I’m now kind of wishing that my blogroll had not been repaired because all it is regaling me with today is evidence that nothing much has changed in the minds of the sex-deprived puritans since the times of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

 I don’t need or want my political leaders to be monogamous; I don’t care if they are.  But I do want to know if they can be trusted.  When they say what they intend to do, we as voters often feel like we’re going to be played for suckers by unscrupulous self-servers who run for office largely for personal self-aggrandizement.  Because we usually are.  But one really material way to know if that’s what’s going to happen is whether the politician in question remains true to the people who they know best and have the longest, closest relationship with.  That’s often their spouses.  I don’t care that they promise monogamy, but if they do and ignore that promise, I hold it against them.

Alternatively, you could grow up, work on your own sexual fulfillment, and resolve your Oedipal issues. Anybody over the age of twelve should have the intelligence to realize that this emotional investment into the sex lives of authority figures is nothing but an echo of a childhood trauma created by the realization that Mommy and Daddy do secret things in the bedroom that one is excluded from.

The Old Reader was down for 3 days and that means I have been separated from my newsfeed. As a result, I missed the new round of Weiner sexting drama and can’t now even figure out what the following attack of prissiness is about:

Because we’re still all pretending that this is a “sex scandal” and carefully avoiding identifying Weiner as a predator.

Which is also why Pelosi can say something truly incredible like “they don’t even realize, they don’t have a clue.” Because of course predators realize that what they’re doing is disrespectful of women. That’s kind of the whole point.

Why is Weiner a predator rather than a really sad loser who tried to do what in this country people are not supposed to be doing, namely, have both a career and at least a semblance of a sex life? Does anybody know what happened to provoke all this outrage? (Other than Weiner sending messages, I mean.)

I was going to continue adding posts to this series when I saw the following photo David Gendron has posted on my Facebook wall:

 

Immediately, a female relative of mine from Ukraine responded, “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

And you know what? The guy holding the poster doesn’t bother me in the least. Just look at him. He is a miserable, unkempt, ugly loser who has no other way of connecting with women emotionally than to try to annoy them with his stupid poster. He has no idea how to inscribe himself into modernity and knows that he is nothing but sad old flotsam and jetsam of a dead world.

The reaction of my relative, however, does bug me to no end. This is a woman who would not know how to be submissive to anybody to save her life. She never got married and never took care of any children. She has been completely self-sufficient her entire life. As a fully Soviet person, she cannot have any knowledge of or interest in the Bible. And all of the men of her generation in Ukraine are now dead precisely because of the idiotic gender stereotypes she swoons over on Facebook.

I have seen so many women who never even get anything from stupidly and irreflectively parroting these gender stereotypes yet who keep doing so. I’m not talking right now about women who exploit these stereotypes to gain something for themselves. Such women are trying to benefit themselves which, at least, is rational. I don’t approve, of course, but they don’t make me nearly as rabid as the unthinking chirpers.

There is no feminism without intensive and ongoing education. People need to realize that the moment they succumb to the desire to simplify reality by saying anything about “all women” or “all men”, they contribute to promoting gender stereotypes that will continue thwarting their lives.

Dear Argentinean publishers:

you are idiots. See below:

 

The person whose face you put on the cover of Dostoevsky’s novel is not Dostoevsky. Neither is he one of the Karamazov brothers. This is the great (probably the greatest) Ukrainian writer Taras Schevchenko. Schevchenko was born to slavery and it took a group of dedicated writers a long time to buy the freedom of this poetic genius.

Confusing Dostoevsky and Schevchenko is like thinking that Borges and Neruda are the same guy. Hurts, eh? So now you know how I feel when I see this book cover.

Snowden’s Russian lawyer gave him a book by Anton Chekhov to help him learn about Russian habits and traditions. I love Chekhov but I worry for poor Snowden if he expects to find Chekhovian characters and situations in today’s Russia.

Another book the lawyer is giving Snowden is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. According to the lawyer, Snowden might find it easy to relate to the protagonist.

