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The betrayal of feminism?
This was written by one of my friends, and posted on facebook. It entertained me, although I'm still out on whether I agree with it entirely or not. I thought it might stimulate debate though, so I offer it to you as is, in the hope that it will either provoke you into an incomprehensible rage, or nudge you into fits of laughter.
A warning: It contains some naughty language and some potentially upsetting ideas, so don't read it if you're easily offended.
---
What was meant to be a rather dry note about Hegelian dialectics has, since a period spent gazing despondently into the middle distance in Trinity bar, become an equally depressing rant about male/female relations at Trinity.
I suppose it's best to start with a recap : Trinity is one of the most academically successful of all Cambridge colleges. Cambridge is said to be the 2nd best University in the world, after Harvard. How then is it that we attract a significant number of women whose ambition doesn't seem to extend beyond being drugged and raped by members of the Rugby Club?
It's here that I imagine cries of 'misogyny!' will begin, and I can understand why. But forget the subservient women and consider the men : Trinity is full of grotesque, butch, pea-brained jocks whose sole aim in life is to abuse their female counterparts while at university, then to rob people of their pensions as investment bankers. The pertinent question here is not why these goons managed to get in - although the question should weigh heavily on our Fellowship - but why eminently intelligent and otherwise independent women should allow themselves to succumb to their retrograde ideology.
What I imagine we're dealing with here is something rather similar to the phenomenon described by the wonderful Ariel Levy in her book 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' : namely, women who are so consumed by ambition and so simultaneously consumed by self-doubt that the approach of the nearest drinking-society member, far from being a harbinger of potential sexual assault (as it no doubt should be), is in fact a comforting assessment of their own worth.
Quite why privileged women who have been told since birth that they're wonderful and worth every penny lavished on them should feel this insecure is perplexing and yet strangely expected, strangely demanding of sympathy. Whether these home-counties princesses even deserve 'victim' status, given their smiling complicity in their own subordination, is also an open question. If I'm pushed, however, my sympathy lies with them, despite their grotesque and inexcusable betrayal of the hard hard slog made by their sisters in previous decades, fighting for equality and an end to sexual violence. Ask most of these ultimately victimised women what they make of feminism, and they will laugh in your face before introducing their throats to another bout of finger plunging and splattered vomit.
Maybe this is the point at which feminism needs to get tough and insulting, as I have consciously been in this note : it's not good enough to impute victim status to people who laugh at the very notion of a gender imbalance, to women so privileged, so close to choking on their silver spoons that they have lost all sense of solidarity. Perhaps they are less victims, and more collaborators, even enemies. Perhaps the upper class anorexics who hang on the arms of rugby captains, consciously perpetuating patriarchal relations, should be dropped entirely from our political sympathy; perhaps we should spit at their feet. Maybe they're just female misogynists, no better than the thick-necked male ***** who force themselves on freshers, slobbering down the tops of vulnerable new arrivals.
I suppose this is another point where more sensitive readers will bridle; but it's worth asking why. Yes I'm a man and traditionally such trenchant statements were left to the radical female feminist fringe, but what happens when gender politics become so distorted, so horrendously skewed, that men have the potential to be more feminist than women? Where, in other words, are strong women in Trinity, willing to stand up to this situation of sexual servitude?
Equally however, men as privileged and (supposedly) intelligent as we are at Trinity have to turn the light of introspection on ourselves: why do we allow these disgusting, crew-cutted pseudo-rapists to dominate the bar every evening? How has it come to be that the only guys who are heard at Trinity, the ones whose braying voices are heard most clearly, are those wearing a drinking-society tie and those with carnal knowledge of the most criminally underweight girl in their year, who have spoken loudly of 'breaking in half' the thinnest girl they can find?
And there are those who, and I dearly hope they know who they are, protest their condemnation to their token 'interesting' friend while spending the rest of their time with the collaborators. People who are thoroughly intelligent, possessed of an almost anthropological knowledge of how people relate, and who nonetheless pursue their narrow social games with people who want nothing more than to strip them of their ethnic print wear and liberal conscience and deny them any kind of female identity. People who will smile broadly at friends deemed 'different', but spend most of their evenings sliming up to the date-rapists at the bar. People who, in other words, have their token 'moral' friend, their token time in Thailand, but who otherwise spend their time greasing up the worst excesses of Trinity's misogynistic culture.
