Feminist Punks and Hoodlums (Part I)

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..by Jonas E. Alexis

Augustine was indeed ahead of his time. He was a man who actually saw moral and metaphysical things just the way they really are.  He clearly understood that once a person rejects the moral, social and political order, soon or later he will end up imitating it or borrowing from its principle[1] in a deceptively promiscuous way.[2]

We can easily see Augustine’s point by looking at some of the vital contradictions that exist in the feminist movement. It must be stated at the outset that feminism was a largely Jewish movement. Some of the leading lights in the movement include:

Betty Friedan (defender of pornography), Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologue), Gloria Steinem (abortion), Rosa Luxemburg, Andrea Bronfman, Bella Abzug, Blue Greenberg, Brenda Howard, Arlene Raven, Buz Hahn, Betty Comden, Cathy Young, Clara Fox, Elfriede Jelinek, Ellen Willis, Emily Mehlman, Gertrude Stein, Gloria Alfred, Grace Paley, Hanne, Blank, Helen Cohen, Jennifer Miller, Jean Rothernberg, Joyce Warshow, Judy Blume, Judy Cohen, Kathy Pollitt, Kitty Carlisle, Lisa Goldberg, Madeleine Stern, Melton Florence, Mollie Orshansky, Muriel Rukeyser, Naomi Klein, Nina Hartley (pornographer), Pamela Waechter, Rachel Adler, Ruth Ginsburg, Ruth Morgenthau, Ruth Segel, Ruth Westheimer, Sally Fox, Sally Lilienthal, Savina Teubal, Shirley Broner, Spencer Laszlo, Susan Sontag, Sylvia Siegel, Tillie Olsen, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Wendy Wasserstein, etc.

These people have opened the feminist floodgate. And we all know that once the floodgate is opened, you simply cannot tell the water where to go. This is one reason why feminist thoughts have infiltrated much of the entertainment industry. More recently,

“Powerhouse feminists like Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Clinton, and Sheryl Sandberg [Facebook COO] have joined together with the Levo League to convince women to know their worth and to battle unequal pay in advance of National Equal Pay Day on April 14.”

Indeed, feminist ideology has crept into many other areas, but the common denominator is that at its eventual roots, feminism denies or attacks (in one way or another) the metaphysical foundation upon which the moral and social order is based.

The sad thing is that young people have been seduced by agents like Gloria Steinem and others into believing that feminism is about justice and fairness when in fact it is a covert and subversive enterprise.

I once had a long conversation with a young and very bright lady during which the topic of feminism came up.

“So,” she said after I declared that feminism is a subversive movement, “are you against equality and fairness for women?” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I responded.

“Tell me one organization or person you know who’s essentially against equality and fairness for women? Be specific.

“And if you happen to come up with one example, you will have to tell me how it is different from other difficult issues in life—such as the wide range of research done by feminist writers and scholars themselves showing that there has indeed been discrimination against men.[3] For example, why one writer has to name a chapter of her book ‘The New Girl Order’?”[4]

She couldn’t name even one. You see, feminism hinges on a set of flowery terms its advocates rarely bother to explain or logically define: “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” “care for women,” “care for the disadvantaged,” etc. Judgments and assertions upon assertions are quickly made like magic, but no one has ever bothered to present factual evidence for those hasty assertions. Take a look at this for example, and see how the masses are being indoctrinated into a system which they can hardly defend rationally:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vC1ksS7TSc

As we shall see in this article and the next, feminism is an ideological movement which always ends up destroying some of its brightest children. 

Let us start with Camille Paglia, a public intellectual who “burst on to the American stage in 1990 with the publication of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.”[5]  Paglia argued during an interview that pornography means freedom, and when one looks at pornography,

“You’re looking at nature roiling up. Pornography is about vitality. It’s not about degradation. [It’s] the vitality of life principle.”

