Jennifer Armstrong asked me to comment on the following:
Marc de Jong: I was raised a feminist by my mom who came from a long tradition of strong feminist women. her aunts, her mother, her grand mother and even her great grand mother. I studied feminism at university with Betty Freidan and I read Simone de Bouvoir avidly in philosophy. There are several famous male feminists, Phil Donahue (who went to my University), Alan Alda, John Lennon and Barack Obama. Some weeks ago a friend shared a planned parenthood post on my wall. It was excellent and having held the hand of two young and terrified catholic girls during abortion who just made a mistake and fell pregnant and approached me because they sensed I could be trusted. They were right to be scared their families would have cut them off immediately and they would not finish school and have an unwanted baby and live in poverty and scorn for the rest of their lives (isn’t religion wonderful?) I joined the debate and proposed ” If 80% of women in the states homemakers and working just refused to do their jobs for just two days. They would crash the economy for six months and all their demands would be fastracked and approved.”
The vitriol and foul language that followed was unbelievable. I was mocked ridiculed accused of trolling for pussy. told to fuck off assfuck over and over and much worse I said it is a proposal I welcome all criticism. I was accused of mansplaining a new word to me that I worked out to mean man knows best always so fuck off dickless prick we dont need men sistas can do it by themselves.
Planned Parenthood is a misnomer being funded by the government. Its Manhaters Anonymous. The agenda runs deep the history of PP is rife with examples of women who argued among other things to kill newborn males and disguise them as abortions. they also argued the case for eugenics not racially like Hitler but by sex. The idea is to have a massive female majority in global society with just enough enslaved men as sperm donors. They are now even more emboldened by biotechnology and stem cells and cloning that that they sense that having fooled Obama they can commit global xy menocide and have a planet with half the population, fantastic resources and space beautiful space and me time. And create a feminine utopia.
This is fact.
Im kind and true and believe in unconditional love and forgiveness and the closest person you will ever meet to Jesus.
But do not understimate my beautiful mind.
And as the greatest natural fencer he had ever seen according to Russian Gennadi Tyschler coach of more Olympic gold medalists in history. Be warned.
There are endless men and women whose personal lives have failed completely so they post these kinds of comments everywhere they can. The comments always have the same structure:
1. “I’m the most feminist of all feminists and I was raised at Friedan’s knee and nursed by Beauvoir.” Every single time, these names are trotted out. Sometimes, Gloria Steinem makes an appearance.
2. “I tried helping feminists but they abused me and heaped vitriol on me.” (Sometimes, the bad feminists also take away our sufferer’s wife / husband, poison his or her kittens and inflict other forms of pain and suffering.)
3. “You don’t know it but there is a secret feminist conspiracy to run the world.”
4. “Beware, friend! The Big Feminist is watching!”
What is especially funny is that I’ve heard the exact same speeches delivered against Jews, Liberals, and “socialists.”
It kind of hurts my feelings that nobody makes such pretty conspiracy stories about Ukrainians. What is a poor Ukrainian supposed to do to make herself be seen as a serious contender for world domination?
P.S. Thank you, Jennifer Armstrong for providing this beautiful quote.
Clarissa's Blog 
My recently published article in the prestigious German tome was a commentary on being labeled evil because “colonial”. I think I’ve got all the street creds in relatively high amounts. I’m a “conspirator”.
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If there is a label, chances are somebody will accuse its representatives of evilness. 🙂
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Yes, but also postmodernism made out that there were no enemies, but the enemy of colonialism. So nobody was evil, except for those who happened to have a colonial heritage, discounting those in the West who had purified themselves from within.
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Can we really find anybody who doesn’t have a colonial heritage in today’s world? At one time or another, everybody was part of this type of structure.
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Yes, of course. Also, what people don’t choose to see is that even those who have been colonized also exert military force against each other and oppress each other. Look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukurahundi
I think the narrative that we can somehow transcend historical events, or purify ourselves by serving our guilt complexes, is completely unfounded.