So I guess the motto is : girls, shame your collaborator friends. And guys, shame the potential date-rapists in your midst. And or, kill yourselves. Now.
A warning: It contains some naughty language and some potentially upsetting ideas, so don't read it if you're easily offended.
---
What was meant to be a rather dry note about Hegelian dialectics has, since a period spent gazing despondently into the middle distance in Trinity bar, become an equally depressing rant about male/female relations at Trinity.
I suppose it's best to start with a recap : Trinity is one of the most academically successful of all Cambridge colleges. Cambridge is said to be the 2nd best University in the world, after Harvard. How then is it that we attract a significant number of women whose ambition doesn't seem to extend beyond being drugged and raped by members of the Rugby Club?
It's here that I imagine cries of 'misogyny!' will begin, and I can understand why. But forget the subservient women and consider the men : Trinity is full of grotesque, butch, pea-brained jocks whose sole aim in life is to abuse their female counterparts while at university, then to rob people of their pensions as investment bankers. The pertinent question here is not why these goons managed to get in - although the question should weigh heavily on our Fellowship - but why eminently intelligent and otherwise independent women should allow themselves to succumb to their retrograde ideology.
What I imagine we're dealing with here is something rather similar to the phenomenon described by the wonderful Ariel Levy in her book 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' : namely, women who are so consumed by ambition and so simultaneously consumed by self-doubt that the approach of the nearest drinking-society member, far from being a harbinger of potential sexual assault (as it no doubt should be), is in fact a comforting assessment of their own worth.
Quite why privileged women who have been told since birth that they're wonderful and worth every penny lavished on them should feel this insecure is perplexing and yet strangely expected, strangely demanding of sympathy. Whether these home-counties princesses even deserve 'victim' status, given their smiling complicity in their own subordination, is also an open question. If I'm pushed, however, my sympathy lies with them, despite their grotesque and inexcusable betrayal of the hard hard slog made by their sisters in previous decades, fighting for equality and an end to sexual violence. Ask most of these ultimately victimised women what they make of feminism, and they will laugh in your face before introducing their throats to another bout of finger plunging and splattered vomit.
Maybe this is the point at which feminism needs to get tough and insulting, as I have consciously been in this note : it's not good enough to impute victim status to people who laugh at the very notion of a gender imbalance, to women so privileged, so close to choking on their silver spoons that they have lost all sense of solidarity. Perhaps they are less victims, and more collaborators, even enemies. Perhaps the upper class anorexics who hang on the arms of rugby captains, consciously perpetuating patriarchal relations, should be dropped entirely from our political sympathy; perhaps we should spit at their feet. Maybe they're just female misogynists, no better than the thick-necked male ***** who force themselves on freshers, slobbering down the tops of vulnerable new arrivals.
I suppose this is another point where more sensitive readers will bridle; but it's worth asking why. Yes I'm a man and traditionally such trenchant statements were left to the radical female feminist fringe, but what happens when gender politics become so distorted, so horrendously skewed, that men have the potential to be more feminist than women? Where, in other words, are strong women in Trinity, willing to stand up to this situation of sexual servitude?
Equally however, men as privileged and (supposedly) intelligent as we are at Trinity have to turn the light of introspection on ourselves: why do we allow these disgusting, crew-cutted pseudo-rapists to dominate the bar every evening? How has it come to be that the only guys who are heard at Trinity, the ones whose braying voices are heard most clearly, are those wearing a drinking-society tie and those with carnal knowledge of the most criminally underweight girl in their year, who have spoken loudly of 'breaking in half' the thinnest girl they can find?
And there are those who, and I dearly hope they know who they are, protest their condemnation to their token 'interesting' friend while spending the rest of their time with the collaborators. People who are thoroughly intelligent, possessed of an almost anthropological knowledge of how people relate, and who nonetheless pursue their narrow social games with people who want nothing more than to strip them of their ethnic print wear and liberal conscience and deny them any kind of female identity. People who will smile broadly at friends deemed 'different', but spend most of their evenings sliming up to the date-rapists at the bar. People who, in other words, have their token 'moral' friend, their token time in Thailand, but who otherwise spend their time greasing up the worst excesses of Trinity's misogynistic culture.
So I guess the motto is : girls, shame your collaborator friends. And guys, shame the potential date-rapists in your midst. And or, kill yourselves. Now.
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Erm...I'm glad I'm not at Trinity?