Paglia advances that thesis in Sexual Personae, but the same thesis, as we shall see, ends up killing her intellectually and morally. She profusely argues throughout that pornography “should be tolerated”[6] in society and that

“Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism has admitted. Geoffrey Hartman rightly says, ‘Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.”[7]

Indeed. Paglia had to quote Hartman, a member of the Dreadful Few, to support her thesis. As a matter of fact, Paglia was coached at Yale by none other than Harold Bloom, a covert Zionist who praises Jewish writers like Anthony Julius of England for standing

“against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.”[8]

Bloom said of Paglia’s Sexual Personae: “There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design, or insight. It compels us to rethink the question of the literary representation of human sexuality.”

Bloom’s first language was Yiddish, and he is quite familiar with the Kabbalah. “In his 40s, Bloom discovered Kabbalah and become close friends with Gershom Scholem; later on, he professed his belief in the ancient sect of Gnosticism, which has attracted many Jews.”[9]

We are told that “Bloom’s ideas, as he elaborated them across a half-dozen more books, came to center on notions derived from Gnosticism, the ancient body of mystical beliefs.” According to this view, “Our true soul is hidden to us, occulted: salvation consists of achieving gnosis, experiential knowledge of that daemon.”^[10]

Perhaps Bloom was practicing his Gnosticism when he said that even Shakespeare and Dickens espoused anti-Semitism.[11] In response to similar accusations, James Wood of Harvard wrote:

“Where does Harold Bloom offer any evidence, in his celebration of the ‘fierce relevance’ of Anthony Julius’s history of English anti-Semitism (May 9), for his blanket assertion that the English literary and academic establishment ‘essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-­Semitism,’ a ‘sanctimonious intelligentsia who really will not rest until Israel is destroyed’?

“And how might this be very different from, say, calling Israelis ‘essentially’ anti-­Palestinian? But then, Bloom likes to speculate that perhaps the English have been so anti-Semitic because of their upper-class love of sadomasochism (you know, those dodgy boarding schools of theirs).

“In place of this precise slander and imprecise imputation, Bloom might have noted that some of the most robust left-wing discussion of Israeli policy has come from members of the British literary and academic establishment who are also Jewish (Tony Judt, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh, Jacqueline Rose).

“If there is more political discussion of this order in Britain than in America it is not necessarily because the English are so anti-Semitic — or at least, I certainly hope not—but more likely (as Judt has pointed out) because most Americans live in almost complete ignorance of the ‘fierce relevance’ of certain political realities and facts.”[12]

It was no surprise, then, that Bloom was terrified when he went to Yale and saw that people, in his words, “were all down on their knees blessing the vicar of neo-Christianity, T.S. Eliot.” Whenever he saw his professors, Bloom thought that they were “a sort of Eliotic nightmare,” and “I certainly didn’t want them.”[13]

Bloom admitted that he was unassimilable at Yale and viewed many of his students as “the enemy, if only because they assumed they were the United States and Yale, while I was a visitor.”[14]

What is so risible is that Bloom lambasts people like Shakespeare as anti-Semites, but when Jewish writers like Philip Roth say things that Shakespeare would never have uttered, Bloom praises them! Bloom calls Philip Roth “our greatest living novelist.”

To Bloom, Roth has a “rebellious creativity”[15] which ought to be a model for other writers. What does Roth have to say? Well, you know the subversive drill:

“Put the id back in the yid! Liberate this nice Jewish boy’s libido, will you please? Raise the prices if you have too! I’ll pay anything!”[16]

Can you imagine Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot even approaching that kind of language?

In any event, Bloom changed the political dynamic when he became a professor at Yale, and one of his first victims was none other than Camille Paglia. Paglia acknowledges in Sexual Personae, “Harold Bloom has been a tremendous source of encouragement and practical help throughout this project.” Jewish influence on Paglia’s work is quite visible:

“Milton Kessler hugely influenced the way I read and teach literature. I am grateful for the early support of my work by Geoffrey Hartman, Richard Ellmann, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Richard Tristman, and Alvin Feinman.”

