Rhinocrisy

Friends, we have in the past expressed concern that our readership might have an overdeveloped sense of morality, and so may be trampled and bruised by the herd in the mad dash towards the pinnacle of crapulence. For your protection, therefore, we present this occasional series on how you, kind reader, may become less kind and more cruel, and thus hopefully further your success.

There are few people as vulnerable and impressionable in this world as children, and as we suggested in previous editions of our Guide to Being Evil, one of the surest paths to unadulterated evil is by exploiting that weakness. As I like to say, there is no sound sweeter than the piteous shrieks of the innocent.

However, it is vital that, in committing your evil deeds, you don’t make too much work for yourself. Not because sloth is an exceptional evil by itself (it’s only a second-rate evil), but because mass productivity is what’s really required to achieve legendary status as a demonic fiend. We’d all like to be able to disembowel and consume the entrails of half a million small toddlers, but who has that kind of time?^* Instead, we can save ourselves considerable effort by piggy-backing on the general tide of evil washing over society.

As a case study, we present the website Miss Bimbo, a “virtual fashion game” created by one Nicolas Jacquart, an evil genius capable of inducing such a towering hatred that you, personally, would relish the act of skewering his body with a couple of meat-hooks. The site is directed at an extremely vulnerable segment of the population: young, pre-teen girls, and its goal may be neatly summed up by the tag: “Are you ready to become Queen of the Bimbos !?!” Herein, the young female may pilot a virtual bimbo, and by controlling her weight, appearance, and social status, may accrue “bimbo dollars” and “bimbo cred”, until she (hopefully) attains the desired rank of ruling monarch of a very sad kingdom.

Now, hold your skepticism. You may, at first, be disinclined to believe that such a website is not a parody, or that it actually has managed to attract half a million young, impressionable girls and inculcated in them a desire to become a vapid, clownish caricature of a human being. This is because you do not have the necessary propensity towards evil! Your failure to imagine such a thing is precisely what we are attempting to correct via this series. Take notes, and learn.

I created a test account to explore the Miss Bimbo virtual world (bimbo nickname: Jenghis Khan). At this beginning stage my goals are modest: secure an apartment, get a job, and “Change your drab hairstyle to become a blonde with cool pigtails!” However, if I were to persevere, I would be able to purchase lingerie, a makeover, a nice tan, and maybe (for the benefit of thousands of points of “Bimbo Attitude”) some plastic surgery: a face lift, or perhaps some breast augmentation surgery! Unfortunately the complaints of outraged parents and health care officials forced M. Jacquart to remove the ability to purchase diet pills for your bimbo, which means that he will no longer be able to directly instruct young girls in how to develop and maintain their eating disorders. However, we can be confident that the remainder of his website will admirably succeed in destroying any sense of self-worth that those girls may have.

Now, take note of what M. Jacquart is doing: his barbarism is hinged on a prototype that is well-familiar within the zeitgeist. Rather than doing the hard work of creating a destructive archetype all by himself and somehow encouraging young girls to adopt it, he has made use of the already-widespread social message that girls need to become as empty-headed and artificial as possible, aspiring only to the acquisition of clothes, money, looks, and social notoriety. Others have already laid the groundwork by creating and maintaining industries devoted to making girls hate their bodies and devalue their minds. Pleasant Nicolas merely provides a conduit for the flow of this filth, directing it more efficiently towards the intended targets. Thus he manages great evil with only slight effort.

We may all learn from his vile example.

^* Not to mention that toddler entrails go straight to the hips.

In this article in the LA Times, one Heather MacDonald contends that there is no “rape crisis” on college campuses and the idea that a significant number of young women in college are raped every year is a ridiculous myth advanced by crazy feminists. Her evidence for this claim is that college rape crisis centers don’t receive many calls. Using similar logic, I have deduced that no one actually uses this new-fangled “Internet” contraption because our blog readership still hovers in the low single digits.^*

MacDonald spends a good deal of time critiquing the methodology of one Mary Koss, who did some pioneering work in the late 1980s on the subject of date rape on college campuses. MacDonald finds Koss’s methodology suspect and concludes it is designed to inflate the numbers and manufacture a “rape crisis” so that feminists can get on with the program of reducing men to castrated tote-bag holders and baby-nappy changers. Rah rah rah!

