Secular Liberal Author Doesn’t Think A Woman Choosing to Be Celibate is A Form of Feminism – Especially if Motivated in Part by Religious Convictions

Secular Liberal Author Doesn’t Think A Woman Choosing to Be Celibate is A Form of Feminism – Especially if Motivated in Part by Religious Convictions

This is another one of those posts I didn’t want to write.

Previously, I blogged about this:

(Link): I’m a 32-Year-Old Virgin, and I’m Living the Feminist Dream by K. Bryan

This editorial by Bryan, which was originally published on The  Washington Post, did not sit well with writer Aimée Lutkin over at left wing feminist site Jezebel. Lutkin spends much of her post summarizing Bryan’s editorial.

Here are excerpts from Lutkin’s piece,
(Link): Purity Culture May Get You What You Want, But That Doesn’t Make It Feminist

Being happy and fulfilled and a woman at the same time does not automatically make one a feminist.

….Considering Bryan’s scholarly pursuits and her immersion in purity culture, it seems likely that her choices are influenced more by her Catholicism than the fight for equality between the sexes.

But hey, if Bryan feels free to disregard the needs of men to pursue goals like learning to scull on the Potomac and working a job she says is the best she’s had in her life, perhaps she has achieved her idea of equality through sexual abstinence.

In a world that frequently feels like it specifically wants to make women miserable, feeling some measure of happiness as an independent woman is a triumph. But although equality is a kind of triumph, triumph is not necessarily equality. Bryan says:

…Personally, my feminist dream definitely includes lots of consensual, joyful, sexual congress outside of marriage, without shame or religious condemnation, but we’re all dreaming a different dream.

Regarding this comment by Lutkin:

But hey, if Bryan feels free to disregard the needs of men…

I’m sorry, but what? Since when is sex a “need,” and who of the female sex cares if men are going without sex? Women are not obligated to give men sex to meet their supposed “need for sex.”

I thought feminists fought against men objectifying women to be used as sex objects? I thought feminists at Jezebel like to say, “Men, we don’t care about your boners.” Now, here we have a feminist writer at Jezebel telling women that they really need to care about men’s boners.

I note that left wing feminists are arrogant enough to think they alone get to determine and define for other women what feminism is.

Jezebel Site and xoJane Site: Pot Meet Kettle – On Supporting All Women’s Voices

Jezebel Site and xoJane Site: Pot Meet Kettle – On Supporting All Women’s Voices

I saw this paragraph or so in (Link): an article on Jezebel’s site (by S. Edwards; title: “xoJane Publishes Terrible Article By a Woman Who’s Glad Her Friend Died, Then Deletes Her Byline“):

• It’s a well-known fact that outrageous confessionals—the kind that populate xoJane’s section, It Happened to Me — garner traffic. Outrage, disgust and anger are the stuff of going viral (a phrase that conjures up disease as much as anything else). Yet xoJane seems to consistently cross an unspoken line, confusing any woman’s opinion as one inherently worth publishing, no matter the opinion, or its costs.

Liberals, Border Issues, and Hypocrisy About Children

Liberals, Border Issues, and Hypocrisy

I don’t normally tackle purely political topics on this blog, but I wanted to say something about this:

From left wing, secular feminist site Jezebel:
(Link): Colbert Perfectly Calls Out Conservatives’ Hypocrisy on Child Refugees

by Madeleine Davies

Conservative pundits are very concerned about the well-being of child refugees who are fleeing to the U.S. borders from Central America in droves right now.

Why, they say, will no one think of the children during these times of crisis? At least the heroes of the right are considering these poor kids…mostly by clamoring for their deportation and complaining about the cost of their barely humane treatment while on U.S. soil.

Hmm, okay, but…

Most left wingers are rabidly pro-abortion. I will return to this in a moment.

So. Left wingers think the American tax payer should take in, pick up the tab for, and care for, all foreign children who cross the American border illegally, and they have the audacity to represent the natural, perfectly understandable tendency of most Americans, including conservatives, to disagree with this as being hypocrisy.

