The Other Side of Feminism:
A lot of people who read my first book couldn’t tell whose side I’m on in the feminism/ masculinism debate. So just to re-capitulate: Feminists are people who are trying to win the recognition women deserve as an equally important half of our species. They’ve been making a lot of mistakes, but that’s inevitable, because they’re trying to bridge the differences between, literally, the two most different groups of people in the world—men and women. A lot of the male/female problems have been caused by men accidentally trapping themselves in a physio-economic recession by inventing so many labor-saving machines to help them get things done that women don’t have to put up with their sh*t anymore. A lot of men feel like life isn’t fair because women don’t depend on men to make their lives complete nearly as much as men depend on women to make their lives complete. A lot of so-called “men” find it’s a lot easier to stand around being whiny little b*tches about women thinking they deserve equality to men, instead of going out and using their manly abilities to actually accomplish something in life. Like any other debate I’m here to settle, it’s not so much a question of who’s right and who’s wrong, as it is a question of who’s f*cking up worse than who. Is anybody still wondering which side that is here?
Now I’m sure we all know the stereotype of feminists as being lesbians who don’t shave their armpits and sit around complaining about how much they hate men, and who call that liberation.
There was a professor at my college who was a militant feminist, who said that once the technology exists, women should just splice their eggs together, give birth to girls, and let men die out, and do you have any idea how many problems that would solve in the world?
What a dumb cunt. Oops, I mean, what an intelligence-challenged female reproductory organ. Splicing eggs requires an industrialized technological level. Living within the physical limitations of the Earth requires a lot of human muscle power that men have and women don’t.
I once came upon a website from somewhere in Australia, where someone had posted a photo of a lady tandem skydiving, topless. That means she was skydiving with an instructor strapped with his chest pressed tight to her back. (I’ve done this before. It let’s you jump from about 3 times higher up and saves you about 8 hours of training time before you make the jump, because the instructor knows everything he needs to know about how to make a safe jump. The alternative is to jump solo, and there’s a whole lot of ways an inexperienced skydiver can kill himself. And sure enough, in the words of the instructor I jumped with, “When I link our harnesses together, you’re going to be glad I’m straight.”)
Anyway, there was this lady skydiving with her tits hanging out and this guy strapped to her back. And somebody had attached a caption to the photo that said, “Enjoy the ride.” Now a whole bunch of people were arguing about what the picture and caption meant.
To me it was obvious that this was a deft little stroke of double-entendre, because the caption could be attached to either person in the photo and give the words completely different meaning. But reading through the arguments people had posted made it more amusing still, because it was pretty obvious what information and anti-information packages everyone was using.
First you had a bunch of reasonable people who had the same basic perspective I did, minus my career as a professional artist and my new career as a punk evolutionary theorist. These people said things like, “It’s just a piece of artwork. It only has whatever meaning you attach to it.”
That was close, but not quite true. In the first book I told you all about the evolutionary origins of art, from picturesque landscapes to punk chicks pissing on the floors of supermarkets. Then in the second book I showed you how art creates cultural values, with my example of Australian Muppet Anarchists in Space and Science Fiction for Republicans—also known as Farscape and Babylon 5. So it was inevitable that the content of this piece of artwork, like all others, was going to pull some basic ideas out of everyone’s subconsciousness. Due to people’s differences in life experiences and cultural background, people were going to attach different emotional meaning to those basic ideas, and some might even shuttle those ideas off into an anti-information package and be unaffected by them, or replace them with something else and react emotionally to that. An artist can’t force everyone to react to his artwork the same way, but he can deduce, based on his audience’s cultural background, how the majority of them will react to certain imagery. So artwork doesn’t simply have “whatever meaning you attach to it”, but it’s something pretty close to that.
There were some feminists in the discussion who realized this little loophole but took it way too far in the opposite direction. They started debating about things like the expressions the people had on their faces, possible reasons the people had those expressions, their positions in the photo, whether or not the emotional states or positions of the people in the photo were relevant to the artwork itself, and I think maybe even the positioning of the words in relation to the photo. So these feminists were basically amateurs trying to apply behavioral psychology to the artwork to determine the artist’s intention when he created the artwork, and who thought they were right, reacted emotionally to that, and expected everyone to agree with them. So while they were correct in saying that artwork doesn’t simply have “whatever meaning you attach to it”, the alternative they came up with was way further off.
