Of all the blogs I have linked to over there on the right, Fred Reed is the one I’ve been reading the longest. It’s more of a column than a blog, really. I like what he does. He makes the absurd look absurd and the normal look normal. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s really quite a feat in a world where so much is completely backwards. He doesn’t interact with readers or pick internet fights. He doesn’t debate issues or appear upset. He makes stupid ideas sound properly stupid. He’s a bullshit filter.
This past summer he wrote a couple pieces that are quite relevant to what we talk about here. In June, he wrote Getting What You Want, Wanting What You Get: An Unabashed Study of Feminism, a quick piece on how feminism changed the world and how women don’t like it. This is exactly what motivated me to start this blog. He’s going on about hooking up, how women, college girls apparently, are complaining about their own promiscuity.
What seems to get their panties in an uproar is that they offer their favors to passersby like soap companies handing out shampoo samples, but without the intimacy, and then grouse because the guy doesn’t call them back. Why would he? Give me one reason.
What I don’t get is, why are gals bitching? This is the world they wanted. They clawed and scratched and burned their bras and had court cases and threw fits to get exactly what they have. They hated men because, they said, men weren’t letting them copulate frantically like men had always wanted them to. Men, or more likely their mothers, didn’t let them make themselves unattractive by dressing like hod-carriers and swearing like sailors. Finally men gave in and now women hate them for that. Whatever happened to gratitude?
It wasn’t like all women were really eager to fuck around. It was the feminists, a bunch of angry women who weren’t pretty enough to land a decent husband, who convinced all the other women that fucking around ought to be the new normal and that marriage was slavery (for women). The actual change that occurred wasn’t that men gave in; it’s that women did. It was, as he notes, mothers who bought into feminism and stopped worrying about their daughters’ purity. Further, it was fathers who, as the social changes began to occur, stopped being around to have any influence either way. Today’s young women certainly didn’t demand the current normal, nor do they have any idea how things got this way. Thankfully, some feminists are still around to instruct them to blame men.
He mentions how girls were expected to be modest and that boys didn’t expect to get laid and therefore went after girls they actually liked, and then:
But then came fem-lib. A torrent of really nasty dykes with politically-significant hairy armpits started yowling about how it wasn’t fair that men could cat around and women couldn’t. Then the Pill shifted the paradigm into high gear. Girls could now Do It in relative security, and abortion, also championed by feminists, provided sure-fire back-up. There was now no reason why a woman shouldn’t say Yes.
Awesome. I’m going to try to work “politically-significant hairy armpits” into a sentence in a meaningful way by Monday.
Which meant—Oh bliss!—that she had little excuse for saying No. Sally Sue might have teeth like pearls and brains and perky tits and a wacky sense of humor and actually be quite a prize, but sex trumps art. If Sally didn’t say Yes, she knew that Greta would. Women had commoditized themselves. It was a marvelous thing for the testosterone wads we think of as college boys.
What he doesn’t say is that while casual sex was good for college boys, it wasn’t so good for all college boys. When boys and girls stop pairing up and start “hooking up”, the girls tend to give it up to the same guys, the alphas. Thus, you might have one guy who bangs three different girls between classes living next to another guy who stays loyal to his long-distance girlfriend because of all the girls he ever liked, she’s the only one who liked him back. (now make that sound people make when they see a basket of kittens)
It quickly came to the old country saw with fangs: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Guys learned that they could say, “Check your oil, lady?” and it worked. Praise de Lawd! Gloria Steinem and Andrea Fire-Plug-with-Leprosy Dworkin had done what men had failed to do in millennia: produce a race of obligately loose women.
What they had done was destroy the Western institution of monogamy. The broke the social constraints that had stopped women from opening their legs whenever some cad got their cooter slightly moist. But then they didn’t like how men responded to the change by not marrying them:
Not being too good at abstraction, they didn’t understand that a man can be perfectly happy with casual sex, scuba gear, and a Harley Sportster. Left to himself, he would never think of having a Volvo station wagon, a boring McMansion with a backbreaking mortgage, or a wedded termagant who wouldn’t let him go out with his friends.
Honestly, having been married, I find it hard to accept the idea of ever going back to that, no matter how much I like someone. I don’t totally love “single life” or go on and on about having my freedom. I kind of don’t care, until I think about actually giving it up.
In July he wrote about Wikileaks:
Two ways exist of looking at Wikileaks, the site that publicizes secret military documents and videos. The first is held self-interestedly by the Pentagon and by Fox News, the voice of an angry lower-middle class without too much education. These believe that Wikileakers are traitors, haters of America, who give aid and comfort to the enemy and endanger the lives of Our Boys.
Implicit in the Foxian view is a vague idea that the leaks give away important—well, stuff. You know, maybe frequencies of something or other, or locations of ambushes or, well, things. Important things. The Taliban will use this information to kill American soldiers. The notion is vague, as are those who hold it, but emotionally potent.
A lot more has been released by Wikileaks since this was written, but I still haven’t heard of a single instance of unwarranted compromise, such as giving away the identity of an undercover CIA officer. If you have, fill me in. I’m all ears.
The other view, held usually by people who have some experience of Washington, is that the Pentagon is worried not about the divulging of tactical secrets, but about public relations. Wikileaks doesn’t endanger soldiers, insists this way of looking at things, but the war itself, and all the juiceful contracts and promotions and so on entailed by wars.
Well, of course.
Remember the military’s frantic efforts to suppress the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, photos of prisoners lying in pools of blood while grinning girl soldiers play with them? These had zero tactical importance. They did however threaten to arouse the Pentagon’s worst enemy.
The American public.
To be fair, the Pentagon also didn’t want the Iraqi public to see those pictures either, but that population had already seen enough nasty shit with their own eyes to be totally pissed off at the US military. I mean, seeing a picture of your fellow countryman bound and humiliated has nothing on watching your own child bleed to death, or watching soldiers take away your husband for no apparent reason and then never seeing him again. So really, it’s far more important that our eyes in the US be shielded than anywhere else, because here we have at least notional control over Uncle Sam’s behavior.
Note that the Pentagon’s orchestrated screaming has not been about technical data that might in fact get GIs killed, but about revelation of the ugly things the US is doing to people. Consider the footage of an American helicopter gunship killing pedestrians in a city street, and apparently having just a swell time doing it. This didn’t reveal military secrets. But it showed the gusnip crew as the butchers they are. Bad juju for the military. PR is all.
I posted and commented on that video before. Bradley Manning, the kid who leaked the video, is still awaiting trial and faces up to 52 years in prison. All for making the military look bad.
Remember when Bush II forbade the photographing of coffins coming back into Dover AFB (I think it was)? That lamentable president said the prohibition was to “protect the privacy” of the dead. (The inside of an anonymous coffin isn’t private?) Those photos contained no military information—but they could have made the public think. Bad. Very bad.
Yes, and it annoyed me that anybody accepted that explanation.
Please just read the whole article. Reed often comes across as a dispassionate spectator, but here I sense a great deal of grief and disgust over the ongoing spilling of blood for profit.
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