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Do you read V.S. Naipaul? He’s my favorite writer on colonialism. Very non PC.
As for guilt complexes, people cherish them at their own peril.
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I haven’t read him, but I’ve read Nietzsche, which is much better concerning the illusions of purification from within.
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Heh heh. Love me, you bitches.
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Yeah. . .
I’ve seen this many many times.
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That article was written by a bot. That is why it is easy to see the pattern. The real conspiracy is by a bunch of women haters. The aim is to keep all internet savvy feminists busy replying to moronic posts like that presented here.
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I wasn’t likely to do anything useful at 2 am anyways, so it’s just as well. 🙂
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The kicker is the “I’m just like Jesus” statement towards the end. Statements like those (“I’m the most compassionate, caring, nicest” etc.) are signals to me to quit listening/reading/caring.
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Some days, certain things do make you wonder???
http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2012-06-why-women-are-more-often-right
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Oh my God, my God, my God. Just as I started feeling better about this guy, he goes and produces this kind of garbage.
I now wonder how N. and I have managed to go all this time without calculating which one of us is more “privileged” and who has been “more oppressed.” I can just imagine that conversation:
“My grandfather died in WWII. That makes me a bigger victim!”
“And we were piss poor, that trumps your grandpa!”
“We were poorer than you! I can make calculations right now!”
“How dare you! The Holocaust!”
“No, how dare you! The Holodomor!”
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“Again, power obfuscates; oppression clarifies.”
– It’s incredible that an educated, well-read person would come up with something this bizarre. It’s like the entire theory of ideology did not happen.
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It’s incredible that an educated, well-read person would come up with something this bizarre. It’s like the entire theory of ideology did not happen.(Clarissa)
And a Feminist to boot. 😉
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I know! I’m completely shocked. Expecting a woman to play the role of a Big Mother to her make partner, rather than that of an equal partner, is completely anti-feminist.
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– It’s incredible that an educated, well-read person would come up with something this bizarre.(Clarissa)
And to think, all this coming from a Feminist. 😉
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Epistemic privilege does have a rather sound philosophical foundation, for example, it could be theoretically abstracted from Hegel’s philosophy and from some extent from Nietzsche. The links to these giants are not totally consistent with their views, but they are there. For instance, Nietzsche saw that being in a relatively weaker position created a psychological pressure to develop the intellect, which the “strong” did not have to develop, as they relied on their strength. This is his analysis in Genealogy of Morals. Often, Nietzsche sides with the strong, because he doesn’t like the kind of intellect that is developed as a result of oppression. “Epistemic privilege” is not necessarily the outcome of being oppressed — at least, it is not directly assured. Rather, being shrewd, calculating and manipulative can also occur.
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That’s the thing, with Hugo Schwyzer. He asks the question, “How is my “WASPy privileged maleness” distorting what I see?” Well, it’s not distorting what you “see”, because there is no underlying truth to the matter, once individual perceptions have been stripped away. Well, I take that back. There is the sum of both his and his wife’s perceptions, which make up the whole of what there is to see. But, he can’t strip back his perceptions, so as to see hers, and thus see all there is to see. That would be masochistic. And wrong.
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As I go through Schwyzer’s article, I agree that the following statement is generally true as a trend, (although it doesn’t apply to individuals as such. Oppressed individuals are not guaranteed to see anything better as such.)
“Here’s the basic axiom: power conceals itself from those who possess it. And the corollary is that privilege is revealed more clearly to those who don’t have it.”
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He’s forgetting, however, that revolutionaries in all countries never come from the working classes. 🙂 It’s always those privileged folks who are especially conscious of the oppression their own social class exercises.
And in the US, the most disadvantaged classes unanimously vote for the Republicans, the party of the rich folks out to rob them blind.
