Special Snowflake™ @Belle_Knox and Make-Believe Feminist ‘Empowerment’

Posted on | February 27, 2014 | 68 Comments

Eric Owens at the Daily Caller deserves credit for calling attention to the dishonest hypocrisy of porn’s feminist enablers:

The sex-worker student doesn’t want her real name revealed — or even her adorably slutty porn name revealed — despite the fact that she has now done at least two interviews, written a monologue about herself and been invited to speak in various Duke classes on the topic of sex work.
The Chronicle has cooperated in this charade, calling the student “Lauren.”

Perhaps the significance of “this charade” was overlooked by some readers. One can argue — and some of our commenters did argue on Tuesday night’s post about Miriam Weeks — that the Chronicle‘s futile attempt to suppress the Duke porn star’s real name was necessary as a matter of personal safety. But this argument involves the assumption that performing in porn is inherently risky, because the men who watch porn are creepy and potentially violent stalkers.

Nobody at Duke University seems interested in the conservative anti-pornography argument, which is that porn is bad for the very reason that it incites and inflames such dangerous passions. The editors of the Chronicle have unwittingly implied that porn addicts are a bunch of degenerate weirdos; the terrors of political correctness forbid them from saying this in so many words.

“An alter-ego is liberating. It’s probably the most empowered I have ever felt.”
— Miriam Weeks, a/k/a “Belle Knox”

However, even if one stipulates that the “Lauren” charade was necessary to protect the student porn star from her perverted admirers, why would the Chronicle also suppress the “adorably slutty porn name” — “Belle Knox” — under which she performs?

Ah, my dear Watson, here we have the telltale clue! While Ms. Weeks is willing, behind a pseudonym, to boast of her enjoyment in doing what she is paid to do on camera under another pseudonym, neither she nor the editors of the Chronicle want to assist curious Duke students in discovering what kind of “empowerment” is actually involved: Fellatio, anal sex, lesbian orgies, bisexual threesomes and even the video enactment of violent abusive rape fantasies: “The Bad Decision video is great. She gets choked, slapped, and raped, all of which I obviously approve,” says one reviewer of a Belle Knox video.

This is “empowering”? No, this is degrading, and any woman who takes money to participate in this degradation is as deserving of condemnation as the freakazoid creeps who pay money to watch it.

Any Christian must condemn this as inherently immoral, conservative traditionalists must condemn it as undermining the sensibility of bourgeois virtue and, if the Supreme Court insists that we cannot legally prohibit teen rape videos, certainly we must be shocked that any feminist would defend this lurid commercial spectacle.

Mile Markers on the Road to Sexual Anarchy

Ladies, I don’t want to seem too judgmental about what you may choose to do within the context of private intimacy, but if your husband or boyfriend starts pressuring you into bondage, butt-sex and bisexual threesomes, consider two possibilities:

a. He’s a hopelessly depraved sicko;
or
b. He’s been watching way too much porn.

Of course, we cannot omit (c) both, since the pornography business depends on the insatiable cravings of depraved sickos who watch such stuff habitually, obsessively, in mass quantities.

The great challenge of civilization as regards sex is to channel human appetites toward enduring monogamous pair-bonds, so that we learn to be grateful for that which is good and right and decent.

We risk sexual anarchy, to employ Matt Barber’s excellent phrase, if we take the attitude that “good” and “right” are meaningless, if we reject decency as “repressive,” if we encourage a sense of sexual entitlement, and if we incite the hedonistic pursuit of whatever twisted wickedness our beastly lusts might imagine.

Ace of Spades has recently given attention to how the millennial generation has a narcissistic entitlement mentality that I have referred to as Special Snowflake Syndrome: Nothing bad should ever happen to Special Snowflakes, and if something bad does happen to them, it cannot be their fault. No matter how objectively culpable they are for their own misfortunes, Special Snowflakes always expect to be viewed as sympathetic victims, for whom “personal responsibility” is hate-speech.

“I feel angry. I feel victimized. I feel harassed. I feel hated. I feel discriminated against.”
— Miriam Weeks, a/k/a “Belle Knox”

One sees this in the way some young college-educated women insist that whatever they say or do is justified as an expression of feminism, and that any criticism of their words or actions is therefore sexist, misogynist, “anti-woman.” This rhetoric demonstrates, more than anything else, the way in which feminism (like “civil rights”) has escaped the possibility of meaningful definition. Having been alive during the original Women’s Liberation heyday of the 1970s and having read about as much feminist literature (or likely more) than the typical Women’s Studies major, I recognize that feminism has always been an ideology lacking intellectual rigor and philosophical coherence, insisting on the primacy of emotional subjective “experience” over objective facts. Feminists don’t have arguments, they have grievances, and their resentments cannot be confined by the parameters of logic.

