Wolfwhistling is Sexist, and Complaining about Wolfwhistling is Racist, and Courtesy toward Women is Sexist, and Demanding Courtesy from All Men regardless of race is Racist, And….
This was too rich not to share:
video depicting a woman walking around New York City and, through no fault of her own, being intermittently approached or cat-called by strangers has become an Internet sensation this week, racking up hits and provoking outrage across the political spectrum. In the course of just a few days, millions upon millions of people have shared the piece, almost all of them appending to the link their own passionate disavowals and earnest calls to action. Initially, its progenitor, a group named “Hollaback,” expressed the hope that the piece “would make an impact.” Quietly, they must be thrilled with the result: In a single week, the spot has had 15 million views, an achievement that places it firmly in the viral hall of fame. Publicly, however, the outfit has been forced to apologize, its victory having turned somewhat sour. What could possibly have happened?
As it has grown in popularity, the video has been transformed into a blank canvas, onto which America’s brave advocates of hyphenated-justice have sought to project their favored social theories. Evidently unwilling to let the spot stand on its own, Purdue’s Roxanne Gay wrote sadly that “it’s difficult and uncomfortable to admit that we have to talk about race/class/gender/sexuality/ability/etc, all at once.” Alas, she was not alone. Soon, the claims of “sexism” had been joined by accusations of “racism” and of “classism,” Hollaback had been forced to acknowledge that it had upset the more delicate among us, and those who had celebrated the video had been denounced as unreconstructed bigots. By this process was its message diluted and appropriated, the country’s most prominent peddlers of grievance and discord electing to squabble and bicker over its meaning, and to strip it of its value in favor of their own, fringe fixations.
“The fact that the video chooses to showcase the experience of a white woman experiencing harassment almost exclusively at the hands of black and Latino men,” Brooklyn Magazine’s Kristin Iverson proposed earlier this week, “is a pretty clear indication of who the audience for this video is supposed to be, namely, those who seek to protect and defend innocent white women, aka the already existing societal power structure.” This theme was picked up in more explicit terms elsewhere, the less direct references to the “power structure” quickly giving way to overt accusations of white supremacy. “Thousands of satisfied racists are sharing that viral catcalling video,” griped Lindy West at the Daily Dot, lamenting that its creators had imposed “manipulative, specific, politicized constraints on the issue of street harassment” and thereby permitted “the bulk of the audience to divorce themselves from the problem.” Yesterday, the Root’s Dion Rabouin dispensed with euphemism entirely, confirming that “some of the video’s intentional choices seem to play on the Birth of a Nation trope that white women simply aren’t safe from sex-crazed black and brown men.” How that’s for a thumb in the eye for the millions who shared the spot on their Facebook pages?
In the exquisitely calibrated judgment of The Nation’s “racial justice” guru, Aura Bogado, the spot was “deeply problematic,” serving not to highlight the frequency with which women are bothered on the street, but instead perpetuating “the myth of the cult of white white womanhood by literally placing this white woman in neighborhoods where men of color will be the ones who catcall (or, in some instances, say hello to) her.” “Doing so,” Bogado writes, “makes it appear as if men of color are the perpetrators of all that is bad on this planet, which can only be balanced with the exigent need to therefore save white women above all else.” The only solution, she says, is to remake the video with a “universalizing” cast: the camera centering on, “say, a black trans woman.”
My comment: I think one can truly, deeply understand Leftists by thinking of them as people who have sold their soul to Uncle Screwtape, and are under direct orders to stir up hatred and discontent and incivility among themselves and others in order to lure as many of their fellow souls to Hell as possible.
This theory may at first seem a little extreme, but please notice: a woman makes a video showing men admiring her in a vulgar or uncouth or unchivalrous way, by giving her the wolf-whistle.
At first, this would seem to be a complaint that the fashions of courtesy and gentility which the Left so diligently and so successfully expunged from our society need to make a comeback. Ah, but that would be too logical a conclusion.
Chivalry is sexism. This is a a word that, as far as I can discover, has no meaning whatsoever, but is meant to provoke the same emotional reaction as the word ‘racism’ but somehow applied to females, as if the evil but utterly imaginary males who think females are a foreign race responsible for our losses in the Great War should be exterminated to aid the glorious foundation of the Reich. These utterly imaginary males attempt to carry out this gynophobic holocaust by holding doors for ladies, tipping hats, and not asking them to join all-male golfing clubs.
