Amerika

We the modern people, in order to feel like our lives of commute-work-consume-sleep are more meaningful, would like to rage in our cages against things that are non-issues.

Brave modern people will do this in order to make ourselves feel like we are not just mundane unexceptional people, but brave crusaders for something of great meaning, like the poignant sayings of Hallmark cards or the bittersweet emotional crash of a good pop chorus. We want to feel alive.

Naturally, we aren’t rebelling against anything important. We don’t want to break the cages; just rattle them. And that’s permitted. Anything is permitted except that which will break the cage. Conveniently, others have told us what to think in this regard, and what is ignorant, and we don’t want to be that.

As a result, there’s only one way to go: down. We want to introduce more divisions, fracture more relationships, and demand more rights in an absolute context so there’s no reasoning with us, just conflicting needs and no resolution in sight.

While we do this, industry and government chortle on like the good parasites they are, laughing that a few hundred million to academia, hollywood and the record industry bought them such a neurotic and thus obedient population:

SlutWalk started, of course, with poor Michael Sanguinetti, the Toronto cop who now goes down in the annals of feminist history (“Daddy, tell me again how you ended up in the Ms. Magazine Hall of Shame?”) because he suggested that women could avoid being raped if they stopped “dressing like sluts.”

Faster than you could tweet “wearing this dress doesn’t mean yes,” a movement was born, with young women, some dressed in lace bustiers, tight skirts and fishnets, taking to the streets, first in Toronto, and now all over the United States and in the U.K., loudly protesting this blame-the-victim attitude.

Their stated goal – apart from having a whacking good time, which is also what street level activism is about – was to reclaim the word “slut” for themselves. – The Globe and Mail

Was this an unintentional list of 1990s cliches?

• Reclaim. The ultimate non-act: redefine a word, and then use guilt to make other people obey. It’s effective except soon forgotten because words revert to their original meanings. A slut is a girl of low value. How do we know she has low value? She gives it away to anyone. That means if you are so dumb as to be her boyfriend or marry her, you’ve purchased cheap goods at an expensive price. It also means she’s dumb as rocks or mentally broken. Sane intelligent people are selective; idiots and the insane are random.
• Slacktivism. Glad to hear it’s a “whacking good time” from this mediocre writer. Translation: it’s a good chance to be dramatic and to tell other people how important you are. You weren’t like the other lazy slobs, watching TV and eating donuts; you were at a Slut Walk reforming society. Except that people have been doing stuff like this for forty years, and now we have more rapes, not fewer.
• Protesting. If life doesn’t do what you want, shout at it. Make some signs. Demand more laws. Don’t go to the cause, which might require you to actually restructure your modern life. Do something convenient instead: change nothing, continue stupid behaviors and tolerance of destructive people, but demand more rights and token kowtowing.
• The risqué. Except it isn’t risqué because you’re building on years of similar things. Sex sells and this society is never going to really condemn you for showing more skin, except for a few old church ladies, of course. What it will do is use your bad behavior to justify more bad behavior.
• Be a victim. Whatever you do, don’t admit that going off into dark corners with guys you just met after beer #13 is the kind of behavior that is guaranteed to eventually cause problems. No, you should be able to do whatever you want: anything, anywhere, anytime. If something bad happens to you, it’s someone else’s fault.

I have a better suggestion: let’s put you all on planes, take you out of your comfortable first world rattling cages, and fly you to the Democratic Republic of Congo:

At least 400,000 women were raped in Democratic Republic of Congo over a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, according to an American Journal of Public Health study that shows the problem of sexual assault is not confined to the restive east.

The study, based on a 2007 nationwide survey of 3,436 women between the ages of 15 and 49, estimates that more than 1.7 million Congolese women have been raped in their lifetime and at least 3 million more have been raped by an intimate partner. – SFG

It’s very well and easy to leave your first-world apartment (secured for you by others who did not have a sense of victimhood), walk down your heavily policed streets, and like a trust fund brat yell and scream at the people who protect you (cops) while demanding irrational and absolute “rights” that you have not earned.

Cages rattle. When you tire of that, you can turn to the other people in cages and tell them how smart and unique, innovative and defiant, brave and bold, reclaimy and whacking good time-y, and savvy, you are. They will then rattle their cages in sympathy and throw feces at the zookeeper. But soon they will tire also and hey, when is dinner? If someone did not bring it to us, we would starve.

If the Slutwalkers(tm) are really as good as their word, they won’t object to a thing I’ve said. In fact, all we’ll hear is the sound of 10,000 iPhones being whipped out of brassieres so they can be used to book flights to the Congo. The army of the righteous will leave their cages, and descend into nature’s fury, and they’ll make it all clean and morally right for the rest of us.

Right?

Tags: feminism