Like guerrilla warfare, all political protests aim at substituting concentration and passion for actual numbers. The idea is to pretend that your opinions are entirely mainstream, even though they’re so far removed from the mainstream that you have to organize a protest to express them.
Of course, if your “protest” involves nothing more than saying Rape is Like, Seriously Bad You Guys while dressed up like a prostitute (because, post-structuralist ironic frisson!), then you must go he extra mile to pretend that anyone not totally on board with your project is just Terrified of Strong Women, Or Something.
“Strong Woman.” It bothers me how much I hate hearing these words. It shouldn’t. Women are perfectly capable of being Strong, and indeed, must be strong if they hope to have any kind of success in life. But strength is the child of Self-Discipline. You become strong by concentration, by endurance, by will. You do not become strong by making an idiot of yourself in public with fellow idiots.
Strong is not the same as Loud. Strong is not the same as Rude. Strong is not the same as Agreeing With Every Other Persun in the Room With Ovaries (because, Solidarity!). And Strong is not the same as complaining about Esoteric Linguistic Oppression when…
You’re trying to control the narrative, to impose your discourse and deny me the right to disagree.
It’s a straight-up totalitarian power trip, and I refuse to play along.
Despite the illusion, totalitarians are not really that strong. The ones that don’t get bombed to rubble swirl down the drain of their own unworkable economics. Unless they sell their ideologies out completely in order to be Wal-Mart’s major supplier, and even then hiccups abound.
When you get the attention of a public that you have defined as hostile, then you get the attention of a hostile audience. If you can’t handle the predictable reaction, then maybe you should reconsider this whole “empowerment” concept.
very well put , if one has to define one’s self to others as strong than like every virtue thus stated it is false. Ah yes an ugly word virtue, from the Latin isn’t it meaning truth
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You can’t possibly be this stupid. And yet you are…
When you stop confusing intellect with ideology, I’ll take you much more seriously. Promise.
You aren’t referring to your imagined intellect, are you? Because then hilarity would ensue. Tell you what, come back when you can actually make a supportable argument. As it stands, what you blathered here sounds very much like “Opposing rape ain’t mainstream, because they had to organize a protest to say it. Batshit crazy McCain said so!”
That there is some weapons grade stupid.
Well, when you start your argument out with an unsupported assertion about what “all” of anything is, and then link to Robert Stacey McCain, that’s pretty good evidence that you are weapons grade stupid.
You simply reinforce that assessment when you opine, weakly, that opposition to rape is so far out of the mainstream because they had to organize a protest to express it. Tell you what, goober, come back when you have an actual supportable argument.
And Word Press can blow me.
So you need a “supportable argument” to distinguish between the statement “Slutwalks are a self-congratulatory waste of breath” and the statement “I am totally in favor of rape”?
Yeah, I call bullshit.
You don’t actually think anyone’s in favor of rape, because no one actually is. The vast demographic that, but for the brave efforts of co-eds wearing underwear in public, would quickly transform rape from execrable crime to spectator sport exist nowhere outside the fantasies of Gender Studies Departments. You know this, so your efforts to claim otherwise are nothing more than a fanciful expression of a Loaded Question/False Dichotomy Fallacy.
But hey, maybe you were dropped on your head as a baby. Let’s work with that. Rape is the result of either poor socialization and callous bad judgment, or a means of establishing pecking orders in fringe social circles (prisons, terror cells, and the like). To pretend it to be primarily a linguistic problem, centered on the shallow insult “slut” serves nothing but the grant of good feelings to those unfortunates who spent their college years reading Foucault and Lacan. It will not stop rape any more than dressing up like a crackhead and waving a placard that says “I AM THE GUY SAMUEL L. JACKSON PLAYED IN ‘JUNGLE FEVER'” will slow the narcotics trade.
What’s not mainstream about Slutwalks is that post-structuralist snake-oil, not the notion that rape is bad, which is shared by every civilized human. Stop congratulating yourself for having a rudimentary moral sense.
Or find someone who’s actually impressed by it. Your call, chief.
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