The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘A Haunting Piece,’ IYKWIMAITYD

Posted on | July 5, 2011 | 32 Comments

From a liberal reporter’s forthcoming Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, This Bitch Is Dangerously Crazy:

McClelland, 31, sought professional help but said she ultimately cured herself by staging her own rape, which she writes about in a haunting piece for the online magazine Good. The title: “How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD.”
Her sexual partner mercilessly pinned her, beat her about the head and brutally violated McClelland — at her request.
“I was not crazy,” she told ABCNews.com.

Oh, hell, yes, she was. But I didn’t tell that to ABC News, because they didn’t ask me. This crazy woman needs to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how. Speaking of Ace of Spades . . .

“Psychiatrists give such people psychotropic medications; leftists give them book deals.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: My apologies to readers and to Ace for having originally the wrong link where I’d intended to link his commentary, which I was content to let be the last word on this subject.

Fixed the link, and now I’ve decided this McClelland woman deserves more than sarcastic putdowns and a link to Ace. Because I printed out McClelland’s tale, sat down and read through the whole thing, and want to go on record with a couple of observations:

  1. McClelland’s journalism career will end badly. She’ll get caught plagiarizing or fabricating or otherwise in a career-ending ethics scandal, and then she’ll be through as a reporter. Her obvious penchant for the “just-so story” — the riveting anecdote that exactly encapsulates the point she wishes to make — is a bit too well developed.
  2. Feminism licenses women writers to get away with stuff that no male writer would dare even attempt. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, writers like Norman Mailer could do tough-guy posturing and talk dirty about sex in the guise of journalism and be considered daring and avant-garde. But that style got overdone by bad Norman Mailer wannabes (and, honestly, the original was tiresome enough) so nobody does it anymore. What we have instead is women writing bizarre sexual self-revelations in the guise of “empowerment.” A few years ago, some woman wrote a whole book about her erotic anal adventures, a book that earned her universal praise from critics. No male writer — and certainly no heterosexual male writer — could get a book contract for a book about his sexual exploits, because the critics would laugh him to scorn. Who the hell cares about a straight guy “exploring erotic frontiers” or whatever purpose is allegedly served by women writing about sex?

Consider these few excerpts from McClelland’s tale:

By my second working day in Haiti, I was finding it alarmingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning, already having rape nightmares and, worse, daymares. And that was before one of the upstanding pillars of the Haitian elite, who insisted he was a gentleman because he loses his erection if a woman starts to fight him off, started to stalk me. On the third day, one of my drivers cornered me in an abandoned building, and I had to talk him out of his threats to touch me. On the third night, I got very drunk. That night, and the next nine nights. . . .
When a French UN peacekeeper I’d met went AWOL to knock on my door, wanting to know, when I gladly unlocked it for him, please if he could kiss me, I couldn’t feel him. Literally. I watched, confused, as he climbed onto me weightlessly, though he was clearly much bigger than I am. When we met again to say goodbye more than a week later, I grasped for anything concrete: my hands on his muscled, uniformed ass, my pelvis against the gun at his waist. Still, I could feel only something static and empty in the places usually occupied by my limbs. When he walked away—telling me he loved me, god bless ’em—I cried my face off. . . .
For months, anything could trigger the sobbing or the heaving. But two things guaranteed it: One was any smell reminiscent of the raw sewage at the displacement camp, where I’d thrown up in my mouth and swallowed it. The other was masturbating. Having gotten increasingly concerned about my new habit of wincing when I thought about sex, I became determined to touch myself like a normal, wholesome person. One time, I managed to keep the bad thoughts at bay all the way until the end. . . .

Are the actions and feelings described by McClelland true? We don’t know and cannot know. No objective verification is possible. We cannot ask the soldier, the driver, the “pillar of the Haitian elite” for their side of events. And certainly there is no one other than McClelland who can vouch for McClelland’s masturbation habits.

Perhaps you see why I am suspicious of a reporter who writes such things as serious journalism, especially when the things she writes have that “just-so” quality about them. Especially when the writer is hustling a new book. And most especially when it occurs to me that the writer’s agent must surely be sending this 2,790-word wild-brutal-sex article to Hollywood producers, directors and actors.

How vividly dramatic, you see. The tropical third-world setting. French U.N. peace-keepers. The tragedy of an earthquake, the tragedy of rape, the tragedy of poverty — and the courageous (but vulnerable) young female reporter in the midst of all this tragic human drama.

It’s Jurassic Park, but with Haitian rapists as the menacing dinosaurs.

My advice to Mac McClelland: Get the largest possible cash fee up front, since it’s about 90% certain that’s all you’ll ever see in one of these “development” deals. Also, demand points on the gross box-office receipts. Points on the net profit are for chumps, because the studio accountants will always find a way to rip you off, shrinking the profit by billing various costs against the bottom line.

Take the money and run, sweetheart — that’s the Hollywood way.

Category: Feminism, Liberals, Sex

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