Look, I tried, I really did. But when she referenced Christabel…

Penny Red heralds the 90th anniversary of women voting, a worthy event but not one reached by the activities of some she praises in connection with it. Indeed, it’s likely that it would have happened a lot sooner had the suffragette leaders not firstly engaged in the practice of intentionally getting themselves arrested (how can we tell? They arranged a press conference before the first occasion even happened) amongst other low class stunts and acts of street thuggery and then abandoning their struggle once the First World War began to engage instead in the practice of shaming the underage and industrially occupied men of Britain into the trenches.

Not that we should be surprised that a gaggle of misandrists didn’t give a fuck about male life.

The Pankhursts were a pack of needlessly and counter-productively provocative loons. Their treatment by the British state was draconic, but their methods hardly helpful towards any goal save self-publicity. Although they did not mastermind the brutal excesses of the suffragette’s movement nadir (smashing windows and arson were tactics that seemed to originate from the base and then were adopted by the leadership, instead of being imposed from above as you’d expect in an organisation with as totalitarian a structure as the WSPU) they certainly did nothing to rein in the militancy, and in face seem to have been engaged in a sick game of catch & match.

Why exactly she would herald a young woman who let her elderly mother faced constant arrest and the aforementioned abuse while she swanned around safely in Paris concocting anti-utilitarian slogans such as “Votes for Women and Chastity for Men” is especially beyond me. In The Great Scourge C. Pankhurst depicts men as nothing other than a threat, in stark contrast to the entirely rational and sane arguments put forwards by many other writers of the time, both male and female. The Pankhursts, of course, permitted only the latter in their movement, clearly more interested in brewing a war between the genders instead of fully uniting them. The Pankhurst agenda was one of increasing gender divisions and exacerbating baseless tensions, not alleviating and relieving them. Their methods set the movement back untold years, alienating would-be and former supporters and allowing only a quasi-Leninist coterie of the pure (or rather, the obedient) get stuck into the joyous carnage. Christabel was nothing other than a prototype for the foul anti-sex crusaders radical feminism would later by typified by.

Not that the suffragists should be tarred with the suffragette brush, mind. Their achievement was a sterling one which other nations took far longer to reach and I have nothing save respect and admiration for the peaceful and well reasoned branch of early feminism, who carved a hard-won path through the thickest of stone.

But let’s not pretend that a cadre of fools smashing windows was productive, especially not when those have-a-go militants then did their best to aid the real military and adopted handing out white feathers instead of tossing bricks the moment the First World War started.

I struggle to express exactly how enraged I am with this post. I’d had my doubts about feminism previously but Penny Red’s blog previously gave me a pleasing impression of this “Fourth Wave” stuff. But now, well, fuck it.

I don’t even know where to start. The suggestion that children are property, perhaps? Or else the total abandonment of any pursuit of equality in favour for the typical “maternal” idiocy that dictates pain, inconvenience and mild risk as being of such great significance that the 50% of genetic code she references counts for nothing. All informed, of course, by the absurd cultural view the Patriarchy places upon motherhood. How else could this lop-sided approach be given emotional heft?

What we’re left with is a problem being identified (lack of respect given to housekeepers and child-raisers) but then not followed through, instead with her taking a grand detour to outline why offspring should be deemed female possessions. Meanwhile not a word is said in empathy towards males except for a less than earnest “Sorry” followed by a reference to testicles and the immortal phrase “Too bad”. So, in other words, an appeal for greater power to women rather than for equality. No doubt she will spring some biological determinist clap-trap in defence of this when challenged, like any good reactionary.

(Which would be far less infuriating if I didn’t find her work largely superb.)

So apparently things have to be “Negotiated” (with this usage of the word reminiscent of Mugabe’s talks with Tsvangirai) rather than it simply being assumed that someone who has contributed half of the child’s material gets half a say in how they shall be raised. For, since the state can support mothers, the man shall be obliged to prove himself worthy of contact with a being he brought into existence (for which he will need to be a “fantastic person”, rather than the slightly more modest requirements for a woman, which apparently consist of a will and a womb) and if he is deemed unworthy to the woman he’ll not have to support the child. Well great, I’m certain that that would suit at least the cash fetishists. Until they worked out, of course, that “the state” only has money due to being fed taxes. In other words, men still pay.

Or, to put it in terms more destructive to this utopian slab of irksome anti-equality irritant, women still get supported by men. Since if you are going to base any idea around state cash (which, I should add, any sane person not intoxicated by anarchism would; at least a couple of times) you can not disregard the taxpayer. In this instance half of these would now be expected to fund the children of any woman who required help, while having no rights to access and raise even those that would never have existed but for their contribution.

