More Thoughts On Feminist Lunacy

Yes, there’s a lot of it going around these days. Some of it is merely mildly amusing or mildly unpleasant. Some of it is actively life-threatening, as we can see from the witch-hunts inspired by recent, highly publicized but apparently false allegations of rape.

Milo Yiannopoulos has produced yet another impressive piece, this time about a feminist virago so hysterical, so vicious, and so utterly bereft of good sense that were she not demonstrably flesh, I would have assumed her to be a fictional character. I hadn’t heard about this...person previously – I don’t keep in touch with events in Silicon Valley to the extent I once did – but given recent developments among technologists, both on corporate boards and among low-level employees, her activities there come as no surprise.

By any reasonable person's definition, and even by the standards of Silicon Valley, Kane is an abusive engine of discord, creating precisely the opposite conditions to those needed for happy co-operation between the sexes. So how did she land a feature-length profile in Matter, Silicon Valley's long-read organ of choice—even though her paranoia and control freakery eventually screwed up what would probably have been a fawning profile and left journalists and readers alike aghast at her childishness and self-destructiveness?

(In case you're not familiar with the story, follow those two links, which have to be read to be believed. Evidently Matter started calling around, asking people about Kane's personal and professional life in preparation for their profile of her and her work—doing journalism, in other words—and she threw a hissy fit and started defaming and smearing the journalists in question, who were respectable professionals, beyond reproach in their dealings with her.)

That second paragraph is the key. Such harridans cannot bear scrutiny and will play every card in the deck to deflect or evade it. In this they most closely resemble racialist mouthpieces such as Al Sharpton, who receives unbelievable deference from the media but whose personal conduct has been so vile as to merit absolute condemnation. Yet they continue to get unearned attention and respect, mainly because they belong to “certified victim classes” the media has resolved never, ever to cross.

Unearned respect is almost always abused to the detriment of the genuinely respectable and respect-worthy. Shanley Kane is striving to present us with a demonstration.

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A pair of terms with which employment lawyers will already be familiar, assumption of risk and informed consent, are relevant to much of the feminist slander-slinging today.

He who voluntarily and without inducement enters some place or situation is said to have assumed the risks that pertain to that place or situation. For example, a Christian tourist who decides to travel covertly to Mecca, an Arabian city nominally closed to non-Muslims, has assumed the risks associated with discovery. An unarmed man who ventures at night into an area known to be the haunt of muggers and drug dealers has assumed the risks that come with that territory. Assumption of risk lays the burden of coping with the risks, including all the damages that would fall upon him should those risks be realized, upon the principal’s own shoulders.

A woman who voluntarily goes unaccompanied, unarmed, and otherwise unprotected through a district where a significant number of rapes have been reported in the recent past has assumed the risks of that activity. Though the deed is criminal and should be investigated and prosecuted, nevertheless she has no moral claim to having been “failed” by anyone. Neither can she validly protest, when informed of the stupidity of her decision, that to be so informed constitutes “blaming the victim.”

The other term, informed consent, pertains to decisions taken under inducement. An employer induces his employees to enter his place of business by offering a salary and / or other benefits. A shopkeeper induces customers to enter his store by advertising its existence and / or promoting his wares. The inducement constitutes an obligation on the part of the inducer to inform those induced of any non-trivial risks attached to such behavior. If the inducer can validly claim to have done so to the best of his knowledge and ability, he is at least partially indemnified against any damages that may accrue to those induced from the realization of those risks.

An invitation to a “frat party” constitutes an inducement. But what does “informed consent” come to in such a case?

• Fraternities are populated by young men.
• They almost always feature alcoholic beverages.
• Laws against them notwithstanding, they frequently feature various recreational drugs.
• Young men, with few exceptions, are interested in having sex.
• Young women, with few exceptions, are the persons with whom young men want to have sex.
• Though this might come as a shock to the terminally naive, quite a lot of sex occurs at frat parties.

Just how out of touch, friendless, and intellectually deficient must a young woman be not to know all that before she first sets foot on a college campus? Does such a girl belong in college at all?

This common-sense observation won’t halt the cries about “rape culture” and “patriarchal oppression,” of course.

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The feminist harridans’ diatribes against men et cetera won’t halt until the media, particularly the Main Stream Media, demand that they hew to the same standards that are expected of men. However, the Main Stream Media long ago abandoned all pretense of “objective journalism.” Like the rest of the Left’s coalition of agents, they’ve signed on to an agenda, in part out of conviction but in at least equal measure because in our time, the preservation of coalitions of allegiant customers is a matter of old-format media survival. Indeed, even some of the “new,” online media have become dependent on such ideological patron groups.

This is a devastating criticism of the journalistic trade. It opens wide the question of whether there’s any “news source” whose reporting can and should be believed by default. When the details of such reports include allegations of rape, molestation, sexual harassment, and the like, careers and lives hang in the balance. A heavy moral onus for destroying innocent lives should rest upon those who promote unfounded accusations.

Women, having allowed feminists to redefine them from the “strong” profile they claimed a few decades ago to the “fragile flower” category they were supposedly striving to escape, will be the ultimate victims. Economic forces are already rearranging matters to separate men and women in business and commerce. The legal hazards of marriage and fatherhood have brought about a huge aversion to those things among young men. Socially, young Americans are partitioning themselves into gender-specific camps to a degree unknown since the Victorian Era. Only terminal blindness to foreseeable consequences can account for it; only the opening of millions of women’s eyes to those consequences can undo it.

“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.