Leading Feminist Blog Takes Cheap Shot

2007-11-28
By

For better or worse, www.feministing.com is one of the top blogs on the web, ranked #337 by Technorati. Regrettably, yesterday lead Feministing blogger Jessica Valenti, author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, took a cheap shot at me, inverting the meaning of my recent blog post The Sexist Pencil Sharpener v. the Sexist Knife Block. Valenti wrote:

“Recently ‘men’s rights activists‘ scoffed at the idea that we were offended by the pencil sharpener (pictured above), which blogger Glenn Sacks wrote ‘depicts a conventional, common sex act which women enjoy.’”

Sounds like I “scoffed at the idea” of women being offended by the sharpener. Yet I actually did the exact opposite, quoting Valenti’s criticisms of it and adding “I don’t blame Valenti for being unhappy over the pencil sharpener.”

As for my comment “the pencil sharpener depicts a conventional, common sex act which women enjoy,” I took the pencil sharpener as depicting normal, conventional heterosexual sex, which women certainly do enjoy. The feminists instead see the pencil sharpener as depicting rape, sodomy and/or bondage. They’re welcome to their opinion, but it’s an interpretation which I think the average person generally would not share.

Among Valenti’s many blog commenters, not one could bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious problem that Valenti had misstated my views on the sharpener. There’s no shortage of loonies who comment on either of our blogs, but this omission did surprise me.

Amidst this temporarily brain-dead wasteland, I will praise one notable exception–Megan, of the feminist blog The Mad Scientist. On her own blog Megan had the decency to note, in between ripping me, that “Personal aside: I do give Glenn credit for stating the pencil sharpener is offensive. The knife block pictured on his site is also offensive.”

As I’ve noted before, someday men and women are going to have to come together on gender issues. When leading figures in the women’s and men’s movements insist on distorting the other camp’s arguments, sadly, both sides move further apart.

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  • http://www.false-accusers.com TheManOnTheStreet

    Feminist think in two dimension Glenn. Manipulate what was said to fit the agenda, or just make it up.

    TMOTS

  • Denis

    Glenn-

    unfortunately, also is the fact that the vast majority of the distortions and outright lies have come from the women. They have been doing this for more than 40 years. In fact, they have been doing this since the mid-1800s. THEY are mostly responsible for the damage to gender relations. Valenti is simply one more in a very long line of liars. Men have silently stood by and took it all this time. Some are only now waking up. Some, such as myself, are radicalized and un-ashamedly militant. There is no reasoning with these people or this movement. They are fighting to win-and so must we. There will be plenty of time afterwards to pick up the pieces and try and put things back together. Remember, THEY started this-not us.

  • http://mensnewsdaily.com/author/the-gonzman/ The Gonzman

    So what else is new?

    Glenn, I know you like to try to have reasonable discussions with feminists, but I have learned over the years dealing with them that mendacity is the rule – not the exception. Feminist success comes in a great part due to political savvy; one of the rules of which is “Try to smear at every opportunity.”

    They remind me very much of the person who gloats “Even the Bible says there is no God!” when the full quote is, “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’”

  • Mjaybee

    “Leading Feminist Blog Takes Cheap Shot”.

    Sky blue, water wet. More news at 11….

  • roger

    while don’t they just release a male version of the pencil sharpener and a female version of the knife block and be done with it?
    that would satisfy everybody!

  • Thomas

    This is what is really sad to me:

    For better or worse, http://www.feministing.com is one of the top blogs on the web, ranked #337 by Technorati

    It means that men still have not organized or even become aware of what is going on. Many men think that if they join arms with a mens group, they are being extremist just for being active in protecting their rights.

    Yikes!

    1975: ‘Baby, you’ve come a long way’

    2007: ‘Men – we got a long way to go.’