Harman is also at Yale, where he is part of the Yale School of deconstruction, a project which was energized by Jewish impostor Jacques Derrida. Derrida himself declared,

“It is true that my interest in literature, diaries, journals in general, also signified a typical, stereotypical revolt against the family. My passion for Nietzsche, Rousseau, and also Gide, whom I read a lot at that time, meant among other things: ‘Families, I hate you.’ I thought of literature as the end of the family, and of the society it represented.”[17]

Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, was using his academic advantage to usurp the family. He used political flavors to make his point, but the end result is the old subversive movement.

According to deconstructionism, “Texts thus become a mere wall of mirrors reflecting nothing but each other, and throwing no light upon the ‘truh,’ which does not exist.” Hence, “the real is as imagined as the imaginary.”[18]

This ideology simply self-destructs. If words have no meaning, then Derrida’s words can be easily dismissed on that basis alone.

Paglia, as it turns out, is one of those people who has to prostrate before the Dreadful Few for sexual ideology.  But the intellectual price is too high for her. As we shall see, she eventually realized that she has been duped all these years.

Paglia writes that “Paganism never was the unbridled sexual licentiousness portrayed by missionaries of the young, embattled Christianity.”[19] But Paglia has a lengthy discussion on Marquis de Sade’s sexual “paganism,” which she herself, a lesbian, couldn’t stomach. She advised people not to “read Sade before lunch!”[20]

Paglia went out of her way to call Rihanna, who never misses her opportunity to sell her body like sluts and whores in sadomasochistic videos,[21] “true artists.” She said elsewhere that Rihanna is “the pleasure principle incarnate.”[22]

Perhaps Paglia should know that Rihanna has recently said that she doesn’t “give a dick about privacy anymore,”[23] meaning that she has every right to literally prostitute herself for money, power and fame.

Now that Paglia is 66, she is lamenting that civilization is crumbling because our education system, among other things, left “no models of manhood”!

Listen to Paglia very carefully here,

“Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now…

“Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys. They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.”[24]

Referring to women who wear semi-clad or sexy and provocative clothes, Paglia said, “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street.”[25]

This is just too good to be true. Does Paglia mean to tell us that wearing provocative clothes is much more vulnerable than defending pornography, which she said is “vitality”? And if she has the mental prowess to defend pornography, why all of a sudden she is so traditional when it comes to clothes? How does that logic work? How is it that she has not had a mental breakdown by upholding two contradictory worldviews?

As flaming feminist professor Judith “Jack” Halberstam of the University of Southern California herself declares, wasn’t Paglia a fan of Madonna in the 1990s?[26] Doesn’t Madonna continue to say that it’s “human nature” to “express yourself”? Didn’t Madonna perform “Erotica” at the “Live Girly Show” in Japan in 1993? Is Paglia’s memory fading? Paglia herself declared that the feminist won the culture wars in the 1990s because, well, “I credit Madonna.”[27]

Perhaps we should play some of those songs again:

Paglia is simply not making sense at all. But she has more interesting and juicy things to say:

“This PC [Political Correctness] gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.

“I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don’t have much to worry about.

“If, however, you are thinking you’d like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them.”[28]

Beautiful, isn’t? Paglia spent much of her career advocating feminist principles but now she wants to tell 14-year olds what to think.  How would Paglia respond to Inna Shevchenko, the young leader of the Femen group (we shall meet her in the next article), who declared that “I’m for any form of feminism”?[29]

 What Paglia is indirectly telling us is that feminism leads to people like Rihanna and Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga and Madonna, which subtly leads to degradation, which leads to the corruption of culture, and which leads to despair and sometimes death. Listen to how Nicki Minaj uses feminist language in order to corrupt her fans:

“With a video like ‘Anaconda,’ I’m a grown-ass fu$king woman! I stand for girls wanting to be sexy and dance, but also having a strong sense of themselves. If you got a big ol’ butt? Shake it! Who cares?”[30]

Ella Alexander of the Independent commented,

“If you didn’t get that from her derriere-wiggling, twerking video, then in the eyes of Minaj you have missed the point.”[31]

What Alexander is indirectly saying here is that Minaj, one of the fresh puppets of the regime, is using her derriere as an ideological weapon. Jewish writer Elizabeth Wurtzel calls this “pussy power,” which she says has led men like Samson to their death.