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That’s a good point about the Republicans and their voters. I think sometimes the oppressed are also revolutionaries, but then they are of a different sort than those who preach the philosophical idealism of intersectionality. In Zimbabwe, certainly, the peasant revolutionaries were not rich — although as it turned out, what they wanted most from their revolution was the chance to take up the role of the colonial powers they had displaced. The bourgeois lifestyle, with lots of expensive cars, servants, suits, religiosity, were all desired.
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” In Zimbabwe, certainly, the peasant revolutionaries were not rich — although as it turned out, what they wanted most from their revolution was the chance to take up the role of the colonial powers they had displaced. The bourgeois lifestyle, with lots of expensive cars, servants, suits, religiosity, were all desired.”
– Of course, one could blame the colonial regime for brainwashing them. Or one could try to see them as valid human beings who were actually capable of choosing what they wanted.
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Well, I don’t believe in the concept of “valid human beings”. That phrase has no meaning to me. Here’s part of Marechera’s critique of post-liberation Zimbabwe:
Finger-fat delusions wash themselves
In the dish of dollars
And proceed to eat liberation’s sadza and stew.
Bullet-proof brains
Take cast iron pains
To maintain their ignorance;
Their wide bellied and Castro beards
Are the matter of many a snide joke.
What can violet flowers not do
Their perfume Baptist to Thrones of Bayonets?
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“Well, I don’t believe in the concept of “valid human beings”. That phrase has no meaning to me.”
– I use it to mean, “somebody just like you.”
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Oh. But I don’t buy into it. I don’t conceptualize myself in that way, no offence. I’m sure everyone is like me and not like me in some ways.
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In much of my experience, I haven’t been a “valid human being” at all. I think that is the starting point for shamanic initiation — where one recognizes that one is not a valid human being in some sense. Then one loses one’s humanity and regains it — that is the definition of initiation.
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Yes, I get it. Theoretically. 🙂
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Yes, you have to enter non-being. Then, that kind of stick with you, and you don’t employ moral categories so readily.
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“you don’t employ moral categories so readily”
– What’s the benefit of that?
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Well, let me try to say.
A “valid human being”, for instance, is a moral category implying person-hood, with all that this entails according to people’s trained or educated notions as to what differentiates being a “valid human being” from being an invalid one. So, on the basis of my education and training concerning “validity” I may come to certain conclusions about the kind of person who is valid, what characteristics they have, how they conduct themselves, their ontological status (as being redeemed by “God” or by morality, or by virtue of the state granting them their “rights”) or what have you. So, I’ll have a certain image of that person, perhaps very distinct, or perhaps rather fuzzy. In any case, I’ve created a categorical demarcation as to what constitutes validity in a human being.
This logically and practically also implies that I have it in the back of my mind as to what would make a human being invalid. So, maybe that kind of person would be immoral, evil, strange, not my color of skin, or whatever. In any case, I’ve set up a mental barrier that mediates my experience of the world on the basis of categories of “valid” or “invalid”.
For instance, like Schwyzer does, I might mentally erect a category of oppressed people who have great validity as human beings. On the basis of that, I’d start to show great indulgence and forbearance in relation to these oppressed people. It may happen, though, that mediation of reality through defining a category of oppressed (versus less oppressed or not oppressed) means I can’t experience the shades of grey that make up the world as it actually is. There’s too much mediation of reality and not enough direct experience of it. That’s what moral categorizing does.
So, entering non-being means we lose our grip on the pre-determined moral categories we have in our heads. We can open our minds a bit more, if we are not afraid of losing some structure and entering the void.
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“So, entering non-being means we lose our grip on the pre-determined moral categories we have in our heads. We can open our minds a bit more, ”
– It sounds like the payoff here is renouncing judgment of people. But that’s one of the best parts of life. 🙂 I like my moral categories and really enjoy judging people on their basis. It’s crazy fun. 🙂
No, this isn’t for me.
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You couldn’t be more wrong. What you are doing is applying a moral category to shamanism, and it is non-moral. The pay-off is in terms of Nietzsche and Bataille’s amoralism. You get to move through different modes of being and see things how you want to see them, without needing to cater to somebody’s moral bias.