  • tonysprout

    The average feminist is a child and must be dealt with appropriately. You can’t respond to their tantrums with anger. When you catch them in a lie or misrepresentation, all you can do is point it out; let them know they’ve been caught. As we see with this case, feminist integrity and self esteem are very low. We’re dealing with people that have masive amounts of inner turmoil stemmming from gigantic cases of penis envy. While the damage they do is extreme, we have to continue the course set by the Hon. Joe Biden and protect women not only from those that would harm them, but from themselves. Can’t anyone see that these poor deluded creatures couldn’t make it in the real world without special government protections?

  • Artfldgr

    TheManOnTheStreet said,

    Feminist think in two dimension Glenn. Manipulate what was said to fit the agenda, or just make it up.

    excerpted from THE PSYCHOPATH – The Mask of Sanity

    Those of us who have had experiences with psychopaths know that the language of the psychopath is two-dimensional. They are, as someone once said, as “deep as a thimble.” An analogy is given of the psychopath as a color blind person who has learned how to function in the world of color by special strategies. They may tell you that they “stopped at a red light,” but what it really means to them is that they knew that the light at the top means “stop,” and they stopped. They call it the “red” light like everyone else, but they have no experience of what “red” really is.

    A person who is color blind who has developed such coping mechanisms, is virtually undetectable from people who see colors.

    Psychopaths use words about emotions the same way people who are color blind use words about colors they cannot perceive. Psychopaths not only learn to use the words more or less appropriately, they learn to pantomime the feeling. But they never HAVE the feeling.

    these words have emotional charges to them and they are used like weapons.. the emotional charge has no effect on them. but it does have effect on people and in a world were everything is tolerated… sociopaths/psychopaths get full reign to use them makeing a situaiton where they are armed and honest good people are not.

    there were good reasons for merit, and for reputation, and such.

    it kept the sociopaths under control..

    another excerpt from the same source


    The callous use of the old, the lonely, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, is a trademark of the psychopath. And when any of them wake up to what is happening, they are generally too embarrassed to complain.

    One of the chief ways psychopaths prey on others is to make use of the normal person’s need to find meaning or purpose in life. They will pose as grief counselors, or “experts” of various sorts that attract followings of people who are looking for answers. They are masters of recognizing “hang-ups” and self-doubts that most people have, and they will brazenly pander to them to gain a follower to use later. Hare tells of a staff psychologist in a mental hospital whose life was destroyed by a psychopathic patient. He cleaned out her bank account, maxed out her credit cards, and then disappeared. How did he get to her? She said that her life had been “empty” and she had just simply succumbed to his sweet words and verbal caresses. As we already know, such words are cheap legal tender to the psychopath. They can say “I’ll pray for you,” or “I love you” just to create an impression. It really, really doesn’t mean a thing. But some people are so lonely and so desperate that even imitations are better than nothing.

    Then, of course, there are people who are just simply so psychologically damaged themselves that the psychopath is the obvious choice for a partner. They may have a need to be treated badly, or a need to be excited by danger, or a need to “rescue” or “fix” somebody whose soul is in obvious peril.

    In a book about Richard Ramirez, the Satan-worshipping “night Stalker,” the author described a young coed who sat through the pretrial hearings and sent love letters and photographs of herself to Ramirez. “I feel such compassion for him. When I look at him, I see a real handsome guy who just messed up his life because he never had anyone to guide him,” she is reported to have said. [Hare]

    Sadly, as we see, psychopaths have no lack of victims because so many people are ready and willing to play the role. And in many, many cases, the victim simply refuses to believe the evidence that they are being victimized. Psychological denial screens out knowledge that is painful, and persons with large investments in their fantasies are often unable to acknowledge that they are being deceived because it it too painful. Most often, these are women who rigidly adhere to the traditional role of the female with a strong sense of duty to be a “good wife.” She will believe that if she tries harder or simply waits it out, her husband will reform. When he ignores her, abuses her, cheats on her, or uses her, she can simply just decide to “try harder, put more energy into the relationship, and take better care of him.” She believes that if she does this, eventually he will notice and will see how valuable she is, and then he will fall on his knees in gratitude and treat her like a queen.