Yes, Russians will give Snowden asylum but they will get as much fun out of him as they can. This is a culture that hides its intense hostility towards foreigners behind a mask of fake hospitality.

In the meanwhile, I’m about to provoke a small demographic crisis of my own because people lose all desire to procreate when they hear about the travails of my pregnancy.

I could be taken to schools as a contraceptive measure because PUPPPS makes my arms and legs look like I’m in the last stages of the bubonic plague. If that doesn’t scare teenagers into using contraception, nothing will.

Of course, physiologically it would be easier to go through this pregnancy if I were younger. I’d still get gestational hypertension and PUPPPS but I don’t believe I’d get gestational diabetes. Psychologically and emotionally, however, it really helps to be an older person. At 27, I’d be hanging from a chandelier with all this stress and making everybody curse they day I was born. But since I’m so much older and psychologically healthier, I am completely calm and even very funny.

Does anybody know what is behind this ridiculous practice of waking infants during the night to feed them? My pediatrician gave me a brochure that insists on this, and my sister tells me horror stories about hordes of unhinged nurses bursting into her hospital room at 4 am in order to wake the baby using cruel and unusual methods.

I’d understand people in Ukraine acting out our collective food trauma in this way. But the US is overcome by obesity. What drives this desperation to feed when feeding is obviously pernicious and unhealthy?

Spain is experiencing a wave of protests by single women and lesbians who oppose the current legislation specifying that public funds can only be spent on fertility and conception procedures to assist couples consisting of a man and a woman.

For the longest time, Spain has struggled with a demographic crisis of massive proportions. Today, the economy is in shambles, and fewer people than ever want to procreate. To fill the demographic hole, Spain has adopted a set of very lax immigration requirements. As a result, the country has begun to suffer from the same host of issues that idiotic immigration policies have caused in other Western European countries.

It is mind-boggling that in view of all this the Spanish government would persist in its practice of imposing barbaric, Franco-era limitations on who is worthy of having a family. Instead of being happy that there are women in Spain who feel like creating little future taxpayers, the stupid government of the stupid Mariano Rajoy is in thrall to its barbaric prejudices.

Isn’t it time to accept that Franco is dead and no amount of political sorcery will resiscitate him?

On a serious note, if you have the same issues with self-esteem as the ones exemplified by the quotes I gave in the previous post, remember that no amount of pretending that they have anything to do with politics or with activism will help solve them. These are your issues and it is up to you to make sure they are resolved, even though you were not the one who created them.

The very first step on your way has to be finding the strength and the courage to name the person or people who made you believe all this crap (“you shouldn’t be too confident, confidence will repel people, you are only attractive if you are self-effacing,” etc.) A little hint: that person is not called “society.” Another hint: none of this has anything whatsoever to do with feminism.

Now is the time to decide once and for all whether you will continue hiding from the issue behind the “we are conditioned by society” discourse or will finally find relief and move on.

I very often feel very thankful that I’m excluded from these weird social codes that seem to loom very large for many people:

Men and women face different pressures when it comes to communicating and performing confidence. Women must be humble and self-effacing (“Oh, me? I’m nothing special.”)

I’m extremely happy I heard this for the first time at the age when it is too old to start doing the fake self-effacement thing.

Here is more:

Women who are “too” confident (which often means women with a reasonable, healthy level of confidence) are disliked much more than men who are “too” confident (which is more likely to mean men who are truly unpleasantly full of themselves).

I’m definitely one of the “too confident” group. And maybe people do hate me for that, who knows? The great thing is that I live in a bubble where I’m convinced that everybody finds me amazing all of the time. It isn’t like I’m capable of noticing or caring what people really think.

With beauty specifically, women end up in a weird double bind. Women must be beautiful, but they must not be confident. So they must play up their beauty while denying having done so and while claiming outwardly that they’re not actually beautiful.

All I can feel for people who participate in this insanity is profound compassion. I wish somebody had told them that the routine described in the quote is extremely obnoxious.

I’ll have my autism instead of this miserable way of being any time.