Posts categoriezed as Gender Issues
Why David Bowie Mattered
As everyone knows by now, poor old David Jones has died a somewhat untimely death thanks to that bastard thing called cancer. As has become de rigeur on such occasions, everyone has taken to social media to bemoan the passing of someone whose work they probably havenât given a shit about in years. Hell, I would be willing to bet a lot of the younger attention seekers didnât even know who Bowie was until the news hit, or simply thought of him as âSome old guy that my dad likes.â As usual, everyone loves you once you are deadâŚ
I am not about to eulogize Bowie. I am not going to go on about how remarkable it is that he managed to turn out so many good songs over so many decades, or how big an influence he was on todayâs rather inferior crop of singer-âsong-writers.â Like most people, I didnât even pay any real attention to his last album release â but unlike so many of those people I am not about to pretend I bought it soon as it hit the stores. Hell, I just looked it up and âBlackstar,â the single, peaked at only 129 in the UK! Yet, now that the poor bastard has kicked the bucket, everyone is acting like he was Jesus in order to horn in on the nigh-pornographic thrill of yet another celebrity death. Like I said, everyone loves you once you are deadâŚ
What I will do is go on about how Bowie mattered as a human male. To me, and I am far from alone in this, Bowie was an icon of two things â male creativity and male rebellion against gender roles. In a world in which most of the creative people are male, yet in which, paradoxically, being creative is seen as not such a male thing to do, Bowie was one of the few male figures known primarily for his creativity. Not his popularity, or his good looks, or his ability to take a lot of drugs and then die young, but primarily for being one incredibly creative bastard. The willfully eccentric music; the wild costumes; the makeup; the use of different personas at a time when such things could still be called creativity rather than mere cheap ploys for attention; even the unexpectedly skillful acting, especially notable in pieces like The Man Who Fell To Earth, all these things labeled David Bowie as âan artistâ and a male one at that. This then, is the first reason why Bowie mattered â his full-on commitment to creativity made it more okay for a man to be âartsyâ in a world where most people would still prefer that we played football instead.
Then thereâs that gender rebellion thing. Eccentric even for an Englishman, Bowie gave the impression that he didnât care in the slightest if you thought he was some poofy weirdo. He dressed different, acted different, and he was even â Shock! Horror! â a bit on the effeminate and delicate side! Other than what appears to have been a very brief flirtation with bisexuality, Bowie seems to have been basically heterosexual â all those wives and kids, you know â and this made his somewhat delicate ways much more subversive than those of gay stars. For gay males to be ratherâŚerâŚgay means little â for a man with a wife and kids to be acting a bit âfruityâ is a real kick in the teeth of those who would prefer men to stay in their place. That is true even today, but even more so in the old days when a teenage Bowie set up the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men because he was sick of people calling him âdarlingâ! Nowadays, nobody gives a shit if a man has long hair, in part because men like Bowie have made it a bit more acceptable for men to express themselves and their individuality in a variety of ways. The gender cage is still there, but thanks to Bowie and others like him, it is a bit bigger than it used to be.
And that folks, is why I think Bowie mattered â not because of his great music, but because he made the lives of men and boys a bit better, a bit freer, a bit happier, in a society that really couldnât care less about the happiness of men and boys. For that, we owe old Dave a nod of respect and the wish that, if the religious people are right and there is life after death, he ends up in the right place!
4 Ways To Become A Better Feminist in 2016
1 â Stop lying like a bitch. Stop going on about a campus rape epidemic that does not exist. Stop claiming only men commit domestic violence. Stop claiming the West is composed of patriarchies â it makes you look about as credible as that guy whoâs always going on about the lizard people.
2 â Start supporting actual equality. Stop whining about STEM and start campaigning to bring the proportion of degrees going to women back down to 51% — as opposed to 60%. Stop whining about air conditioning and start focusing on all those men living in cardboard boxes over a heating grate. In short, stop trying to widen the many gaps that already run in your favor.
3 â Shut the fuck up. Really. Nobody needs a bunch of over-privileged bigots taking part in a debate about equality. Itâs like asking David Duke to weigh in on Black Lives Matter. Itâs like asking Westboro Baptist to turn up at a Gay Pride parade. Itâs pointless, itâs useless, and can only lead to jerks trying to further their privilege by sabotaging the attempts of those actually trying to change things for the better.
4 â Kill yourself. If you canât start behaving like a decent human being, or at least shut the fuck up, you should do the human race a favor and take yourself out. I suggest jumping under a moving train, or into a wood chipping machine. The latter would be better as your remains could then be used as mulch â which is more than you will have done for anyone while alive.
Why Do People Believe Stereotypes About Feminists?
Letâs start with what these stereotypes actually are.
Generally, it all comes down to these threeâŚ
Feminists are all a bunch of lesbians
Feminists are physically unattractive
Feminists hate men
Letâs tackle these stereotypes about feminists one at a timeâŚ
Feminists are all a bunch of lesbians
This one is clearly bullshit. Most feminists, alas, are all-too-straight. They spend waaaay too much time whining about not being able to get a man to not be straight. They also spend way too much time going on about how they donât need a man, which is just a weird psychological flipping around of the fact that they do need a man! You see, actual lesbians donât waste time going on about how little they need a man, they just go out and get themselves a woman! I suppose the reason so many people believe that feminism is some sort of lesbian plot is the same reason so many right wingers believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and so many left wingers believe the Islamic Invasion is a good thing â most people are idiots, and idiots believe what their leaders tell them to.