The crux of the matter here is that the moral order, which resonates within every human being and which dictates that human actions should be subservient to practical reason, always comes back with a vengeance. For example, Nicki Minaj confessed that having an abortion “always haunted me all my life.”[32]

If Paglia wants to be a fully rational human being, she certainly needs to renounce the feminist movement, which has been a central force in the destruction of the social order. Paglia will have to agree with Augustine, who persuasively said:

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”[33]

In other words, the wicked men and women of this world who happen to have power and influence over young people are actually slaves. Read Holly Madison’s Down in the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny and you’ll soon or later discover that Augustine was once again ahead of his time.

It should be clear by now that feminism pretends to liberate women from the shackles of tradition, but the same movement ends up enslaving women by treating them as sex objects. That is the central issue, and even the British newspaper the Telegraph has implicitly come to similar conclusions. The newspaper asked back in 2013:

“Are female artists being exploited by an innately sexist industry? Or are they liberated and empowered to present themselves however they want in an increasingly permissive environment?”[34]

Many musicians would somewhat agree that the music industry has been taken over by the powers that be. Suzi Quatro admitted:

“The music industry is so sexualised now. The difference is that the females are choosing it themselves, so you can’t say they are being used by the industry. Nobody told Madonna what to do, nobody tells Lady Gaga, so you can’t say it’s the men sexualising them anymore. There are so many semi-naked women in videos.”[35]

Sandie Shaw concurred:

“I think a lot of women artists are boxing themselves in, rather than being boxed in… To make a living you have to be a brand, you have to look a certain way, present yourself in a certain way. So you have issues about your weight, your hairstyle, everything. Because unless you can sell a fashion range you are not going to earn much money in the modern music business.”[36]

Feminism is indeed the matrix in which women are being shackled. Remember Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines”? Remember how it talks about “liberating” women? However, the same song leads women to misogyny and “domestication.” Even Salon had to admit that the lyrics in “Blurred Lines” are “rapey, the video overtly objectifies women and the only people worthy of clothes are men.”[37] Thicke himself said,

“We tried to do everything that was taboo. Bestiality, drug injections, and everything that is completely derogatory towards women.”[38]

Thicke added something which gets to the heart of the feminist movement: “What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I’ve never gotten to do that before.”[39]

What we are seeing here again is that much of MTV and the music industry is a colony of feminism, which is basically passion over reason, which leads to degrading women, which leads to misogyny, and which is against the moral order.

Take for example Miley Cyrus, who considers herself as “one of the biggest feminists in the world”[40] and who started out as “Hannah Montana.” A few years later, passion overtook Cyrus’ moral reasoning and she eventually became a “wrecking ball,” spreading her feminist hammer all over the world.

Cyrus’ feminist hammer seems to have no boundary. She has recently dumped Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son (Patrick) for “Victoria’s Secret model Stella Maxwell!” “There are times in my life where I’ve had boyfriends or girlfriends,” says Ms. Wrecking Ball.

Cyrus, who has already become a walking drug addict,[41] has gone to deep end. Cyrus’ parents themselves declared that “The Industry”—most specifically Hannah Montana—actually ruined the family. “The damn show destroyed my family,” said Billy Ray Cyrus.

“I’d take it back in a second. For my family to be here and just everybody be okay, safe and sound and happy and normal would have been fantastic. Heck, yeah. I’d erase it all in a second if I could.”[42]

What Billy is slowly realizing here is that the family is more important than money, power and fame. The family is the fabric of society, and once the fabric of society is destroyed, then the nation will be in shamble. “I’m scared for Miley,” Billy continued.

“She’s got a lot of people around her that’s putting her in a great deal of danger. I know she’s 18, but I still feel like as her daddy I’d like to try to help. At least get her out of danger. I want to get her sheltered from the storm. Stop the insanity just for a minute.”[43]

“Billy Ray then spoke about Hollywood tragedies Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith — drawing vague parallels to his own daughter’s wild life.