My main disagreement is the implication that modern women have some duty to behave in a certain way because of the fight for female emancipation and suffrage in the early part of the 20th Century. I always see that such noble deeds were done to give women a choice about how they live their lives, rather than to oblige them to exert dominance over men and not have loose sex and so on.
I also think you (well, you friend
) overstates the 'sexual servitude' of women. Surely the men who play rugby and get drunk with the sole aim of getting laid are just as pathetic examples of slaves to hormones as the women who bait them? I don't think these people are 'rapists', I just think they are sad and desperate, just like the women you refer to.
Other than that, I generally agree.
I also think you (well, you friend
) overstates the 'sexual servitude' of women. Surely the men who play rugby and get drunk with the sole aim of getting laid are just as pathetic examples of slaves to hormones as the women who bait them? I don't think these people are 'rapists', I just think they are sad and desperate, just like the women you refer to.Other than that, I generally agree.
Obviously the entire thing is exaggerated greatly - no court in the country would convict any of the guys in question of rape, for example. To attack his viewpoint you have to attack the sentiments behind the exaggerations, not the exaggerations themselves, which are simply there for literary effect (and probably to attract attention and cause controversy, I'd wager 
).
).I don't much like drinking society culture. But I found it fairly easy to ignore it. Don't like the people? Go somewhere else - find another college bar, hang out at Union or the ADC or whereever appeals. Cambridge is a big place; the vast majority of students are not like those described in the diatribe above. The existence of drinking society goons never once stopped me doing anything I wanted to do. They harm no one (except possibly themselves). The girls who are part of that world choose to do so. Live and let live.
Cexy
How then is it that we attract a significant number of women whose ambition doesn't seem to extend beyond being drugged and raped by members of the Rugby Club?
Hahah I was lying drunk in the carpark outside the rugby club on Friday night.
I haven't actually read the post but I get the idea. I think the problem is that she needs to get laid, soon.
I disagree with the implications of drugging and date rape, but I have to say I agree with a lot of the sentiments. While I am in no way averse to various alcohol-fuelled socials, I have on various occasions been made distinctly uneasy by some of the goings on I've seen among other parties sharing the Curry King/formal hall at the same time as us. I do wonder why girls who are apparently some of the most intelligent in the country still need to dress like prostitutes (case in point: certain rugby team girls who I saw headed out wearing ONLY their rugby shirts and high heels) and simper at some frankly awful men before slobbering all over them and retiring to somewhere vaguely more private (on most occasions) to have their self-worth confirmed by the fact that the ape wants sex with them. Similarly, why are these men, also supposedly some of the most intelligent in the land, still able to act like subhumans?
I've been desperate for some male attention in my time but fortunately my relative lack of good looks and the fact nobody could describe me as resembling a stick have meant that I've never been moved to act quite like that because it would be both funny and terrifying in roughly equal measure.
I've been desperate for some male attention in my time but fortunately my relative lack of good looks and the fact nobody could describe me as resembling a stick have meant that I've never been moved to act quite like that because it would be both funny and terrifying in roughly equal measure.
I'm never able to take any piece seriously if it describes a sexual advance on a consenting woman as 'rape'.
One wonders, if the women who accomodate - and actively pursue - "patriarchal relations" are to be excluded from feminist sympathies, who then are feminists fighting for? Presumably the whole point of feminism is to persuade people that women deserve equality, and to ensure that this equality is upheld, but if feminists are to count those very women they feel are being oppressed as enemies, they surely betray this aim.
Best mention that I don't wish to tar all feminists with the same brush, but the writer of the article has clearly not thought through his/her (is it specified anywhere?) position.
One wonders, if the women who accomodate - and actively pursue - "patriarchal relations" are to be excluded from feminist sympathies, who then are feminists fighting for? Presumably the whole point of feminism is to persuade people that women deserve equality, and to ensure that this equality is upheld, but if feminists are to count those very women they feel are being oppressed as enemies, they surely betray this aim.
Best mention that I don't wish to tar all feminists with the same brush, but the writer of the article has clearly not thought through his/her (is it specified anywhere?) position.
Chumbaniya
I'm never able to take any piece seriously if it describes a sexual advance on a consenting woman as 'rape'.
My main points of contention with the article would be
(i) the implication that today's women have any duty to act in such a way as to uphold the feminist ideals that their forebears fought for. They didn't ask for equality in society's eyes - in fact some of them may resent it.