These feminists’ opinion of the artwork was that it was anti-feminist, misogynistic, and counter-revolutionary. The fact that the man was on top of the woman implied masculine dominance. [Except for the fact that assuming he was the instructor and she was the student, that’s how tandem skydiving works.] They both had big grins on their faces. For the man that was to be expected, because he was skydiving strapped to the back of a topless woman. But the fact that the woman had such a big grin on her face didn’t prove anything, because she could be insane or drunk or something. [That in spite of the fact that a photo of two people skydiving with big grins on their faces most readily implies that skydiving is fun.] The fact that she was skydiving topless made her a sex object. [Unless she was skydiving topless because she was an empowered woman who though that would be fun.] The fact that someone had taken a photo of the topless woman skydiving proved that she was being turned into a sex object. [Unless this photo was taken as a means of communicating to other women that it was possible for women to be so empowered that they go skydiving topless just because it’s fun.] And then I think the argument came around to the fact that the caption was attached to the top of the photo, which put it closer to the man, which implied that it was supposed to refer to him. [Except that the artist was faced with the choice between attaching the caption to the top of the photo or the bottom, which would’ve put it closer to one or the other of the people in the photo, and the brightest and most noticeable spot in the photo was the topless White woman somewhere close to the center of the photo, which meant that was the part of the photo that the audience’s eyes would be drawn to first, followed by the words sometime afterwards, so that when they put the pieces together chronologically it made the words seem to refer to the woman first and the man second, regardless of their relationship to the photo.] And the fact that the man was in the background and that the words could be applied to him to give them a completely different meaning proved this was a subtle masculinist tactic to secretly undermine the feminist empowerment message of the artwork.
The actual debate would probably fill up about 10 pages of this book, but I think that pretty well covers all the main points that were made.
Basically, these feminists were trying to be the Gestapo of artwork, who were trying to control what people were going to think and the cultural values they were going to develop as a result of looking at the artwork. They weren’t trying to pass laws, but they were trying (in vain) to use feminist morality developed from a strictly female perspective to convince men and women alike that they were right and that everyone who disagreed with them was wrong. They were attempting to use logic and reason to alter everyone’s perception of the situation in order to alter everyone’s behavior, but they didn’t realize that their version of logic and reason was not universally inclusive. They didn’t realize how much their perception of the situation was affected by their own life experience and cultural background, and they had no idea of the effects that gender has on shaping people’s brains and consequently their perceptions of the world. So they were falling into the usual trap feminists fall into, putting forth arguments that make perfect sense to them but to everyone else make them look like a bunch of whiny bitches—and accusing everyone who accused them of being whiny bitches of having been brainwashed by the misogynistic masculinist culture, which just proved they were right in everything they said.
As I’ll show you throughout this book, if the success of your political ideology depends on preventing or discouraging people from thinking about certain things, then your political ideology obviously doesn’t work, because it doesn’t encompass the entire realm of human behavior. What you have is a political ideology that works well under certain conditions. If your conditions then stray from the ideal conditions for your ideology, the most effective way for you to make your ideology continue to function under the new conditions is to try to force everyone to continue cooperating with your ideology. And that’s been the bane of monarchy, theocracy, Communism, Capitalism, and every other political ideology we’ve tried and eventually abandoned over the course of history.
Anyway, my point is, in the pursuit of personal empowerment, developing a perception of the situation that’s the complete opposite from the way your oppressors want you to perceive the situation is not the end of the road. It’s only a beginning. And not even the only possible beginning.
In the quest for personal empowerment, you are not truly empowered until you have made your enemy irrelevant to your situation. As long as you are doing the opposite of what your enemy wants you to do, you’re still reacting to the enemy. That means the enemy is continuing to define your perception of the situation and therefore is controlling your actions.
If you consider yourself an empowered feminist, you are not truly empowered until you are willing to protest against masculine dominance by dancing naked in the streets. Not that I’m suggesting you should do this, my point is, if you rejected that idea outright, unconditionally, simply because its seems at first glance like something your enemies would enjoy you doing, then the information and anti-information packages you’re using to interpret the world are still the ones that were created by your enemies. Your mind is not yet your own.
And I’m just using feminism here as an example. The same thing applies to anyone who’s trying to liberate themselves from anyone else.