However they themselves, who believe the government (U.S. tax payer) should buy sandwiches for these kids, are fine with with unborn, American children being slaughtered in the womb via legalized abortion. (Some of them are fine with this even up to the third tri-mester.)

Liberals hate American, unborn babies who are still in the womb and don’t want to protect them, but think Uncle Sam should shower love, money, and protection on the children of other nations who arrive in our nation illegally?
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Related posts:

(Link): Hypocrisy of Left Wingers and Atheists and the #NotAll Hash Tag or Rhetoric

(Link): Liberals on Paranoia: Right Wing Concern is Simply Paranoia and Hence Supposed Evidence of Conservative Lunacy but Same Behavior Totally Acceptable and Non-Loony from Liberals

(Link): Celibate Shaming from an Anti- Slut Shaming Secular Feminist Site (Hypocrisy) Feminists Do Not Support All Choices

The Sex Economy – Why Buy The Cow When The Milk is Free – Or, When Sex is Free and Easy Why Should Men Bother to Commit to Marriage

The Sex Economy – Why Buy The Cow When The Milk is Free – Or, When Sex is Free and Easy Why Should Men Bother to Commit to Marriage
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✦ This is one of those posts on my blog that contains strong, adult language. As in the “F” word is used several times, so if you are a dainty, wilting Christian flower who faints at the sight or sound of cuss words, have your smelling salts handy. I do not always issue warnings like this when strong language is in the content.
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The Sex Economy – Why Buy The Cow When The Milk is Free – Or, When Sex is Free and Easy Why Should Men Bother to Commit to Marriage

It seems like once every year, or every other year or two, a right wing, conservative type of writer comes up with an editorial explaining to women about the sex economy, and why the expression “why buy the cow when the milk is free” still rings true.

Then your secular feminists get angry and write rebuttals to those editorials. I’m not quite sure why secular feminists so deeply object to the concept (though I do have a theory or two), but mainly, I find their objections vague and unmemorable, and I’ve read several of their anti-sex-economy editorials over the years. Despite having read some of their rebuttals, I’ve yet to make sense of why they object.

Here are the links:

✦ 1. The liberal / left wing/ secular feminist perspective ✦

(Link): Sex is Not An Economy And You Are Not Merchandise from the Jezebel site (author unknown; possibly Lindy West)

✦ 2. The conservative position ✦

2A  (Link): The economics of sex: Has the price gotten too cheap? by Naomi Schaefer Riley

2b (Link): Cheap Dates and How the ‘price’ of sex has dropped to record lows

✦ EXCERPTS

✦ 1. The liberal / left wing / secular feminist perspective ✦

(Link): Sex is Not An Economy And You Are Not Merchandise

It’s hard to know what sections of what to excerpt from this liberal essay from Jezebel, because its author (who is perhaps Lindy West?) largely engages in ad hominem and a lot of snark.

For example, after quoting a long portion of conservative Riley’s piece where Riley says:

The “price” [of sex] varies widely. But if women are the gatekeepers, why don’t very many women “charge more” so to speak?

Because pricing is not entirely up to women. The “market value” of sex is part of a social system of exchange, an “economy” if you will, wherein men and women learn from each other—and from others—what they ought to expect from each other sexually.

So sex is not entirely a private matter between two consenting adults. Think of it as basic supply and demand.

When supplies are high, prices drop, since people won’t pay more for something that’s easy to find. But if it’s hard to find, people will pay a premium.

—[end excerpt]—

The Jezebel writer’s response to that view consists only of these words:

Oh, shut the fuck up.

—[end excerpt]—

Seriously. That is all the writer had to say in response.

Go click the link I gave to the page and read it if yourself you don’t believe me.

Much of the rest of the page consists of that sort of rebuttal. Which might be fine on a casual blog such as mine, but Jezebel is a main stream publication which I presume has a wide readership, and if the Jezebel writer is trying to change minds, she is not going to have much success by saying, “fuck you” and not much else.

Here I am, still pretty conservative in regards to sexual ethics, or pretty sympathetic to conservative views about sex, and I’m really, honestly trying to understand her liberal, feminist objections to why she is opposed to the conservative “sex economics” genre of editorial, but how can I arrive at an understanding of her view, when it consists of nothing but a “fuck you” to her ideological opponent?