(ii) the implication that in all cases, the women are being taken advantage of by the men. It may seem that way at a casual glance, but isn't it possible that that's just the way we're forced to look at it, perhaps because we expect to see the women taken advantage of?
(iii) the implicit assumption that a scholarly life of contemplation is better than a life of carnal pleasure. This has been an assumption of philosophers for millenia (going all the way back to Socrates) but it's not necessarily true. The extent to which a thinker will presume it's true because it's their choice of lifestyle is something that deserves careful contemplation.
I guess the point I'm trying to make with (iii) is that this discussion could very well be impossible to have. People who aren't intimately involved in the sports club/drinking society/formal swap/Cindies lifestyle are naturally going to assume that those who are are misguided and insecure, because if they admit that those guys are actually having a great time, then it's admitting something lacking in yourself. Equally, those who are involved in it are never going to admit that it's all a sham to cover up their insecurities, for the same reason.
Helenia
I disagree with the implications of drugging and date rape, but I have to say I agree with a lot of the sentiments. While I am in no way averse to various alcohol-fuelled socials, I have on various occasions been made distinctly uneasy by some of the goings on I've seen among other parties sharing the Curry King/formal hall at the same time as us. I do wonder why girls who are apparently some of the most intelligent in the country still need to dress like prostitutes (case in point: certain rugby team girls who I saw headed out wearing ONLY their rugby shirts and high heels) and simper at some frankly awful men before slobbering all over them and retiring to somewhere vaguely more private (on most occasions) to have their self-worth confirmed by the fact that the ape wants sex with them. Similarly, why are these men, also supposedly some of the most intelligent in the land, still able to act like subhumans?
I've been desperate for some male attention in my time but fortunately my relative lack of good looks and the fact nobody could describe me as resembling a stick have meant that I've never been moved to act quite like that because it would be both funny and terrifying in roughly equal measure.
I've been desperate for some male attention in my time but fortunately my relative lack of good looks and the fact nobody could describe me as resembling a stick have meant that I've never been moved to act quite like that because it would be both funny and terrifying in roughly equal measure.
Wow, god forbid the woman actually wants sex with the guy? Obviously it's to reinforce her self worth and nothing to do with the guy's insecurities or the fact that, shock horror, women like to **** too.
A lot of the people on this thread are proclaiming feminism but are basically just closet misogynists.
Helenia
I disagree with the implications of drugging and date rape, but I have to say I agree with a lot of the sentiments. While I am in no way averse to various alcohol-fuelled socials, I have on various occasions been made distinctly uneasy by some of the goings on I've seen among other parties sharing the Curry King/formal hall at the same time as us. I do wonder why girls who are apparently some of the most intelligent in the country still need to dress like prostitutes (case in point: certain rugby team girls who I saw headed out wearing ONLY their rugby shirts and high heels) and simper at some frankly awful men before slobbering all over them and retiring to somewhere vaguely more private (on most occasions) to have their self-worth confirmed by the fact that the ape wants sex with them. Similarly, why are these men, also supposedly some of the most intelligent in the land, still able to act like subhumans?
I've been desperate for some male attention in my time but fortunately my relative lack of good looks and the fact nobody could describe me as resembling a stick have meant that I've never been moved to act quite like that because it would be both funny and terrifying in roughly equal measure.
I've been desperate for some male attention in my time but fortunately my relative lack of good looks and the fact nobody could describe me as resembling a stick have meant that I've never been moved to act quite like that because it would be both funny and terrifying in roughly equal measure.
Cexy
So I guess the motto is : girls, shame your collaborator friends. And guys, shame the potential date-rapists in your midst. And or, kill yourselves. Now.
So I guess the motto is : girls, shame your collaborator friends. And guys, shame the potential date-rapists in your midst. And or, kill yourselves. Now.
Firstly I just find it sad that someone has that much interest in the lives of others.
The entire article smacks of a guy who came to Trinity believing it to be full of like-minded academic 'dorks' who had no social lives during their teen years and managed to get into a uni where they'd be safe from socialising and feeling 'nerdy', only to find that people could indeed be pretty, thin, athletic, charming, socially able and be good at their subject at the same time.
I know how it feels to be jealous of these people so I identify to an extent with the backlash your friend has produced but I think at best it's just very thinly veiled sour grapes.
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