I’ve heard of a lot of people in the Globalization 4.0 movement who have found different ways to use public nudity as a means of protest. For one example, 2,000 naked people marching down the street in protest of uptight Christians trying to enforce their morality on everyone else don’t get arrested. They get ignored—that is, to the extent that it’s possible for people to ignore 2,000 naked people marching down the street. You know why? Because who the hell would dare to try to arrest 2,000 naked people and take them all to jail? They’re all breaking the law, but the local jail won’t hold 2,000 people, and even if it would, transporting them there would tie up 1,000 police cars—or maybe 200 paddy wagons, which the police probably don’t have. Not to mention, all it would take would be for one of those 2,000 people to accuse a police officer of molesting them—or maybe all of those 2,000 people to accuse police officers of molesting them—and the local court system would be backed up for months.
And that would still be a victory for the protestors, because preventing the court from upholding laws was the whole point of the march. Flooding the court with public nudity cases would force the judge to choose between which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce—the laws that actually protect the public, or the useless laws that uphold Christian morality. The police not daring to arrest 2,000 people for public nudity would just be a different version of useless laws not being enforced—not to mention, a more public display of those laws not being enforced.
Oh, and by the way, while all you empowered feminists are out there dancing naked in the streets, would one of you mind giving President Bush a blowjob while you’re at it? I mean, President Clinton got impeached for lying about getting a blowjob, and we’ve gotta get President Bush out of there somehow. He lied to get us into a war, and now about a million people are dead, but now that we have a Democrat majority in Congress, they’re too chickensh*t to do anything about it. So it’s time for Plan B. I know that just about every self-respecting empowered feminist in America would probably rather protest the war by dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire on the front lawn of the White House than to give President Bush a blowjob, but hey, this is war, and sacrifices have to be made. Just think of it this way: We’ve got 4,000 Americans dead so far and about 30,000 wounded. I’m sure you won’t be the first American to get shot in the mouth by the enemy. But remember, it is critical that we get President Bush to lie and say that he didn’t get a blowjob from you. So if you’re a hot college intern, I’m sorry, but this is just not a job for you. If you’re an overweight naked feminist in your late 70s with no teeth, that would be ideal.
Anyway, I’ve met plenty of women who can be considered truly empowered because they don’t simply not do what men want them to do, they have rendered men completely irrelevant to their lives and now do whatever they feel like, regardless of what affect it does or doesn’t have on men.
I have three friends, who I’ll call the Virgin, the Medieval Stripper, and the Bar Fight Queen. They’re all tall, slender women in their 20s and early 30s, and I’ve seen all of them naked, because that’s just the kind of people we are. But I never considered sleeping with any of them, because that’s just the kind of people we are. They were just doing their thing, changing clothes or whatever, and they didn’t care that I was in the room. Like I said, they’ve all rendered men completely irrelevant to their lives. They all have boyfriends too—or maybe several—and they’ve left many more in their wakes, who all thought they were hot at first but ended up feeling like they’ve been run over by a bulldozer. Because these women know what they want, and they let nothing stand in their way.
The Virgin is pure evil. I know this because we were housemates for a couple of months.
Her parents must’ve swingers who met at the disco or something. She was born in the early 80s, so it must’ve been the final days of disco. Anyway, when she was a teenager they kept pressuring her to go out and meet some boy and get laid. So she did what every teenager does, and… no, you pervert, she rebelled against her parents. Why the hell do you think I call her the Virgin?
The Virgin loves to break boys’ hearts. Many have tried to get in her pants, and all have failed.
The Virgin’s goal in life isn’t to stay a virgin forever. Her goal is to meet up with a nice guy she wants to marry. Or at least, live with more or less forever. You know, like chicks did back before the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ rolls revolution.
So the Virgin meets up with guys all the time, and they’re interested in her, so they start talking to her. And then somewhere along the way, fairly soon, she tells them that she’s a virgin and she intends to stay that way until she meets a nice guy she wants to settle down with and they spend a couple of years together to make sure they’re right for each other. Or something like that.
And you know what the guys always do? They stop talking to her.
Now, apply a little behavioral psychology to the situation here (which the Virgin is exceptionally good at, not that you need to be in this case) and it’s pretty obvious that guys who quit talking to chicks the instant they hear they’re virgins and intend to stay that way for the foreseeable future, have certain things in mind that are a lot higher on their list of priorities than finding true love.
And I suppose I should point out that the Virgin doesn’t go to singles’ group meetings at our local church to meet guys, she’s been a landmark in the local Rocky Horror Picture Show scene for 6 or 7 years. Now she’s head of the lighting department. So we are talking about the embodiment of the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll revolution here, and we are talking about punks, goths, and ravers… and especially goths… in their late teens or early 20s. So considering the priorities of people from this particular cultural background, it isn’t surprising that “getting hot chicks in bed” is a lot higher on their list of priorities than “finding true love”.