“‘I’m concerned about Miley. I think that [Cobain’s] world was just spinning so fast and he had so many people around him that didn’t help him. Like Anna Nicole Smith–you could see that train wreck coming…Michael Jackson—I was trying to reach out to Michael Jackson.’”[44]

Billy admitted:

“I should have been a better parent. I should have said, ‘Enough is enough–it’s getting dangerous and somebody’s going to get hurt.’ I should have, but I didn’t… Honestly, I didn’t know the ball was out of bounds until it was way up in the stands somewhere.”[45]

Billy again said: “I was going to work every single day knowing that my family had fallen apart, but yet I had to sit in front of that camera.”[46]

“The Industry” is actually the “wrecking ball.” It turns things upside down and basically declares:

“Screw the family. If Cyrus can bring money, then let us use and squeeze her until she cracks and breaks, until she becomes a ‘wrecking ball,’ and then we will throw her out. There are plenty of suckers out there who will do just about anything to get the almighty dollar.

“In fact, Nicole Scherzinger has already admitted that she wished she were ‘more slutty. I’d probably be a lot more successful if I were… This is such a tough industry, you know. To make it, you really have to sell your soul to the devil.’”[47]

Once again, DMX was right. His own words bear repeating here because it goes to the crux of the issue:

“The industry doesn’t have to do with talent; it’s about playing the game… The industry—if you ain’t got a strong mind—will break you down, [and] it’s a matter of time. The industry vultures with nothing to feast on…The industry plays in the dirt, stays in the dirt—test the wrong one in the industry and you will get hurt.

“The industry wanted, dead or alive, new artists to sell their souls…to survive. The industry don’t give a fu$k about you! But the industry couldn’t make a dime without you!”

Billy Cyrus drew similar conclusions:

“All those people around, they used me every time. It became so obvious that, man, no matter what happens, they’re going to put you up there and let you take the bullet.”

Billy got straight to the point:

“You know what, there’s no doubt I did stuff when I was a teenager that I’m sure could have turned out horribly. I’ve done some stupid crap—I do stupid crap. We all do. But it’s different when you sit back and you see it happening to your little girl. I feel like I got to try. It’s my daughter. And some of these handlers are perhaps more interested in handling Miley’s money than her safety and her career.”

This is the hidden grammar of “The Industry,” Billy. Money always comes first.

Give people like Taylor Swift a few years and they will be floating on wrecking balls like Cyrus. In fact, Swift, who has admitted that she is a feminist with the help of none other than Lena Dunham,[48] has already been heading toward that direction with songs like “Bad Blood.”

In the same vein, Lily Allen, who has been “hailed as the saviour of pop and an icon of the new feminism,”[49] is already rolling on a wrecking ball with songs and lyrics like “it’s hard out here for a bitch.”[50] For Allen, just about everyone is a “bitch”: “Dolly Parton is a bitch. Adele’s a bitch. Angela Merkel is a bitch…” The Guardian declares,

“She’s sitting in the make-up chair listing bitches, of which she proudly counts herself one. Her song echoes under the door. ‘Rihanna’s an inspiring bitch, my mum, Miley’s a bitch, rising. She’s my hero. Kate Middleton is NOT a bitch.’”[51]

To make things even easier, the Guardian quotes Jewish writer Elizabeth Wurtzel’s book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, in which she writes:

“I intend to scream, shout… and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers. I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself.”[52]

That is the end of feminism.What feminists do not get is that they are only free to do what is right, not what they want to do. If they protest against this, then why would they be complaining all day if a Ted Bundy is allowed to do what he wants?