All because of some worn out paradigms of child ownership and maternal supremacy, which a socialist feminist truly has no excuse for not seeing through. Through suffering, we earn. Through earning we own. Through owning we hold power.

And disregard any unbalance that this causes, of course, for this is feminism and here the ascendancy of female power must come above the obtainment of equality. Where women’s “rights” can be claimed they must be, with a disregard to the repercussions upon the other half of humanity. Forlorn fathers must be disregarded, for we are “Sorry about your balls” and that will suffice as recompense.

You bloody traitor to egalitarianism, Penny Red.

Sophie Platt, writing for The F Word, has an irritating but valuable article here.

Irritating because it is filled with typical vindictive puerility:

I would love for them to turn the tables round one night and end a sexual encounter before their partners had come. A friend of mine tried this once, and reported that the incensed rage and sulking that followed could only be likened to that of a three-year-old who has been told Christmas had been cancelled.

Also due to the prejudiced, sourceless bigotry that somehow imagines that an Austen reference that was long ago faded through overuse constitutes a valid substitute for anything beyond the most meagre of anecdotal evidence:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that teenage boys on the whole are more concerned with their own satisfaction than that of their partners

Let’s see if I can give this a go: It is a truth universally acknowledged that Afro-Caribbean men care more about stealing car stereos than raising their bastard children. Does that sound in any way acceptable to everyone? No matter, I shall just generate a false consensus in lieu of an adequete proof and make pretence that my view is that of the entirity of universe denizens. Does this not make a refreshing change from the mainstream press and its ceaseless distortions?

Furthermore her phallus obsession is seemingly total, as well as less than benign:

It’s just that so many are made to look like a penis, some disturbingly realistic, that they seem rather sinister as a tool for us to become better acquainted with our own bodies.

Where to begin with this? Is she stating that she finds real phalluses realistic? Or is it the prospect of women using items which resemble the organ used for the act that they are stimulating with it that unsettles her? Is it really appropriate and wise to label the sexual predilections of others “sinister” in such an article? Or any article? Is it in pointing out her failure to mention the rise of the “Fleshlight” devices for men that are now plastered all over the internet?

More harmfully still she has made a deep error in her analysis of “Raunch Culture”. Platt attempts to stage a forced division, of sorts, between the elements she truly disapproves of (lap-dancing legality, pole-dancing lessons, girls wearing mini-skirts and so on) from those she can not help but muster begrudging respect for (the popularity of a programme revolving around the sex lives of a set of vapid egoist females, the mass marketing and cultural strength of an item designed purely to bring women vast amounts of pleasure, vibrators on sale at Boots).

Such a dichotomy quite simply does not exist.

Both sets of phenomenon are part of a cultural motion away from the moralistic confines of the past and towards a state of personal liberty to pursue physical pleasure via carnal means. They are not divisible and any efforts to consider them along some form of “Pro” and “Anti” patriarchy lines is bound for failure, as are all other strictly partisan assessments. Women pleasuring themselves and feeling no shame and men resorting to bandwidth over charm and discussing without generating horror their nights at lap-dancing clubs are not in the slightest phenomenon which can be held apart. Their origins are precisely the same: formerly residual Christian morality dominated Britain’s views of carnal union, but since this is rapidly disintegrating people are beginning to act far more as they please and are in acceptance of far less restraints or restrictive mores. To divide this tendency into two separate paragraphs and imagine that it can somehow be split apart is the height of foolishness: they are simply differing manifestations within near identical circumstances. But Platt becomes wound up in her tiresomely hackneyed depiction of Raunch Culture:

it has become about appearing to be sexual available simply to please men and not to fulfil their own desires or fantasies.

The rise of so-called ‘raunch culture’ means that for many girls, merely looking ‘pretty’ has taken a back seat for looking ‘sexy’: supermarkets stock pole dancing kits as children’s toys, glamour modelling is in the top five career choices for pre-teen girls and hundreds of girls all over the country are counting the days until they are 18 and are legally allowed breast enhancements. Girls are being sexualised at an increasingly younger age, and it seems to be more about self-esteem than sexual satisfaction. The pleasure that comes from sexual experiences at this age is often the feeling of being thought attractive and being desired by a male than actually getting off.

Has she no conception of the positive effects of banishing shame in exposing more flesh than our present 1950s hang-over hegemony permits? Is she unaware that the frequency of exibitionism has always matched voyeurism? Obviously not: it is required that all shifts be made somehow in favour of the Patriarchy. Thus pole dancing kits suddenly are related to skimpier outfits for young women and are entirely unrelated to alterations that increase women’s pleasure.