“If the patriarchy is about men making decisions for women and taking away their agency, why do some feminists want to control other women’s decisions? . . . Feminism to me means advancing my personal liberty, my opportunity in the world, while also championing my body and my right to choose what to do with my body.”
— Miriam Weeks, a/k/a “Belle Knox”

Nevertheless, insofar as Women’s Liberation originally had any legitimate argument, it was that nothing so proved how women were consigned to second-class citizenship as the fact that they were treated as “sex objects” who were valued primarily or exclusively for their beauty and desirability as men’s sexual partners.

It is possible, of course, to contend with this argument, to say that the admiration of feminine beauty is so universal as to be a fact of human nature, and to point out that the realities of reproductive biology make the survival of our species dependent on the ability of women to arouse men’s concupiscent interest. But I digress . . .

If feminists insist that treating women as “sex objects” is degrading to women, how can pornography possibly be “feminist”?

This was obvious to the original Women’s Liberation movement, and radical feminists protested against pornography for many years until — with stealth funding from the pornography industry, including Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Foundation — there emerged in the 1980s what is now known as “pro-sex feminism,” sometimes called liberal feminism to distinguish from (the original) radical feminism. That the women’s movement was co-opted by the porn industry is a fact that Women’s Studies majors usually don’t learn until their sophomore or junior year, if they learn it at all, because this is one of the shameful secrets that the feminist cult doesn’t like to mention, and radical (anti-pornography) feminists have been marginalized within their own movement.

One can see in this a replication of the “Popular Front” strategy pursued by the Communist Party in the 1930s, when subversives welcomed liberal allies, overtly embracing “democratic” movements while underground agents of influence secretly infiltrated mainstream institutions on behalf of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

Radicalism and the ‘Abolition of Gender’

Similarly, actual feminists — that is to say, man-hating lesbian socialists — understand that their movement’s long-term success depends on the ability of the Democratic Party to function as an effective political vehicle to implement their agenda. Feminists also act as “change agents” by infiltrating mainstream institutions and organizations (e.g., the Girl Scouts and teachers unions), and such influence operations would be more difficult if people became too curious about feminism’s ultimate objectives. Having liberal democratic allies to act as the “faces” of feminism thus suits the movement’s strategic interests, and feminists will shout “homophobia!” and “McCarthyism!” at anyone who points out the anti-Christian, anti-capitalist and anti-heterosexual nature of feminism’s core ideology. We therefore must be grateful for radical feminists who tell the truth — “PIV is always rape, OK?” — about their ideology, who explain that their goal of destroying the heteronormative patriarchy requires the abolition of “heterosexuality” per se.

“I have always been a very sexual person, and I’m also bisexual, but I haven’t ever felt really welcome.”
— Miriam Weeks, a/k/a “Belle Knox”

Duke University sophomore Danica Liu is a radical feminist who chastised Miriam Weeks in an “Open Letter” to the Chronicle::

I cannot support your decision to be complicit in pornography. I cannot condone your participation in an industry in which an overwhelming percentage of workers suffer rape and sexual assault. I cannot see your behavior as anything less than reinforcement of a status quo that actively harms and oppresses women.
Once upon a time, I was a liberal feminist, like you are now. I believed in female empowerment through sexuality, and I believed I could somehow destroy the patriarchy while wearing red lipstick, expensive bras and sexy high heels. I believed in porn and sex positivity and basically everything — as long as it was consensual, of course. I believed the most empowering thing for a woman was choice and that gender equality was the ultimate goal of the feminist movement.
But then I began to realize equality, whatever that means, would never be enough. . . . What’s the meaning of equality when women are still being oppressed?
The thing about liberal feminism and “choice” is that it’s based on a fantasy at best and an outright lie at worst. And the lie is this: As long as we make our own choices, we can be free. . . .
I am a radical feminist, which means that I believe in the abolition of gender. I no longer believe in “gender equality,” and, instead, I fight for women’s liberation and an end to patriarchy and sexism.

Is Danica Liu a radical man-hating lunatic? Of course, but her radical man-hating lunacy is at least an honest lunacy. As crazy as she is, her feminist ideology is a coherent syllogism, pursuing her insane premises to their logical conclusion of complete madness.

Danica Liu excoriates the Duke starlet for exploiting privilege:

In becoming a porn star, you have played into a system that values a certain race, body type and class. You are able to make this decision because of your race, body type and class.
I have been lucky enough to receive financial aid so I can attend Duke, but if I had not, the same sex work opportunities available to you would not have been available to me as an Asian woman.