    Dream on.

    The fact is, such a woman, with her fierce commitment to such a man, her dedication to being a proper wife, has allowed such fairy tales to distort her sense of reality. The reality is that she is doomed to a lifetime of abuse and disappointment until “death do us part.”

    feminist leaders and fellow travelers are sociopathic… all the changes in the past 40 years by them are so that the sociopathic in their midst can raise extreme hell without consequences…

    reletivism means you cant tell if they are bad
    redefine language, and you cant catch them in lies
    children alienated makes more what?
    emotional words as weapons
    population reduction through soft eugenics
    compartmentalized thinking being instilled
    creating thinking thought over logic thought so that feelings can be used to heard those with feelings… this has no effect on them.

    and the game they are playing with the group of disenfranchised around them is

    Let us assume that in a dispute, one side is innocent, honest, and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent person no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only lie he can tell is to falsely confess “I did it.” But lying is nothing but good for the liar. He can declare that “I didn’t do it,” and accuse another of doing it, all the while the innocent person he has accused is saying “I didn’t do it,” and is actually telling the truth.

    The truth – when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad – especially if the innocent person is honest and admits his mistakes.

    The basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars – psychopaths. Even the simple act of giving testimony under oath is useless. If a person is a liar, swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However, swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness. Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liar. [Robert Canup]

    so now you understnad why you cant win as long as society accepts them and has such ideals that they cant be realist enough to prevent them from making slaves of us all for their own pleasurs.

    want to know why no meritocracy any more?

    At the same time, psychopaths are good imposters. They have absolutely no hesitation about forging and brazenly using impressive credentials to adopt professional roles that bring prestige and power. They pick professions in which the requisite skills are easy to fake, the jargon is easy to learn, and the credentials are unlikely to be thoroughly checked. Psychopaths find it extremely easy to pose as financial consultants, ministers, psychological counselors and psychologists. And that’s a scary thought.

    and here is a perfect example let me see if you see the similarities

    I was once dumbfounded by the logic of an inmate who described his murder victim as having benefited from the crime by learning “a hard lesson about life.” [Hare]

    and the feminist

    “Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.” – Catherine Comins

  • Artfldgr

    The last decade has seen the emergence of an inescapable and terrifying reality: a dramatic surge of juvenile crime that threatens to overwhelm our social institutions. […] Children under the age of ten who are capable of the sort of mindless violence that once was reserved for hardened adult criminals. […] At this writing, a small town in a western state is frantically searching for ways to deal with a nine-year-old who allegedly rapes and molests other children at knife point. He is too young to be charged and cannot be taken into care because “such action may only be taken when the child is in danger, not his victims,” according to a child protection official. [Hare]

    Why does it seem that we have a veritable epidemic of psychopaths? Sociobiologists are suggesting that increasing psychopathy is an expression of a particular genetically based reproductive strategy. Simply put, most people have a couple of children and devote a lot of time and effort to their care. Psychopaths systematically mate with and abandon large numbers of women. They waste little of their energy raising children, and in this way, psychopathic genes are being propagated like wildfire. The sociobiologists aren’t saying that the sexual behavior of people is consciously directed, only that “nature” has made them a certain way so that it will happen effectively.

    The behavior of female psychopaths reflects the same strategy. “I can always have another,” one female psychopath coldly replied when questioned about an incident in which her two-year-old daughter was beaten to death by one of her many lovers. When asked why she would want to have another child, (two had been taken into protective custody), she said “I love children.” Again we see that the expressed emotion is in contradiction to the behavior.

    Cheating skills seem to have an adaptive value in our society.

  • http://national.teambio.org/2007/12/15/the-great-pencil-sharpener-war/ Bring It On! National News » The Great Pencil Sharpener War

    [...] Gal did a great post about sexism, harassment, and what constitutes those things. It referenced a series of posts (more here, here, here, and here) about whether a pencil sharpener with the body of a woman doing [...]






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