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Saturday, July 19, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Shatterboy
In a Rape Culture, anyone can be a rape victim or a rapist.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
"Post-feminism Society" Laughs at Female Objectification
Here in our "post-feminism society", where genders are finally equal in every sense of the word (yes, that is sarcasm), we can comfortably laugh at female bondage and the antiquated notion that your wife is your property at MarryOurDaughter.com. Maybe I am just being a kill-joy, but I thought for something to be satire it required that the targeted audience, men who objectify women, could not view or say it without a shred of irony. I just think it is probably in bad taste to mock something that is not at all historical. Considering that Washington University just handed out an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who supports marital rape, the view that marriage renders a woman the sexual property of her husband is alive and well even in the ever-praised bastion of gender equality, the Western world.
Eerily, the website reads more like a pedophile's shopping list than the lame attempt at satire it really is. From the profiles:
Katelyn F.
Age: 14
Location: CaribbeanBride Price: $24,995
Our own Little Mermaid Katie Lynn swims like a fish and isn’t happy unless she’s getting wet! She got her SCUBA ticket at 12 and she can pull more than her weight as crew on any kind of boat or ship. She tells us she’s tired of dry land and that’s she’s looking for a husband who works on, by or in the water.
I suppose I have no sense of humor, being that I do not think that selling young girls into slavery to men is at all funny.
The testimonials, of course, sound familiar:
"Thank God for your site! Our daughter was really nervous walking down the aisle, but she seems okay now and the money we got let us keep our farm and even add on a few acres."
Because selling your daughters to keep afloat is nothing new to real people, in real places, right now:
"We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is 200,000 afghanis. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy pays in installments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy food."
Accusations of shrill feminist aside, my definition of satire lies more along educational lines. Meaning, of course, that the purpose of satire is to educate people how utterly ridiculous the universal phenomenon of objectifying women really is. Piss poor attempts at being clever like the Marry Our Daughter website are, at best, getting a sick laugh out of female objectification without providing any relevant context. At worst, the site operates on the same wavelength as the ubiquitous rape joke, the headlining punch-line of every half-wit comic's cliche repertoire.
New rule: poking fun at stereotypes, especially anything resembling female objectification, is only funny if and only if sexist pigs cannot chuckle along without a shred of irony and self-reflection.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Pedophilia is Sexy
Cross-posted at Female Impersonator
With the recent uproar surrounding the bust of the polygamous compound down in Texas, I took the time to do a little theorizing why pedophilia seems to persist, contrary to opinions that state that only "backassward third world countries" do that. I started with examining the American perception of "sexy", although I am fairly certain that this social feminine norm holds constant for most modern cultures. Then, I looked at the tendency of college males to "date down". I finally try to make sense of this all in a larger scheme of what our society thinks is "sexy", and how that might fuel pedophilia.
I feel that it should go without saying that I am firmly anti-sexy. I really dislike the constant barrage of female sexuality to sell products. Considering that the mainstream definition of "sexy" is submissive or only sexual in the context of pleasing men, I have no desire to be sexy, nor do I have any desire to see "sexy" images day in and day out.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most about "sexy" is this infantilization of women. If you do not possess a Y chromosome then age, maturity, and ambition are not tolerated. You are to be stupider than your man, lest you intimidate him. If you are smarter, do not tell him so. The Cloud-Father hath gifted man with a penis, making his opinions more important than yours. This is especially apparent when a stronger female, denying the power of socialization, dares to be particularly outspoken or "shrewish". Inquires are made to her mental state. Her voice is "shrill" and her displays of any emotion are weepy. Perhaps her anger is "hot" or "sexy". She is urged to stop fighting and start fucking. "You quarrel like a married couple," they say. "You would have hot hate-sex together."
The message is clear: women are babies, mentally ill, PMSing, or need a good dose of masculine throbbing superiority. They are not entitled to an opinion, unless it is demonstrably flawed or analogous with your own. Like I said earlier, a woman's place is making babies and boners, not instigating meaningful conversation.
What is the consequence of this infantilization? I would not be incorrect to say that I am fairly certain that men are attracted to younger women for precisely this reason: the fetishization of youth, stupidity, and weakness. In circles of my friends, my male friends will openly discuss how they prey on high school girls. My female friends will then confess that they dated college boys in high school, and usually lost their virginity to them. This trend rarely goes the opposite way.
The popular sentiment is that men date younger women because women mature faster than men. I say that is bullshit. Regardless of the growth of breasts, hormones are not responsible for my twenty-two year old male friend dating a sixteen year old girl. What he likes about her is her innocence and her gullibility. She probably has never had a serious relationship; she wants desperately to please him. If he was to stop calling her, she would have no way to contact him. In short, she is malleable. A female university student would not sleep with him for his approval. She also would not be impressed with his age and his car. In short, he would put himself in a position where he is as vulnerable to rejection as his paramore by dating his equal.
This is simply not done. Why would a man want a wise college woman when he could have a younger high school teenager desperate to sleep with him to explore her sexuality or to please an older man? Why would a man place himself in a position where he is equal, god forbid, to a woman if he can maintain superiority with his age and her idealism?
The very things that draw men to younger women are the same things that draw pedophiles to children: malleability, gullibility, innocence, virginity, and youth. On the long spectrum of sexual encounters beginning in rape and pedophilia and ending in genuine consensual sex, men dating women much younger than themselves for those reasons is closer to the morally wrong end of the spectrum then the consensual one.
In all honesty, I am not all at shocked when it is revealed that so-and-so is a pedophile. In a world where sexiness is submissiveness, youth, and stupidity, children are not that separate from the collective vision of the ideal woman. I do not think that there is something concretely wrong with pedophiles. Equating the "disease" of pedophilia with sociopathy or real psychological issues conceals the point and fails to hold men responsible for their actions. Pedophilia is the darker cousin to the very real and very prevalent image of "sexiness" that our society holds as the feminine ideal. The only disease pedophiles have is the egocentric view that they are entitled to rape (and sex with children is nothing but rape) children because they have internalized their masculine socialization to a greater extent than other men. Perhaps their self-esteem is especially low, so they feel that they cannot have consensual sex with someone of age because no one would be attracted to them. Perhaps they are married men that molest young girls because they feel that they are entitled to some sex that does not come accompanied with a human being expecting them to be decent to them.
Many men like to fuck dolls. They watch porn in which the actress takes abuse and exists solely for the pleasure of her audience and any man on camera without a care to herself. A sick man will internalize this image, and seek women out that adhere to this porn star image. A particularly immoral man will not only internalize this image, he will purposely groom someone malleable and immature to service his needs like the porn he watches every day, or in the movies he sees in the theaters. These men are pedophiles, and they are criminals responsible for their own actions. They are not insane, nor are they tugged about by a nonexistent brain in their penis that overrules their sense of morality. They are men that think that they are entitled to sex with someone that asks nothing in return.
My point is that the mental states of a man who preys on children or a college-aged man who preys on sixteen year-old girls are not dissimilar. They are both products of our culture and masculine socialization.