Here are more excerpts from the Jezebel page (and the only name I see associated with this page is Lindy West, so I assume she is the author, but I may be mistaken about that):

If anything, sex is less commodified now than when my great-grandparents were courting. Before divorce; before reliable, effective birth control; before women’s advancements into the higher levels of the workforce; marriage was ALL about economics.

Now that women are able to leave abusive and unhappy relationships, support themselves financially, and choose when/if to have children, we don’t need marriage anymore.

It’s no longer an economic imperative, which means that people are free to be choosy about who they marry. So you’re damn right marriage rates are dropping and people are marrying later. It’s because we’re getting better at it.

[conservative Riley wrote:]
We now have a split mating market: One corner where people are largely interested in sex, and one corner where people are largely pursuing marriage. And there are more men looking for sex than women, and more women looking to marry than men.

[Jezebel author responds:]
Okay. Wait. So women are banging dudes willy-nilly on the singles scene and it’s lowering their “market value,” but women are also “vastly” outnumbering men “in the marriage market”? Which is it? I’m confused.

—[end excerpt]—

My response to the Jezebel author’s supposed confusion on this point: there are some women, who are celibate and waiting until marriage to have sex, such as me.

And yes, women such as myself, find it harder to get married, as we are virgins and are (or were) waiting until marriage to have sex. We find it more difficult meeting men who respect our celibacy- until- marriage lifestyle.

Many men these days (even a lot of Christian ones) now expect or demand sex prior to marriage, because a lot of other women, women such as yourself, have been too happy to have sex before marriage, which gives the men little incentive to respect my wishes (i.e., no sex before marriage, and I’d like to marry).

A lot of people – the ones who scoff at virginity and sexual purity – have this weird-ass view that you should “test drive” your partner prior to marriage to make sure the two of you are “sexually compatible,” see this post,

(Link): Weak Argument Against Celibacy / Virginity / Sexual Purity by the Anti Sexual Purity Gestapo – Sexual Compatibility or Incompatibility – (ie, Taking Human Beings For Test Spins – Humans As Sexual Commodities) (Part 2)

And yes, views such as that make it very difficult for people who believe in staying a virgin until marriage to get many marital prospects.

Feminists at Jezebel: Okay for Adult Women to Ridicule A Baby’s Appearance but Not Okay for Adult Men to Do Same to Grown Women

Feminists at Jezebel: Okay for Adult Women to Ridicule A Baby’s Appearance but Not Okay for Adult Men to Do Same to Grown Women

I am putting this in its own stand alone post; some of the following content appeared in my previous post:
(Link): Mean Moms Caught Making Fun of ‘Ugly’ Babies in Secret Facebook Group

In some areas, I am in agreement with secular feminists, but in others, no. I continued to be puzzled by their glaring double standards and hypocrisy on some issues.

I’ve written about the penchant for secular feminist hypocrisy before on this blog, such as:

(Link): Secular Feminists: It Is Okay To Be A Slut But Not Dress Slutty For Halloween or for Companies to Sell Slutty Costumes -huh? Also: Wrong for men to objectify women but okay for women to objectify men -say what?

This next link is from feminist site Jezebel, which has, in the past, decried what I refer to as “Lookism” (i.e., society telling women their value resides in their physical appearance, so that some women are judged solely on that criteria and/or develop low self esteem or eating disorders as a result).

The feminists at Jezebel are against society (advertisers etc) or men criticizing or mocking a grown woman’s appearance (For example: (Link): Will Women Ever Have the Freedom to Be Ugly? – from Jezebel), but in the following, the author and many of the post’s commentators are fine with grown women mocking the looks of babies and toddlers.

(Link): Mean Moms Caught Making Fun of ‘Ugly’ Babies in Secret Facebook Group

Excerpts:

by TRACIE EGAN MORRISSEY

However, the stuff on that Facebook group (which has since been deleted) didn’t seem all that bad, as far as Internet nastiness goes. Mostly, the moms were making fun of the kids’ clothes and the parents’ choice of stupid picture as their profile photo, commentary that doesn’t really have much to do with the kids at all.