So, score one for the devil, as one aspect of charity and courtesy has been successfully removed from society, and the most basic of all human relations, the male-female relation, is now poisoned with continual suspicion, paranoia, mutual accusation, and distaste.
To aid in the increase of the poison, a slanderer with a camera and too much time on his hands makes a video showing an attractive woman walking down the street, and edits out all the hours and hours of film where no one spoke to her. The point here is to show that a wolf-whistle (which I would call vulgar, yes) and saying hello (which I would not call vulgar, no) are presented as evidence, not of male admiration for femininity, but of hatred.
Um. What? Beg pardon? It is unwanted attention, and therefore the woman’s father, older brothers, or husband should set the dogs on the lout, or clout him with a knout, or beset him with a stout knoblolly, but it is not a sign of hatred or disgust on the part of the masher, but of lust.
Should the woman not be the object of lust? That would seem to be a reasonable complaint, since it is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. So, again, logic would seem to suggest that this video is promoting the spread of Christian virtue. Let us send all the Construction Workers to Sunday School, and lard those in the lower class who adopt upper middle class manners of courtesy and self-command. Right?
Wrong. Score a second point for the devil, because now normal, if vulgar, human behavior is defined as an aggression akin to rape, and therefore a proper excuse and justification for paranoia toward men, and hatred.
And to add richness to madness, the Morlocks (as I like to call the vocal idle Left energetically deconstructing Western society and urging us all to jump into the cesspit) now turn and rend one of their own, with an argument more convoluted than the Bat-Logic Batman used on the old TV show to leap through comically disjointed hoops and solve the crime.
This video is racist because it shows Caucasians of Spanish descent and Blacks, both living in lower class neighborhoods, as acting like low class men, and whistling at the woman. That indicated that the woman and her photographer are consumed with race-hatred, and wish for the extermination of all the Jews. Or something.
Score three for the devil: Hatred between men and women, hatred between the races, and hatred between the classes all stirred up by the whines and complaints of the Morlocks, not to mention the very real danger of contempt, even loathing, being provoked in the hearts of all reasonable and rational men overhearing all this bemoaning and bellyaching from the fever swamps of Bedlam.
Let us cut to the chase:Leftism is accusation of personal defects. That is all it is. There is no philosophy there, no political program, no ideas. Perhaps there were such things among the Left in your father’s generation, or grandfathers’. No. Now there is nothing but to accuse, accuse, and accuse.
Leftist are not mentally ill, but their pseudo-religious worldview requires them to act like mentally ill men, and rewards them and encourages them the farther from the light of day they wander, drooling and shrieking and tearing their clothes. They are not pure evil, but their pseudo-religious worldview requires them to nag, bitch, whine, complain, and generally act like shrews and scolds and termagants — and that is just their menfolk. They are not trying to destroy the Western world, but their worldview rewards them for every destructive and self-destructive behavior. They are not lying-ass liars, merely people taught and trained to believe that truth does not exist, and that all words, both those they hear and those they say, are weapons in a Darwinian war between the Left and the sinister forces of whatever it is this week. The Patriarchy? Capitalists?
And, yes, some of them are deliberate liars, deliberately illogical, and some of them are innocent madmen actually inflicted with a range of mental disorders which makes their flights of idea and paranoid episodes indistinguishable from the behavior of the mainstream Left. And some are possessed by unclean spirits.
So while it may raise a smile of schadenfreude to see them fall on each other like starving cannibals, and gnawing each other’s heads like damned souls buried neck deep in the icy floor of hell, we should not indulge so alluring a temptation as to smile at it, because sadism and hatred, hatred and sadism, envy and hatred, misanthropy, misogyny, and nine other forms of hatred is the only product and only byproduct of the Leftist worldview.
This is what they live for, and this is what they spread. Even when they savage each other, none of them wakes up, none of them foreswears their insane psuedo-religion, none of them questions their dogmas and doctrines and meaningless verbal formulas. Merely more hatred wells up.
And the Dark Lord on his red-hot iron throne in Hell, crowned in dark fire and mantled in wings of membrane, were he able to smile a thin and malign smile, would do so. He cannot. That pleasure is denied him. And so, like his creatures on the Left, those who serve him knowingly and unknowingly, he seeks to reduce all living beings to his same level of empty and nihilistic misery.
Let us not smile such a smile ourselves.
BUT LET US REMEMBER TO GO VOTE. Any RINO would be better than this crew of imps.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