In the Relationships chapter I talked about hot women being the pinnacle of the relationship pyramid—after gay men, that is—because they’re the ones that all the guys want. So this is one solution a hot woman has found to that. She can’t leave the house without guys trying to get in her pants, but their reasons for wanting to get in her pants aren’t all that beneficial for her. So instead of having to go through endless social rituals with every guy she meets, hoping she can find a good one and guessing wrong most of the time, she decided what her goals in life were and she lays the cards on the table right up front:
“What are your goals in this situation? That’s what I thought. See ya, sucker.”
She processes guys’ relationship applications with mechanical efficiency, and never compromises on her position. Like me, she spends an awful lot of her life with nothing but her high standards to keep her company, but the alternative is to devote an awful lot of her life to useless dead-end relationships just so she can feel like she has someone to keep her company.
The Virgin is a master—or maybe, mistress—at emotional aikido, which is why I say she’s pure evil. Because she always uses her abilities to make situations turn out in her favor, which isn’t always very favorable for the other person.
She has one technique I could best describe as weaponized cuteness. She uses all the emotional communication signals of a five or six-year-old. Then she acts really immature—meaning self-obsessed—like a five or six-year old. So she outmaneuvers your psychological reaction to her because from the emotional communication cues she’s giving you, she makes you feel like you are talking to a five or six-year-old, so you’re really patient with her and you give her what she wants because she gets you to feel like she’s trying to be good but just doesn’t know any better. If she pulls off the sensory illusion all the way, she can get you to feel so much like you’re talking to a five or six-year-old that you don’t notice that she’s actually 23 and stands 5’11”.
Even if she doesn’t pull her sensory illusion off completely, she still creates a path of least resistance for you that leads you right where she wants it to lead you. Since she’s 23 but acts like she’s 5 or 6, it’s impossible to tell how she really perceives the situation. Does she have an adult perception of the situation, or doesn’t she? If you treat her like she does have an adult perception of the situation and she doesn’t, what’s she going to do? Throw a temper tantrum? If you do that and she does throw a temper tantrum, is everyone around you going to think you’re an a**hole for not being patient with her and not being more considerate? Or does she understand most of the situation, but not quite all of it, and she would understand it if she had a few more pieces of information to work with? But what are those pieces of information? Since she isn’t trying to use any information and instead is running away from the whole situation emotionally, she isn’t giving you any clues to which pieces of information she has and which she doesn’t have, so you have no idea which direction to go from there. So the easiest way to deal with her is to treat her like she really is a five or six-year-old, because you can’t figure out any other way to try to get the situation to turn out favorably for yourself. But if you try to make the situation turn out as favorably as you can for yourself that way, you make it turn out even more favorably for her, because you play right into her hands.
The Virgin is so good at weaponized cuteness and uses it so much of the time that I’d known her for about 3 or 4 years before we ended up living in the same house, and it was only then that I discovered she wasn’t really that immature. Prior to that, I figured that her immaturity was just another way she was rebelling—still—against her parents trying to get her to grow up faster. I figured she’d grown up with a feeling of not being allowed to be a kid, so her brain had developed with the feeling of needing to try extra-hard to be a kid. Based on what I knew of her at the time, all the pieces of the puzzle were perfectly consistent.
Having lived with her for two months, I can say that if anything, all the pieces of the puzzle are even more consistent that I realized. As it turns out, much of her immaturity is an act that she uses when other people are around. That’s not to say that she always uses it consciously, but that is to say that she learned how to do it by rebelling against her parents, and now when she acts in whatever way feels most appropriate to her to try to make situations turn out favorably for her, she does what she’s good at. Her weaponized cuteness works so well that she can afford to be so self-obsessed when other people are around, and she can still afford to be that self-obsessed when she’s all by herself and acting like an adult. (Or as the case may be, isn’t literally all by herself, but comes home and takes her emotional disguise off, anyway.) She has learned to act like an adult when it suits her, but being so self-obsessed has always worked so well for her that she’s never needed to learn anything else.
When she moved into the house we shared, she was looking for a job. She was having a lot of trouble finding one though. Finding a really sh*tty job is easy—it’s always easy. But then you get trapped in a situation where you have to spend all your time working at your sh*tty job to try to make ends meet, and you don’t have any time to go look for another job, because the only time another business where you could work in the same occupation is open so you could bring them your resume and then come back another day for an interview, is during your work-day at your sh*tty job.
