prenuptial agreements are, at best, a partial solution to obviating some of the risks of marital property disputes in times of divorce. They are not the final word.

[edit] Foreign Women

Full article: Mail-order bride

Another form of the marriage strike is to single out only American women, or women from any English-speaking country (such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand) for shunning.^{[citation needed]} English-speaking women are characterized as rude, aloof, selfish and brainwashed by feminism.^{[citation needed]} Instead, such marriage strikers encourage men to marry women from other, usually developing, countries.^{[citation needed]} Most often mentioned countries are Latin American, Eastern European, or Asian countries, such as the Philippines, Africa, Thailand, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine and Poland. They state that such women are more likely to appreciate marriage than American women and are much less likely to divorce.^{[citation needed]} Some even go so far as to urge the men to move to the other country and live there rather than bring the foreign wife back to the United States, in case she gets "infected" by feminist ideas; citing horror stories of foreign women using the man for a green card and ripping him off.^{[citation needed]}

In 2005, the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act was attached to the Violence Against Women Act and was passed. The passage of IMBRA includes placing restrictions on visas given to women who meet an American man through an online dating service. Many marriage strikers have assailed the law as a spiteful attempt to protect American women from foreign competition, as a sort of "love tariff".^{[citation needed]} In fact, despite the term "mail-order bride", most marriages between American men and foreign women do not use "mail-order bride" services.^{[citation needed]} However, IMBRA can come into effect from any online correspondence, not just through a dating service.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• Alimony
• Bachelor
• Child support
• Families Need Fathers
• Family law
• Fathers' rights
• Involuntary celibacy
• Masculism
• Misandry
• Palimony

[edit] Research

• US National Center for Health Statistics: Divorce rate in 2003 was 50% of the marriage rate
• 15% of men are awarded custody, unchanged since 1994 (see p. 1).
• As a matter of routine in family court, fathers are awarded four days a month visitation to see their children.
• Annual support payments increase 18% to $40 billion paid by 7.8 million separated parents, 6.6 million are fathers
• Up to $4.1 billion available to states that create support and arrearage orders, and then collect (see 6B, 6C, & 6D).
• Divorced/separated men commit suicide 400% more than women (see # 5, 15).

[edit] Further reading

• Dump Your Wife NOW! Blog - A blog united with the men's movement. Thought provoking original articles on men's liberation, masculism, as well as articles taking aim at radical feminism and the marriage strike.
• No Marriage - A case study against marriage to an American woman
• Why Men Won't Commit: Exploring Young Men's Attitudes About Sex, Dating and Marriage by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead PhD and David Popenoe PhD
• The Marriage No-Shows by Carey Roberts
• Have Anti-Father Family Court Policies Led to a Men's Marriage Strike? By Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson
• Women Lose When Feminists Bash by Carey Roberts
• The Marriage Strike by Wendy McElroy
• Lysistrata Complete text of the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• Eternal Bachelor blog - The thoughts and musings of a man who has cheated a woman out of a divorce settlement.
• Stay Single, Young Man! - by Vox Day.
• Don't Make Her Mad - Thwart the false pretext of a divorce (domestic violence/fear thereof) via surveillance of the false allegation.
• Tenets of leykis A series of rules created by radio-personality Tom Leykis to help men get sex with minimal time and effort.