If you want to judge people, you can judge them. For instance, yesterday I called a number of people “apes” for referring to me as “dear” or “honey”, which I do not like.
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Why “somebody ‘s moral bias “? My bias is only mine.
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Like I said, if you want to have your own moral bias, you can have it!! Why wait for me to allow that? But you did apply a moral category to shamanism that was unwarranted.
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I’m not waiting for anything. There has been massive judging on this blog. 🙂 I just wondered what attracted you to this worldview.
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That is the most logical question — what attracted me. Well, quite precisely, the fact that the colonial way of life I’d been bought up to experience as normal was no longer viable for me. This is, in a nutshell, what attracted me. Beyond this, also the fact that I was brought up to have a colonial feminine personality. My superego was very badly formulated, that is, it was formed to suit a very different culture, which was also now defunct. It also made me subservient to men — my superego. This was all very, very bad for me. I’d reached a dead-end so far as my psychological survival went. So, I got into this mode of “facing death” for renewal. I discovered this method originally through Nietzsche, but it is also highly prevalent in Bataille, and one can see the death and renewal motif in Marechera’s writing, especially THE HOUSE OF HUNGER.
This solution has turned out to be very, very useful to me. On it’s basis, I have an extremely viable marriage/relationship, I only do the work that fulfills me, I have found deep companionship with many black Zimbabweans (which my superego had later drawn limits against, post-migration). I go against the grain that has been established for my peers, many of whom are housewives. I’m not. I do kickboxing. I have a high (no longer repressed) sex drive. And so on.
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This is really admirable. It fills me with happiness to hear such stories. I wish more people followed your example. To speak in terms of my research, this is truly a successful female Bildung, something you never even see in literature.
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Thanks. One day I will write about it. That is really hard to do, because my enemy was so invisible, and because I had to tear myself down so violently, by breaking with my normative value-judgments, in order to do so. People do react rather negatively to the necessary, but destructive side of shamanism. They think it’s mental illness, when in fact it is a cure for something rather more socially dysfunctional.
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Actually, the meaning of amoralism, according to Nietzsche and Bataille is to become wilder, stronger in oneself, more independent and less tame. This is not a moral injunction that everybody has to do so. You can try it or not attempt it. It’s not even an issue of having the power of free choice. One can be seduced into trying shamanism, or one can avoid it. There are no transcendental principles governing this fact.
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People have a lot of difficulty perceiving amoralism and amoralism. For instance, Nietzsche’s amoralism is viewed most commonly as lauding the rights of the oppressors to oppressor whomever they please. Well, that would be to assume he was maintaining a moral position on who gets to oppress who. He isn’t.
Bataille’s dalliances with prostitutes has also been criticized to death for its immorality. Well, yes, but that was precisely the point of Bataille’s actions, to slip out of the grasp of morality.
Renouncing judgement on people would have to have a moral motivation, for it to make any sense. This is a categorical distinction — that it is a good idea to renounce judgement on others. Christians would make that value-judgement.
Shamanism really is just about the void.
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I like “Bullet-proof brains.” 🙂
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Then Marechera goes on to write about the outcome of the bloody conflict: people get to indulge in consumerism and “redneck modalities” (i.e. directly imitating the colonials):
The sight of blood makes me hunger
After raw tomatoes
After the cream and rose complexion of Nordic
Girls,
Makes me thirst for the Masai’s bull-wrought
Resilience
And perhaps a glass of Gerac, that savanna sundowner
Of redneck modalities.
Were regrets basket chairs
We’d be condemned to sit for life,
Or sit still passionately; the Siamese cats
Nuzzle against my ankle, purring.
In the garage of the imagination
Quietly sparkling, A Rolls Royce, Pulsar, an
Alfa Romeo..