As flawed a view as this unquestionably is this article is valauble because Platt has hit the nub of this issue: it is simply not expected of girls that they will entertain themselves, while with boys only (fittingly paired) certain fundamentalist Christians and some extremist feminists would argue otherwise. This is a strange and harmful double standard, in that it denies half of the population the assumption that it is correct to pursue their personal pleasure. The consequences are young (and occasionally even elderly) women who have never experienced an orgasm, a highly unfortunate state of affairs that leaves the men in a strong lead.

It would seem that Platt, then, is excellent at identifying the problem before us but fails in terms of solution. She, for instance, disparrages the shift that has eradicated the near total silence on matters of female pleasuring that reigned previously, through her offensive against the surgingly popular sex toys, now sold by a variety of mainstream stores and chains. For how can something remain a taboo when it is upon the evening news? Having the act she fears girls are not expected to participate in directly alluded to on chemists shelves is surely going to break the culture which she outlines.

The silence is thus effectively already breached.

(It seems that rather than swallowing this post, as I believed it had, Scribo Ergo Sum instead posted it. I rather wish that I had realised this before re-writing the article. Given that the two articles ended up pretty distinctive just give them both a read and see what you think of each.)

And interesting article about a condition that I had also noted as strange but wide-spread in The F Word.

Alas, it comes accompanied with the sort of unproductively vengeful puerility that feminism often utilises:

I would love for them to turn the tables round one night and end a sexual encounter before their partners had come. A friend of mine tried this once, and reported that the incensed rage and sulking that followed could only be likened to that of a three-year-old who has been told Christmas had been cancelled.

while this Austen referencing slab of truist bigotry is simply dire:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that teenage boys on the whole are more concerned with their own satisfaction than that of their partners

but besides this typical failures it does manage to get to the nub of the issue. Teenage girls are simply not expected to begin fondling themselves at all, while for boys it is simply an assumed course of action that is entirely inevitable (or at least such assumptions are made but all save, fittingly coupled, certain fundamentalist Christians and some extremist feminists). This is a strange cultural dichotomy and the double standard denies a considerable proportion of half the population pleasure readily available to them.

However having done so she then commences to make a jumbled analysis of the matter as a contemporary issue. Besides the obvious strangeness of this passage:

It’s just that so many are made to look like a penis, some disturbingly realistic, that they seem rather sinister as a tool for us to become better acquainted with our own bodies.

(Are we left to presume that Platt finds a real penis to look “disturbing” or is it that the notion of an item which resembles a real phallus being used to stimulate the act whereby a woman is penetrated by a phallus disturbing? And can this truly be considered sinister? Is it any more so than the flourishingly popular “Fleshlight” aids for males which are plastered across the internet, yet she makes no mention of?)

there are deeper flaws in her argument: firstly she endeavors to somehow distinguish “Raunch Culture” from the Sex In The City, Ann Summers et al movement she mentions later in the article. Witness this hackneyed tirade:

it seems to be more about self-esteem than sexual satisfaction. The pleasure that comes from sexual experiences at this age is often the feeling of being thought attractive and being desired by a male than actually getting off.

It just seems very bleak, not to mention futile, to summon up so much effort to create the illusion of oozing sexuality, when actual sexual satisfaction, not to mention experience, barely enters into it.

Yet to attempt to somehow divide the parts of recent trends that Platt feels plays to male voyeurism and patriarchal exploitation and so on from the parts which she at least begrudgingly approves of (the parts involving women talking about sex, buying aids towards that end on the High Street, inclunding from Boots, and the invention and mass distribution of products intended to produce vast amounts of female pleasure) is entirely impossible. The two are one part of exactly the same cultural motion: one that leads away from the prudishness of the past and towards personal liberation from the shabby, moralistic confines of the past.

Unfortunately for Platt this movement is cross-gender: while women no longer feel like beasts for enjoying themselves alone men less and less despair at resorting to bandwidth instead of charm or are much bothered about confessing to viewing a pole-dancing session. If there are some parts of this broad development within society which she finds pleasing and others she does not then she should say so, rather than try and treat an entirely fused destruction of the former norms as two seperate bodies of change.

As it happens, to resort to annecdote (it seems par-for-the-course upon the feminist blogs but personally leaves me feeling uncomfortable, seeing as I am using a limited pool of individuals to try and grasp the shifts and tides influencing an entire society), I have found that the erosion of former restrictions on pleasure-seeking have resulted in a larger amount of young women than Platt suggests were willing to during her generation admitting to masturbation. The number of those who refrain is still almost inexplicably high but there is a chance that this may decline.

There is a possibility that the sale of aids and devices to assist pleasure increase the daunting nature of the act that they seek to bring enhancement to but their prescense will surely have a positive net effect. An act which had previously been kept under heavy cultural covers is now alluded to directly on chemist shelves.

The silence has thus effectively been already breached.