The Virgin finally found a job, but it was about a week or two before her mother got her two weeks of vacation time. She’d been planning on coming to visit for months. And on top of that, she’s working in Iraq. She works for KBR, which is a subsidiary of Halliburton (I guess evil runs in their family!), and they pay her 70 grand a year to be a receptionist at a hotel in Baghdad.
So the Virgin told her new employers that her mother was working in Iraq and she was coming home for a vacation for a couple of weeks, so she’d need two weeks off. They told her too bad. So the Virgin worked there for a week or two and then quit.
She thought she had another job lined up that she’d be able to go to after her mother went back to Iraq, but then that fell through. And then she kept having a lot of trouble finding a job. And for the rest of the time she lived there, she never found one.
So here’s what all that has to do with her weaponized cuteness and her immature self-obsession. She lived there four months and only paid half a month’s rent. Our other housemate, the Former Meth Addict Stripper (you think I’m making these people up, don’t you?) who was the one with the lease on the house, finally threw here out. The two of them used to be friends, and now they’re not anymore. I don’t know what went on between the two of them exactly, but obviously the Former Meth Addict Stripper (I’ve seen her naked too, frequently—no, not professionally, you pervert) never figured out how to convince the Virgin that she really did need to pay her rent. Every time she tried, the path of least resistance always led to her letting the Virgin keep staying there without paying her rent. Finally, the only other way she could find to even try to make the situation turn out in her favor was to throw the Virgin out. But even that didn’t turn out to be very favorable, because for four months afterward she had an empty room that nobody paid rent on. So all that is consistent with the Virgin getting people to have a lot of patience with her because they feel like she’s doing the best she can.
Now the Former Meth Addict Stripper hates the Virgin’s guts because the Virgin still owes her three and a half months’ rent and she can’t figure out how to get her to pay—or even to feel like she needs to pay. The Virgin still doesn’t have a job, last I knew, so she still can’t pay even if she wanted to.
On the Virgin’s side, she can’t figure out why the Former Meth Addict Stripper is being such a b*tch to her now. So that’s still consistent with the Virgin getting away with being so self-obsessed when other people are around and not realizing how self-obsessed she still is when other people aren’t around.
Ironically, the Virgin has another tactic she uses sometimes that you could call weaponized maturity. Basically, no matter how much of an adult you’re being, she’s being more of an adult. Or if you seem to be acting immaturely, she starts acting like an adult. So she lures you into a contest of who can be more of an adult than who, and she makes you realize you should already have been in the contest because after all, you are an adult.
I saw her do this one night when she and I and the Rocky producer were driving back from visiting the Bar Fight Queen. She was hungry so we stopped into a Sonic Burger or something like that.
At the Sonic (or whatever this place was) they used a retro ‘50s arrangement, where you pull up to a parking space under an awning and order from what’s for all intents and purposes a drive-through menu. When you tell them what you want, they bring it out to your car. That way you can use it as a drive through that works pretty well, or you can stay and eat in your car and listen to your own music and whatever else, which you can’t do at a regular fast food restaurant. And maybe they have tables inside too, I don’t remember.
So the Virgin made her order and a chick brought it out to her. And the order was wrong. The Virgin ordered a medium drink, and they brought her a small, but they still charged her for a medium. So the Virgin told the chick it was wrong. The chick said she’d go exchange it. But I was tired and wanted to go home. So the Virgin said no, she didn’t have time. We’d already had to wait quite a while for them to bring us what they had. So the chick offered to go get her another drink for free, and she’d be right back. But again the Virgin told her no, because I was tired and needed to go home—even though I didn’t really want to go home that badly.
The Virgin wasn’t doing this for the sake of getting the right order. The chick had offered to fix it. It was pretty obvious by the end that sticking an emotional barb in the chick’s hide and making her regret bringing us the wrong order was worth more to the Virgin than a free soda. I doubt it was worth anything to the Virgin in practical terms, because she didn’t go to that Sonic (or whatever it was) regularly. What she got out of the deal was the satisfaction of teaching the chick a lesson.
So what do you suppose happened when the Virgin got into an emotional aikido duel against me?
One night at the Rocky Horror Picture Show I needed to get some photos taken for my website. I needed lights and a stage (or at least, something as close to a stage as I could get.) Between the time the Virgin finished setting up her lights and the house opened to let the audience in, I had a window of opportunity of about five minutes. So I started refocusing her lights. I’ve worked in theatre most of my adult life. I work with stage equipment for a living. And just about ever light I’ve ever touched in my entire career cost more than hers.