Feminists are physically unattractive
This one is, for the most part, true. Which helps to explain why they canât get a man that doesnât need to be inflated. Sure, Naomi Wolf is pretty â a cow, but a pretty cow â and Steinem wasnât too bad when she was young, but most feminists look like something out of a 1950s EC horror comic. Letâs face it, all you have to do is look at the profile pictures these people post on Facebook to realize that they are about as attractive as a moldering zombie or a tentacled alien from outer space. So the answer to our question when it comes to this one, is that people believe the stereotype because it is usually true.
Feminists hate men
People believe this particular stereotype for the same reason they believe shit is smelly and brown â they have seen, and smelled it, with their own senses and it makes them want to heave. For a couple of decades now, even people who donât pay that much attention to gender politics have turned on their TVs to see cackling feminist hyenas blithering about how wonderful women are and how worthless men are. They have seen the joyous reactions to hate crimes like those committed by Lorena Bobbit and Catherine Kieu Becker. They have seen a torrent of newspaper and magazine articles celebrating the fact that boys are falling further and further behind girls in just about every way. They have seen feminists claim there is a rape epidemic going on when the evidence in their own lives tells them that rape is, thankfully, nowhere near as common as feminists would like it to be. They have seen feminists claim that virtually all victims of domestic violence are women, while also seeing men and children in their own lives victimized byâŚer⌠women. They have seen young menâs lives ruined by feminist witch-hunts fuelled by nothing more than a few malicious lies and rape hysteria, and then they have seen the false accusers let off the hook because feminists claim that prosecuting them somehow stops actual victims from coming forward!
And thatâs just the people who arenât paying much attention! The ones who really look into these matters find even more horrific evidence of feminismâs rabid man-hating. They see feminists calling for the abolition of womenâs prisons in the UK! They see feminists setting up the White House Council on Women and Girls to improve female outcomes in education and health â areas in which females are already doing better than males! They see feminists opposing shared custody, making sure that rape continues to be defined as something a man does to a woman, having men fired for insulting them on social media, and even trying to jail them over mere disagreements!
So, overall, the answer to the question posed in the title is that people believe the stereotypes because at least two of them are true. Sure, feminists arenât mostly lesbians â but they are hideous hags whose very existence seems to be all about shitting on men in every way they can.
Female Creativity â There Ainât No Such Thing
More and more lately, we hear about how important it is to get women into this creative field or that scientific discipline, as if their mere femaleness will somehow improve said fields. More women in comics! More women in movies! More women in music! More women in STEM! More women in computer programming! These are calls screeched across the media by everyone from feminist bloggers to the Amerikan Emperor. The problem is, women just donât have much of a record when it comes to being good at creating things. And that is putting it nicelyâŚ
Letâs face it â women arenât much good at creating anything that doesnât shit itself every five minutes. Pretty much all the achievements of civilization can be put down to men, patriarchy, call it what you will. From patriarchal Sumerâs decision that the wheel was good for something other than pottery, to some dudes figuring out how to put some other dudes on the moon, to social innovations such as welfare and public schools, just about everything that has dragged humanity out of the primordial slime has been the doing of some man or other.
Feminists and white knights will argue that this is due to lack of opportunity for women, but thatâs a load of shit. First, women have been going to Uni for decades now, yet where is the wave of innovation from the First Sex? Where are the inventions? The new ideas that are supposed to result from Womanâs different point of view? Nowhere, thatâs where they are. Hell, even feminism goes all the way back to some Greek bloke called Plato! And then thereâs the fact that males belonging to oppressed groups â thatâs real oppression, like slavery and lynchings, not faux oppression involving air conditioners and tiny cartoon wristies â have managed to create many worthwhile things. George Washington Carver came up with dozens of innovations in agriculture â thanks, no doubt, to the enormous privileges bestowed upon him by being born a poor, black slave! What did the rich white women who graduated from University the same year as Carver come up with? Butkus. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Not that we know of, anyway â itâs always possible that one of the poor dears invented the computer but had it stolen by the patriarchy! Then there are Carverâs musical equivalents. Poor black men trapped in ghettoes who somehow managed to come up with rock ânâ roll, the blues, rap, and â may god forgive them â jazz. What the hell did rich white women come up with during that time? Any musical genres cooked up by those over-privileged twats? Not that I know of, no. Hell, Iâm pretty sure that it was poor white men, not rich white women, who came up with most folk music and Country and Western, though I see little reason to be thankful for either of those achievements.
And no, learning to ape the creations of men is not being creative. Sure, there are many women who can write a good song, a good novel, a good poem, but only in forms and genres set out by their male superiors. The basic formulas being followed, they were almost always created by men, and without those basics even the most âbrilliantâ of female artists or intellectuals is left floundering like the mediocrity that she is.
So, the next time someone goes on about how essential it is to get more women into the arts and sciences, just remind yourself that, despite plenty of opportunity, the only thing women have come up with has been plenty of nothing.