If feminists want to remain decent human beings, then they need to agree that you can’t just go out there and sing about “bitches,” produce “torture porn,” and and pollute the airwaves in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”:

Going back to Robin Thicke’s response. Elizabeth Plank of Salon was confused because she quickly noticed that Thicke was carrying his own casket when he said that he intended to degrade women. She responded ironically:

“Yes. Men who respect women are the ‘perfect’ people to degrade them! Like they say, it’s funny! Cause this way, women never know who they can trust! I guess misogyny is like that expired brie you accidentally ate while you were drunk: you just need to get it out of your system.”[53]

Plank is right, but what she could not grasp was that the feminist movement always ends up in misogyny and degradation of women. Furthermore, if there are no absolutes and transcendent values which ought to be applied to all people, why is Plank upset about Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”?

In addition, central to feminism is the idea that women ought not to be told what to do, particularly when it comes to clothes and profession. How, then, can Plank tell the women in the “Blurred Lines” video what to do? What if they choose that profession? Can Plank seriously condemn this on feminist principles?

Obviously not.

Plank continues:

“What underlies this frankly depressing statement is that if we respect women, it’s fine to demean them. The singer makes that painfully clear when he explains: “People say, ‘Hey, do you think this is degrading to women?’ I’m like, ‘Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I’ve never gotten to do that before. I’ve always respected women.’

“Not only is it totally fine to demean women, it’s actually fun.

“Then, to add insult to injury, he tells us were all idiots because we care. ‘Right now, with terrorism and poverty and Wall Street and Social Security having problems, nudity should not be the issue,’ he continued.

“YEAH HOLD YOUR HORSES, GUYS. It’s not like women’s objectification is linked to any other serious social problem … like, I don’t know, violence against women?!

“It’s not like studies show that being exposed to images of objectified women gives men ‘greater tolerance of sexual harassment and greater rape myth acceptance’ or makes them view women as ‘less competent’ and ‘less human.’ It’s not like singing about ‘blurred lines’ will reinforce a culture that already trivializes the importance of consent.

“So if there’s nothing ‘blurry’ about the male artist’s misogynistic intentions, what about the women involved in the project? The video’s female director, Diane Martel denies any sexist wrong-doing and dismissed Thicke’s comments in an interview with Eric Ducker at Grantland.

“Emily Ratajkowski, the brown-haired model in the video agrees. In an interview with Esquire, she explained that the women in the video were ‘directed to have a sort of confidence, a sarcastic attitude about the whole situation,’ and that the ‘eye contact and that attitude really puts [them] in a power situation.’”[54]

If Plank would just look at Ratajkowski’s biography at a deeper level, perhaps she would have the answer to her question. Ratajkowski described her mother, who is Jewish, as a “feminist and intellectual” who actually was an English professor at California Polytechnic State University. For Ratajkowski, Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” is actually a “career path into focus.”[55]

“I’m not worried about nudity,” Ratajkowski said. “I’d rather play a complex character who has a love scene than a stupid girl who’s just a girl next door.”[56] By the time that “Blurred Lines” was released, Ratajkowski instantly became a sex symbol. Practically overnight, she became a celebrity. Plank writes,

“The stunning model (who I wouldn’t recommend looking at unless you’re ready for a dramatic drop in your own self-esteem) makes an interesting point highlighting the complexity of this topic.

“She explains that growing up with a feminist mother made her realize that her body could be a source of pride. ‘It’s something very important for young women today to have that confidence. [The video] is actually celebrating women and their bodies.’

“So according to Ratajkowski, naked female bodies on television can be empowering. She also positions the video as a critique of the misogynistic music video genre. ‘Pop music is great, but there’s a lot of BS about the attitude of guys being super-gangster — that’s why the whole video is silly. It’s making fun of itself.’

“So what happens when the model in the song doesn’t think the video is objectifying, but other women do? In other words, if a woman is objectified by the viewer, but she isn’t objectifying herself, is she still an object? If a tree falls in the woods, but it doesn’t hear its own sound, did it make one.”[57]

Plank declares,

“It’s not ironic to put women naked in a music video because it’s an extension of the crap that already floods our screens. It’s not anything new, it’s just more of the same old sexist garbage.

…[T]he idea that consent is a ‘blurry’ concept is deeply ingrained in the way sexual assault is represented in the media, our culture, the education system and, yes, our judicial system.