But when she saw me handling her lights, she told me that they were her lights, nobody touches her lights, and if I want them moved I need to tell her where I want them and she’ll move them.
Four minutes to doors open. My life’s work depends on this photo shoot. I needed photos for my website, so I could get people to buy enough copies of Volume I that I could quit my job and free up another 40 hours per week to spend writing more books. And this was the only place I could go to get on a stage in front of lights. So suffice it to say I had way the f*ck more important priorities than she did.
But I also knew how f*cking immature she was. Even if I did have time to explain all of that to her, it wouldn’t make the slightest impression on her.
So I reverted my aviation speaking habits and started being very direct. Of course she misinterpreted it, but anything else I could’ve done she would’ve misinterpreted even worse.
She did what I told her, but then she said, “…And by the way, thanks for being so nice to us while we’re doing all of this for you.”
A very deft emotional aikido move, even if completely misplaced. She was playing her weaponized maturity technique, and was reinforcing it with her weaponized cuteness. She communicated to me her perception of how I was talking to her, and she communicated to everyone else in the room that she was being more mature than I was and more innocent that I was, all at the same time! If she’d come anywhere close to correctly identifying my reasons for talking to her the way I was talking, it would’ve been an unconditional victory for her. But she didn’t, so all it ended up being was unconditional bitchiness.
What she wanted from me was superficial bullsh*t general politeness. She wanted emotional communication. But emotional communication requires time and energy. I didn’t have any time, so I was focusing all my energy on completing the mission I’d come here for.
Three minutes.
The way she was acting, if I’d tried telling her anything she didn’t want to hear, or told her that her perception of the situation was wrong, or tried to disagree with anything she had already decided was right, she could’ve thrown some temper tantrum and turned off all her lights. Or maybe she wouldn’t’ve done that, and she was just acting like she would but it was all a bluff. Either way, she was f*cking up my life for her own amusement.
Two minutes.
But the photographer got a bunch of photos and everything turned out all right.
The story of what happened when she got into an emotional aikido duel with me was that we got into a conflict with each other that we had no way of working out at the time, so we ended up sparring back and forth a little, pitting emotional aikido against emotional self-defense, carried out the mission, and both walked away unscathed. The conflict between us could’ve spiraled out of control in any number of ways that could’ve had disastrous results for either or both of us (probably me), but we contained it to the situation itself and didn’t let it get in the way of our doing what we needed to do.
When our time was up, she told me our time was up, politely, without playing any double beat or any emotional aikido technique, for maybe the first time ever in her life that she was out in public. So I thanked her for her help and got out of her way while she refocused her lights.
I’ve told you all this about her for a reason. As it turns out, she’s a lot like me in a lot of ways.
She’s way the hell smarter than most people she meets, and for the life of her she just can’t find an education or an occupation that lets her put all her abilities to use. Hence her reason for having so much trouble finding a job—because she’s sick of getting stuck with sh*tty jobs.
And hence her having gotten so good at manipulating people. Just like everyone else, she’s using her abilities to try to make a life for herself. She lives in an environment full of people, so getting people to do what she wants them to do is a very big way to make a life for herself. And she has nothing else to do with her abilities, so that’s what she devotes them all to.
The critical difference between her and me is that she was born in the f*cking eighties! She’s younger than MTV! So she has negligible attention span, a middle class American grasp of how the world works, and virtually no point of reference from which to distinguish between superficial bullsh*t and things that have profound importance attached to them. Instead, she measures the importance of anything solely on its superficial value. She’s smart enough to know there’s more to the world than that, but she knows very few other people who are that smart, so she has basically no way of learning any more about the world than what she can see and what most people tell her it means.
I meet a lot of kids like that.
Now what all this has to do with feminine empowerment is that she knows what she wants, she knows what her abilities are, she figures out how to use her abilities to get what she wants, and she doesn’t f*cking care how anybody else feels about that. She doesn’t understand the world nearly as well as she thinks she does, but to the extent that she does understand it, she has figured out how to make full use of everything in her environment to make a life for herself.
Now here’s the tragic ending to her story. Between being so intelligent and being so good at emotional aikido, she’s really good at working at call centers answering telephones. Yes! She’s one of those people! I practically shoved a fistful of garlic in her face and drove a stake through her heart when I found that out! And I was already living with her then!