However, the stuff on that Facebook group (which has since been deleted) didn’t seem all that bad, as far as Internet nastiness goes. Mostly, the moms were making fun of the kids’ clothes and the parents’ choice of stupid picture as their profile photo, commentary that doesn’t really have much to do with the kids at all.

And the meanest stuff was still kind of hilarious:

[comments by the “mean mothers” on secret Facebook group:]

Does anyone else look at some photos and think that no matter how much money you pay for an outfit, it’s not going to help your child look cute? I’m probably going to hell for saying that….

Most of us will be there with you then

An ugly baby thread. I have died and gone to heaven…why can’t you guys live near me so we can do this over cocktails?

Before I address this…It…I want to point out that it makes my heart happy that you have a Mean Girls tab in your computer. Good stuff. Now, # 1 is this a he or a she…You absolutely can not fix ugly. This is a God given example of such.

One post compared a little girl’s face to the mean boy in Toy Story, which majorly pissed off her mom, who made it a point to post that her daughter is developmentally delayed because she was born prematurely. What that has to do with anything is anybody’s guess. Maybe she was trying to garner some sympathy? Was that her way of explaining away her own daughter’s face? It’s almost like she’s admitting that her kid isn’t cute, but that there’s a reason for it, which is actually more fucked up than what the mean moms were doing.

Notice that the Jezebel blogger was rationalizing the actions of the Facebook group mothers.

Some of the Jezebel commentators:

lethekkUTracie Egan Morrissey131L

Are you kidding me? Why on earth did this make the news, even Fox news? Ugly babies exist. People make fun of them behind their parents’ backs. People are not 100% nice all the time. This is a normal thing. What’s next, a report about how some guy made fun of the way another guy threw a ball?

One Jezebel poster was excusing the poor actions of the mothers by pointing out bad behavior by others as justification – because people being sexist or rude towards women apparently gives all women the right to be assholes to children and babies, some of whom are disabled:

[by] Sarah “The Pope”
SiegelUlethekk51L

Because it’s a chance to shit on women. Are they covering the endless disgusting shit that Redditors and 4Chan users say all day fucking long? No, but some casually catty comments about ugly babies coming from women is news.

Ugh.

Additional comments by various Jezebel commentators below – bearing in mind this site is very much against “rape apologia” or “rapist apologists/ism.”

That is, many of the participants at Jezebel are vehemently against anyone trying to excuse of justify rape in any way shape or form, and rightly so, but I can’t help but note that a group of women who bristle at rape apologism and ‘lookism,’ when done against grown women by men or marketers, are none- the- less giggling in glee, or defending, grown women who are bashing toddlers and infants based on their looks on a Facebook page.

Empress FoofypantsUTracie Egan Morrissey141L

Attention new mothers: Your baby looks like a flying monkey that bit into a particularly sour lemon. Get over it.
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moodyonceamonth

Can I please come sit by you? You’re cracking me up!
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anteriorcruciateUTracie
Egan Morrissey71L

there have been times when you’ve seen an infant and thought, “Ew.”

Only a few? Ha.

They are all uniformly ugly, hideous, mewling creatures and they all look the fucking same. SORRYNOTSORRY, PARENTS.
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barelylethal: battle axe shitassUTracie Egan Morrissey1L U
I can’t get mad over a secret facebook group. It’s not like they were a band of roving shitstirrers all over everyone else’s feed, calling their kids ugly.
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crocutaUlethekk1L
Hell, even their parents make fun of them sometimes. My friend was nicknamed Lardo by his parents as a baby.

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Related posts this blog:

(Link): How Feminists Are Making Women Easier Rape Targets

(Link): So According to Some Feminists Believing in Female Equality Means Supporting All Actions and Behaviors by All Females Ever – Even their Pubic Hair Photos and Bloody Vagina T Shirt Designs? What?

(Link): On Miley Cyrus Being Sexual at 2013 VMAs – Hypocrisy of Secular Feminists

(Link): Why Comic Characters and Super Heroes Can’t Marry – Marriage Makes People Selfish