Translation: “Don’t tell me about feminism, you rich white bitch!”

Young, Innocent … and Did I Mention ‘Young’?

Imagine what Danica Liu would have said if the Chronicle had not concealed the reality of what “Belle Knox” does for money. Because, in point of fact, the inequality that Miriam Weeks so lucratively exploits is age-based inequality — she does teen porn.

The meaning of this should be self-evident, but it escaped my attention until Tuesday night, when a reader sent me an e-mail expressing disbelief that such an ordinary-looking woman as Miriam Weeks could be highly sought as a porn performer. Aren’t porn stars supposed to be beautiful bombshell blondes? How is it that this plain, skinny brunette is being flown out to Hollywood and paid many thousands of dollars for her services in the “adult film” industry?

Indeed, it would seem to be mysterious, but by the time I saw that e-mail, I had already seen the NSFW “Belle Knox” Twitter account, and I wrote back to the mystified reader:

The thing is, she’s EIGHTEEN — no tattoos, “innocent” looking.
Finding jaded tattoo-covered whores with silicon-implant breasts is not difficult. But the supply of “innocent” looking 18-year-olds willing to do three-ways, etc.? Yeah, that’s the premium product, and the demand is high.
Basically, it’s the closest thing to kiddie porn that the market can supply legally, which is why I’m creeped out by this feminist talk about how “empowering” it is.
— RSM

At 5-foot-4 and 94 pounds, according to her profile at an “adult modeling” agency, 18-year-old Miriam Weeks looks younger than her age, so underdeveloped she might be mistaken for an eighth-grader, and this is precisely her value in the “teen porn” trade. She’s not one of those brazen fake-boob strumpets; she’s the small-chested barely-legal girl whose appeal is her ability to represent a pervert’s fantasy of sexually insatiable “consenting” youth. There is no law against “teen porn,” and perhaps some people would defend it as meeting a market demand, but it would be difficult to imagine any feminist argument in favor of it.

Maybe editors at the Chronicle didn’t want to examine the context of this alleged “empowerment,” or maybe it was not apparent to them. If you’re 20 or 21, it might not seem particularly weird to think of an 18-year-old Plain Jane getting paid for this. Maybe you have to be a grown-up — a parent — before the objectionable nature of such “empowerment” becomes something you can’t ignore.

“I’ve always really liked watching porn. I started watching porn when I was maybe 11, and it was something I was always very ashamed about . . .”
— Miriam Weeks, a/k/a “Belle Knox”

There are no grown-ups at Duke University, a playground for the privileged young, who are indoctrinated in obsolete ideologies by middle-aged Marxists and dogmatic proponents of “Critical Theory.” The faculty seek to transmit to future generations their own misguided puerile dreams of an egalitarian utopia, a sort of Peter Pan fantasy where nobody ever has to be an adult accountable for his own decisions and responsible for his own happiness. And the predictable result is that everyone at Duke is perfectly miserable:

It’s no small feat being known as the infamously worst college for women in a country where a number of respected colleges cover up sexual assault reports, but then there’s Duke University. The elite North Carolina college has a heinous reputation for slut-shaming, double standards and overall sexual hostility towards their female students.

That’s Cosmopolitan magazine’s description of the sexual climate on campus, and I’m sure the male students would see it otherwise, but the simple fact is this: Duke is filling its students’ heads full of politically correct jargon and intellectual abstractions — “patriarchy!” “homophobia!” “misogyny!” “slut-shaming!” — that are useless in solving the real-life problems that students have with sex. What this attitudinal indoctrination does is to supply the permanently malcontented and eternally aggrieved with a set of labels for their problems and epithets they can apply to people they don’t like, but is there any meaningful correlation between this rhetoric and the reality it is supposed to describe?

If the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and if the only ideology you’ve got is feminism, every problem is a result of the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy. But the frat boy who is too drunk to care about “informed consent” doesn’t have a patriarchy problem, he’s got a drinking problem. And the same is true of the frat boy’s date who is too drunk to say “no” with sufficient clarity to be understood by an equally drunk 19-year-old with a raging boner.

To adapt the famous adage of Animal House‘s Dean Wormer, “Raped, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.”

The Drunken Dialectic of Date Rape

Deriving its basic structure from Marxism, feminism is obsessed with seeing every relationship in terms of power. Whereas the comrades of yore saw class struggle everywhere (the proletariat being oppressed by the capitalist bourgeoisie) feminists are incapable of looking at male-female conflict without seeing the male as the patriarchal oppressor and the female as his victim.