“It’s what drives many to doubt the veracity of rape allegations. It’s what drives many rape survivors to never report their rapes. In fact, it’s why rape is the least reported crime and why 97% of rapists will never see a day in jail.

“Sure, Ratajkowski could have felt empowered and her performance could have given confidence to a handful of women, but does the personal benefit outweight the collective harm? Sure many men could have watched this video and got the joke, but what about those who didn’t?

“What about the people who watched the video and internalized the message that women can be consumed like objects without consent because, you know … sex is about ‘blurred lines’ anyways.”[58]

Once again, if Plank wants to understand the ideology behind Ratajkowski and Thicke, she needs to cancel her feminist membership precisely because you cannot be a consistent feminist and remain logical. Listen to Plank in her article “Female Boxing: Forced to Wear a Skirt?”:

“If women are told they must be seen not heard, then they must stand up and speak louder. Given that we are often instructed not to fight back, it’s about time we enter the metaphorical ring and kick some serious figurative butt.”[59]

Plank was obviously digging her own grave here. If women “must stand up and speak louder” and get in the ring to “kick some serious figurative butt,” who is Elizabeth Plank to tell Ratajkowski what to do with her own body? And isn’t Plank asking Ratajkowski to get in the ring and kick her butt for saying that “Blurred Lines” is “crap”?

[1] He wrote in his classic meditation Confessions that “All those who wander far away and set themselves against you [God] are imitating you, but in a perverse way.” Augustine, The Confessions (New York: New City Press, 1997), 71.

[2] I have personally observed this phenomenon. Just a few months ago, a commenter told me that “reason does not prove anything” and wrote two lengthy paragraphs hopelessly and incestuously using reason to make his point! My answer was quite simple: if reason does not prove anything, why do I have to spend my precious time answering the paragraphs? I finally had to throw in the towel.

[3] See for example Noah Berlatsky, “When Men Experience Sexism,” Atlantic, May 29, 2013; “’It’s Not a Contradiction for Men to Discriminate Against Other Men’: A scholar of gender studies on reconciling feminism with the reality of gender bias against men,” Atlantic, July 14, 2014. Cathy Young of Time herself declared, “Until feminism recognizes discrimination against men, the movement for gender equality will be incomplete.” Cathy Young, “Sorry, Emma Watson, but HeForShe Is Rotten for Men,” Time, September 26, 2014.

[4] Kay S. Hymowitz, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys (New York: Basic Books, 2012), chapter 2.

[5] Bari Weiss, “In Pursuit of Manly Equality,” The Australian, January 1, 2014.

[6] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 34.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Harold Bloom, “The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism,” NY Times, May 7, 2010.

[9] David Mikics, “Harold Bloom Is God,” Tablet Magazine, January 2, 2013.

[10] William Deresiewicz, “The Shaman,” New Republic, September 14, 2011.

[11] Bloom, “The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism,” NY Times, May 7, 2010.

[12] “The Anti-Semitism Question,” NY Times, May 21, 2010.

[13] Mikics, “Harold Bloom Is God,” Tablet Magazine, January 2, 2013.

[14] William Deresiewicz, “The Shaman,” New Republic, September 14, 2011.

[15] Mikics, “Harold Bloom Is God,” Tablet Magazine, January 2, 2013

[16] Quoted in Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 981.

[17] Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 39.

[18] Quoted in Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 134.

[19] Paglia, Sexual Personae, 25.

[20] Ibid., 239.

[21] See for example Mark Sweney, “Rihanna’s S&M video ‘too explicit for daytime broadcast,’” Guardian, May 9, 2011.

[22] Quoted in Maureen Callahan, “Pop Goes the Paglia,” NY Post, December 9, 2012.

[23] Jessica Goodman, “Rihanna Doesn’t ‘Give A D-ck’ About Privacy Anymore,” Huffington Post, April 21, 2015.

[24] Quoted in Bari Weiss, “Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues,” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2014.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Halberstam, Gaga Feminism, 6.