But you remember what I said about her not being able to find a job that puts her abilities to good use? She’s really good at answering phones but she f*cking hates it. But it’s the job she’s found that puts her abilities to the best use. Hence the reason she so dreads getting stuck in yet another sh*tty job.
The Medieval Stripper is a sex worker. By that I mean she gives men hard-ons on a professional basis.
The Medieval Stripper likes being naked, she likes dancing, and she likes making lots of money. So she combined her interests and got a job.
In the Medieval Stripper’s words, “The dumbest form of life is a man with a hard-on.” If you can give a man a hard-on you can convince him of anything.
A lot of people assume that all sex workers are the victims of predatory men. For a lot of sex workers I’m sure that’s true.
BUT.
For empowered women who have rendered men irrelevant to their lives and now play their own game by their own rules, I can assure you, the hunters have become the hunted. And if the former hunters don’t believe that, that just proves how good these feminist hunters are.
I’m sure that for a lot of hunter guys, a woman who acts like a hunter is a real turn-on because it makes her seem like that much more of a challenge. And that is true. But if you honestly believe you can ever win against a feminist hunter and claim the prize you want so badly, all that proves is that she’s lured you into your own trap. You do not yet fathom what hunting means. Check yourself, buddy. She gave you a hard-on, didn’t she? That means you perceived basically nothing about the situation.
Now, women have been using sex to get what they want from men for, what, about 7,000,000 years? At least? So like any other industry that has been around for 7,000,000 years, people who work in that industry have developed a whole lot of specialized skills for doing their job. I don’t want to go giving away anyone’s trade secrets here, but here’s one example:
If you get too close to a stripper, like, you try to grab her ass or something, and she can get away from you neatly, you’re f*cked. She’s going to smile real big while she backs away from you and shakes her finger at you as though to say, “Oh no, no, no you naughty little boy.” This is a literal emotional aikido move, and she just fed you some floor tiles.
First of all, you didn’t throw her off her groove, so you didn’t disrupt her performance.
Second, she let you know that you crossed the line—or more likely, that you were getting too close to the line.
Third, she just let everyone else in the room know that you crossed the line, or were getting too close to it. People like, all your friends who came with you, and everyone else in the audience, and all the bouncers in the room.
Finally, she shows everyone that you dared to challenge her and she won. That only adds to her performance and makes her even more desirable, because you thought you were the hunter and you became the hunted. And she made kicking your ass look like it was all part of her show.
What was it you were trying to get out of the deal again?
The Bar Fight Queen has two kids and she’s financially independent, so she has no further use for men in the traditional sense.
Now the Bar Fight Queen is an ethical slut. Hence her title. Which she came up with herself—but it’s kind of a joke. She likes having sex, she likes not being tied down to one man, and like hot women everywhere, she can’t leave the house without lots of guys trying to get in her pants. So she found her own way to combine her interests and opportunities and found the arrangement that suited her best.
The Bar Fight Queen is very careful in her selections. She picks her men from different backgrounds so they can’t possibly know each other or meet each other by accident. She isn’t deceitful about it; they all know about each other.
She’s also very crafty about it. However she got to be this way, she’s really good at male psychology. If you’re attracted to her, she knows more about why you’re attracted to her than you do. Then she uses it to her advantage. By knowing what you want out of the situation, she’s able to work with that to make sure she gets what she wants out of the situation. But she’s also cooperative about it. By knowing what you want out of the situation, she can make sure you get what you want too.
She’s also very nice about it. Sometimes even too nice. She mainly picks guys who haven’t been very successful with women. Then she tells them she doesn’t care if they run around with other women. For most guys that would be a dream come true.
Unfortunately, her benevolence gets the best of her male psychology here. Since these are guys who haven’t been very successful with women before, instead of being glad that she doesn’t care if they run around with other women, a lot of them fall in love with her. Then she has to put a stop to that. But she’s always as nice as she can be about it. First she tries to get them to understand her side of the story. But sometimes she has to break up with them.
Another place you wouldn’t expect to look for feminism is in the porno industry. Which is why a group of people set out to change that.
Suicide Girls is the biggest punk site on the internet. And how do you get to be the biggest punk site on the internet? By working in the biggest industry on the internet: Sex.
Suicide Girls is basically MySpace for punks, minus all the advertizements. You pay $4 a month or something for your membership, so they don’t have to sell advertizement space.
The founders of Suicide Girls decided that instead of trying to fight for feminism by fighting against the porno industry, they would fight for feminism by invading the porno industry. They didn’t have a problem with the porno industry itself; some women like getting photographed nude, and if you try to protect people’s rights by preventing them from doing what they like, you aren’t protecting their rights, you’re protecting your values.
