The Sexist Pencil Sharpener v. the Sexist Knife Block
Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, is angry over the pencil sharpener pictured above. On Feministing.com she writes:
“What better way to start the week than a stark reminder of how the world sees women? (It seems the perfect woman is almost always dismembered and frequently being penetrated.) Just f***king kill me now.”
I don’t blame Jessica for being unhappy over the pencil sharpener, but I wonder if she would be as offended by the knife block pictured. The knife block seems far more offensive than the pencil sharpener:
1) The knife block depicts extreme and painful violence.
2) The pencil sharpener depicts a conventional, common sex act which women enjoy.
I’m not saying Jessica would reject any complaints about the knife block–perhaps she would agree with men’s activists that it’s offensive. But it seems that Jessica and many other feminists tend to see popular culture as “offensive to women” when, in reality, popular culture is far more anti-male than anti-female. This is particularly true when depicting violence–a dozen men can die in a movie or cop show and scarcely anyone blinks, but when a woman dies, it’s a big deal. To pick one example, see my blog post Pirates of the Caribbean & Male Disposability.
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Stumble It!
November 27th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Gesh Glenn…
Don’t ya know? Thats differentttttttttttt!
TMOTS
November 27th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
“The pencil sharpener depicts a conventional, common sex act which women enjoy”
In your dreams.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
“olivia said,
“The pencil sharpener depicts a conventional, common sex act which women enjoy”
In your dreams.”
There is always one isn’t there. The typical nay-sayer, denier of anything bleeding obvious.
Really need to grow up and smell the anti-male sexism before even considering the privileged princesses “feelings”..
November 27th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I don’t dream about pencil sharpeners, olivia. The shapener is undignified, crude and possibly insulting; I don’t like it. the knife block is wicked, hateful and clearly not in your mind. You seem not to care at all.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:50 am
“olivia said,
In your dreams.”
You see the sexual notion that women hold: men like sex, and wish women liked it. This is learned behavior. We teach this to our children, boys and girls alike. It makes men believe we need women more than we really do. Women believe it too. It is patently untrue. It can be un-learned.
But it is a very useful social convention. Were men to realize how little we really need women, society would unravel. Men have not yet even gained the ability to conveniently and easily control our fertility, and women are already bemoaning the lack of good marryable men. Middle aged middle class single women are, as Glenn pointed out elsewhere, choosing to have children without benefit of marriage. There are, I believe, two reasons for this. One is the marriage strike; the other is much much more troubling to me.
“Liberated” women seem unwilling, or unable, to endure the compromise necessary to actually marry and live with a man. They will say they have been in relationships that they hoped would lead to marriage and children, but “none of the relationships worked.” What these women really mean is they were unwilling to accept someone else at face value, as another imperfect human, and actually compromise some of their deeply-held beliefs in the name of making a marriage work, and for the good of children. Women have been told they can have it all, and that is what they believe. Choosing to become a mother without a father is the ultimate act of self-indulgence. The lack of marryable men is partly due to a genuine shortage; the rest is merely a reflection of women’s uncompromising attitudes.
Olivia, maybe you will be able to find someone you can manipulate long term with that thing you were born with. And then again, maybe not.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Jessica Valenti’s book is pathetic, BTW. Why are you essentially promoting it for her? Have you read it? Good Gawd! What a waste of paper. And now we have Amanda Marcotte “publishing” as well….
When I was younger, I always thought that a writer had ‘made it’ when they got published. Sad to see that virtually anyone can ‘get published’ today. Especially gender and race baiters.
And for the record, she has never condemned the knife block. I seem to recall her telling someone to “get a sense of humor” when challenged….
Ahhhhh eqalllliteeeee!
TMOTS
November 28th, 2007 at 9:39 am
OK, so we have two exhibits on display.
Exhibit “A” is that of a sexually explicit act in the form of a pencil sharpener.
Exhibit “B” is that of a plastic knife block in the form of a human male, it’s color incidentally, is blood red.
One of these exhibits brings to mind horrific, mindless rampages of death and destruction. The other, something that most adult people would find enjoyable.
One exhibit reminds us of the grotesque and brings to mind, even by it’s very color and the placement of the holes, the nature of true evil. The other brings to mind that which most adults regard as an extremely intimate encounter.
But for some people the icing on this cake isn’t that males being portrayed as an object to be massacred, so Sir, it’s that a female is being portrayed as a sex object. Never mind the very clear and startling message the blood red, male-shaped, knife block brings to ones mind, feminazis rail against their kind as being portrayed as a sex object!
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take sex over death any day.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:44 am
One glorifies sex, the other violence against men; few females have the intellectual capacity to discern the difference, or at least it seems that way. Yeah, it’s a real good idea putting females in positions of authority, NOT.