Not only are [young women seen as] objects, they are abject, terminally unable to cope with the exigencies of adult life, of the bewildering array of life choices modern society offers us, from vaginal butchery to jobs in the service sector.

Yes, I fear Laurie Penny is off her meds again. 

I hesitate to summarise what it is she’s banging on about in this extract from her latest book, as it isn’t particularly clear to me. Nor is it always obvious how one avalanche of hyperbole and assertion leads to the next. The joining logic is hard to pin down, let alone parse. It’s all rather impressionistic and yet terribly adamant. It’s sort of, “Self-harm-something-something-patriarchy-obviously.”

Western womankind is collectively imagined as a toddler let loose in a candy store, so overwhelmed by the range of options that it has an ungrateful tantrum and is sick on the floor. 

Collectively imagined. As so often in Laurie’s mental landscape, dark forces are at work although the evidence has been lost in a mysterious warehouse fire. We are, however, pointed to the “front pages of celebrity magazines,” on which, obviously, all sane people model their own, actual lives. We’re told that “Successful women on the verge of mental and physical collapse… is a myth that pleases the powerful,” though who the powerful might be is also far from clear. Can she mean the overwhelmingly female readership of Heat magazine?

Meanwhile, huge chunks of rhetoric fall from the sky:

Sometimes we get called rebels and degenerates and troublemakers, and sometimes we are known to the police. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.

Because it just wouldn’t be a Laurie Penny article without some of that. 

Theodore Dalrymple on the values and inversions of the British underclass:  

Certainly the notions of dependence and independence have changed. I remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been an astonishing gestalt switch in my lifetime. Independence has now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and dependence on the state.

Mothers would say to me that they were pleased to be independent, by which they meant independent of the fathers of their children — usually more than one — who in general were violent swine. Of course, the mothers knew them to be violent swine before they had children by them, but the question of whether a man would be a suitable father is no longer a question because there are no fathers: At best, though often also at worst, there are only stepfathers. The state would provide. In the new dispensation the state, as well as television, is father to the child.

See also this, especially the last two paragraphs. 

Ed Driscoll quotes Daniel Henninger: 

The IRS tea-party audit story isn’t Watergate; it’s worse than Watergate. The Watergate break-in was the professionals of the party in power going after the party professionals of the party out of power. The IRS scandal is the party in power going after the most average Americans imaginable.

See also Roger Kimball on de-unionising the IRS. Paul Caron’s exhaustive archive covering the scandal is of course still growing. 

And somewhat related to this, Christina Hoff Sommers on sporting gender quotas and law gone bad: 

Because of pressure from women’s groups like the National Women’s Law Centre and the Women’s Sports Foundation, Title IX evolved into a rigid quota regime that dictates equal participation in sports by both sexes regardless of interest… Schools are cutting back on male teams and creating new women’s teams, not because of demand, but because they are afraid of a federal investigation. [Feminist advocates] have persuaded courts that if there are fewer women than men on college varsity teams the only explanation is discrimination. [But] the evidence that women taken as a group are less interested than men in competitive sports is overwhelming.  

As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

You wouldn’t want to miss the annual International Buffalo Bodypainting Festival in Jiangcheng County, China. 

Oh, don’t tut. You’ve been culturally enriched.  

K.C. Johnson on dogmatic faculty, the Duke rape hoax, and why due process matters: 

It was, I think, unprecedented, the sort of behaviour we saw from the Duke faculty. Faculty members essentially chose to exploit their students’ distress to advance a campus pedagogical agenda, to push their own ideological vision and to abandon any pretence of supporting fairness, due process and the dispassionate evaluation of evidence… A complete abandonment of any pretence of objectivity, of any interest in the truth.

Ann Althouse parses Hillary Clinton and is taken aback by what she finds:   

Read it again and see how shocking it is. Not only did Hillary completely turn her back on “balancing competing values” and “more thoughtful conversation,” she doesn’t want to allow people on one side of the conversation even to believe what they believe. Those who care about gun rights and reject new gun regulations should be stopped from holding their viewpoint. Now, it isn’t possible to forcibly prevent people from holding a viewpoint… but the question is Hillary Clinton’s fitness for the highest office, and her statement reveals a grandiose and profoundly repressive mindset.

Somewhat related, Jayson Veley on the joys of modern schooling:   

Andrew Lampart, a student at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, Connecticut, was assigned an in-class debate on gun control during his “Law & You” course. While preparing for the debate during study hall, Lampart logged onto the school-provided internet and found that students were forbidden from visiting The National Association for Gun Rights… “I used my study hall to research gun control facts and statistics. That is when I noticed that most of the pro-second amendment websites were blocked, while the sites that were in favour of gun control generally were not… I found it nearly impossible to get solid information to debate my side of the argument.”

Meanwhile, a book critical of modern feminism, but written by a feminist, catches fire mysteriously. And Perry de Havilland discovers another classic Guardian sentence. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Franklin Einspruch on the new censors: 

For a long while I’ve been trying to interest my friends in the art world to get behind freedom of speech in a bigger way, to recognise that the very health of the marketplace of ideas depends on its openness to entry and its freedom of transaction… This usually doesn’t persuade anyone who isn’t already liberty-minded to begin with. So next I resort to self-interest. We creative types rely on that openness to function. If we don’t stand in defence of hate speech — not the content, just the right to express it — any mechanisms for cutting it off will eventually be used against us. If injured feelings take on the seriousness of injured bodies, we will become a society that pulls art off of walls, cancels performances, and strikes essays from public view. Sadly, this usually doesn’t work either, because the targets of accusations of hate speech typically lean right, and the art community leans left. 

Franklin also links to this Pew survey of social media use, which suggests that self-described progressives are statistically much more likely to ban or block people with whom they disagree. A finding that may not be entirely shocking to regular readers. 

And somewhat related, Greg Collins on the unremarked privileges of the self-appointed privilege police: 

The paramount privilege at universities is not race, class, or gender, but intellectual soft despotism… A student whose worldview clings to that of university administrators and professors has the advantage of accessing university resources, money, and time to drive his cause. These instruments are far more powerful in granting benefits to politically preferred groups in higher education than subconscious biases in favour of particular races or classes. It is a privilege when your views conform with those of more than 90 percent of your professors. It is a privilege when your worldviews are blessed by a proliferation of like-minded commencement speakers and guest lecturers. And it is a privilege when you have university resources, money, and time within fingertips’ reach to wield to advance your political cause. 

As an illustration of this leverage, Collins mentions one of many sabotaged speaking events – a talk by the conservative writer Don Feder at the University of Massachusetts in March 2009, the subject of which was, or would have been, free speech. Within 20 seconds of opening his mouth, Feder had been interrupted, shouted down and called a racist, before being screamed at repeatedly and assailed with epithets about his daughter. Despite his pleas for civility, Feder was unable to speak for more than three minutes without further, often deafening interruption by members of the International Socialist Organisation and Radical Student Union. Footage of the disruption can be seen here. Despite the students’ prolonged attempts to intimidate Feder and prevent the intended discussion taking place – a goal they accomplished – campus officials later claimed that Feder “chose to discontinue his speech.” An interesting, and revealing, choice of words.