It may surprise you to learn, however, that Koss’s paper was not the only one on the subject! Using my favorite methodology, “a few minutes of careless searching”, I found one of these papers, which you can read here (but only with a JSTOR subscription). The authors are quite careful about their methodology (which is relatively unambiguous in its manner of questioning), and they find 20% of women reporting unwanted attempted intercourse and 10% reporting unwanted intercourse (rape - 71% said “no” explicitly) out of a sample of 518 college women. Female alcohol use was present in the majority of cases (65% in the third category), but even if this puts rape in a “gray area” (as MacDonald suggests), this only eliminates 65% of incidents, still leaving a substantial number of rape incidents going on every year. Criticisms could be made of this methodology, of course, but we shouldn’t expect the numbers to change by an order of magnitude. Shockingly, MacDonald presents no studies that manage to knock down the basic claim.

Most interesting to me, however, was who the women described unwanted incidents to:

Saaaayy… do you think that might explain why no one is ringing up rape crisis centers? Because talking to a stranger is like, the hardest possible way to deal with a rape? Surely no…

The real problem, as Heather MacDonald tells us, is that women are tarting it up instead of keeping their chastity belts on:

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act … and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”

And that, my friends, is evidence you can take to the fucking bank.

^* Hi Bob!

Apparently, one of the leaders of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota has decided she’s not going to put up with this “banning abortion” shit. She says, “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

Check it out.

My roomie pointed me to a post by Sean Carroll on the recent incident involving Kos and a certain TBS web-ad for the show “The Real Gilligan’s Island”, featuring Mary Ann and Ginger in a pie fight.

I’ll get the obvious stuff out of the way: Kos is a moron. His response was ridiculous, regardless of your opinion of the ad. It showed a complete lack of respect for his comrades and their concerns. He deserves to have his face buried in shit for a while. Fortunately the fallout hasn’t been all bad: check out the resulting Women Kossacks bleg (warning: it’s still horribly ugly in appearance).

As to the ad itself: I’ll admit, I find it titillating. I clicked on it. I’m not particularly embarassed about that fact. But note this aside by Sean Carroll:

One indication of the fact that the world has not achieved perfect gender equity is the paucity of ads featuring oil-wrestling matches between hunky men in Speedos. Not, I expect, that such imagery would be very attractive to many people of either sex.

So, why is it sexist to watch two statuesque women smearing pie over each other? Obviously there’s a certain amount of objectification inherent in making something arousing. But I don’t think anyone in particular would complain, if it weren’t that men didn’t resolutely refuse to be made into sexual objects.

I shan’t minimize the role of gender disparity in perpetuating this situation. For many (if not most) men, interactions with women continue to be defined by sexuality, and women are made to assume the role of sex object whether they want to or not. The same is decidedly not true of men; women are not given much freedom to express any notion of a male sexual aesthetic or to shamelessly objectify men (whether they want to or not). As many important people have said, and with more erudition and footnotes than I can manage.

But I don’t think this is all. Not long in the past, there definitely was a notion of male physical beauty, one appreciated and even held forward by men. If we dip back into ancient Greece, male sexuality was prized even above that of women. E.g. Plato’s Symposium, where this brief excerpt is just one of many lines celebrating the homosexual relationship above the heterosexual:

And am I not right in asserting that there are two goddesses? The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite-she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione-her we call common… The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul-the most foolish beings are the objects of this love which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accomplishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite indiscriminately. The goddess who is his mother is far younger than the other, and she was born of the union of the male and female, and partakes of both.

But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part - she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her. Those who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature…

This was unquestionably not a society with gender equity, but the sexuality of men was certainly celebrated.

So I think there’s as much or more a component of homophobia inherent in the dearth of male sexual objectification. Men might be willing to accept such a position (or rather, to impose it on each other), except for their galloping fear of being perceived as bent. Of TV in Ancient Greece, women might have complained that it was sexist to show the Skipper and Gilligan mud-wrestling and completely elide the unworthy females (and what about Mrs. Howell?). In other words, there’s nothing inherently sexist about two women having a half-naked pie fight. It’s the underlying implication: who gets to decide what’s sexy and what’s not.