I will smear my face with soft lanoline,
With American Girl Hand Body Lotion
With Ambi skin-lightening cream—
With pasteurized and bionised dung.
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Hi J.F.A
How do you get in a position where you need to tear yourself down and start from scratch?
Was it as a result of not questioning your makeup prior to the realisation that you had to change?
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Yes, of course.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/cross-cultural-perspectives-on.html
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There is also some historical context. I was born shortly after a war in favour of colonialism was declared. Look up U.D.I. In 1965, the media was censored, both from the inside and from outside of the country. Then the war began, and continued until 1980. I was born in 68. So, I was kept in a colonial bubble for a long time.
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Anyway, this view of Hugo Schwyzer’s is fundamentally ideological in a Christian sense. This is not because it doesn’t contain an element of truth, it is because any element of truth is radically distorted by making it into a generalization:
“Again, power obfuscates; oppression clarifies”. One would have to bow down to anyone who was powerless, if one really believed this.
I think a cure for a lot of this idealism would be to to and live in Africa for a while. Bow down to Somali warlords, for they are the “oppressed”. Bow down, bow down.
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“it is because any element of truth is radically distorted by making it into a generalization:
“Again, power obfuscates; oppression clarifies”. One would have to bow down to anyone who was powerless, if one really believed this.
I think a cure for a lot of this idealism would be to to and live in Africa for a while. Bow down to Somali warlords, for they are the “oppressed”. Bow down, bow down.”
– I agree completely. Completely. These generalizations attempt to simplify very complex things. But the world does not lend itself to such facile definitions.
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I don’t understand the excerpt. If it’s supposed to be serious it’s too disjointed, unsupported, and incoherent to make the point. If it’s supposed to be satire it doesn’t work.
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I have no idea. I quoted it verbatim.
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It was just the rantings of some random nutjob.
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I’m not sure what makes me go “WHAAA??” more–the concept of “epistemic privilege” or the phrase “fell pregnant.”
J
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I have heard a few women suggest the extermination of male babies, except for a few for breeding, over the years. I am glad that they are only a small minority, and I hope they stay that way.
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Yeah, I met one, too, at an online forum once. She wrote the EXACT same texts as this guy even though she live son a different continent and speaks a different language.
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Well the guy was born in southern africa, I think, then migrated to the US. Anyway, his use of the term, “Jesus”, would be more innocuous than the way it is generally used by right-wingers ideologically. I suspect there is much more going on here than the kind of typical ideological rhetoric that Amanda Marcotte generally unpicks so successfully. Jesus is different in southern africa than he is in the US, for instance.
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To be honest, I react much more negatively to Amanda Marcotte than to Jesus. 🙂 Jesus is full of rage, which I can relate to, while Amanda is too saccharine. I’m now referring to both as authors of texts, as you understand.
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Yes, I do get bored with her ideas about music, cooking and pop culture. I think her writing is not saccharine, but sarcastic, though. It’s a southern trait, to be annoying, whilst smiling. Do I have that wrong?
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I don’t know, I don’t read regularly. But whenever people give me a link, it’s always, “Every time a woman breathes, she has been victimized by evil society. Let’s pity the victim!”
Maybe I just chanced upon pieces that were not that good, so I’m not insisting on my opinion.
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No, I didn’t get that from her at all.
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The Conficker worm was probably a Ukrainian conspiracy.
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His writing style could use some improvement. However he didn’t give any dictionary definitions which is a plus in my book.
Seriously though what you have here is a disenfranchised man who was a feminist. Now through the use of the word mansplaining among others you have someone who writes this… He’s upset because essentially he got what seems like the equivalent of “Go back into the kitchen and make me a sandwich the men are talking here.”.
Some people could argue that he deserved the comment. However even if he did feminism lost a supporter on that day which is a loss for feminism. I mean like the guy is almost as nice as Jesus… think of the positive PR that could bring!
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Such stories are always completely spurious. There is no need to take them seriously.
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Its always great to see conspiracy news!
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