So if a drunken hook-up is disappointing or embarrassing — “Wow, I got hammered at the ATO party last night and woke up all sticky with vague memories of being molested by a dweeb!” — this misfortune can never be ascribed to too much vodka. Within the context of feminism, vodka is irrelevant to your victimhood.

It is not sufficient to chalk this up as a regrettable experience to be avoided henceforth. No, you are a victim, and the dweeb whose splooge is responsible for that sticky feeling is a rapist, and never mind the impossibility of proving this as a matter of law.

There were no witnesses to the carnal act. Your friends at the ATO party, who were none too sober themselves, may or may not remember seeing you leave with the dweeb, but nobody saw him drag you away at gunpoint, either. Whatever happened in the dweeb’s dorm room, it was a private act. However much you may regret what happened, it’s a “he said, she said” situation if you press charges.

Surely (you tell yourself as you make the morning-after walk of shame back to your apartment) no one could imagine that you would have consented to a vaginal injection of dweeb-splooge. You’re pretty sure you remembered to take your pills as prescribed, so it’s unlikely that your uterus is incubating an embryonic half-dweeb.

Still, despite your hangover, you have some fuzzy recollection of clumsy pawing and frenzied thrusting, and that sticky feeling is unmistakable evidence that your nightmarish memories are true: The disgusting dweeb had his way with you, and is probably even now bragging to all his dweeb buddies about the experience.

“RAAAAAPE!”

And maybe, in some sense of the word, this is true. But in such a circumstance, with no witnesses and absent clear evidence of force, the accusation of rape tends to reverse the usual burden of proof, to require the accused rapist to prove a negative — that he did not rape you — and the presumption of innocence is negated. Feminism teaches that if you say you are a victim, anyone who doubts your victimhood is a hateful apologist for “rape culture,” and only a misogynist would mention the role of vodka in this situation.

Let me ask this: If slut-shaming is off-limits, is drunk-shaming OK?

That is to say, I’m inclined to believe a college girl who says she got raped while sober, but these incidents almost always seem to involve a girl and a boy who are both under the influence of alcohol. This brings us to Chronicle columnist Lillie Reed:

The freshman porn star at Duke had consensual sex with someone. Whoop-dee-doo. Where is the huge campus backlash and witch-hunt when someone gets reported for rape? Although not unexpected, it is repugnant that our campus is in uproar over one freshman’s consensual sex, yet no one bats an eye about the many known rapists who live on this campus alongside their victims every day.

(What? Duke is harboring “many known rapists who live on this campus”? Could you please name these dreadful criminals, Ms. Reed, so that other victims will know to avoid them?)

Duke’s warped relationship with sex did not begin with and does not end with one porn star. There are entire websites devoted to the “biggest sophomore sluts” and the frats that are secretly (or not so secretly) the “most gay.” Mornings after, frat bros sit in common rooms, casually discussing intimate details of their hook-ups for anyone to hear.

We will not inquire, Ms. Reed, how you know what fraternity brothers discuss in the common room on the morning after. But if this is typical, as you say, who is responsible? If girls at Duke know that “intimate details of their hook-ups” will be public knowledge as soon as they put on their panties and go home, why do they consent to these hook-ups?

Could it be — and forgive me, Ms. Reed, for suggesting this concept in plain English — that Duke sluts have no shame?

Just throwing that out there.

“My experience in porn has been nothing but supportive, exciting, thrilling and empowering. . . . I am not ashamed of porn.”
— Miriam Weeks, a/k/a “Belle Knox”

If shameless promiscuity is the prevailing norm for Duke girls, are we surprised that Duke boys expect them to put out? And if this expectation is commonplace on campus, if Duke girls are routinely putting out like Pez dispensers, hooking up with any Duke boy who strikes their fancy, don’t you think the expectations created by this behavior might be implicated in the campus rape problem?

While I’ve never set foot in Durham, Ms. Reed, it seems to me that this situation with your infamous freshman porn starlet presents Duke students with a “teachable moment,” if there were anyone on campus who could think of a lesson worth teaching.

The radical feminist sophomore Danica Liu knows what she wants to teach — it’s the patriarchy, dammit! — but everybody else at Duke seems hopelessly confused. So let me suggest a lesson: Displaying your genitalia for all the world to see is a bad thing, having sex with complete strangers is also a bad thing, and Miriam Weeks getting paid to display her genitalia and have sex with strangers on video creates the impression that Duke women are just a bunch of shameless whores.

This is a very bad impression, Ms. Reed, and you don’t seem too concerned that people might believe it is true. Maybe you think all Duke girls should do what “Belle Knox” gets paid to do.

Because it’s so empowering, y’know.

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
— George Orwell

 

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