[27] “Camille Paglia – ‘I don’t get along with lesbians at all. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them,’” Independent, August 25, 2012.

[28] Weiss, “Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues,” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2014.

[29] Quoted in Decca Aitkenhead, “Femen leader Inna Shevchenko: ‘I’m for any form of feminism,’” Guardian, November 8, 2013.

[30] “Nicki Minaj Is Hip-Hop’s Killer Diva: Inside Rolling Stone’s New Issue,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 2014.

[31] Ella Alexander, “Nicki Minaj offers her own version of feminism: ‘If you got a big ol’ butt shake it! Who cares?’,” The Independent, December 31, 2014.

[32] “Nicki Minaj Is Hip-Hop’s Killer Diva: Inside Rolling Stone’s New Issue,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 2014.

[33] For a cultural history on all this, see E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).

[34] Neil McCormick, “Sex in pop music: what do other female pop stars think?,” The Telegraph, October 7, 2013.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Elizabeth Plank, “Robin Thicke’s sexism isn’t ‘blurry,’” Salon, July 27, 2013.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Zayda Rivera, “Robin Thicke’s new single ‘Blurred Lines’ slammed as ‘kind of rapey,’ draws heavy backlash for degrading women,” NY Daily News, June 19, 2013.

[40] “Miley Cyrus Thinks She’s ‘One Of The Biggest Feminists In The World,’” Huffington Post, November 14, 2013; “Bernadette McNulty, “Lily Allen or Miley Cyrus: who’s the bigger feminist?,” The Telegraph, November 13, 2013.

[41] “Inside Miley Cyrus’ ‘drug den’: Patrick Schwarzenegger’s girlfriend surrounded by cannabis, a rolled up bank note and a vial of white powder at recording studio,” Daily Mail, January 7, 2015; “Miley Cyrus in new drugs controversy: Star ‘seen opposite a table covered in what appears to be paraphernalia during late night recording session,’” Daily Mail, January 4, 2015.

[42] “Billy Ray Cyrus: ‘Hannah Montana’ Show ‘Destroyed My Family,’” Billboard, February 15, 2011.

[43] Billy Ray Cyrus Says ‘Hannah Montana’ Destroyed His Family,” Rolling Stone, February 15, 2011.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] How Hannah Montana has ruined our lives, by father of the £20m teenage star,” Daily Mail, February 16, 2011.

[47] “What’s new Pussycat? Nicole Sherzinger on being a global pop star and conquering an eating disorder,” The Independent, March 10, 2013.

[48] Sam Frizell, “Taylor Swift Finally Explains Why She’s a Feminist and How Lena Dunham Helped,” Time, August 23, 2014; “Taylor Swift Reveals She Has Been A Feminist All This Time,” Huffington Post, August 24, 2014;

[49] “Lily Allen: The Full Interview,” Esquire, January 24, 2014.

[50] Lily Allen: ‘Why I’m not ashamed of taking drugs (and why I’ll have sex with boys my own age but only go out with older men),’” Daily Mail, September 13, 2009.

[51] Eva Wiseman, “Lily Allen: ‘I’m called mouthy but I’m just talking,’” Guardian, November 17, 2013.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Rivera, “Robin Thicke’s new single ‘Blurred Lines’ slammed as ‘kind of rapey,’ draws heavy backlash for degrading women,” NY Daily News, June 19, 2013

[54] Rivera, “Robin Thicke’s new single ‘Blurred Lines’ slammed as ‘kind of rapey,’ draws heavy backlash for degrading women,” NY Daily News, June 19, 2013.

[55] Bee Shapiro, “For Emily Ratajkowski, ‘Blurred Lines’ Brings a Career Path Into Focus,” NY Times, October 23, 2013.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Plank, “Robin Thicke’s sexism isn’t ‘blurry,’” Salon, July 27, 2013.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Elizabeth Plank, “Female Boxing: Forced to Wear a Skirt?”, Huffington Post, January 18, 2012.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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