What the Suicide Girls produce is not pornography in the sense that you’d probably think of it if I said that’s what it was. It’s nude art. Whatever else it is or isn’t is up to the models. They use free-range models, so each model works on her own terms, submits her own work, and then the owners of the site decide whether they want to buy it or not. They have certain standards, because they have a general business sense of what will or won’t go over well, but mainly what they’re interested in is creativity—you know, art.
So they get all kinds of weird stuff. Naked chicks jumping through in snow drifts, naked chicks lifting weights—like, 300 pounds at a time, naked chicks cleaning shotguns, naked chicks rebuilding their motorcycles, whatever. In other words, women who like being naked and like being photographed, doing what they like.
There was even one model who posed nude outside the research station where she works. In Antarctica. Where do Playboy models pose nude? In bedrooms and showers and swimming pools and on beaches and a bunch of unimaginative crap like that? So as you can see, the Suicide Girls are putting the word art back into the term nude art.
Also, they don’t restrict their models to looking like Barbie dolls. They come in all colors, sizes, and shapes—well, shapes to a point, anyway. Not to be sexist, they set up another site called Suicide Boys. And not to be shape-ist they set up a site called Curvy Girls, for overweight models… or whatever the politically correct term is.
Just to give you an idea how non-Barbie-doll of models they accept, they have one model who got in an accident and had to get one of her legs amputated at the knee. So when she got her prosthetic leg, you know what she did? She got tattoos painted on it!
When I found out they were the biggest punk site on the net, I joined up. Then I made the mistake of talking about my work there. Just like the evolutionary scientists, the Suicide Girls were under siege by the Bush administration. I figured, what better place to talk about the most controversial project in the history of humankind but on the biggest punk site in the world, right?
Big f*cking mistake. Cuz I met up with a whole bunch of pseudo-intellectuals and fake intellectuals and fashionably dumb people and mental communists and fashionably helpless people and fashionably oppressed people and people who played stupid and all kinds of crap.
Finally I pissed too many people off and got kicked off the site. They are Capitalists, after all, which is how you get to be the biggest punk site on the net—or biggest of any kind of site on the net. So they’re not in the business of selling reality, they’re in the business of selling whatever version of reality the most people are willing to pay for. But at least now I can say that my project is so controversial I got kicked off the biggest punk site in the world for it. Hey, I made myself the King of Kings two books ago. Now I can say I’m also the Punk of Punks.
Speaking of Capitalists, feminine empowerment, and the sex industry, I can’t end this section without saying something else. Basically, if you try to copy what the Suicide Girls do and make money on the trend they started by commandeering it, gutting it of its content, and then selling a hollow plastic replica of it, you’d better plan on failing. As I’ve said before, in other terms, despite what a lot of Capitalists wish, other people’s ability to adapt to their situation is not a resource for you to make money on.
When I lived in Portland, at one point I lived out on the edge of the city near a snooty sophisto suburb. Every week I’d get some free lifestyle newspaper in the mail. It was full of a bunch of crap that my sophisto neighbors thought was important. Sometimes when I was bored I’d glance through it just to chuckle at how superficial their lives were.
There was one lady who wrote a regular editorial column. One week she wrote about the emotional hardship of sending her two children away to Europe for semesters abroad. The following week she wrote an article complaining about the new law that had been passed, which allowed underage strippers to work in clubs that served alcohol.
Now, I’ve known an awful lot of sex workers in my time… No, not professionally, you pervert! Anyway, having known so many women who work in the sex industry who I met in no way related to their occupations, I got the distinct impression that I knew a side to the story that she was completely oblivious to. As one former stripper I’d known once told me, the worst part about her job was knowing that dirty old men were going to go home at night and jerk off thinking about her.
So I wrote a letter to this columnist and said, in effect:
Look, you dumb bitch,
Instead of asking why 18-year-old strippers are being allowed to work in clubs that serve alcohol, maybe you ought to be asking why we live in a society where the best way so many 18-year-old women can find to make a living is by taking off their clothes every night in front of crowds of men they don’t even know. Not everyone has parents who can send them away for college semesters in Europe, you know!
She didn’t write back to me. I wasn’t expecting her to.
Hey, if you want to talk about Capitalists trying to use other people’s adaptability as capital they can use to make money for themselves, adapting to our situation is exactly what the global Green-Anarcho-Socialist revolution is doing. Try making a profit on that!