misogyny

The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.

Yes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too- but that we're not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one.

If from immemorable time, the Men had been so little envious, and so very impartial, as to do justice to our talents, by admitting us to our right of sharing with them in public action; they wou'd have been as accustomed to see us filling public offices, as we are to see them disgrace them; (...) A Schurman, with a thesis in her hand, displaying nature in it's most innocent useful lights, wou'd have been as familiar a sight, as a Physician in his chariot (...): And an Amazon, with a helmet on her head, animating her embattled troops, wou'd have been no more a matter of surprize than a milliner behind a counter with a thimble on her finger (...). Not reason then, but error and ignorance cased in custom, makes these superficial creatures think it an unnatural sight.

It always pisses me off when I__ calling in to some Morning Zoo radio show to promote God-only-knows what__robably this book, so get ready, I__ comin___hen the DJ actually tries to convince me that there are as many female comics as male ones. Cue hypermasculine Morning Zoo Hacky McGee voice: __o Kath, I don__ know what you chicks are always complaining about._ To which I respond: __eally? Why don__ you call your local comedy club and ask for the Saturday night lineup? I guarantee you the male to female ratio is going to be about nine to one. You dick-wad.

It would be a mistake to suppose that all Urnings must be woman-haters. Quite the contrary. They are not seldom the faithfulest friends, the truest allies, and most convinced defenders of women.

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame?

I__ not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

This is the underside of my world.Of course you don__ want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you__e intelligent. You don__ want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don__ want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don__ want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don__, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don__ complain, women who don__ nag or push, women who don__ hate you really, women who know their job and above all__omen who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.But the frogs die in earnest.

Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don__ love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker__ Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he__ horrible to her, and that__ what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille__ ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller _ all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about _ you__e writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don__ typically get with the __hore_ or the __lut_ or the sexual girl.

Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them.

BOLLOXIMIAN:My pleasures for new cunts I will uphold,And have reserves of kindness for the old.I grant in absence dildo may be usedWith milk of goats, when once our seed__ infused.My prick no more to bald cunt shall resort__erkins rub off, and often spoil the sport.POCKENELLO:Let merkin, sir, be banished from the court.PENE:'Tis like a dead hedge when the land is poor.

Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you're hungry and disgust you when you've had your fill.

Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.

But in this case,_ he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, __ feel that there is one cliche_ that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking, therefore, there is to be.__here is undoubtedly a strong possibility, notwithstanding the vagaries of contingency and misfortune, that my son mighthave fallen__r might, we could say, have voluntarily jumped, in accordance with the ethical codes with which he has been brought up__or a play you have made with some success, although, as I am persuaded you would concede, very little originality.__lain speaking if you__e Henry James, perhaps.

And then there were men who were violently afraid of losing to a woman, the scariest men in the world. They become dictators, heads of state, bureaucrats, men with deadly weapons, they were everywhere. Sometimes she could pick one out with a look, but they were often charming, they had to have the power to attract in order to dominate.

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men _ or about women _ is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation.... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.